Episode 28 | Two-Time World Debating Champion on How to Win Arguments June 12, 2022

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GUEST: Bo Seo, Author, Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard

Can you apply the rules of debate to your next dinner conversation? Author and champion debater Bo Seo sees parallels between formal verbal sparring and informal chatter around the table. In this episode, we talk about his book, Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard. Bo makes the case that anyone can relay the skills needed for successful competitive debate into real-life conversations. He says one of the most important skills you can cultivate has nothing to do with the words you use, but rather the attention you bring to truly listening to what your fellow conversationalists are saying. Bo says when you make authentic connections with your verbal opponents and empathize with their stance and opinions, debate becomes transformative – an exercise that not only makes for better personal relationships but can create a more civil society. Bo shares tips and techniques on how to effectively make your case at home, work, and play.

BIO:

Bo Seo is simultaneously a world-class debater, a journalist, and a law student at Harvard Law School. In all those facets of his life, strong communication skills are a must. In his new book, Bo draws on his own experiences as a two-time world champion debater and a former coach of the Australian national debating team and the Harvard College Debating Union to share the most effective methods in hashing out disagreements – whether they take place on a debate stage or in a coffee shop. Bo is one of the most recognized figures in the global debate community, having won the World Schools Debating Championship and the World Universities Debating Championship. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, CNN, the Australian Financial Review, and other publications. He’s a panelist on the prime-time Australian debate program, The Drum. Born in South Korea, he grew up in Australia before heading off to Tsinghua University in China where he received a master’s degree in public policy. He’s now studying law at Harvard Law School.

LINKS:

Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard

BRAD PHILLIPS, HOST, THE SPEAK GOOD PODCAST:

I’m recording this episode in the wake of two high-profile mass shootings: one at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York that took the lives of 10 African Americans, and one at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas that killed 19 children and two teachers. By the time we release this episode, it’s entirely possible that yet another mass-shooting tragedy will have occurred. And if you’re listening to this episode a few weeks after its release, it’s almost certain that at least one, if not several, has indeed taken place.

According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the United States has more than 20 million AR-15-style rifles legally in circulation – a weapon of war that has played the starring role in a sickening number of mass killings.

For a time, those weapons were illegal. President Bill Clinton signed a ban into an effect in 1994. The ban stopped the manufacture, sale, transfer and possession not only of the AR-15, but of other similar weapons.

But the ban expired in 2004, and the results have been tragic. According to ABC News, “Gun massacre incidents involving these weapons…skyrocketed from 2004 to 2014, jumping 167% compared to the 10 years the federal law was in effect.”

I’ll put my cards on the table: I support a renewal of that ban. I’m bringing that up because I’ll be speaking with a world debate champion in this episode. Of the many smart things he shares in his new book about how to become a better debater, one that stuck out with me had to do with the idea of “side switching.”

In a competitive debate, once the debater receives the topic and side they’ll be arguing, they begin developing their arguments. But in the last five minutes before the start of a debate, my guest says, he recommends stress-testing your ideas by “reviewing your arguments from the perspective of an opponent” and “thinking up the strongest possible objections to each claim.” “The point of Side Switch,” he writes, “was not to prejudge the other side, nor to excuse ourselves from listening to them. It was to unsettle us from complacency, so that we might engage with more openness and perspective.”

So, I decided to stress test my beliefs for stronger gun control by side switching. Here are a few thoughts:

First, people own these weapons for many reasons – most of which have nothing to do with a desire to commit a mass murder.

As I noted a few minutes ago, there are at least 20 million AR-15s in circulation in the United States. Very few of them are used to kill. According to a Pew Research Center analysis, “rifles – the category that includes guns sometimes referred to as ‘assault weapons’ – were involved in 3 percent of firearm murders.” That seems to suggest that our focus on assault rifles is obscuring the damage done by weapons involved in far more deaths.

And here’s my darkest thought, my nightmare scenario. It feels wrong to verbalize it, as if I’m somehow tempting fate – but here goes. Sometimes, I wonder what would happen if a person with an AR-15 started shooting up the Amtrak car on which I was sitting. At that moment, would my strong objection to AR-15s remain, or would I wish I had one in hand to at least give myself and my fellow passengers a shot at survival? Truth is, I’d want the weapon.

