John Donvan:

Hi, everybody, welcome to Intelligence Squared. I’m John Donvan. And as you know, we do debates. But sometimes we do conversation, we talk about the whole question of why anybody would even want to debate or go see a debate. And the context that makes this a matter of interest to us is the fact that as a society right now, we are so torn up by argument. Can we at least agree on that, that as a society, we’re not doing very well in talking to one another? Okay. Okay. Great, we can agree on that. But back on point, what interests us is whether the thing that we do, which is to bring people together to argue with one another, actually serves a positive purpose, because you can easily imagine the opposite being true. If there’s too much arguing going on in the culture if we’re divided and we’re enemies to one another, if there’s so much that we disagree on, so viscerally, what’s the point of a program that sets people up to disagree for a whole hour? So our answer is, and it has been since we started our debate series just over 16 years ago, is that there is such a thing as arguing well, arguing in good faith, arguing to understand your opponent’s position.

That’s what we aim for with the debates we put together. Yes, it is entirely an artificial setup. There’s one question to answer and there are time limits in their opening and closing arguments. That is a competition model. It’s not how people argue things out in real life, but with just this slim amount of structure, and just a few rules like no personal attacks, and stay on point and keep in time, we think that this model at least demonstrates what it is to have to listen to the other side. Because you can’t argue better than your opponents if you don’t actually hear what they’re saying. Well, I started this by saying sometimes we do conversation, and over the past year, in between debates, we’ve recorded conversations with people who also believe that argument done well, is both possible, and maybe just the thing that’s needed right now. And they have some insights on how to argue well.

I recently listened to those conversations and found that in some really interesting ways, these three people kind of echoed one another, even though they come from three completely different walks of life. One of them is a psychologist. One of them runs a hedge fund. One of them was a student debater who became a champion on the world stage. And I’m going to move back and forth among them as I share some of what they had to say. Let’s get started.

“In this book, I have told the story of how it changed my life. Debate gave me a voice when I had none.”

Okay, that guy’s name is Bo Seo, he was born in South Korea. His family moved to Australia when he was a child. He didn’t really learn English until he was eight years old. And then he discovered debate.

“It taught me how to argue for my interests, to respond to opponents to use words, to lose with grace, to pick my battles. As far as transformations of the world go, this is minuscule but for me, it was everything.”

Okay, so you already get the Bo is a big believer in formal debate because it so changed his life.

Plus, he is so good at it really, really good. He became a world champion. And then he went to Harvard and then he became coach for the Harvard debating union and for Australia’s national team. And when we talked, he had just published a book called “Good Arguments, What the Art of Debating Can Teach Us About Listening Better and Disagreeing Well,” so you know where he’s coming from, and why I wanted to talk with him.

Bo Seo:

The opposite of bad disagreement need not be agreement, but it can be good disagreement. And I’m not sure we’ve seen outside of small pockets of civil societies, the school networks where debate proliferates, what a culture built around good disagreements looks like, right? And I’m really excited by the possibility of that culture. It’s a different kind of argument culture, isn’t it? And at this time, I think we’re seeing kind of two cultural forces at work.

One is the culture of bad disagreement, which is people shouting across at each other, and the resistance to that is a culture that favors sorting, essentially, of like gathering with like, of organizing or finding your people, of gathering with like-minded individuals. And I want to sort of say against both of those, there should be a third culture that’s based around good disagreements. And as I say, I’m excited to see what that might look like.

John Donvan:

Okay, so there is a glimpse here of what Bo Seo is getting at, that disagreement in itself is not the problem. Let’s not label disagreement the problem, but we do have a problem culturally in how we are disagreeing. But let’s now go hear from the psychologist in this trio. Here’s how I introduced him.

So Adam Grant, author and speaker and Business School professor and social media influencer and TED Talk multimillion hit wonder, bestselling author I should say, I just want to say to you, thanks so much for joining us on Intelligence Squared.

Adam Grant:

Great to be here, John. I love the Intelligence Squared debates and I hope we’re going to get to do some debating during this conversation.

John Donvan:

Yeah, Adam Grant is all that I just said there and just in case you don’t know of him in a sentence, I would say his gift is bringing the insights of psychology to improving the way that organizations you know, organize themselves and run themselves. And where he is immediately on the same page as Bo Seo is that he’s concerned about the way that we’re losing the ability to disagree without becoming enemies because we disagree. He takes this on in his book, which is called “Think Again”.

As you survey the culture now and let’s make this American culture and culture of discourse, the culture of politics, et cetera. How do you grade where we are in this kind of entrenchment that you’re talking about? Or on the flip side, how well do you think we’re doing as critical thinkers as a culture?

Adam Grant:

Does the scale go below F?

John Donvan:

[laughs] Okay, there’s your answer

Adam Grant:

Not good.

John Donvan:

Yeah. I mean, what are some examples?

