Pushkin.
I experience disagreement as a kind of closeness, and that means sometimes being in touch with yourself, being in touch with others, with the world around you, at such proximity that it could hurt. And it's in that that I think you allow yourself to live more fully, that you allow relationships to develop more richly. And it's that vision of life that I'm attracted to.
Boso is a two time World Debate champion and the author of the book Good Arguments, How Debate teaches us to listen and be heard in everyday life. Many of us try to avoid conflict, but bo makes a strong case for how disagreements can actually enrich our lives. The key, he says, is to learn how to disagree, and Bo says it actually starts with learning how to listen.
Listening is not just a virtuous thing to do. It has a competitive purpose, which is you're never going to change someone's mind unless they feel like your arguments connected with their concerns. So listening is the collaborative process of bringing the other person's ideas into full view, so you know what they are, you know what you're working with.
On today's episode, a World champion debator teaches us how to disagree better. I'm maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans. I show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. One reason I was drawn to both story is that he actually spent much of his childhood trying to avoid disagreements, which is not what I would have expected to hear from a world champion debater.
So I moved from South Korea to Australia when I was eight without speaking English, and I quickly learned that the hardest part of crossing language lines was adjusting to real life conversation, and that the hardest conversations to adjust to were disagreements. That was when the rhythms of ordinary speech broke down, when passions ran, People's facial expressions stopped matching what was coming out of their mouths, and everyone interrupted.
And so there was that difficulty. But there was also the sense that I had, as a newcomer to a place, that my belonging there was conditional. It was conditional on not raising my voice too loud or rocking the boat, and I felt that in disagreement, in revealing myself to the other I could unsettle any belonging I'd been able to achieve up to that point. And the combination of those two things made me resolved to be very agreeable. And that's to nod, to smile, and to get along.
And how did it feel for you, as a young child to have to be so agreeable all the time, to agree with everyone all the time?
You know, when you don't give voice to a thought that you have, it sometimes dies, which is a terrifying thing that when you have a reaction and you question it enough or you tuck it away enough that part of your personality becomes harder to access, really a kind
of self denial, a self betrayal. The thing that made that okay was that it felt like progress, and it was progressed towards assimilation, and it was progressed towards fitting in, gaining friends, accumulating sleepovers yea, and people to do snack swaps with during lunchtime. And I might have even felt that. You know, it's a huge sacrifice for the family to move countries, and some of it on account of my education.
I wonder whether when my parents, perfectly innocent asked things like how are things at school, are you making friends? That made it feel like an achievement. And so even as I was getting further away from myself and losing parts of myself, it felt like I was gaining something else, and perhaps at that moment that that something else was
more important than speaking up for myself. And the thing that broke me out of that was a promise that my fifth grade teacher made me, which was that in debate, when one person speaks, no one else does. And that promise of time of attention it made me feel as though I might be heard, not just in agreement or assent, but in disagreement to So that's how I got started.
Bring me back to that first moment where you found yourself articulating opinions and arguing for a point. I mean, what did that feel like for you, Because that's another form of progress, that's another kind of achievement, and it was one that you had buried for so long. But I wonder if you can set the scene for me when you realized how empowering it was to hear your voice heard.
So the first debate was on the topic that we should ban all zoos, and I was the first affirmative speaker.
And so by affirmative, you mean you have to agree with banning all the zoos.
That's right. Okay, that's right. So you're proposing that we do this, and so there's a period of preparation. You get about a week, so you're sitting with this topic and you have time to look up stories of leopards and captivity and developing strong feelings about that, and you write out your speech. And all of that was pretty familiar because you do essay writing and you do schoolwork, and I had almost put off the knowledge that I'm going to have to own this in a different way.