So, side-switching revealed something important to me. People who view guns differently than I do have valid arguments for their position. And whereas many people on my side of the gun control debate too often dismiss their opponents as “not caring about kids” or “gun nuts with small penises” – yes, I’ve seen that one several times – or as being “paid off by the gun lobby,” I think they might be over-generalizing and missing some of the more legitimate arguments. I don’t want those in agreement with me to change their mind – I think they’re on the right side – but I also wonder if we can defeat the other side’s arguments if we don’t fully understand, and even empathize with them. Because allowing ourselves to see their world through their eyes gives us a shared starting place for a conversation. It allows us to anticipate their fears, values, and beliefs more accurately. And rather than talking past someone with a talking point that doesn’t at all reflect their position, at least we can talk to them with a starting point that frames their beliefs in a way that’s more likely to resonate with them and move the conversation forward.

I’m not naïve. I know this issue, like so many others, has people of deep belief staking out hardened positions that make it impossible to see their opponents as anything but the enemy. And I know that’s unlikely to change any time soon. But I also know that our current state – of yelling past one another – hasn’t helped to reduce our gun violence problem. In fact, the number of mass shootings has gotten worse.

Perhaps incorporating side-switching – and other debate techniques – into our discussions with our friends and family members and colleagues and acquaintances and social media followers – can offer us a more productive path to developing winning arguments that persuade people and, ultimately, lead to better policy. We shouldn’t be afraid to pressure test our ideas by side switching. We should instead welcome the intellectual rigor that forces us to either open a door to a different way of thinking, or makes us able to articulate why we believe what we believe – despite valid arguments to the contrary – even better.

Bo Seo is a two-time world champion debater and a former coach of the Australian national debating team and the Harvard College Debating Union. He won both the World Schools Debating Championship and the World Universities Debating Championship. He graduated from Harvard and is currently pursuing his doctorate at Harvard Law School. In this conversation, we’ll discuss his new book Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard. And he’ll also coach me through developing an impromptu argument and will point out – politely – why my strategy might have missed the mark.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Bo Seo. Thank you very much for joining me,

BO SEO:

Brad, thanks so much. I’m so happy to be here.

PHILLIPS:

I suspect when most people think about debaters, they think about people with a really quick wit or a silver tongue. People who were born with these skills. And I imagine to some degree there’s truth to that, that some people are born with innate qualities that are likely to make them more successful at debating than others. But to what degree do you see it as an innate skill versus something that truly can be cultivated through coaching and experience?

SEO:

I think it is the case that, you know, some people have proclivities and predispositions that suit them to the activity, but it’s not a very good organizing principle for an activity that wants to continue for it to only be available to people within inborn talent. And certainly, in my case, I was really quite a shy kid and one way in which that shyness manifested is a real aversion to conflict. When I started debating in elementary school, I’d only been in Australia a couple of years. I didn’t, in fact, have the language and founded not only a kind of a training ground, but, as with any activity or community that’s been able to sustain itself for such a long time, I founded a kind of channel in some way that can bring you from where you to somewhere else. And even though that destination is not clear, the journey is so accommodating and it’s rewarding at each step that I found it quite easy to keep going down that path. And I’ll just say one last thing about it, Brad, which is that there was once a time and the origins of debate are in kind of ancient Greek rhetorical tradition, where this was not viewed, rhetoric and debate was not viewed as a kind of an elite education, but rather something that citizens needed to participate in collective and really self-rule. Right? And so, though it has become a kind of a viewed as a kind of a skill set, or an education afforded to the few, part of what I want to do is to remind people that this was once viewed as knowledge and a set of skills that should be available to everybody. And that the activity has the resources to cultivate that in a lot of people.

PHILLIPS:

Another myth, if you will, that I think even you shattered in your subtitle of the book – the book is called Good Arguments, but the subtitle is How Debate Teaches Us To Listen And Be Heard is that you led with listen before be heard. And that struck me immediately as interesting, because I think one of the myths again, is that we expect these silver tongue orders, you alluded to the, the ancients, the Ciceros, the Quintilians, etc. that that is what we have to come across as, but, you even in the subtitle of your book, point out, no listening comes before speaking.

