Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Bo Seo: Why Debating Matters?

Episode Date: December 25, 2023

Join Endgame YouTube Channel Membership! Support us and get early access to our videos + more perks in return: https://sgpp.me/becomemember ----------------------- Bo Seo—two-time world debate champion, journalist, and author of “Good Arguments”—explores the culture of dialogue in fostering a healthy democracy. #Endgame #GitaWirjawan #BoSeo ----------------------- About the host: Gita Wirjawan is an Indonesian entrepreneur, educator, and currently a visiting scholar at The Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), Stanford University. Gita is also just appointed as an Honorary Professor of Politics and International Relations in the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, UK. ---------------------- Get Bo's Book Here: https://www.periplus.com/p/9780593299517/good-arguments-how-debate-teaches-us-to-listen-and-be-heard ---------------------- Understand this Episode Better: https://sgpp.me/eps167notes ----------------------- SGPP Indonesia Master of Public Policy: [e-mail] https://admissions.sgpp.ac.id https://wa.me/628111522504 Other "Endgame" episode playlists: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-hh_bKgnJ6FqDJwTs5YB3xMvQrFCDSoJ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-hh_bKgnJ6GMirnRoVac4TFpkQb85LqD https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-hh_bKgnJ6GKWds018OKy75Vw1bcCH_S Visit and subscribe: https://youtube.com/@SGPPIndonesia https://youtube.com/@VisinemaPictures

Debate is a complicated subject. It combining that element of logic on the one hand, emotion on the other, deliberation and performance. People say, being a debater, it's not a very Asian thing to do. But I couldn't be a debater without that culture that says you try and hear what the other person is saying. You learn to listen before you speak. before you speak. Actually, when you're blabbering on, putting all these ideas on the table, putting your name to various things, you're not always in a position of strength.

This is endgame. Hello, friends, today we're getting both so. is a win competition debate or debate a dead

a world two times and he also is a book great

really which is good arguments our debate teaches us to listen and be heard

Bo thank you so much for coming on talk thank you so much for lending

your strength to the publication of my book here in Indonesia and

thank you for having me on this important program I've read your

book it's a fascinating book I want to basically ask you how you grew up and what were some of the things that made you the way you are. Please tell us. You know, I have a professor who's a writer called Jamaica Kincaid who once said, your life happens before the age of eight and the rest of your life are echoes of that.

and for me, I just make the cut off because I think the defining experience of my life was the experience of migration. So I was born in South Korea, and I was a pretty shy kid. And, you know, the one thing about South Korea is there are a lot of Koreans there. And I think I thought I could get through life by being one of a craft. out by hiding, not standing out, doing my part, but skating under the radar. And when I moved to Australia, that became impossible. I was one of a handful of Asian kids at my school in my neighborhood. I moved without speaking the English language.

So my difference was embedded in speech. every interaction with language had the potential to mark me out as an outsider. And there are a lot of interactions with language in the world. Even then when I moved, I think I thought I could do the old thing of hiding my differences from others. And the way in which I did that was by being very agreeable. So I smiled and nodded, a distant kind of smile. And I kept most of my thoughts to myself. And I think the inevitability was that just wasn't going to work in this new country.

I was going to have to find a way to talk about my differences, to engage with the fact that I live in a community, in a neighborhood, in a society where I am not. or like everybody else. And we're going to have to work out some way to make that a force for good rather than of bad. And the way I got started in doing that is my year five teacher promising me in primary school that on the debating team, something called the debating team, when one person spoke, no one else did.

And that promise of silence, of attention, not in the ways that I was the same as everyone, but the ways in which I was different, that made me feel for the first time that I could raise my voice in the fullness of who I was. And that included my differences as well as my similarities with others. So it was an experience rooted in migration that ultimately sets something about, well, that put me in closer contact with our situation as people, which is here we are on this plot of land with people who are not like us. And what do we do about that?

What gave you the strength to go up there and start debating? Was it a challenge that you needed to take on to prove something? or it was just something that you became, you know, kind of like enamored with. I think certainly, you know, never underestimate the force of someone who's overcompensating for something. And all those words being enamored, obsessed, seems right to me. And it's rooted in the absence of something. the absence of a voice, right? The absence of real relationships and interaction and real conversation.