Adam Grant:

Well, I think — I think if we think about life domains, one of the saddest studies I read recently is actually a series of studies showing that people would rather have a conversation with a stranger who shared their political views than a friend who didn’t. I mean, that’s a travesty. I guess, you know, it actually — let me rethink that. I guess you could say that’s good news that people are open to having conversations with strangers, not just their friends, except you’re throwing a social bond a meaningful connection out the window, just because you have a different set of views. That seems awfully short sighted and closed minded to me.

John Donvan:

It’s a lot of things that you’re trying to fix, but what’s the overall sort of schematic viewpoint that you’re trying to present in the book?

Adam Grant:

Well, I think when I looked at the data on why people have such a hard time questioning their assumptions, their opinions, their decisions, one of the consistent findings is that too many of us spend too much of our time thinking like preachers, prosecutors and politicians.

And John, I know you would never do this, but other people occasionally, right, in preacher mode, they’re busy trying to proselytize their own views. In prosecutor mode, they’re attacking somebody else’s views. And in politician mode, they only listen to people who already share their views. And my concern with all three of these mental models, right, they’re mindsets that we can slip in and out of at any point in our day, is that whether you know, your — whether your biggest vice is getting locked into preaching, prosecuting or politicking. In all of those modes, you concluded that you’re right and other people are wrong. So they might need to think again but your mental work is already done. And what I wanted to do and think again, was to teach people to escape those traps by thinking a little bit more like a scientist. John, when I say think like a scientist, I do not mean that you need to own a microscope or buy a telescope. Let’s be clear, although personally, I would enjoy it if you dressed up like Bill Nye on a weekly basis.

For me, though, thinking like a scientist means that you don’t let your ideas become your identity. That you’re as motivated to look for reasons why you might be wrong as you are to search for reasons why you must be right, that you see your opinions as hypotheses waiting to be tested. You see your decisions as experiments, right, that might falsify your hypotheses. And you have the humility to know what you don’t know, and the curiosity to find out more. And so much of that means I’m not going to define myself by my opinions. I’m going to define myself by my principles.

John Donvan:

Okay, I’m breaking in there on Adam Grant, because he just mentioned defining yourself not by your opinions, but by your principles. So here’s the third member of the trio. And guess what word he uses a lot.

Ray Dalio:

It was painful. It was — I felt a lot of pain and I learned another principle through this. Pain plus reflection equals progress.

John Donvan:

That is Ray Dalio and Ray Dalio started what became the world’s biggest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates. He is a billionaire and philanthropist and something of a philosopher hence his focus on principles. Most of his books have that word in the title. And one of his principles is that we need to challenge what we think we know. And in his company, he actually formalizes this process. His staffs of investment experts are required to take part in a version of debates inside the building about whose ideas stand up as to scrutiny. His term for this is thoughtful disagreement. So that’s how we got interested in Ray, but the story about how Ray himself came to the practice of thoughtful disagreement is an interesting one in itself.

Ray Dalio:

Okay, so it’s 1979, ’80, ’81. And I had calculated that American banks had lent more money to foreign countries than those countries were going to be able to pay back and that this was going to produce a big debt crisis.

And with an economic collapse, it was a very, very controversial point of view.

John Donvan:

And let me — let me interrupt for a second. And how much standing did you have publicly at this point?

Ray Dalio:

Hardly anything. But it got a lot of attention, in the media and so on. And then on August 1982, Mexico defaulted on its debt, and a number of countries followed, and then I’m given a lot more attention. I was asked to testify to Congress. I was on TV show at the time called Wall Street Week, which was a big deal TV show, okay, because I was right and I thought that we’re going to have an economic collapse, and I could not have been more wrong. August 1982 was the exact bottom of the stock market and we went on to move that. I lost money for myself. I lost money for my clients. I got so broke that I had to borrow $4,000 from my dad to help to pay for family bills.

You know, and it was a really humiliating experience. And it was one of the best experiences most transformative experiences of my life, because it was painful. Because then I started to think, how do I know if I’m wrong? Like, I don’t want to go through this again.

John Donvan:

And I’m wondering why you use the word arrogant about yourself —

[talking simultaneously]

Ray Dalio:

You know, you look at it and like I was so overconfident, you know, like the saying, often wrong, but never in doubt. You know, you looked at me, I look at me and I look back and say, wow, [laughs] he’s an arrogant jerk.

John Donvan:

Well, you were wrong. But were you —

Ray Dalio:

I was arrogant, arrogant, meaning so overconfident. Unjustifiably overconfident.

John Donvan:

But does that mean you had not sufficiently examined your premise? Is that where the justification comes in — lack of justification comes in?

Ray Dalio:

I think everything is a probability. So I worked hard to try to come up with that and I was right in calculating that we would get the default and so on, but that didn’t matter. It’s just that I wasn’t — I was too confident.

