Why Good Arguments Are Essential to Good Democracies

Good Arguments. How Debate teaches us to listen and be heard. Bo joins us now via zoom from Washington, d C. But I want to get to the book in just a second. But how to take us through your journey? Because it's really interesting. How did you become U two time world champion for debating? Well, thanks so much for

having me on the program. I started debating because I moved as a kid from South Korea to Australia without speaking a word of English, and I quickly found that the artest part of doing that was adjusting to real life conversation where people can kind of mid sentence change directions and spin you out. And the way I kind of got over the shyness and the conflict of version.

I felt was by joining the debate team of the strength of a single promise from my elementary teacher, which was that when in debate, when one person speaks, no one else does. Um. And to someone who had been used to being spoken over and interrupted and taken out of conversation, that seemed to me a kind of a life raft. Um. And I've really been writing it ever since. Man, it's just so relevant. It's a you know, we're producers are getting right here, like cross doc cross dog, like

let the person be heard. Um. But there is a bigger message here, right in terms of an environment that we sit in today, where you can't have different opinions, nobody wants to hear it, and everybody just kind of shouts and yells at at each other. Um. You know, how do you think about the world today and what ails us? Well, we're living at a time of really extraordinary polarization, and it's easy in times like that to

see disagreement as the source of our troubles. And what I'm trying to suggest with this book is disagreements can be a force for good, not only because they're useful in terms of finding out truths and ensuring people are heard and and and we can be honest and frank

and forthright with each other. But more importantly, because good arguments what good democracies are, They're good work They're what good workplaces are, what good families are, that we, despite our differences, resolved to live together and instead of ignoring our differences, to put them in conversation with one another with the hope that we might be able to get somewhere deeper, somewhere better, somewhere richer than we might be

able to on our own. So my hope with this book is to restore people's confidence in what disagreements can do, and hopefully to give them a few skills that are going to allow them to handle them a little bit better too. I think that one thing that keeps people back from the expressing disagreement in the workplace is perhaps the way that we interpret how other people are going

to take that disagreement, the idea of people taking conflict personally. So, but what's a good way to, you know, how should people express themselves in a way where they get to that better place by disagreeing with one another? I think that's a really important question. And debate is such a big part of the workplace now, isn't it, Because the nature of modern wide collar work is just we sit around in meetings and disagree all day um. And I think the book gives a few different pieces of advice

for someone in that situation. I think the first is you want to be really clear what the disagreement is about, right and uh, to say, we're just having a conversation about this higher or about this this business plan, as opposed to all the other disagreements that we might have

flying around. As soon as there's that kind of imprecision about what the conversation is about, it tends to become unruly, and it tends to bring in personality, It tends to bring in all the things that has happened in the past. So the first thing I would say is every disagreement starts with an act of agreement, and that's often about

what the discussion is about. The next thing that I would add is you want to have the kind of rules that we started our conversation with, so in competitive debate, you know that everybody gets equal time in which to speak. They're not interrupted while they're speaking and they're given turns so that when I speak and I give you a chance to speak, there's no need for me to interrupt because I know I'm going to get a turn back.

And restoring some of those basic rules I think can make many of those conversations go more product to think, it's a big part of this too, is that there doesn't have to be a winner or loser in the conversation or in the debate. Absolutely um. And you know, one of the things that you learn as a competitive debater is wins and losses are temporary, you know, just

the way it is in the workplace. You might take a w in this particular conversation or a loss in this particular conversation, but your coworkers aren't going anywhere right, and so they're going to be back the next day or the next week, the next month with a different issue where you're on going to be on different sides,

sometimes allied, sometimes on opposing sides. So I think the real lesson, in addition to taking seriously the needs sometimes to prevail in arguments and to stick up for yourself and to carry your message, is to recognize what we all need is a set of rules, a set of practices that allows us to keep the conversation going in the long term and for the betterment of our organizations

and for the betterment of ourselves. I have to you know, I think about presidential debates or political debates like do you do You watch them and you say, well, this isn't a debate, this is just a show. No, seriously, right, Like people don't have a chance to kind of say things. There's constantly somebody jumping in and that's not a debate, or is it? I think I think that's exactly right.

I don't think they are debates and something isn't a debate just because it's called a debate, or because two people are standing at an awkward distance from each other at different podiums, right, Um. And I think often what happens in those debates is UM, one or more of the participants turns what would otherwise be a debate into a kind of a brawl, right where it's a kind

of a shouting match or a name calling game. And it becomes really important, UM, in those moments to pause, as you said at the at the top of the program, to say, to identify what is happening, to name the kinds of tactics that are being you, whether it be name calling and something like that, and to say is it a debate that we're having or is it something else? Because without that kind of a check um, what begins

as a debate can devolve into something worse. And we see that not only on the presidential stage, but we see that around the kitchen table and with our families and our loved ones, and we see it at workplaces all the time. We're going to continue the conversation both sits for a second. We've just got to do a little bit of news. I have to say, I love and just reading some of the prep materials that you know. It was because as a shy kid like this was giving.