So I think in some ways I was striving to have something I didn't have. That was one driving motivation. But that point about what gave me the strength to do that, some of that was my family. Okay. So, you know, I think something quite unusual happens when you, you migrate as a family, which is your relationship becomes a little more equal with your parents. Hearing your father be called a racial epithet for the first time is like seeing, you know, a God take an arrow. And you, and these people who,

you know, when you're eight, they seem like giants. They come down to earth. And in my family, my parents spoke a lot better English than I did. But I quickly became more integrated into the society because I had friends. I had a school. I had soccer club and so on. Right. And so we became a kind of unit. We were working things out together. And we had six pairs of three pairs of ice, six individual eyes with which to work out where we were. And so around the dinner table, it was, it at times felt like a conversation of equals. My perceptions of this society, my opinions about where we were headed as a family seemed to carry some weight. And so that sense that even though I was embarrassingly young,

that here were these adults taking me seriously. I think that meant an enormous deal to me. Would you regard that as the overriding force that the family was supportive of your taking on this challenge? would things have been different if they were not supportive? It certainly would have been very different. And, you know, that sense of not quite knowing where you are. You know, you go to the supermarket for the first time and you don't know what the soup looks like.

And so you look around, there's two other people who might know in your family. So you have to say, does anybody know what the soup look like? So that sense of interdependence. And that sense that at the end of a day, a day of real exploration, trying things out, that you were coming back to a safe space, a haven, at the least gave me a kind of oasis in which to replenish my... strength yeah but I think it did a lot more than that too I think it raised my voice it made me feel accountable for the ideas that I was putting forward so my family was

certainly an indispensable part of my development you talked about the roles of some of the teachers that encouraged you talk about that you know I had a One thing I came across since joining the debating team in grade five was just a kind of a cast of coaches and mentors and teachers. And it's like the cast of a Victorian novel. There are kind of slightly shifty ones and there are the bombastic ones and then there's the nurturing one who comes in right at the right time. And there's something about that community that it's so built on giving back. And the idea that your mentor could be someone your age or just a year above is not at all foreign. So the person who was probably most important for me was my grade six teacher who told me that you could be an important voice for this kind of.

century. Wow. Right. And she had no basis on which to say this. What could I have written in my book reports or science reports that that led her to say that, but she did. And that kind of almost reckless faith in someone. And from someone who was. newly arrived in the country, the idea that I could have a voice at all in that society, that someone saw that was willing to say that, I think that changed a lot of things. When did you start feeling that you hadn't? You hadn't what it take. I'll let you know when I have that time. But I mean, you mean in debating? Yeah, in debating. I mean, well, I'm trying to get people interested.

interested in debating. Yeah. Because not everybody likes to participate in debating, right? It's, it's, I think people view that as something that's really tough to do. And, and you've turned out really okay by being able to debate effectively and well. And, and I think it's important for more and more people to get excited about debating. Absolutely. And how do you get over that mental block?

because yeah that moment for me comes in stages you know so the first time when I realized I was onto something yeah was the first time I debated at all right and I was in year five yeah school auditorium, spring day, rain falling down. You know, it was the beat of the rain drums masking the heartbeat. And I was slated to be the first speaker arguing that we should ban all zoos in front of a group of about 50 kids. and, you know, it's the kind of nerves where you squeak as you go on state. And I'm standing there and I look out into the audience. And somehow I get the first word out.

And, you know, I've heard athletes describe how they can remember every sensory detail in a game because they're so on. They have to be. It's like a life or death kind of situation. Same is true for me with debates. I can remember everything in a room. And I stood up there, managed to get a few words out. And I saw these small changes in the audience. I saw someone nod slightly and then more vigorously.

I saw someone wink a little in recognition. And, you know, up until that point, the world had seemed like a serious. of hard surfaces, and I would have to squeeze myself, no matter how narrow the gap. But that moment when I started speaking and I saw the world reacting to me in real time, I started to think, I can change something about this place. I can be in conversation with the world around me. That was the first time when I knew I was on the cusp of something.

thing that if I took a leap, it would change me. How many times have you been in a position to defend a position that you were, you felt ideologically opposed to? It happens very often. So the design of a debate is, uh, you're given a topic right that we should ban all zoos and either you flip a coin sometimes to decide whether you're arguing for or against. Or you got no choice.