But that day comes and it's the school hall. It's old fashioned, almost a kind of a large shed type corrugated iron roof. There's rainfalling overhead. It's a kind of a dramatic setting in my mind still, and I remember going up on stage and looking at this audience of about fifty kids seated in these snaking rows on the floor, and I remember starting to speak and noticing all of
these small changes in the audience. So you saw a WinCE of recognition in the corner of someone's eye, or you saw one person unfold their arms, or another person turned to the person next to them and say, are you hearing this? And that moment carried the realization. It made me think that I could change something about the world through the power of speech and language. And it was, in some ways the opposite of the achievement I had been working towards on the other end, which is how
do I change myself around the expectation of others? How do I change myself to fit in these surfaces that felt so fixed in place, And it felt like asking the world to see me in my entirety as someone with opinions, someone capable of asking, presuming to ask that people change their mind for me, and to have some reaction to that. Yeah, that was an amazing thing.
You know, it's so interesting to hear about your childhood experience because in many ways I've actually had the opposite evolution as you. So as a kid, I relished a good debate. I mean, I argued so much that my parents would tell me, Maya, you should try and become a lawyer and you grow up, because at least then you'll make a living off of this incredibly annoying feature of your personality. So I'm the youngest of four kids, maybe arguing was my way of being heard in this large,
boisterous family. But interestingly, Bo, what's happened is, over time, I feel like I've lost a lot of my will to argue, Like I find myself giving up more easily, conceding easily because it just feels exhausting. I guess like it often at times just feels like maybe it's not worth it. And so in this moment, I would love for you to convince me, Bo, why is arguing important
and what are the costs of not arguing? Because I need you to light that fire that I had under me and childhood, reignite the flames so that I can, you know, still bring that same kind of passion to day to day discourse.
You know, I feel that so acutely. I think there are so many reasons and different kinds of pressures to give up on disagreement. There are personal pressures if you're a shy person like I am. There are periods of life where you want to be with like minded people because you want to make progress and you want to work on something together rather than just talk and disagree.
And then there's of course the political context, where nowadays it's very hard to imagine disagreement as anything other than a source of pain and division and maybe even an existential threat to the fabric that holds our society together. And the best argument I can give you for why we should give good disagreement a chance is that it's the key to a bigger life, one in which we don't hold at bay the opinions, the impulses we have that are inconvenient, where we don't hold other people at
enough of a distance that they can't hurt us. I experience disagreement as a kind of closeness, and that means sometimes being in touch with yourself, being in touch with others, with the world around you, at such proximity that it could hurt. And it's in that that I think you allow yourself to live more fully, that you allow relationships to develop more richly. And it's that vision of life that I'm attracted to.
You also give us a handy framework in your book for deciding what's even worth arguing over, and I really appreciate this because you're saving us a lot of unnecessary grief and frustration by at least living the spaces in which we disagree. And so do you mind just walking us through this checklist.
Yeah, for sure. And you can believe everything I've said up to now a bit too much. And I think that's what happened to me, right, So you learn to overcome your silence, and you know, people kind of point you out as the debater who doesn't know how to stop. And so it was born out of necessity for me, this realization that it takes cleverness to know how to argue any proposition, but it takes wisdom to know which ones to argue and which to let go.
I love that complexity. I mean, these are the moments that I relish on a slight change of plans where the world champion debator comes on and shares that they too have to be cautious because they're actually in one extreme. And so there's this dance that we each play in our own lives when it comes to disagreement and we have to figure out where that happy equilibrium exists.
Yeah.
I just love when again, that kind of complexity is captured.
Complexity is a nice word for it. It's just you know, you have to recover totally from these things sometimes.
Yeah.
One framework that I came up with is called the Rissa framework, and it's a checklist to consult before going into an argument, and so the components of risks are
are real, important, specific, and aligned. So the first question you ask is is the disagreement between you and the other side real or is it a misunderstanding or an imagined slide So you thought they said something when in fact they actually said something else, And launching into a critique can actually generate its own argument, right when they
say you're being unreasonable or you're assuming bad intentions. So you have to check whether it's a real disagreement, and then you ask is it important enough to you to
have the disagreement? And the way in which this one goes wrong, I think is at the end of a long day, we're feeling a little cranky, and so we latch onto something, and the something becomes like a little proxy battle for this emotional welfare that you want to engage in at that time, And so there's a question about whether the thing you're disagreeing about is really important enough to justify that disagreement.