[music playing]

John Donvan:

We’ll be back with more conversation about debate.

[music playing]

John Donvan:

Hi, I’m John Donvan. This is Intelligence Squared. Welcome back to our set of conversations about the value of debate, the value of disagreeing well. Before the break we heard hedge fund manager Ray Dalio tell us about a time he was absolutely sure he was right, but he wasn’t and after that, he set out never to repeat that error if he could manage not to, the error of not challenging his own assumptions and he turned that into a kind of discipline. He always sets out to challenge his own ideas.

Remember Adam Grant talking about being a scientist? Well, it’s like that. An idea is something to be tested. And inside his company, Dalio has actually formalized the process of ideas being openly debated among his staff, everything and everyone can be challenged. Even the boss? How good are you at work when your employees tell you that you were wrong? First of all, how many really are doing — I’ve had a lot of bosses who said, I want to know when you think I’m wrong, and it’s turned out that they really don’t.

Ray Dalio:

I love it. I need it. That knowing how to deal with what you don’t know is more important than anything you know. I just want to be right. It doesn’t have to come from me. And how stupid is it to not be flexible? It’s just so dumb that people form conclusions, and they’re attached to the conclusions, rather than working themselves to the right answer. After all, if there’s a disagreement, how do you know that the wrong person isn’t you rather than the other person?

And so the art of thoughtful disagreement, to be able to consider the other side, of course, is an essential step toward getting to the right answer.

John Donvan:

There is a key phrase, consider the other side. And that connects to the central presumption of any debate, which is that there is another side and the other side may have enough going for it, that it at least merits being heard and considered and that requires those of us who are in a debate, or those of us who are watching a debate to do something we may seem to have a lot of trouble doing, admitting that maybe we were wrong, and maybe, just maybe being willing to change our minds.

Ray Dalio:

I’ve asked neuroscientists about it. I’ve asked educators about it. It’s part neuroscience, I understand and it’s part our environment. There is something in our brains that has to do with the amygdala, the part of the brain that interprets disagreement as — or a challenge as something like an aggressive act in which there’s a fight or flight.

So if you disagree, are you attacking me? No, I mean, you’re not attacking me. I’m just curious. I just disagree, but that’s part of it. And part of it is the education system that is brought up with oh, great, you’re smart. You got the right answer. That doesn’t teach the benefit of learning from being wrong, because almost all learning comes from being wrong. Because if you’re right, what is there to learn? And if you’re — if you’re wrong, that’s your learning opportunity, but it’s not taught.

John Donvan:

I think for a lot of people. One of the obstacles to changing your mind is shame perhaps in having been wrong.

If you held a position and you held it for a long time, and this — the intellectual, the cerebral case is made, that it was just totally wrong. That’s embarrassing and shameful. And I would think that that would be a disincentive at an emotional level to change your mind or at least to admitting to anybody that you’re changing your mind.

Ray Dalio:

Oh, it is. It is so much for both. But I mean, that is absolutely so stupid. I mean, like, I’d be really embarrassed at the stupidity of it, right? In other words — but I would understand it’s been trained into us. But when I say I don’t want to change my mind — I mean, if you verbalize it, doesn’t that sound stupid?

John Donvan:

Yeah, ridiculous. But we see that happening in the political realm constantly.

Ray Dalio:

I can’t deal with the politicians and political realm. That’s fine. I just — to speak to each one of the people on this podcast. It’s not — it’s normal, like you’re saying, but if you can then just kind of intellectualize it enough and say, boy, is that what I want to do? I don’t want to admit I’m wrong so that I can be right.

John Donvan:

So let’s bring back our psychologist Adam Grant, because we talked about the same thing.

Adam Grant:

One of my goals is to use the best evidence available to invite people to listen to ideas that make them think hard, not just the opinions that make them feel good.

John Donvan:

What do you think is the thing that causes people to stop at a certain point?

Adam Grant:

Well, I think some of it is, you know, it’s just playing what psychologists call cognitive entrenchment, which is making assumptions that you don’t even realize you’re holding like a fish that doesn’t know what’s in water. But I think more of it is probably motivational and social.

The motivational part being — I don’t want to feel like an idiot. And every time I admit that I’m wrong, I feel a little bit dumber. And I also don’t want to look like an idiot, or get excluded or ostracized by my tribe that shares my views. And so it’s a lot easier to stick to the comfort of conviction, rather than embracing the discomfort of doubt.

John Donvan:

So you’re — I hear you saying that for the individual, it can be threatening to their sense of identity to admit they were wrong. But there’s also the need for — that’s an internal pressure but there’s also an external pressure on people who admit they’re wrong in public. I’m thinking particularly of political leaders, if they change their position, they’re immediately accused of flip flopping as though that is a lack of integrity as though they are just putting their finger in the wind and may — and maybe in some cases, they are but certainly not in all cases. But talk a little bit about that external factor if whether or not that’s part of the critique you’re doing.