Exactly. Right. And so it happens an enormous kind of number of times over the course of a career. And I have to say, and this is something that we should be ambivalent about with regards to debate. We should think about what the limits of this approach are. But I have to say, as I became more experienced, I started to defer the judgment. And I started to say, for this two-hour period, the aim is to explore the idea. And the way in which we're going to do that is my putting up the best case that I possibly can for this side that I've been given.

And at the end of that two hours, we're going to come to a different kind of engagement with this subject. We're going to reflect on what just happened in the... dark hours of the night, we're going to say, did I get any of that right? That's especially if you won the debate. So it happens quite often. How do you feel if you had won a debate by defending a point that you really don't feel comfortable with?

How do you deal with the psychology of that? And just curious. Yeah. Well, I think the one thing you learned, and I think you actually learn it probably in the other direction, which is you really believed something. And it may well have been your experience tells you this is true. You think it's a moral imperative that your side prevail, but you lose.

So that's the mirror image of what you just described. And what you learn by going through that is that there's a difference between being right and persuasive. that the latter is the work of craft. It's a skill. It's performance too. What happens on the day? Did you get your speech and gesture and thinking all in order? So for me, to answer your question,

in those instances where you prevail on the wrong side, you applaud the mastery of skills but you maybe you weep for the substantive outcome and you hope that by mastering the skills of advocacy and maybe more importantly

testing your certainty against the opposing position that perhaps in the real world when it counts when you have to advocate for your cause for real, that you'll be better prepared to do that. Putting aside this being a performance, right? Does that teach you how to be more open-minded? Absolutely. Does that teach you to be trying to stay away from any predisposition with respect to any

particular issue or position or whatever? So I think the danger that you've identified is you can be so open-minded that your brain falls out. And I worry about that. Because you travel for debate and you don't want to leave your brain hanging out. Right, right. You travel all across the spectrum, right? That's right. Then you lose direction.

That's right. Right. I worry about it more as a theoretical. possibility than what I've seen in practice. So one thing I see in debating is, and actually it's easier for younger people to do this. What I hear on the bus rides back from the competition, sometimes primary school students,

is, you know, and you can see these students, they argue till they're red in the face. That's kind of a terrifying thing when you see a primary school student go red in the face. And he's like, this kid going to be all right. What you hear on the bus ride back is one of the kids turned to their former opponent and say, you know, you had a good point there. And what that suggests to me is they found a new language, a different language than

the one of debate for reflecting on the conversation that just occurred. And so I think that switch is very important. and the danger that you've identified becomes acute where we're just in the world of debate. So it's right, I think, that we need to nuance our thinking by considering the other side. That's how we give it a texture. That's how we cure blind spots. But if we're in the business of trying to be all-seeing, judgment goes out the window. clarity goes out the window

conviction can go out the window too so part of I think harnessing the power of debate for good thinking and hopefully for good society is knowing its limits too you've won a world championship

twice that's awesome right it's so inspirational to many people around the world and I I hope for that to be an inspiration to a lot of Indonesians or Southeast Asians. You talked about a lot of things in the book.

One chapter you dedicated to, you know, how to deal with bullies. Talk about that. And I want to take you to a different place after this. Sure. We're witnessing so much bullying at many levels, right? Yeah. So I love actually the proximity of those two things in your question. The victory and then the bullies.

And that's actually how the chapter is structured too. Because for me, the great height of my debating career was in January 2016 when I won the World University's Championships for Harvard. And that was the first time I started thinking about writing this book. And it would have been a kind of triumphant, instructional, this is how you ascend this mountain called debate. And then nine months after that, so September 2016, was the presidential debate cycle, a campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and the debate cycle that was a part of that. and if viewers think about that election,

I bet one image they might conjure up very quickly are the debates because the debates were not only a symbol for the polarization and division that had set in in that country, but I think it became a instrument for those divisions to become more pronounced, more entrenched. And so it felt like ascending to one, what you thought was the peak. And it turns out there's another one.