SEO:

I think that’s right. And, I don’t know what it is. I mean, it’s very hard to make a statue out of someone who’s listening or something like that and so when we think about a debater or a speaker, we think about them actually in the process of oration, but you can almost look at just the mathematics of it. So, a debate round is about an hour, let’s say. And, that’s in a debate with two or three people on either side. You speak for probably seven to 12 minutes of that time. And the rest of the time you are listening, right? And in the lead up to that, in the research that you do and the preparation that you do, again, there’s not a whole lot of you putting your perspective out there and it might be reading, which is another form of listening. It might be researching, which are other forms of listening. And that proportion I think is roughly right. That in order to get kind of seven to 12 minutes of really good concentrated speech, there have to be many hours of preparation that go into it. And why is that? I mean, one thing is what we’re trying to do in debate, as we’re trying to do in real life, is usually not to express our perspective, absent any context, right? It’s usually to be able to connect with someone. It’s to be able to influence the conversation in a certain way. It’s to be able to change the way in which a community is thinking about a certain issue. In order to do that, you have to know where you are starting from. And we’ve all sort of been at parties and social situations where someone just kind of balls down and starts talking about something completely random. And I think so much of our public conversation is like that these days where, like we were all talking about something else, and you just came and started shouting (LAUGHS) about some random issue. And that kind of, you know, cacophony really doesn’t leave a lot of room for things like call and response, things like harmony. And some of that music, I think, is there in the best conversations. It’s there in the best disagreements, even though it’s contentious, and that all starts with listening,

PHILLIPS:

Right? Let’s get into the mechanics of debating if we can.

SEO:

Sure.

PHILLIPS:

Because my hope is in our conversation, I can learn from you, but our audience can as well in terms of what we’re supposed to do to be better debaters. And let’s use an example of a debate that you alluded to in your book. Is the right language to use the proposition was the death penalty is never justified? Is that how you would state it?

SEO:

Yeah.

PHILLIPS:

That’s the proposition.

SEO:

That’s right. Yeah.

PHILLIPS:

Okay. So, the death penalty is never justified, and now you find out that that’s your topic that you have to debate, and you also find out which side of that debate are you on pro the proposition or against it. When you first, when that lands and you figure out which side you’re on and what the topic is, you have something like an hour to prepare. What do you do in that hour to get ready for the stage?

SEO:

So, the amount of preparation varies. And depending on the debate format, it can go anywhere from 15 minutes to several weeks, in some instances, where you can do quite a bit of research. I think maybe the thing that might be most useful is what do you do when the time is really short because it usually is the case that in conversation, you can’t wait for ideal conditions, right? And one of the things that’s interesting and useful about debate is it controls some things, but in other ways, it has the same messiness of real life. Right? You don’t have very much time to prepare. You have to kind of go at it. So, the first thing that I do when I’m given a topic is I write it on the board, or I write it on the top of my page. And I think about what are all the disagreements that this contains. And, this is in the first chapter of the book. You’ll actually find that in one debate, there are many different disagreements going on. And I talk about this as three types. So, one is a kind of a descriptive or factual disagreement about say what the death penalty is actually like, right? And two people might have different views about how often it happens, where it happens, what the means by which it happens are, how long it’s been happening, and those factual disagreements form a part of the background conditions under which this more obvious disagreement about whether it’s a good or a bad thing is unfolding. So, there’s a kind of a descriptive disagreement. The second is there’s a normative disagreement about whether what’s happening is good or bad, right?

And then finally, there’s often a prescriptive disagreement about what we should then do about it. Should we ban it? Should we keep it, should we limit it? Should we do something else? And so, when you look at a topic that the death penalty is not justified, it seems like a normative discussion, but you might think there might be descriptive disagreements about what the death penalty is in fact like. There might be normative disagreements about what justified actually means. And once you look at that word justified, you can think, are we thinking about it through the lens of retribution, for example, of righting the wrong, that’s been visited upon the victim? Are we thinking about it through a more societal lens? What advances the interest of society writ large, how do we think about the interest and the rights of the accused, or the person being subjected to this penalty? And once you’ve broken down that what, like a single disagreement into its constituent paths, you can start to think about, well, which of these actually matter to us. And you might find that for something like a factual disagreement, maybe the best thing to do is just to Google it, you know, because, you can sort that out through means other than debate actually. Right? Whereas something like a normative disagreement probably does require arguments and rebuttal and the kind of discussion that I spent a lot of time thinking about. So, the first thing I would do before generating arguments and thinking about what language you’re going to use, what kind of facts you’re going to pull out in support of your case is just to get a sense of what the lay of the land is. And, once you’ve done that, you can focus your energy a lot more. And you can direct the kind of skills that you might be developing in debate to ensure you’re having the conversation that would be most productive and that you most want to have.