Adam Grant:

Yeah, I think — I think it’s really easy for politicians to get accused of flip flopping whatever, they changed their stance.

And I think what we need to recognize is it’s not how frequently if somebody changes their mind that matters, it’s when and why. If you just change your policy to appease an audience and get their approval, that is literally thinking like a politician. You’re a flip flopper. If you rethink your views based on new facts, you’ve learned something and I think that we need a culture change on this. We need to recognize that integrity is not about maintaining fidelity to your beliefs. It’s about maintaining fidelity to seeking the truth and to solving problems. And there are many different ways to do that. I don’t know that any of them are going to be easy, but from my perspective, if, you know, if I have to choose a political candidate, I would — I would say it’s — I would prefer the candidate who’s willing to contradict herself at the risk of being accused of hypocrisy over the one who sticks to her guns and sacrifices her integrity, right?

The hallmark of real integrity is being honest, not being consistent.

John Donvan:

You know, in hearing both Adam Grant and Ray Dalio talking about changing their minds, they are both implicitly saying that there actually is a best answer out there or at least a better answer. They’re saying that being able to change your mind can serve very pragmatic ends, which is basically not making bad decisions. But remember, we started out focused on a different goal and that is being able to argue with people we disagree with and not end up hating each other because of course of two people who disagree declare at the outset, that they are willing to change their minds that would already be a really good start. And on that point, I want to circle back to our debate champion both so because here’s a guy whose whole format was exactly not giving ground in an argument. Competitive debate is about winning and the other guy losing and yet Bo Seo’s book, “Good Arguments” is about not doing that in real life.

Bo Seo:

There’s so much work that has to be done and so many different things that we need to do to come together as a society again, to come together as nations again.

But I know from my experience that the power of this activity to empower individuals to speak up to be able to engage others with respect to be able to come together in conversation and leave with unexpected answers that you didn’t think you might arrive that, that’s a way of slowly changing the world.

John Donvan:

But there’s another aspect it’s key to debate and to the kind of debate that you went into, which was called a competitive debate. Number one, it’s a contest. Number two, you’re not just trying to be heard but you’re actively, as you just put it, trying to change the world a little bit. You’re trying to change someone’s mind. So talk about how it is more than just being heard. And what about that appealed to you? I’m guessing it was that the competition forced you to just get better at it. But maybe there’s — maybe you liked competing too.

Bo Seo:

I did. And you know, sometimes with these kinds of discussions on civil dialogue and so on, I think sometimes it requires us to be kind of angelic, you know, to be kind of infinitely patient to just take in the information and so on. But, you know, there is a part of it, which is curiosity about how your ideas will be received, and kind of like a pinball machine when it bounces up against the other person, it’s going to come back to you in a different direction, right? And so that process of evolution and trying to stay ahead and you know, in a debate often — John, I don’t know whether you feel this as a moderator, but the experience of competing usually isn’t like, gosh, I really want to crush the other side, you’re usually trying to just keep up with the — with the with the pace at which the ideas develop, and you’re kind of just trying to see whether you can respond to this next idea whether you can evolve your thinking in a way that is going to be responsive to the other person’s concern.

And so that experience of competition for me was important. Partly I’m sure because there is a part of me that’s competitive that wants to do well, but another part of me that just saw the joy of the transformation unfolding before me, and that — that that kind of progression and that propulsive force felt to me like a kind of progress. Winning is not the point, so then what is — I think what the point is that InterBase you know, that even the people that you Beach, are going to be back the next day or the next week or the next month, on a different topic, on a different side with different arguments probably improved through the course of your last encounter, and you’re going to have to start again.

So you’re going to have to learn to disagree in such a way that keeps the conversation going, right? And that keeps both sides willing to come back.

John Donvan:

And then I threw a hopeful thought into the conversation. I suspected Bo would agree, and I was right.

And there’s also something to be said just about the idea that even by engaging in an argument with another person, you’re demonstrating a gesture of respect for that person. Now that’s not true of all arguments. There can be some very nasty arguments at the moment of a fender bender or something like that and, and in some political settings that we’ve seen in the last couple of years, but that — by and large, would you say that the willingness to disagree with somebody, particularly if the two of you come at it in good faith is actually a show of respect for one another?

Bo Seo:

Absolutely, absolutely.

And, you know, I used to think that the willingness to engage in debate was a kind of a vote of confidence in yourself, right, in your ability to handle it and to express yourself well, but nowadays, I think it’s more of a vote of confidence in the other person to receive you with some grace to be able to respond and make something productive. Out of the exchange and for me, in matters that we try and debate a lot because you know, the wins and losses feel extremely consequential if we debate like once a year, right? But once we — but if there is a kind of repetition and there are many rounds and we disagree about lots of different things, and we have different performances, the individual wins and losses become less threatening, and it becomes more about the quality of the conversation that we have overall.