You're kind of halfway up. You're still a base camp. Exactly. Or that's just where you land. And it made me think debate is a complicated subject. In part because it abuts some of the richest, most difficult questions that we have to confront as humans.

It contains... light and shade. And part of that is what we've been talking about before, about it combining that element of logic on the one hand, emotion on the other, deliberation and performance. So that brought the question of, what do we do about the fact that some people are bad faith debaters, really acutely to light?

And the two answers that I came to was, first of all, to a fault, the answer of debate says there's a technique to this. We can identify an underlying physics of bad disagreement as we can, good disagreement. The subject matter changes, but the dynamics, we can isolate a few of them. So one very practical tip that a lot of debaters are torn. Because there are different kinds of bad debaters. And one of them is someone called the Wrangler who says no to everything. I know some people are like that. I'm sure you're.

We won't name anybody. But they're the people who can give you convincing reasons why you're wrong. to just about any suggestion that you give. And the advice in responding to someone like that is to turn around and ask them, well, what do you believe? So that then it's a discussion of equals. Right. And you have a position just the way that I do.

So the first set of answers is about how do we counteract these moves as a matter of technique and strategy. but the second which I think opens up in the structure of the book opens up into questions of society and in my thinking opens up to especially to the political challenges that we're facing at present which is how do we restore

what can too often be a brawl How can we bring debate back in that context? You know, you come out to me as somebody who's non-confrontational, right? That seems to be one of the secrets as to why you're a successful debater. Because any such time when somebody comes out superimposing, confrontation, it's just not going to work. Right? And I've seen lots of people who have claimed to be good debaters. But they're not like you.

You know, and you talked in the book about how to get somebody to not necessarily agree with you, but disagree in a cool way with you. Right? That's challenging, man. I mean, that just shows a lot more realism about what's happening in the world. because it's it's near impossible to get everybody to agree with your position right but i think it's a lot more possible to get people to disagree with you in a good way right and with the kinds of complexities that we're faced in the world right now your style i think is more suitable to wood peace

From the Zen. Yeah, I mean, it's rare that you see somebody who comes to the table with a highly non-confrontational manner, but being able to understand, being able to listen, being able to be hurt, being able to get the other guy to sort of like succumb to some sort of position that entails peace and calm. Absolutely. I feel that from you. I feel that vibration when I talk to you. I appreciate that. And I'm sure that's happened to a lot of people. Explain the science of that.

Is it more art or science? For a start, it's biography. For a start, it's biography. And it comes from the experience of being an outsider, of being very comfortable in the position on the periphery, where you learn to listen before you speak. there's a cultural dimension to that too. People say, being a debater, it's not a very Asian thing to do.

Ain't that the truth. And, you know, but I couldn't be a debater without that culture. That culture that says you try and hear what the other person is saying. So I think that's the start of it. And then the science which you can superimpose on top of that is it's very much in your interests for the other person to spell out their position in full. Why?

Because they're then accountable for something. And very few people have their position fully worked out. So when you see the whole thing and you ask them, are you done? you'll see the whole thing you can see the ways in which it falls apart so I think that's the science of it

that actually when you're blabbering on putting all these ideas on the table putting your name to various things you're not always in a position of strength you know how do you see your skill or your mastery of this art and science

being applicable to the remedy of what we're witnessing in the social media space right where you've got the amplification of the two differing eco chambers that don't seem to be able to communicate with each other

and how uglier it's gone in the last few years by way of equating democracy with algorithmic amplification I intuitively I feel and I think that

I think your skill set is something that could be an antidote to this as to get these two opposing sides that do not want to communicate to each other to at least start melting. I mean, I'd be very eager to get your thoughts on that question too,

but I'll offer two ideas here. And both are, I think, just getting us to understand with more clarity the problem that we're dealing with. One, I think, is that so much of social media in particular is built on an architecture of gratification. It's around finding a group of people who amplify our existing biases and positions so that we become more extreme.