PHILLIPS:

Okay. So, step one is you get that lay of the land. You do that.

SEO:

It’s a long step one. (LAUGHS)

PHILLIPS:

It’s a long step, but you know, that descriptive and factual narrative or prescriptive and try to figure that out. And now let’s say you’ve gone through that thought process and is in thinking about the death penalty is never justified just in brainstorming for 30 seconds, I wrote down that you can argue that it’s a barbaric practice, that’s outlived its purpose, or that it’s applied unequally, or that it’s not actually an effective crime deterrent, or that it violates your religious faith, or that it can lead to a misuse of state power, or that innocent people too often are killed. There are so many paths you could go down and that’s just half a dozen. I came up with in a minute of thought. How do you, I mean, I’m sure that there’s no shortage of ideas or paths you can go down, how do you then start to distill that and say, I think, in terms of trying to win this argument, this is the most productive path.

SEO:

Yeah. And by that was pretty fast, maybe.

PHILLIPS:

(LAUGHS)

SEO:

Or maybe I’ve just been talking for too long on the first thing. So, that’s exactly how it does start, right? So, you have often actually quite a large number of ideas and intuitions, and sometimes there’re just things that you’ve read. Right? And it might just come out of an article and what you then do is you try and kind of group like ideas together. Right? So, with some of the things that you said, Brad, for example, there’s one cluster of things that’s kind of about distributional consequences, right? How does this affect different people differently in a way that might be problematic? There have been there some things that are kind of more straightforward, normative claims about whether this is an okay thing to do. That’s the religious point and, and some of the other arguments that you are bringing up. And once you’ve kind of clustered those arguments, then you might think about, well, what’s the most effective way for me to make this point, right?

SEO:

And I give a, a few different frameworks for how you might do that. But to distill it down a little bit. Arguments, in general, need to do at least four things: They need to, and these are, I call the four “Ws” in the book. It needs to be clear on what the argument actually is. Right?  Then it has to explain why it’s true. It has to give an example of when it might have happened before, and finally explain why it’s important. Right? So, when you have a claim that the death penalty harms traditionally disadvantaged groups, let’s say, or historically disadvantaged groups, well, why is that actually true? Right? And you might have to explain the mechanics of how that happens. Give some examples, give some statistics in support of that claim. When has that happened before that those would be the examples. And then the final step is to then say, well, if it does treat people unequally in this way, why is that enough of a reason for us to conclude that it’s morally unacceptable? And here you are balancing up the strength of the argument that you’ve just offered with competing arguments on the other side. And to go back to kind of where we started the conversation, we can’t make decisions about the four “Ws” or indeed any other decision that we make within the argument without anticipating and trying to empathize with the listener and what they want to hear at this particular time.

PHILLIPS:

You tell the story in the book of a young woman you were debating against, and you said you were trying to clobber her with facts and …

SEO:

Yeah.

PHILLIPS:

… you lost complete sight of the audience and their needs and, and allowing them into the conversation. So even if you won on a purely facts-based argument, you lost because you didn’t bring all those other factors into the conversation.

SEO:

I think that’s right. And it’s especially the case in real life. Where, you know, we have these quite idealized ideas that we want the arguments and the facts to stand for themselves, and we don’t want the personality of person to be involved at all. But, we know that we don’t have time often to think about, you know, the truth of every argument or things like that. But actually, people are very good at making judgments about the trustworthiness of someone, right? And as long as that’s the case, that personal element, that connective element of bringing the argument in conversation with what the needs and the curiosities, and the difficulties that the audience are having, that connective work is always going to be really important. And so, with a lot of the drills and the advice and the tips that I have in the book, their force and their power reveals reveal themselves in conversation and in motion. And, and the thing that gives it that kind of animating power is not just like the force of your intellect or your ability to do these things, but the way in which it helps you connect with other people. And it’s in that two-sided conversation that I think a lot of the force of this stuff comes through. And, just the last thing I’ll say about that is, you know, and it, again, reminds me of the first thing that you asked me about is one of the reasons why debate can’t be just the province of like magical demigods who love this kind of thing, is because whatever power debate can give people, whatever power that debaters have, come in part from the listener. And it’s in that conversation that debate can do all of the world changing things that I’m arguing in this book that it can.

PHILLIPS:

What’s funny about your response is the name of this podcast is The Speak Good Podcast. And one of the things that became clear within just a few episodes was when I asked people for the magic words that they might use in a certain situation.