I feel like the colloquial version of that is looking to pick a fight. I want to also say one thing, which is I think in deciding whether the topic is important. It's important that we don't confuse the importance of the topic with the importance of the person to us. So you might be talking to a loved one whose opinion you really value, that really matters to you, or a trusted colleague, but you still might deem the topic unimportant enough that it's not worthy of debate.
I like that. I like that, you know. I think disagreeing is one language of communication. It's one way of talking about the things that matter in our relationships, and it's the one that we sometimes reach for when the
emotions are running. And in that scenario where you pick a fight because the other person's opinion matters to us or we're feeling insecure about where our relationship is at, the better thing there probably is to admit to those fears, for example, just say to them, you know, just hear me out here, rather than defaulting to disagreement as the way in which we try and have that conversation. So, yeah, I think that's a really interesting point and something that
I see all the time. And it's one reason why disagreements with those whom we're closest to tend to go the worst.
Because the receiver confuses the two as well. Exactly, It's like, why aren't you willing to have this disagreement with me? Do you not care about me?
Yeah? Absolutely?
And so like you said, I think it could be very helpful in those moments to tell the person, Look, I really care about you. I really care about your point of view. The reason I'm not engaging with this particular disagreement is because I don't think it's important enough. But that does not mean that I don't think you're important enough. I really do.
Yeah. I think that's really helpful to name the difference between importance of the topic versus importance of the people. I don't think I had thought about it so clearly, but I think it's helpful.
Okay, so far we've gone through R and I. So is the disagreement real? And is the topic important enough?
Yeah? And then the third question is is the topic is the subject of the disagreement specific enough? And here you want to think about how much time you have
to have the dispute, how much bandwidth you have. So if you're dropping off the kids for soccer practice and you have five minutes before they have to leave, that's not the time to talk about really fundamental disagreements you might have about their education, right, and so are you going to be able to resolve or to make progress within the time and the constraints that you have, And a lot of that I think comes to the specificity
of the question. And then the fourth on the list is about the reasons why the parties are engaging in the disagreement. And here you want to check that not necessarily you and the other person have the same reasons for wanting to engage in the disagreement, but that your reasons for wanting to engage are okay by one another. Right, So imagine another person is just coming in to hurt your feelings or to vent or to pick a fight, as we've been saying, that's a moment to say, hey,
I'm not engaging in this disagreement with you. If that's the reason why you're coming into it. There may be other ways to talk about the issue. It may be that I just hear you out if what you have to do is vent, but we're not going to have a disagreement about this.
All that said, sometimes there are good reasons to put on our debating cats. After the break, Bo offers advice for how we can disagree better. We'll be right back with a slight change of plans. But one of the reasons I loved reading your book and I loved digging into your work is that you know, we disagree all the time, but we also talk past each other all the time. And I feel like what your work argues is that we don't have to be satisfied with the
quality of disagreements that we often have. We can in fact do better. There is actually a method to disagree well, a method to the madness, if you will. Let's get into some of the tactics for how it is that we can disagree better. What does a good argument have to do in order for it to be effective.
It's two things. It's to show that the claim that it's making is true and that it's important. So let's imagine you're arguing that we as human beings should be vegetarian because it's good for the environment. You have to show first of all, that being vegetarian is in fact good for the environment, because otherwise the argument is untrue. You have no legs to stand on, and that the fact that it's good for the environment means you should
be vegetarian. That's the importance part that's saying the fact that this is true gives us enough of a reason
to change our mind or our behavior. And it's usually in that second prong, the importance prong, that people tend to fall behind, because after we've demonstrated the truth of something, it can seem kind of self evident because it is for us that justifies the conclusion, but for other people you might have to give additional reasons for that argument having the kind of effect that you want it to.
So I'm vegetarian, so clearly I win. So when it comes to importance, I think what I hear is that it needs to have relative importance, because I can think that it's important to care about the environment, but I might think that other things are more important than that our protein intake, whatever it is. And so would you
call it? The reason I hesitant to just use the word important is I feel like a lot of people can agree a lot of things are important, but actually it's about how we rank them in a hierarchy of relative importance that determines what the ultimate recommendation.