John Donvan:

There was something you said in the book that I found really interesting, which was that one of your favorite views in terms of the way people talk to each other is ABC News’ “The View,” so the show that has been on for 20 years started by Barbara Walters, as usual.

It’s a group of four women who disagree on topics kind of kicking around the subject, and you’re a big fan of the view and I want to see what’s going on to those couches that you really like.

Bo Seo:

[laughs] I have to say, I was quite young when I got into it. I was in middle school, and I felt that it was co-hosts and they’re — I think they’re all women. They were doing something really quite amazing, which is he was a show where they knew and the point of their gathering was to disagree, right? And to disagree about everything actually and —

John Donvan:

And mean it by the way, they were not posturing —

Bo Seo:

— and sometimes they leave, you know, [laughs] mid show and then there’s not — many of them. So if they leave it’s quite noticeable.

And but — they always come back the next day, and there’s no — and there’s a kind of a high and low thing, right. They’ll argue about the politics of the day and then argue about what Britney Spears is up to. And it was the repetition of it that I thought was amazing, that they would be able to argue at really quite high octane — at quite a high octane pitch, but there was something about that — about their relationship about the way in which they dealt with each other that they had fire found a kind of a common groove and a common rhythm that allowed them to come back day and day in again. And importantly out amazingly keep people watching and you guys live this out in a very different way offensively in this series, but to have people want to come and watch people disagree is for me a source of enormous hope, because even at a time when disagreements are seen as a kind of a source of division and ugly and something to shy away from, people still do see the value in it.

John Donvan:

We are now going to get into some useful advice on how we can do it better. That is how we can disagree with each other but still be able to connect with one another. Bo Seo was talking about not giving up on each other stay in the discourse. Don’t walk away, keep the conversation going. Grant had another suggestion. Be willing to approach any argument with a sense of humility, which really resonated with me because of what I shared with Grant about my own approach to being a journalist, which, if you didn’t know is what I’ve been doing for most of my professional life.

There’s another theme that you talked about a great deal about the willingness to acknowledge that you are wrong. And that is the concept and the value of humility, which really spoke to me because I had — I had a very, very long career as a journalist for ABC News.

Started when I was very, very young, and went to more than 35 years of working for them in a lot of situations where there was strong contentiousness involved. Like I was the White House correspondent, I was the Jerusalem correspondent, I covered Israel, I covered Russia during its collapse, Eastern Europe’s collapse — wars in various places. And these are all highly, highly contentious situations in which one side says they’re right and the other side says they’re right. And they fight against each other, and they struggle with each other. And I found myself particularly as a — particularly as a foreign correspondent in cultures that I didn’t understand, throwing away the value that we were taught in my generation was the most important value as a journalist, which was objectivity, which was the notion that there’s a solid truth out there. You need to go find it; you don’t need to go report it — you need to keep your personal views out of that.

Those became somewhat ingrained habits in me keeping my personal views out of what I put into the program. But at core I didn’t believe in the value of objectivity. And I never said it out loud because it was so much the Shibboleth of the time, objectivity, objectivity. I developed a different set of values for what drove me as a journalist and trying to get some semblance of a truth, which again, I would — question is really something that can be nailed down. I pursued three things. One was honesty, the second was curiosity, and the third was humility. The idea that I probably really didn’t know — I probably really wasn’t equipped to opine on any of this stuff. And I found throughout my career when people love to go to journalists and say, what’s going to happen and who’s right and I have always avoided those conversations, which makes me kind of the perfect candidate to be an Intelligence Squared moderator because I’m standing in the middle and I’m trying to involve the two sides and not involve myself. And then I found that your argument, in “Think Again” depends so much on the notion of humility, and I want to know what you mean by humility in this in this idea of being able to think again and change your mind.

We’ll be back with more conversation about debate.

[music playing]

John Donvan:

Welcome back to our year end episode about the value of debate on Intelligence Squared. I’m John Donvan. Before the break, you heard me tell psychologist Adam Grant about my own experience as a journalist where I learned a lot about being curious and trying to be humble. Let’s hear what Grant had to say in response and some specific tips about how to argue better.

Adam Grant:

Well, let me start by saying John, that if we could elevate those principles of honesty, curiosity and humility, I actually think that might be a better path to objectivity than attempting to direct objectivity itself.

I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to be objective, right? As a psychologist, I know that everyone has biases and if you don’t think you have them, then you’re falling victim to the — I’m not biased, bias where you think that you — you’re capable of a level of neutrality that you know no other human being is. So what would make you any different and that makes you ironically, more bias in the data. So I think, you know, I actually think that the best way to be objective is to prize the principles that you just described. And when we talk about humility, I think about intellectual humility is as just being willing to both acknowledge and explore what you don’t know. That means there is an ever expanding list of things that you’re uncertain about, that you’re uninformed about, and you’re excited to try to fill some of those gaps in your knowledge, knowing that you’re probably not going to find the truth with a capital T, but you can get closer to it. And the best way to get closer to it is to be less wrong.