SEO:

Yeah.

PHILLIPS:

They would say there are no magic words. It’s really about listening more carefully. And what have come to realize is the name might be Speak Good, but really the most important technique might be listen harder. And that that’s the prerequisite before any speech begins.

SEO:

I like that. I look forward to the pivot and it’ll just be silence. (LAUGHS)

PHILLIPS:

(LAUGHS) right. I guess that’s the downside of rebranding the podcast with a theme of listening. We just have, you know, three minutes of dead air before anybody speaks up.

SEO:

(LAUGHS) But you know, those go to those ASMR (Autonomous sensory meridian response) type, the things that help people go to sleep.

PHILLIPS:

(LAUGHS). Right. I hope this podcast is not a soporific

SEO:

No, I wasn’t saying that. (LAUGHS)

PHILLIPS:

Well, if it is, well I suppose as long as it has some kind of valuable social utility.

SEO:

Yeah. (LAUGHS). We hope that it can.

PHILLIPS:

So, if I could kind of make very clear that generationally, I’m probably a generation ahead of you, there was a, a pop song by DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince in the late 1980s, I think, it was called, I Think I Can Beat Mike Tyson. And I suspect with you as a world debate champion, that there is no shortage of people wanting to take you on to prove.

SEO:

Yeah.

PHILLIPS:

So, listen, I just want to tell you I’m way smarter than to have the audacity to try something that dumb. So, I’m not going to do that. But, what I would like to do instead is maybe do an improvisational exercise with you where you could coach me for a moment and really just help me understand the thought processes I should be going through in every step. So, first of all, is that okay with you? Can we do that?

SEO:

Sure, sure.

PHILLIPS:

Okay. So, and to the audience, I’ll just say, this is completely unplanned. So, I may completely flounder and embarrass myself terribly here, but, I suspect that’s true of many people who would be going through such an exercise.

SEO:

(LAUGHS)

PHILLIPS:

So be it. So, would you, as a starting point, maybe throw out a proposition, a topic that is worthy of debate.

SEO:

Let’s try that we should not eat meat.

PHILLIPS:

Great. What side of that debate should I be on?

SEO:

Proposition? So, I’m so arguing in favor of the proposition

PHILLIPS:

So, I’m arguing in favor of, we should not eat meat. So, I’m making the case for veganism or vegetarianism.

SEO:

Yeah.

PHILLIPS:

So, I’m going to go back to your steps that you laid out a few minutes ago, you said, step one is what is the lay of the land and figure out is this descriptive and factual? Is this normative, whether it’s good or bad? Or, is it prescriptive what’s are we going to do about it. And if I understood your description earlier, this fits into that normative category. You’re nodding. Okay. So that’s correct.

SEO:

I think that’s right. And you might note there are probably going to be some factual disagreements in there. Right? You could say, you know, what are the environmental effects of eating meat? What are the processes by which it arrives at our table and, and you might take kind of note of that, right? Because they might become important, but you’re right that, on the whole, it’s a kind of a normative discussion.

PHILLIPS:

Okay. And before we start fleshing this out a little bit, the first place my mind went was to a rebuttal because I could see somebody on the other side – we didn’t get to that yet, and I’m doing something you described in the book as side switching, which I love, side switching being, basically you take on the arguments of the other side in the most authentic way you can, which I just think is a great recipe for empathy anyway. So, I kind of went there first and I could see somebody saying, look, we’re biologically primed to eat meat. And, I wonder if maybe a pre rebuttal or prebuttal is that what they call it – might  be to acknowledge that perhaps there was a time when biologically we needed to get enough calories and energy through meat eating, and that is no longer true, just to kind of take that argument off the table. Is that a reasonable place to begin?

SEO:

It’s a terrific instinct. And again, the view of empathy there is not like you just sort of listen to it and nod along, and then just move on. Like, it’s an empathy that calls us to take some action, right? Which is to respond to those concerns. So, you’ve said something, They’re going to say, this is a biological necessity. Your response is, it’s kind of no longer a necessity. And then Brad, the step that you might want to take there is think so now you are kind of at neutral aren’t you, because you’ve neutralized that argument. So, you’re kind of tying, but you want to win (LAUGHS). Right? So, the step that you might then say is not only is it not biologically necessary for health, we’re kind of talking about health and sustenance, it’s actually healthier not to eat meat. Do you see what I mean? So, then you can you take what is a kind of a neutral argument that would be just kind of pre-butting, as you said, or responding in advance to something that’s more of a kind of a positive advocacy for your side. And within that you can fold in the arguments that are responsive to what the likely response from the opposition is. But, you probably want to take the additional step of thinking, well, can I actually show that this is going to be healthy for lots of people? And then you would kind of go through the process of, well, why is it healthy, right? What evidence do I have for that proposition? And why is being healthier, kind of an important enough consideration for not eating meat.