Is that's terrific. So it's certainly not absolute importance. And so here I think it often comes down to asking, right, what matters to you? What do you care about? Yeah, and trying to give reasons tailored to them to change their mind.
I kind of want to introduce into this conversation a debate that my three older siblings and I lost over and over again with my parents in childhood. If you don't mind, okay, because I'm clearly over this bow. You know, it's not like I'm bringing it up, you know, thirty years later anything. Okay. So we always wanted a pet growing up, ideally a puppy. What do I need to do to convince parents that every set of parents should get a family pet because it is good for their
child's development. Let's let's have you tell me how do I How do I achieve those two burdens? I have to show that the main claim is true, and I need to show it's important. What would I do in that case?
The first thing you have to show is getting pets is in fact good for the kid's development. That's the truth claim. And then you have to say the fact that it's good for the kid's development gives us enough of a reason to get the pets. So that's exactly the kind of relative subjective importance, So it being good for the kid's development might not do any good if one of the parents is deathly allergic, for example, In that instance, that would just override this other interest that
they have in their kid's well being. But in more moderate cases, where it's the competing demands are maybe it's expensive or it's costly on time, you might by explaining why it's the kid's development through the pets that we should privilege, you might be able to change their minds.
So I can easily see people following the set of rules. When they know they're about to enter an argument, they have the ability to prepare for it. As a little kid, I'm creating my little puppy line of argumentation. But I'm thinking about daily life, in which often times normal conversations and of escalating into arguments almost without our own awareness.
So they escalate so quickly, and it can feel very odd bo to interrupt and declare before we continue in this heated exchange, maybe please establish some ground rules, like yes, I can just imagine my friends and being like, get the hell out of here, maya, what are you doing
with this formal nonsense? And so, when emotions are running high, how do we take the temperature down and like take that moment to breathe and try to integrate these kinds of frameworks and discipline is what I'm hearing, this disagreement discipline into our lives.
Yeah, it's a great question and a hard question. I think the first thing is you want to come to this kind of agreement ahead of time, So when things are kind of good, especially when you're in a relationship, having a conversation about how you want to resolve disputes, and once you have some agreement, it can often be easier to refer back to it say hey, we've deviated from the thing that we promised each other. I think
that can be useful. And I think the second thing is I wonder whether our aversion to awkwardness must be really great, you know, because we would rather put up with kind of a painful exchange sometimes. Then to recognize that a conversation is artificial in the best way. It's something we are building together and saying, hey, are we building this the right way? And so I think it can be subtle. It can be are we talking about the same thing right now? Let's check is this really
a disagreement about the dishes? Or are we now talking about something else? You're even a topic in your day to day disagreements. In your day to day disagreements, it's a dispute in search of a topic often and one thing that you know, I had a big blowout with my father when we first moved to Australia about not calling our relatives enough. And even that took some work to get to because initially it was just ill feeling.
You know, you get that sense when someone's upset at you and they're kind of commenting on you left your shoes over there, and what are we talking about at the moment? You know, then there's an official kind of maybe accusation is too strong a word, but there's a stronger claim about something that you've done wrong. And then you start to see the shoe thing was just leading up to this moment, so then you recognize the claim. And for us, it was not calling the relatives enough.
And we would have this discussion and I would say, you know, I call them this many times in a week. That doesn't seem crazy, and I know what's going on in their lives, and he would have some responses to that, but it didn't feel like we were assuaging anybody's concerns. The ill feeling was still there, And it was only when I stopped arguing and said, why does this matter
to you so much? What are we really disagreeing about, that we realized that the calls were a kind of stand in for broader concerns about losing connection to home, right of seeing your kid lose his grasp on his native language in the process of acquiring a new one. That that was really what we needed to talk about. And so the clarity in debate of starting always with the topic and almost having this north star towards which you aim all of your efforts, just understanding the importance
of that, the importance of naming the dispute. I think that's come and use countless times. I think the more fluency people have with those concepts and those skills, I'm hoping, the more natural it can seem. But it may be worth questioning whether this mode that we have of thinking about conversation as free flowing and driven by just natural impulses. It may be worth questioning whether that's the most productive way of thinking about it.
