255 - Good Arguments - Bo Seo

You Are Not So Smart

Science, Psychology, Brain, Business, Mental Health, Culture, Neuroscience, Mind, Health

4.6 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2023

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode’s guest is Bo Seo, the author of Good Arguments – a book about how he became a world debate champion in which he not only teaches us how to apply what he has learned to everyday life but imagines communities built around, not despite, constant arguing and disagreement. Seo says that a political life without constant disagreement would be impoverished. As he puts it, quote, "Nations are, at their best, evolving arguments. As he writes, “In a liberal democracy, good arguments are not what societies should do but also what they should be.” See believes that on well curated, well moderated platforms, ones that value good faith interactions, arguing and disagreement would flip from being catalysts for polarization to the very engine of depolarization and change. In the interview, he not only tells us how to defend ourselves against bad arguments, but explains how in his mind a great democracy isn’t a place where everyone agrees and sees eye-to-eye, but one where we work to have better quality disagreements.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.
0:27.6	The episode 255.
0:46.0	There's real power in stepping back and saying, what is this really about?
0:52.7	And in that moment, you and your opponents are almost on the same team, because it's
0:58.2	in both of your interests to be able to figure out what we're disagreeing about.
1:03.0	And the flip side of that, of saying, what is it that we're disagreeing about, is what
1:08.9	are we not disagreeing about?
1:14.7	That's the voice of both so.
1:16.7	He's a two-time world debate champion, but he wasn't always great at debate.
1:23.0	In fact, a little before his ninth birthday, Bo lost his ability to disagree.
1:32.0	It was 2003, and to expand the range of their opportunities and his parents decided to
1:38.9	move from South Korea to Australia to Warunga.
1:42.7	That's a suburb of Sydney, where Bo would find himself in cultural and social isolation.
1:52.0	He spent weeks in the back of a rental car, as his parents did all the things New Immigrants
1:56.3	must do, registrations, filings, leases, buying a couch, but soon it was time for his first
2:02.4	day of school.
2:03.4	Third grade, and on that first day, his first teacher and his first class wrote his name
2:08.8	and his home country on the blackboard and introduced him to a room of kids, unsure what
2:15.4	to make of him.
2:17.5	And with that, he entered the world of arguing, not quite debate, and he wasn't very good
2:25.0	at it, because as I mentioned earlier, he could not yet disagree.
2:33.4	When I moved to Australia and I moved across language lines, I learned that the hardest
	...

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