We double down rather than hearing opposing views. But it's a cheap kind of gratification, and we know it doesn't satisfy us. Because we wouldn't be addicted to it if it did satisfy us in a deeply meaningful way. It's a kind of a diet Coke. There's no nutrition. It's a sweetener. And my hope is, and it requires some activation energy, which is the heart part,

but my hope is that the deeper rewards of conversing with people you disagree with, of discovering new horizons, right, of possibilities that way, of having to trust the other person to bear yourself in your difference, right? And have that rewarded, as it often is, as it was for me, my hope is that that kind of deeper satisfaction will realize that's more nourishing than the sweeteners. So that's one part of it. The other way to describe the problem

is I think there's something really funky going on with the melding of the private and the public space. And now with social media, it's become so easy for people to imagine themselves public figures. And there are advantages to celebrity, of course, but there are downsides that you would not want to shoulder. Imagine if every thought you had, every interaction you had, you had to cast as though you were being broadcast on media.

And so for me, a big part of reclaiming conversation in the 21st century is recreating the realm of the private, the private where we can make mistakes, where we can be quicker to forgive, where our statements are not representative of a clan. Yeah. And so for me, I haven't quite worked out, right, what a social media system, what an internet that maintains that level of privacy or creates that might look like.

And until that moment, the analog option of switching off, of having those conversations, and feeling the freedom in that private space again, I think that's one path forward. What do you think? How possible, though, is that?

I mean, profits are the biggest motivator, right? For anybody that's involved in the creation of this private space. And I just don't see how the technologist being able to submit to the idea of whatever you're suggesting. interesting, right? Because at the end of the day, they're chasing the cliques. Yeah. Right? They're chasing whatever. That's quite true. I mean, I, I, uh, my advocacy is in the main for face to face conversation.

Yeah. Right. In the online space, in researching the book, um, the few instances where I thought something is going right here are communities motivated by incredibly powerful sense of mission. So some of the best disagreements online are between the editors of Wikipedia. The profit motive

is taken away. That might be one important observation there. But that sense of there is a purpose here. That's greater than self-promotion, greater than the advancement of particular interest.

That seems one data point worth focusing on. Do you sense that there's not enough political culture that warns any ability to change the pre-existing construct?

So there is, of course, an operating political culture, so it's worth trying to name what it is, I think. And what I've observed, I live now in the United States, is it's a culture that has given up in significant part on persuasion.

And so the prevailing ethic, it's a big thing to give up on. And so the prevailing ethic is one of organization. Organization of what? Your base. And once you take that off the table, imagine, you know, going back to the story I was telling of how I got started in this thing at all, which is the realization that words and language could change something about the world. Taking that off the table, I think, diminishes us in our personal lives,

and it precludes a certain kind of politics, which is another way of saying it precludes. a certain way of us living together in community. I think that might be, at least in part, a time in which we're living. I want to shift gear here. Sure. You know, we're sort of like living in a much more multipolar world,

which unfortunately has diminished people's ability to multisely. multilateralize, diminish the role of multilateral institutions. I just think that this entails a much greater need for somebody to help, you know, put two parties together to agree to disagree or to agree to agree, right? In the absence of multilateral capacities to get a lot of people to agree to agree or agree to disagree. This has become a lot more bilateralized, right? Relations or relationships between countries. Better yet, plurrilateralized. And I just think that the need for somebody with great debating skills

would be able to play a big role in this new kind of vote. I mean, first, I guess, I want to ask if you agree with the diminution of the role of multilateral institutions. If you did agree, then I think, or would you agree that the role for somebody with great debating skills, you know, would be real in bridging between countries? or amongst few countries. This is an area on which I have to defer to you, right? And your significant experience working with these organizations. It's not a comment on age. But so you're describing a change at a kind of a high level, right,

of the relationship between nations. And there's an interesting mirror image that I see. see of the change that's happening within countries too, which is, at this time, that seems post the height of optimism about what the United Nations could be, actually, nations within themselves look a lot more like the United Nations than they did in years past. They're becoming a lot more internally diverse, whether it be through commerce or the or the movement of people. You know, I said the defining moment of my life was the moment of immigration.

And it seems more and more that we all live as migrants. We all live on borders. And we all live learning multiple languages. If not actual languages, then the cultural language of how. we talk to one another. Yeah. And so both because of the geopolitical trends that you've described, but also that maybe the figure of the 21st century is someone like the migrant,

the border walker, that question of how do we make our differences work for us rather than against us? What are the skills that are going to help us do that? I think that challenge becomes more acute. That's really interesting. You know, with the kind of exponential evolution that we're going through, call it AI, call it genomics, call it geopolitics, things are quite exponential, right, the way they're changing.