 

PHILLIPS:

Is it a good technique? So, I could see how the side making the opposite case might say, look, the standards for animals in captivity are much better than they used to be. There’s cage free, there’s free-range animals. They’re given a much better life than they ever were before. So, the old idea we’re not talking about foie gras and stuffing animals so that their livers become five times their normal size. This is a distorted view of what really goes on in today’s modern farm. And so, to your point, then, perhaps the argument, I guess the question I’m asking you, in terms of debate technique, is could I take that entirely off the table and say, my opponent has said that it’s better for the animals than it’s ever been before. And I will concede that point. Instead, we should be thinking about whether or not it’s good for us and the evidence there is overwhelming. I mean, or by conceding an argument, does that then give them more ammunition that could help them lead the debate? I guess the question is when do you concede an obvious point and when does doing so present unanticipated and possibly counterproductive risks?

SEO:

Yeah. I think it’s the right instinct and it speaks to, so if I say the four “Ws,” the last one is why is this important? Right? And you’re sort of challenging that, right? You’re saying like, why does the fact that animals are treated better now than in the past mean that we should still subject them to the kind of treatment that we do at the moment? The question about when you concede an argument or not is an important one. And, in general, the bias of debate is to not concede, but to do something that is called a kind of a conditional. To say, even if that was true, here is my response. Now this is kind of a bit annoying, because it sort of sounds like debaters just don’t want to give up any ground. And that was kind of my, and I do sometimes think that (when) listening to debates – these guys think they’re right on everything. But, to take a more charitable view of it, the conversation is a lot richer, and the conversation is a lot more multifaceted. If you not only bring your own perspective and priorities to it, but try and say, even if you care about the things you care about, here’s a different way of applying those priorities. Here’s a different way of thinking about how that intersects with the debate. And so, you are willing to walk down a part of the way of the road with them, you see. And even if you ultimately turn in a different way towards a different conclusion, you are willing to kind of entertain their basic premises  and to go a little bit further down. And so, you’ve just identified a situation here where you probably want to do both. You want to say, even if animals are treated better than they have in the past, we still think we’re correct. But, in fact, Brad, the other end of that is you actually don’t think they’re treated that much better, probably. Right? And, there you’ve stumbled on a kind of a factual disagreement that’s embedded within the normative disagreement. And, you might say, well, actually, we just have to settle this now. We have to settle what we think actually happens out there in the real world. And we’re going to marshal different evidence and different studies and different case studies to prove our point. But it sort of illustrates the point that when you stumble on a kind of a disagreement within a disagreement, you can kind of make a decision on, actually, if we come to an agreement about how animals are treated out there in the real world, is that actually going to solve that other disagreement, for example. Right? And so, there are lots of, and I like the drill because it gives life to all those little decisions that you have to make along the way.

PHILLIPS:

Right. Right.

SEO:

And each of these things that we’ve been speaking about are really kind of toolkits that you have in a utility belt kind of thing. And at each junction, you can kind of pull out the right tool, make a move in a way that allows you to get ahead, but more urgently to respond to the concern in front of you and to try and move the discussion forward in a way that leads to a kind of a richer insight than people shouting at each other from a distance.

PHILLIPS:

Right. And maybe just one more question along these lines, and then we can get off the exercise, but I am fascinated by these decision points. And so, I will take your advice. I will use that even if construct you recommended, even if animals are created better, and then of course, I’ll maybe express skepticism that that’s true. But even if that’s true, it has severe negative consequences for human health that increases our cholesterol. It increases heart disease, risk of stroke. And we should be doing this for our own sake, particularly with the advances of Beyond Meat and the other meat, like artificial products that are now available, in basically every North American supermarket, at least. Where do you, I’m curious, and maybe I’m putting you on the spot a little bit, but if you just want to say, I want to put this guy out of his misery and, and end this debate right now. What do you come back with either a specific talking point or technique that you would go to now?