I think that we don’t — we don’t teach this kind of humility, in part because humility gets a bad rap. A lot of people think about it as low self-esteem or lacking confidence. I love that one of the Latin roots of humility translates to, “from the Earth.” And what that signals to me is that humility is about being grounded. It’s about recognizing that you’re human, you’re fallible, you have strengths you also have weaknesses. And that means you can actually display confident humility which is being secure enough in your own knowledge to admit what you don’t know. The handful of leaders that I’ve really admired are the ones who started COVID by saying, we actually don’t know how to — how to fight this yet, but I’m confident that we have an excellent team that’s going to figure it out. And as the science changes, our policies are going to change with it. That is confident humility. I don’t know what I’m doing yet. But I believe I’m capable of leading us toward a better future.

John Donvan:

Okay, so humility, that’s maybe a good tip.

Here’s another one, this one from Bo Seo, debate champion. Try looking at things from your opponent’s point of view. That is actually an exercise practiced by experienced debaters, switching sides, though it’s called side switching.

Bo Seo:

In order for the side switch techniques to be used for, it doesn’t require you to fully understand what the other person is thinking and in fact, that might not be, you know, always achievable, right? But what I like about the exercises is, it does give you a few moments of uncertainty, right to countervail against what might otherwise be strongly held conviction, right? Which is a good thing, but to be able to say, I might have missed something here. I think that makes you a more agile debater. I think it makes you more flexible. I think it makes you more receptive to the ideas that the other side is putting forward and so it’s not so much that the fights which exercises allow you to achieve empathy, but maybe that it creates the room in which empathy can emerge and seep through.

John Donvan:

Yet another tip from Bo Seo. Make sure you can actually name your disagreement because maybe it’s not worth arguing over.

Bo Seo:

You know, it’s so often the case that in the disagreements that we have at home, what begins as just a kind of a disagreement about the dirty dishes, then becomes, you know, this thing that happened last week, or the sense that you’re not listening to me, or it tends to compound, doesn’t it? And one of the starting points in debate — and I see it in the Intelligence Squared debates as well is naming what the — what the debate is about, and that’s the topic so that you’re able to say all of those other things that you’re talking about, my personality included, might be fitting subject for debate at some other time, but it’s just not the debate that we’re having right now.

John Donvan:

I disagree with that. What if — I mean, I am bringing that up because you might have — one might encounter resistance to that formulation —

Bo Seo:

Yeah.

John Donvan:

— in the outset.

Bo Seo:

For sure. For sure. And that is an instance where you probably do have to negotiate prior to the start of the disagreement, right? So every disagreement in my view should start with some amount of agreement. And that then agreement about what you’re actually talking about, and how you’re going to go about having that disagreement. And so, being deliberate in that way, I think that really increases the chance of it, of the disagreement going right.

John Donvan:

What about learning how to interrupt? That’s been one of my tools that I’m comfortable using as a debate moderator, but in personal interaction, interruption can really, really be seen as aggressive and offensive.

Bo Seo:

Yeah, I think in general, it’s not a very good idea in personal disagreements. And the reason why I think that John is — I’m sure you do it very judiciously [laughs]. But where there is no third party moderator, and you’re playing umpire and moderator yourself, I think people usually tend to have kind of self-serving or slightly distorted ideas of when an interruption might be justified, right? So the way in which I would kind of fix that is the turn taking. That’s a feature of debate, right? When I get to say something, you respond, but I don’t have to interrupt at this one because I know I’m going to get a chance to respond.

John Donvan:

Oh, I see.

Bo Seo:

As long as you can kind of — it doesn’t have to be — I talk for seven minutes uninterrupted on YouTube for seven minutes uninterrupted, but you can say, can I have a little bit of time here, right? And then you’re going to get a go, but we have to agree then I’m going to get a go and response.

I think that’s a better way to do it, because it cools the temperature and it increases the chance that both sides will be heard, and each side will be heard by the other.

John Donvan:

You know, it strikes me that that actually could be a takeaway tool for any of us if we’re going to have a conversation with somebody at work at home and family and it’s going poorly to just say, let’s just do this. Let’s just take turns and hear each other out and be fair about that. I think it’d be very, very constructive. You do talk about the topic — the idea that certain topics should not be on the table for debate. And in some cases, that’s because of the offence that they might bring two individuals who are challenged by the very premise of the debate itself. You need to go back to your book, you’re talking about the disruption, that kind of disruption, the weight of that disruption would — could land more heavily on those for whom the debate was raw and personal. As debaters, we had to be attentive to these people, not because they were quote, snowflakes, a term of derision, meaning an overly sensitive person, but because they were human, prone to hurt and exhaustion, we had to think less about the freedom to disagree than about the responsibility to disagree well.