It's sort of like forces or pushes people to think more like migrants. Because you've got to be able to emigrate from one place to another. Right? Isn't that? I mean, you know, with AI being able to change the way we work, the way we think, the way we do things. And, you know, I've talked about this a few times in terms of the exponentiality of the cost reduction of AI, how it comes down by 60% on a yearly basis

and how chat GPT today would cost a lot less than how much it would have cost last year, much less 10 years ago, if you were to invent it 10 years ago. And how the alteration of the genetic code a human being or an animal or a creature can take place in a much more speedy, manner, it's the kind of dynamic that I think requires people to just be a bit of a

migrant. Oh, that's so interesting. I mean, you know, the story that came to mind as I was listening to you just now is the story of Exodus. Yeah. Right. And, and, you know, my family are relatively privileged. We're economic migrants, parents moving for opportunity. But for a young kid, it feels like being forced out. And you're in this new world. You have some tools that you brought with you that feel increasingly limited. And the question is, how do we make the most of this? And that experience of migrating as a civilization into the unknown, it can feel like a

kind of exodus. the old world can no longer exist, right? So what do we do in the new one? And that can be a terrifying thing. But the one possibility, and actually the reason why your description sounded hopeful to me, is those are the times when cultures invent themselves anew. And debate has a big role to play in that.

So one of the reasons why I don't believe this debate is not for Asians thing is because so many countries in this region are born of intense independence movements, periods of constant debate about where the future could go. And so inasmuch as we're coming to those moments of renewal more often, to your point about exponentiality, we should embrace the possibility that there is and we should tool up for it.

Yeah. We should tool up for it. What concerns me is, I'll come back to AI again, there's not a whole lot of debates taken place within this space. And if I've said this before, the technologists,

they're not advancing the discourse, a conversation, the narrative in a necessarily multidisciplinary manner. They're pushing ahead just by themselves with some degree of arrogance without involving roping in, the people of culture, people of philosophy, people of environment, people of economics, people of spirituality and all that. When there should have actually been a discussion, a conversation, a conversation, a discourse or debate, right, as to how you can actually progress this narrative so that there is wisdom.

Without these, I think there is a risk of not pushing the narrative in a judicious manner. I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for one thing that brings to mind is the, it's evident in the result. the lack of debate and deliberation of the sort that you described. I mean, even the nature of a predictive language model, there's a tendency towards the average there.

I still haven't come across a chat GPT type that asks questions in the way that humans ask questions, you know, of people. And one of the things that... I worry about is less AI eclipsing people's ability to argue well than us becoming more like the AI, like the predictive language models. How would you fill in the blank as a member of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party? Or what slogan?

What hashtag can I append to my comment to make it searchable, categorizable, findable by people who agree with us. So for me, just as it's important to have that kind of deliberation in the creation of technologies, it seems important for me that we try and maintain the human moat around what may be the greatest technologies of our civilization, which is the power of speech, argument, the knowledge that we've been. built for talking to one another, of making the content of our minds legible to the other, and for us to travel with that. Now, it's not a mockery that it's not being debated, right? Stuff like that should have been debated.

Yeah. Right? About how to progress that. I think that's right. In a better way. I think that's right. And also, it, I mean, it speaks to the other part. of the political arrangement and the economic arrangement,

which is there are debates about this stuff among the general population. There are lots of concerns that people are raising, but the fact that so much of this technology is in the hands of the very few who are not accountable to the people raising these concerns, that's inseparable. So just as it's important to teach people the skills of debate, to encourage debate. It's important, too, to think about a political arrangement

that allows those debates to make a difference. You're now studying law. What sort of a future are you envisioning with what you're doing and what you've done. This is where we start talking about the end game. Yeah. You know, towards 2045, which is the year that I like to use for purposes of Indonesia or Southeast Asia. Yeah.