Yeah, and we have all kinds of social norms that govern our behavior and steer us away from what feels instinctive and natural. Those are working very nicely.
For sure.
For sure, No, I won't cut ahead of you in line, even though I want to, for example. So yeah, I think that's totally fair. So Bo, you are a two time world champion debater, and I think intuitively, when I think about the skills that a debater has, I sometimes forget that listening is right at the top, right. I think of charm, and I already have thought and great
oratory skills. But you talk in the book about just how important it is to be a really thoughtful listener, to really respond to what it is the person saying.
Yeah. Absolutely, And this too is a lesson that I had to learn on the fly. So the time that you're given to speak when you're in middle school is about five minutes, and when you're just starting out, the challenge is filling up the time, so you usually end up at like three minutes or four minutes, and then you sit down and there's some time remaining. And so the work initially in debating is can you get to the five minutes? Can you come up with enough stuff
to say? And eventually, through research writing out your arguments. Watching old debates, you can you can get there and you have enough argument, and soon it becomes can you talk a little faster so you can get more stuff in? And this was where I was at when I came across an adversary, Deborah, who would kick my behind weekly. And it's a lesson I learned when I debated with her, which was I noticed she actually did not fill up
her page with reams of argument. Instead, during the rounds, she took copious notes of what the other person was saying, So in that moment, she was almost a transcriber, faithfully noting down what they had said, sometimes giving it order where it was disorganized. So when you had been presented a word cloud, you give it a kind of structure that they were lacking. You maybe think about other points that they could have made that would have made the
point even stronger. So there's this kind of amazing act of listening as a creative, constructive act. And I could also see her listening out from the perspective of the audience to think what are they getting, what are the questions that they might be having. So there's listening with one ear faithfully to what the other side is saying with the other ear, listening to how a third party is hearing this, whether they're responding, whether they're persuaded, what
they're still not sure about. And it was only after she had done that, after she had figured out the lay of the land, that she started writing the final script of what she was going to say. And you know here again, listening is not just a virtuous thing to do. It has a competitive purpose, which is you're never going to change someone's mind unless they feel like your arguments connected with their concerns and connected with the
points that they had made. So it was a way a new way of thinking about listening, all through the lens of still wanting to make the best possible argument that you can.
Are there any tips you have for ways we can become better listeners? And I think we're just told listen better, and it might not be prescriptive enough. I might not know how to actually implement that recommendation.
I think one way is by asking questions and drawing out the argument from the other side. So listening, I don't think is just the act of hearing. It is the collaborative process of bringing the other person's ideas into full view. So you know what they are, You know what you're working with. So in the examples that we've been talking about, asking so why do you believe that's true? So is there some evidence? Did you read something that
made you think this way? And then once you get a sense of why they believe the argument is true, saying so why does this matter to you? Right, it doesn't matter to you more than these other values that you might be thinking about. And soon, whether it be with a kid who's, you know, not used to articulating themselves a certain way, or a staff member who's shyer, or a friend who's a special conflict of verse, you can collaboratively build up the arguments. So I don't think
listening is silent. It is a collaborative conversational process that helps you better understand where the other side is coming from.
Yeah, okay, now let's talk. But another concept I read about in your book is called side switching. So do you mind telling us what side switching is in the context of debate and why it's a valuable exercise.
So much of debate is obviously an exercise in certainty. It's in preparing your arguments fully believing in their truth and importance of using all the persuasive tools at your disposal to project as someone who's credible and persuasive on a topic. But one thing I learned is that the best debate is before they go on stage. In the last few minutes, they go through these exercises called side
switch exercises, which take a few different forms. So one is to turn to a fresh sheet of paper and to come up with the four best arguments for the other side. Another is to go through the case that you've prepared as if through the eyes of someone who vehemently disagrees, and try to poke as many holes as
you possibly can. Or a third is you imagine that you've just lost the debate, and you write down the reason why you lost, and all of those unsettle things a little bit, and they unsettle your certainty in particular.