This goes directly to the conversation that’s taking place about what’s happening on college campuses and whether certain — it’s often phrased as whether certain speakers should be brought on campus, but I want to put it on in a different framework whether certain topics should be entertained as debatable or not. And I want to know what your thinking is on that.

Bo Seo:

It’s a really — it’s a really, really difficult issue. The only real bright line that I draw in the book is a debate cannot question the equal moral worth of the participants, because the whole point of debate is, you know, given equal opportunity and equal time to speak because you have equal worth as individuals. So I don’t think it would be acceptable to have a debate saying certain races are inferior to others, pro or con, for example, and for me that wouldn’t be a bright line.

We also have to think about when we as institutions, staged debates, the kind of legitimacy that we lend in suggesting there are two sides to this issue, right? So that’s another issue that we might have to think about in the way that media companies —

John Donvan:

But that judgement is ultimately political. It is ultimately a judgement call.

Bo Seo:

Yeah, of course it is. And I think one thing I would add here, John, is the fact that these kinds — some things may not be appropriate subject for debate, does not mean we should stop speech on it, right? So there are lots of different ways in which we can talk about something. And there are instances where simply sharing our views might be appropriate, or having kind of, you know, dueling perspectives presented, but not in a kind of an adversarial debate format might be more appropriate.

There are other times when you just have to negotiate, for example. So this is a book about debate. The higher level question that it answers is, how can we disagree better? The higher level question about that is how do we deal with the fact that we’re all different, but we have to coexist, and at each turn, disagreement is not the only answer to coexistence. Debate is not the only way in which we can disagree. And so there are some instances where debate is appropriate. And I think, you know, there’s lots of different ideas, all of them worth canvassing about where we might draw the line, but I’ve given you a sense of where I might, but that’s not to say we shouldn’t talk about those issues. It’s that we shouldn’t debate about.

John Donvan:

Well, our three interlocutors have given us a lot to think about and almost some catchphrases to hang on to for what they are urging us to consider. Ray Dalio’s is thoughtful disagreement, Bo Seo’s, good argument, Adam Grant’s is, think again.

And while all three of them are concerned about the state of our polarization, they do think there are ways that we can reason through disagreements and survive the fact that we won’t see eye to eye some of the time, maybe much of the time, and they all see a virtue and being able to change your mind. And on that point, I shared something with Adam Grant in our conversation, something that I have seen at our live in person debates that has long sort of amazed me. And in this context, it has really given me hope.

My favorite part of every debate and I have done about 200 of them now. After the debate was over, I would step out into the lobby and kind of float on the ocean of excitement that I felt happening there as people poured into the lobby and crowded shoulder to shoulder, and I would chat with people and there was a really, really high level of buzz and people would be continuing to have the talking about the debate and sharing their views and swapping ideas back and forth. But as I chatted with people, the ones who I found most kind of bullying and just a non on a high about what they had just been through were those who have changed their minds.

People would say to me, you know, I came in here and I never thought that I could change my mind on such and such a topic, but I did tonight and they would kind of share a sense of excitement and exhilaration. It was so remarkable to me that this thing that — as you said earlier, we anticipate is going to be painful, so painful that we dig in on our views — we become entrenched to watch people who decided to indulge in this exercise of coming to a debate, taking our challenge to them to listen critically and to keep open minds and then actually didn’t change their minds were thrilled by having gone through it.

Adam Grant:

That’s amazing to hear and I think it speaks to the power of a few things that to me are built into your structure that are missing from everyday life. The first one is that people come to listen.

They show up to really digest information in a deep way and to focus their full attention on a debate. The second is that they don’t have to advocate for a position, right? So one of the most fundamental findings in psychology over the last half century is when you argue for a position, you are not convincing the other person as much as you are convincing yourself. And the idea that I can come as a fly on the wall and hear other people grapple with different views and nuanced issues. It’s very different from me being one of the debaters and I think that’s ingenious to make sure that there are many more people in the audience than there are on stage. And then the last thing for me is that you’ve really set up these debates to make it clear to people that this is a learning experience, right? I think you’re actually setting the stage for the joy of being wrong that people get that rush of saying, wow, I learned something new. And I think that the challenge is to take that experience and poured it into our everyday interactions.

John Donvan:

So given all that these three friends of our debate program had to say to us about listening and about changing your mind and about hearing the other side I want to step back for just a moment and bring in our CEO Clea Conner, for a brief reflection from her on what we heard from our three guests in light of — right now I’ll put in together a new season of debates to launch with the new year. Hi, Clea.

Clea Conner:

Hi, John.