What are you doing now and what are you going to do with whatever you're doing? So I'm just finishing my law degree at Harvard Law School. And this is my attempt. a kind of a second career after an enjoyable period in journalism and writing this book, of course. I think the threadline in all that and the project that I've adopted as my own is the one we've been discussing, I think, this time, which is how do we create a world that's down at the level of what we do every day as citizens. It's at the level of the political arrangements that we've just touched on, where we can make our differences work for us rather than against us.

And to do that, I feel like I need to equip myself with as many skills as I can. Journalism, the ability to find out information, to present stories, to participate in the public conversation, that seemed like one important skill. Debate, of course, was perhaps so far the defining experience that I've had. And now, law feels like a different language of disagreement, a strong tradition, a vocation, and another way at that same question. you know, I have this and I wonder

if this is true for you too just based on the fact that you've had three, four, five, very full careers I always feel like I'm missing something, you know. And often I was, right? So when I was and I think it comes from

that feeling of being in a new place and feeling like I must be missing something here. Oh, you'll feel that way until you're in the 50s and 60s. When will it end? And so I, you know, whenever I'm in a vocation or a community or a profession, I feel like I'm missing something. And law is just such a fine and kind of story tradition.

You know, it has its way of doing things. And mastering that language for now is my priority. You see yourself as being more value-aditive, lawyering in the private space or in the non-private space? Very eventually, my concerns are always public. Concerns are always public. And my concerns are international too, because I think the privilege that I've had,

is having a background where I've been able to see things in different parts of the world. And if I can be a bridge, if I can help us make those transitions that we've been describing, I'd love to do that. What are some of the things that you think deserve bridging in the next decade or two? What are some of the long view items that you think you can play a role in the context of bridging? I think one very important one is how do we preserve the rule of law and how do we uphold democratic values at a time when they are under challenge? not only externally, but for all the reasons we've been talking about internally. I think the great concern is what happens to relationships between nations,

what happens to the strength of democratic systems in a moment of social decay, right? I think that's a kind of a cross-border problem too. It's it is the kind of there are underlying causes that are shared by lots of places, right? And so that's one area that I'll certainly be keeping an eye on. How do you see democracies sort of like going into recession as of late? And I would even argue that the recession of democracies and many places around the world could be attributable to the less optimal intersection between power and talent. Oh, that's interesting. Right?

Say more about that, if you could. Yeah, I mean, I, the selection of talent in many democratic countries has been a lot more. based on loyalty and or patronage, as opposed to meritocracy. I think you can uphold democratic values if you have the proper intersection between power and talent, and if you can recruit talent a lot more based on meritocracy. But we're seeing symptoms, many places,

that are supposedly democracies, they're not doing that. Ironically, in a place like China, which is not exactly a democracy, they've been able to recruit talent a lot more based on meritocracy as opposed to patronage and or loyalty. I think one part of that

is just the growth in economic inequality too. Right? So... I'm with you. I'm with you. So how do we constrain the natural tendencies of capitalism so that not just for economic reasons, but for all these reasons that we're describing. You're right. It's about the people and how we assign people roles in society, how we assign positions of leadership. And so I think that is inseparable from that.

And I guess to bring it back to my project, there is a broader context to this good arguments thing, which is there are the speakers, the skills they possess, the know-how that they have, their ability to perform, then there's the context. Kind of like the NBA as the context for the players.

What are the overall? acoustics of the room. And is it a space in which a person's talents and a person's individuality? Right. And that part matters because people are unruly. Yeah. They're never what we want them to be. They're untidy. Do we have an acoustics that honors that? And so that feels very important to me. Interesting. You know, you're going to be going to Singapore. I've been arguing. lately that I would regard Singapore as a pretty robust liberal democracy. I don't think it's fair to just judge Singapore for not being able to distribute power to people. I think they've learned to do that a lot better. And they've been able to give space to the media and to the opposition a lot better

than before. But in addition to that, they've been able to give and distribute. public goods in a really cool way. You know, I've been saying welfare, healthcare, education, intellect, integrity, moral value, social value, and all that good stuff. It's predominantly because of their ability to make sure that talent was recruited on the basis of meritocracy, not necessarily patronage and or loyalty. I'm just curious what your views are, with respect to Singapore, potentially being regarded as a robust, you know, liberal democracy. I don't know nearly enough about Singapore, as I'd like to and as I should.