Yes, and you help decouple ideas from self identity, which is often what makes passions run so high in day to day disagreements, right I sometimes well, no, I'm trying to think it's that in the middle of a disagreement, if you think that eating on a point is a threat to self identity in some way, it's challenging who you are to say, you know what, you're right, I
kind of agree with this. You're much less likely to ever accept that you might even wrong about something, So it feels like this is side switching, is a way to give yourself that space to see, Oh, you know, I could be a person who occupies both points of view and yeah, I'm curious to know whether that just affects the psychology with which you enter into a disagreement.
I think enormously it humbles you. It forces you to think that maybe you're the person who needs to be accommodated because you're being unreasonable, and it brings down the temperature of the other side disagreeing, because that itself can be kind of upsetting, like you're my partner, how can
you find this objectionable? Or you know, my best friend, you should of course agree with me, and knowing there are two sides, expecting there are going to be some objections here, it's a tool to me make your arguments better in advance, but also to anticipate that there will be pushback and that you're going to have to work through it. And I think that conditions you to a certain kind of exchange that I think can be more productive I'm just wondering.
I mean, you've been in all these positions where you've argued for sides that you might not personally believe in or agree with, and I just wonder, have you ever fallen for your own message? If we hear ourselves saying things, over time, we might start to believe those things are true. And so have you ever found that because you were asked to argue for a certain side of something, you actually found yourself agreeing with that side on the other end, and that was unexpected for you?
Yeah, I think in every debate you do undergo a change from having argued for a position, And the way in which I experienced it is very rarely that I just end up adopting the view that I have, but rather that it leaves a residue the next time you make an argument for the position you actually believe. The
echoes of the opposing argument are always there. And I used to think that that meant you don't have any convictions anymore, or you're unsure, But in fact, I've found that a lot of my convictions are stronger for having considered the other side, for having those echoes. It doesn't have the brittleness of something so fixed, it's more flexible, it's more porous, you're more okay with its incompleteness.
I mean, what I'm reflecting on as I hear this conversation unfold is that when you're in the world a debate, you basically have to agree to live in the gray space in life generally where you feel out of minimum open to the other side of the debate. I mean, you have to as part of your career. You have to be open to the other side because you might
be asked to fight for it tomorrow. Right, And I just wonder, like, when you've trained your brain to live in the gray space of life, where we understand that there is nuance and complexity and at least two sides to every argument, I wonder how that affects the way that you interact with the world.
Yeah, I mean, it's such a beautiful question. And I think that grayness is the natural state, right, that it takes a certain kind of willing blindness to aspects of ourselves to say we are just like every other member of this political party or this cultural group, or this
linguistic group or this country. There are ways in which we feel other, all of us, and so I take that kind of grayness, feeling slightly at odds with things as the natural state, and I think it's changed my view of what I can ask for from the world, which is more than to be left alone, to be kept safe, to let me get through the day, but rather that I want to be in conversation with the world. And I think it's given me that belief that it's possible.
It's given me some of the skills, not all of the skills, that you need in order to be in such a conversation. And once that conversation is ongoing, I think so much as possible, you can learn about the world, You can form relationships, you can discover parts of yourself, try out new identities. Right, all of that relies on there being that ongoing conversation, and I just feel grateful to be a part of it.
Hey, thanks so much for listening. Join me next week when we hear from doctor Lucy Kalanathi, who lost her husband to cancer eight years ago. She reflects on how her grief has changed over time. You may have read her husband, Paul's best selling memoir, When Breath Becomes Heir. If you enjoyed my conversation with world, debate champion Boso, I recommend listening to our very first episode of A Slight Change of Plan, which happens to be my favorite
episode of all time. It's called a Black Jazz Musician takes on the KKK and features Darryl Davis. Darryl is an expert on changing minds. Since the nineteen eighties, He's inspired hundreds of people to leave the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacy groups. We'll link to the episode in show notes. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written,
and executive produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our producer Trisha Bovida, and our sound engineer Andrew Vestola. Luis Scara wrote our delightful theme song and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Late. You can follow A Slight Change of
Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker. See you next week.