John Donvan:

So Clea, I would like to get your take on something I was thinking about as I listened to it all three of them had to say. So on the one hand, an important message that we’re putting out there was be willing to admit you’re wrong. But on the other hand, what we do in a debate is we put up two debaters and sometimes two teams of debaters who are there to make the case that the other side is wrong. So what about that tension? Because at Intelligence Squared, we put a value on being open to changing your mind, but we also value debaters who will argue their side with intellectual ferocity. So what are your thoughts on that?

Clea Conner:

I don’t think it’s too hard to reconcile for me because what comes to me is that being open to debate is not being right or wrong.

I mean in a perfect world, people come to a debate with an open mind. And they’re open to being convinced that perhaps they actually need more information to declare that they’re for or against a debate topic. That’s why we always have an undecided position. But if we think about reconciling these two ideas, being willing to admit you’re wrong, but also being able to defend your ideas with true conviction, I think we actually get to the same conclusion. Debate is about better understanding your ideas through the evidence and ideas of people who disagree with you. It’s about learning something new, whether it informs the next evolution of your thinking, or reinforces your existing opinion. So for me being open to debates is about being open to learning something new, it’s open to understanding what shapes your thinking, how you relate to the world in a deeper and more meaningful and more impactful way, just because you’ve gathered that new information from another point of view.

I mean, if you change your mind, that’s powerful, you had more to learn and thinking you’re right instead of knowing you’re right are two completely different phases of understanding.

John Donvan:

That’s very well put, thinking you’re right versus knowing that you’re right. So is that — would you — would you say the core value of what we want listeners to get from what we do?

Clea Conner:

I think, I mean, yes, for sure. Debate creates an opportunity for the two sides to listen and to share. It’s like sharing in a process to better understand other ideas, but make more informed judgments and decisions and, you know, build your own arguments as well. I’d say for our listeners, you know, a lot of this is being informed about what decisions to make, who to vote for, even lifestyle changes that you might want to make and being informed, it’s not an exercise in being able to argue your point.

I would say it’s being able to argue your opponent’s point.

John Donvan:

Just as our guest said, same thing.

Clea Conner:

Yeah, exactly.

John Donvan:

Know your opponent’s point of view, yeah.

Clea Conner:

If you can switch sides and argue a point of view you disagree with and think really critically about how your arguments could improve, I think that’s where true learning kicks in and I think that’s where our audience really likes to be intellectually challenged.

John Donvan:

All right. Clea Conner, thank you so much for dropping by and sharing those thoughts. And I agree. [inaudible]

[laughter]

Clea Conner:

We don’t have to disagree. We just agree [laughs].

John Donvan:

No, not on that one. So there it is everybody, we will keep doing what we do. We will keep putting on our debates, good argument. And to say goodbye for this episode, how about we take inspiration from one last check in with Bo Seo, that — maybe the example we set for good debates and good debaters are not changing the world overnight, but maybe a little bit day by day.

Bo Seo:

The Melancholy comes from the fact for me, John, in that — the change that we affect is always going to be very small.

It’s going to be about small changes in ourselves, small changes in the person across from us, but if you can imagine everybody in the world engaging in these discussions, doing slightly better at the family dining room table or at work, or out there in the public square. I have to think, and at this point, it is just optimism, but I have to — I have to think that that’s going to nudge the world in a more positive direction.

John Donvan:

Well, here’s hoping that Bo Seo is right. That is it from me and from this set of conversations about debate, but I think they perfectly capture why we do this. And you know, as we’ve said in this program, that the way discourse happens these days is really broken. It’s why it’s so refreshing to hear people disagree civilly and constructively and not just blow smoke. And we know from so many of you, that’s exactly why you listen to what we do. And it’s why I like to remind you that as you turn to us for all of that, we turn to you for support.

We’re a nonprofit at Intelligence Squared, and it’s contributions from listeners like you that keep us going. So please consider sending us a buck or two or 10 or 50, whatever works, go to iq2us.org and look for the donate button. It’ll give you a stake in what we’re doing here each week and it will mean that we are here next week and beyond and stay with us in the weeks and months to come because we have some great debates coming up. Once again, I’m John Donvan and this is Intelligence Squared. And I’ll see you next time.

Thank you for tuning into this episode of Intelligence Squared made possible by a generous grant from the Laura and Gary Lotter venture philanthropy fund. As a nonprofit, our work to combat extreme polarization through civil and respectful debate is generously funded by listeners like you, the Rosenkranz foundation and friends of Intelligence Squared. Robert Rosenkranz is our chairman. Clea Conner is CEO. David Ariosto is head of editorial. Julia Melfi [spelled phonetically], Che O’Meara [spelled phonetically] and Marlon Sandoval [spelled phonetically] are our producers. Damon Whitmore [spelled phonetically] is our radio producer, and I’m your host, John Donvan. We’ll see you next time.