SEO:

It’s usually not a kind of a talking point, right? And the reason why that is, is especially when you are responding to someone, it’s usually a kind of a feature of how they’ve put together their argument. That’s going to be the kind of the critical floor. And in this instance it might be, and you obviously haven’t made the argument in full, but it may be that it’s just a kind of an assertion to say that we need to prioritize our kind of our interests. Right?. Just the last, the last bit of your, um, point about human health … and so on. And I think it often is the case that people aren’t as rigorous in arguing for why their priorities are set the right way. And so,I would kind of question why is it that, that you’ve prioritized the things in the way in which you’ve done it and what are the arguments that were offered in it? And you might come up with a counter argument about that.

PHILLIPS:

So, my failure there, in part, was using an assertion, which left the door open for you to then accuse me of not fully making my case.

SEO:

Precisely.

PHILLIPS:

And, one of the interesting things toward the end of your book, you have this really interesting chapter on technology. And I forget the name of the, uh, artificial intelligent debate project.

SEO:

Project debater.

 

PHILLIPS:

Project debater, which I think most people listening are familiar with, Garry Kasparov, taking on the chess computer, the name of which I’ve suddenly gone blank on as well

SEO:

Deep Blue.

PHILLIPS:

Yeah, Deep Blue, and that idea that there’s so many different places you can go. And I think your analogy of a toolkit is apt. It’s probably a toolkit with thousands of tools on it because that’s the whole skill of debating, I guess, thinking about which tool do I need to deploy at this moment to achieve my intended purpose. I want to maybe end our conversation with just a couple of questions about how to use debate in the real world, off the debate stage. I interviewed a former colleague of mine a few months ago for the podcast, John Donvan, who you mentioned in the book.

SEO:

Oh, terrific.

PHILLIPS:

Yeah, John and I worked together at ABC News and okay, he’s now the moderator of Intelligence Squared debates. And by the way, for our listeners, if you scroll back to our earlier episodes, you could listen to that one as well. I asked him the question. I think we spoke around the holiday season, and I was asking him questions about Thanksgiving. And he almost scoffed at the notion that debate skills could be used effectively at the Thanksgiving table. And he pointed specifically to the idea that, look debates are artificial constructs. They have a set of rules and formats that you don’t have at these much more unstructured, unwieldy conversations at the family dinner table. So, he did give some thoughts, but I have to say, I think it’s fair to say that he was largely dismissive of the idea that there were parallels between formal debating and real-life conversations. You seem to be much more open to the idea that there was much more of a connection. Can you talk about why, or maybe more importantly, what competitive debate can teach us about what we could do at our everyday conversations better?

SEO:

Very much so. And it is an important caveat that debate is certainly not the only way in which we should disagree or handle our differences, but it is an important one. And my argument is that it can apply to situations around the family dining room, as it can to the dining hall, to workplaces and other everyday settings. One way in which you see that I’ll sort of say two things. I think the first is we’re kind of living at a time when the things that we really prize, I think, us people’s earnest belief in what they’re saying. And, the idea that if you really believe it, and you really mean it, that it must carry some kind of a force, right. And one of the things that debate teaches you is precisely at the time when you feel something most passionately, that’s actually the time when you have to slow down and think about, are you applying the skills? And are you applying the kind of the craft of argument to make sure that what’s in your mind is getting transferred to the listener in the right way. And I think one feature of discussions at the, you know, kind of around the turkey or the figurative turkey is …

PHILLIPS:

Which is a funny thing to be talking about, given that our proposition was meat eating is wrong.

SEO:

(LAUGHS)

PHILLIPS:

So, let’s say it’s a tofurkey maybe, perhaps.

SEO:

Yeah. Like a tofu loaf. The real event of the conversation is not you just kind of expressing your view, but putting in the work, right, to make it persuasive to the other side. And that actually does involve some pretty boring things, like making sure that your claims are justified in the right way, that it’s illustrated in the right way, that you’ve given a sense of where you are coming from, you’re being attentive to the use of language. So, I actually think the deficit at the moment is not belief or passion, but is actually about the skills of argumentation. So, there’s a kind of a skill-based component. And then the other thing I would kind of return to Brad is you alluded to it a little bit is debate has all of these exercises, they’re called side switch exercises, where, for example, after we’ve done an exercise, like the one that we just did, you’re going to take out a fresh sheet of paper. And now you’re going to come up with arguments for the other side. And this kind of simple paper and pen exercise of trying to get into the other person’s head, or to step into their shoes, to step into their perspective and reason out and try and map out what their view of the world might be, that’s a kind of a really radical view of empathy. That doesn’t give us complete insight or anything like that, but that unsettles a little bit our preconceived notions, our absolute conviction that we must be right, at a time when we experience so many of our private and public conversations as being stuck. That at Thanksgiving, there’s that person on that side of the room and there’s us on this side. And so, the metaphor is not just kind of reaching out, but switching places every now and then. There’s a kind of a play associated with that. There’s a gamesmanship for sure, but I think it can unsettle things in a way that allows us to make progress where we haven’t before. And so, we were joking before about listening and all these things, and debate shows that listening, empathizing, these are not passive acts, right. They’re actually quite a bit of work.  And the work and the craft and the skill of it, I think is missing. And it’s not the only thing that matters to be sure.

PHILLIPS:

One thing I’m confused about.

SEO:

Yeah.

PHILLIPS:

We talked earlier about conceding the obvious point. You said in the debate context, at least don’t concede the obvious point. You say, even if, but then there’s the side switching at the Thanksgiving table we’ve just been talking about. If I’m trying to listen carefully and even empathetically to what that person is saying, even if I disagree with them, my instinct might be to say, and even maybe legitimately feel, I understand where you’re coming from. This makes sense to me, which almost feels like it’s a concession of sorts. How do you reconcile that?  Or maybe it’s just that in everyday conversation, it’s more acceptable to concede points, whereas in debate context, it’s more potentially harmful to do that.

SEO:

For sure. I think it’s what you said. You know, one of the skills that might be external to debate, and I write about it a little bit is knowing when to stop debating. Right? And, debate is a tool. And it’s a kind of an exercise that I think has all of these extraordinary benefits, but knowing when to stop and knowing on which points to stop, that’s a kind of a quality of judgment that is external to debate, but that comes from a better understanding of how disagreements work. And that’s really the broader question that I’m interested in. Is debate is I think a body of knowledge that hasn’t been widely shared in the way that negotiation has, in the way that mediation has. But the higher level is how do we disagree better? Right? And the higher level above that is how do we live in a world where we’re different from other people, right? And that’s not just descriptive characteristics of sex and race and religion those kinds of things that are important, but that each person, in the fullness of who they are, is different from other people. Right? And, and the way in which we make those differences work for us and not against us, is by learning to manage our disagreements better. And I think debate has something important to say on that question.

PHILLIPS:

Well, you make that point beautifully in your book. Again, the book is called Good Arguments. How Debate Teaches Us To Listen and Be Heard. I will say to our listeners who are interested in communications titles, I gobbled this book up in probably five hours. This was my reading on a plane from New York to Chicago and Chicago back to New York. It helped that there was a one-hour delay, I got a little more reading done, but it is about the easiest book I could read. Because, as I said to you, before we started, it’s an autobiographical book in which the techniques of debate are embedded, which makes it enjoyable and easy to read and packed with value of specific concrete tips you could use in formal and informal dynamics alike. Bo Seo, thank you very much. This was a great conversation. I enjoyed having you here.

SEO:

Brad, thank you for reading the book so closely. And I enjoyed the conversation very much. Thank you.

PHILLIPS:

In Bo’s book, he writes about the German philosopher. Arthur Schauer, who in 1831, published a book called the art at treatise in his book, Bo mentions a German philosopher named Arthur Schoepenhauer, who in 1831, released a treatise called The Art of Always Being Right. In it, he says the art of winning an argument, whether one is in the right or wrong, outlines 38 unscrupulous techniques from subtly changing the topic to goading the opponent into anger for succeeding in debate. The best one in the book? “Claim victory, despite defeat, if your opponent is shy or stupid, and you yourself possess a great deal of impedance and a good voice, the trick may easily succeed.” I think we’ve all been in debates, arguments, conversations with people who use some of these techniques, and simply being able to recognize which devices people are using gives us insight into how those can be turned back around on the person. But perhaps more importantly, in the context of what we were talking about in this episode, listening better, perhaps it’s an opportunity to think about the techniques that we ourselves are using in debate and how to make sure that we are staying on the right side of argument as well. Thanks for listening. Until next time, speak good, and maybe listen even harder. Thanks for listening.

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