As he talked about, you know, debate gave him a safe space where he could be heard. And I have to say, I'm one of seven people who listen to our show or watch it know that. And I was a really extremely shy kid. Probably hard to believe at this point, but I was, and in college got into radio because it was an opportunity for my voice to be heard. Nobody could to me until you met me, and then I can just interrupt you all the time a very kind, You're actually very gracious. I want to

get right back to Boast. So he's a journalist, he's an author. He's got a brand new book out. It came out this week. It's called Good Arguments. How Debate teaches us to listen and be heard. He's got some great tips in here on how to not just be heard, but how to listen, because that's a really important part

of any debate. Bo Carol and I were talking about where we wanted to take this, and we both you know, said at the same time, social media is what we want to talk about, because you know, there's the idea of getting stuck in a canoe with somebody on Twitter and you just can't get out of it, this idea of you getting an argument, you have anonymous people replying to you. How do you deal with this on social media? Do you just get off and you just ignore it and just close it up and say I'm not even

going to participate because that's what I feel like doing sometimes. Yeah, I think the you know, one thing about being a debate or is it makes you very sensitive to the acoustics of the room that you're talking about, and uh that you're talking in and social media presents a lot of challenges in that regard, where whereas in a kind of a face to face conversation you're being heard equally, on social media, the most divisive content tends to be prioritized,

even though I'm debating you or talking with you, it's sometimes for the benefit of an audience, right, and it's

actually kind of talking past you in that way. So I actually tend to think that, um, social media the way it's currently designed is pretty inappropriate for the kind of debate that I'm advocating, and that UM in that regard, you know, it may well be that social media has other contributions to make, whether it be finding out information or it may actually be quite good at gathering like minded communities, which it seems to do with extraordinary effectiveness.

But I'm suggesting that there may be other better channels, such as face to face conversation and public discussions, to be able to have the kinds of disagreements, UM, that I'm advocating for. You know, about what kind of takes me off sometimes is when someone I'm having a discussion, we don't agree, and then the person who says, well, we're just gonna have to agree to disagree and then it's done. And like wait a minute, like you just

stop the conversation. Like that to me is not productive either, so help me, Like you have a chapter how to know when to disagree, So help me here. I agree with that completely and um, And it does feel like a kind of resignation, doesn't it, And a vote of no confidence, um, not only in oneself but in the other person, because it is kind of saying to you, I don't trust you to be able to handle this conversation very well. And I think the need for that declines the more of us and the more of our

population develops the skills of good argument. Um. But that's not to say that you should be arguing about everything under the sun either. And in the book, I provide a kind of a checklist, uh. I call it the Ristar checklist, where I encourage people to ask where that the disagreement in front of them is real, whether it's important enough, whether it's specific so you're not talking about everything in one go, and whether the two sides are

aligned in their objectives for the having the discussion. And that's a kind of a way to um, stop us from jumping into a dispute out of defensiveness or pride, but rather to be a little bit more deliberate. Um. But I share the concern exactly that that when when they say, you know, let's just agree to disagree or or even or even just sort of not politely and um,

And where a smile, that's not really a smile. Um. It's a kind of you know, a decision not to be involved with the other person and to take a relationship further exactly exactly. And it's and it's and it's the kind of standing at a distance. You know that that I fear perhaps even worse than just outright conflict, because then you can see the differences between people. Is when we have contempt for one another, when we stand at a distance from one another. But what about when

it comes to bad faith arguments? If if somebody is you know, is making a bad faith argument. And I'm you know, thinking of Washington, d C. Yeah, I'm really thinking of politics and what we see. Yeah, I know, I'm not even going to hide it. But book, what do you recommend to people who actually want to get something done in Washington? How should they be approaching these discussions, these arguments? I think The first um and most practical step that I recommend in the book is to understand

the tactics of bad faith debaters. And one of them, as you say, is lying. And one thing about lies is they don't just lie once. They lie many times,

right in a deluge that kind of overwhelms you. And one of the things that debaters know to do is to pick a representative lie, to fit it in with other things that we know to be true, to show why it's inaccurate, and then to explain why that's kind of symptomatic of how that person is approaching the discussion, and again to return to a point we made earlier. It's a way to pause and to say this kind of tactic is unacceptable in the discussions that we're having.

Of course, those tactics on their own are not going to be enough to deal with a lot of the problems of bad faith that we have, but they are individually empowering and they are a way to restore the

conditions of debate. I think one challenge here, and again i'm thinking about Washington, is a lot of these bad faith arguments happen when there's really no other side to debate that person, because everybody lives in their own universe these days, so you have you know, people go on prime time talk shows on certain networks, for example, and they're not challenged necessarily to a debate. They're kind of just allowed to say whatever they want and then that

clip goes viral and they get their point across. And that's the world that we're living in. So so how does somebody on the other side, then, you know, respond to something like that. I think that I think you're diagnosis. I agree with completely that misinformation that extreme views flourish in situations where there's no person to challenge them, right, and and where it's like minded people egging each other on.

So part of the argument that I'm making is there should be more debate day to day, right and so, um, I think we're often losing confidence in our ability to persuade other people, in our ability even at Thanksgiving dinner, to challenge a relative, to have a conversation about their beliefs, or to be able to do that in schools in

other settings. And I think that's don't hit me because I'm interrupted you because but Tim and I like kind of behind the scenes, it's like, you know, the conversation made after right now for not banning guns because people are saying, well, we didn't ban airplanes after nine eleven. It's ridiculous. But so how do you have an intelligent debate around that? And we've all get about three seconds left,

we'll have you back in. I think the best thing you can do is to set a single topic, to say, here is the narrow issue within the broader universe of things we could be talking about, To take turns right, to guarantee people an equal opportunity to speak, and to hold them accountable on what they say, and to pursue each idea fully rather than letting people slide across different positions. So much fun, so engaging. Who would have thought that a two time world debate champion would be such a

great guest on Bloomberg Business Week Radio. Our producer Paul Brenne, of course, so great to have you here. Um both, so thank you so much. Check out his book Good Arguments, How Debate teaches us to listen and be heard, folks, this is what we need. Have a good safe evening. I'm Carol Master along with Tim Stanivic. This is Bloomberg