But, you know, the two things that I would say is, first of all, I came to Jakarta in part, and I'm going to Singapore in part. Because I think the world has something to learn from this region on some of the questions we've been talking about. How do we manage this level of diversity? How do we create a nation, a community, a direction from that diversity, from that position of paying respect to the differences that we contain? So, you know, some of the complexities of the diversity that I see in the United States seems to pale in the complexity to what I see here. And I have to think there's all this knowledge accumulated about how we best do that. So I would put Singapore into that category of countries managing these issues that we have to try and deal with. The second is, so Li Kuan Yu was a debater.

Hell of a debater. Hell of a debater. And it was important for me to see this person with whom I have many differences of views. Parry with Western journalists. And, you know, and Perry is a generous word, right? And you could just see the force of intellect. You could see the comfort in argument. You could see how he brought everyone to a position of parity,

and then it became not parity. That sense of experience given voice. That seemed to be rooted in a certain view of ambition. an ambition that was not self-regarding, but was about a group and eventually a nation. I think that's something we can learn from. He was never interested in immortalizing himself. It's always about the institution. It's rare to find anybody that would be keen on immortalizing the institutions as opposed to the person itself.

That's right. So if we can. to go back to the question about the kind of bridging that's going to have to happen. What's your view on that in the next 20, 30 years? I think it's going to be very challenging. Realistically speaking, by way of the ever-expanding gap between the two eco-chambers within a village, within a zip coat, within an island, within a country, much less within the globe.

Number two, the overriding interest of the entrepreneurs in possession of the technology, in pursuit of massive profitability, being in a position to basically manage the relevant regulatory stakeholders. At the expense of, you know, the average people's ability to advance the necessary narrative to bring about the whole village in a collaborative, cooperative, coherent manner. I'm not saying it's an impossibility, but I think it's

going to be challenging to try to bridge, you know, between two opposing sides or two diverse sides or two different sides. So I hope I'm wrong. I hope you are too. Yeah. So that was the first long view item, right, that you're keen on working on. What's the second long view item that you're keen on working on? The first one, if I succeed, will be an armful. It will be an armful. And I don't know.

On the best of days, whether I can make a contribution to it, though I hope I can. The second probably is I hope I can learn enough, hopefully, hopefully, hopefully on that subject, but it can be on others, that I can pass it onto others. So my writing this book is rooted in a love of teaching. And the joy of having written it is that I felt I had enough ideas to sustain the length of the book. I don't feel like I can say that about the next book I'll write for now. I haven't had enough life yet. But I felt that in that moment I felt I had. So I hope to.

It's a beautiful book. Thank you. You know, some parts of the book resonate personally to what I've gone through. I mean, I grew up a little bit like the way you did. Is that right? to a foreign country, not knowing how to speak English at the age of 13, you were at 8. Of course. You know, it was a struggle just to climatize, to acclimate, and, yeah, just to be able to survive.

It's a book of survival. It's a book of success, you know. I appreciate that. And it's a source of hope for me that you had those experiences. Yeah. And you made these contributions as a kind of bridger. Yeah. And a teacher too.

Final question. Sure. Is there anything that you would have done differently? The thing I wonder about, and I think I'll wrestle with it for the rest of my life, is the periods where I feel most large and in some ways, is most like myself is when I'm moving. And when I'm being thrust into a new place and having to improvise, listen, talk back a bit, see if you can find a rhythm.

But I'm seeing now, you know, with a lot of my friends starting their families and so on, that there are some unique rewards to staying port. It almost feels like the other side of the moon. I haven't been there. And so it's not that I don't know enough to say I would have chosen that. And in some ways, I haven't lived enough that those tradeoffs were most stark. They haven't been as stark as they might have been, as they may be in the future.

But that's what I'm wrestling with at the moment. Wow. Sounds good. All the very best man to you. Thank you so much. Thank you for this conversation. And I hope you come back to Indonesia. I appreciate that. Thank you. You got lots of fans here. Thank you.

That's, that's BAUSO, penulies that's great and ahelea debat. Thank you, thank you. This is end game. Narrator. J.I.N.N.N.