The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard by Bo Seo

Episode Date: June 13, 2022

Good Arguments: How Debate Teaches Us to Listen and Be Heard by Bo Seo Two-time world champion debater and former coach of the Harvard debate team, Bo Seo tells the inspiring story of his life in competitive debating and reveals the timeless secrets of effective communication and persuasion When Bo Seo was 8 years old, he and his family migrated from Korea to Australia. At the time, he did not speak English, and, unsurprisingly, struggled at school. But, then, in fifth grade, something happened to change his life: he discovered competitive debate. Immediately, he was hooked. It turned out, perhaps counterintuitively, that debating was the perfect activity for someone shy and unsure of himself. It became a way for Bo not only to find his voice, but to excel socially and academically. And he’s not the only one. Far from it: presidents, Supreme Court justices, and CEOs are all disproportionally debaters. This is hardly a coincidence. By tracing his own journey from immigrant kid to world champion, Seo shows how the skills of debating—information gathering, truth finding, lucidity, organization, and persuasion—are often the cornerstone of successful careers and happy lives.Drawing insights from its strategies, structure, and history, Seo teaches readers the skills of competitive debate, and in doing so shows how they can improve their communication with friends, family, and colleagues alike. He takes readers on a thrilling intellectual adventure into the eccentric and brilliant subculture of competitive debate, touching on everything from the radical politics of Malcom X to Artificial Intelligence. Seo proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that, far from being a source of conflict, good-faith debate can enrich our daily lives. Indeed, these good arguments are essential to a flourishing democracy, and are more important than ever at time when bad faith is all around, and our democracy seems so imperiled.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for being here. I'm the sort of guy that thought the beatles were actually a band of beatles not like a band of musicians so welcome to the show guys we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in go see all the wonderful groups tell your friends neighbors subscribe get them on the phone right now start messaging them on the dms and social media don't don't send them your nude pictures tell them why don't you subscribe to the chris voss show go on there and hit the bell notification button on youtube.com for chest chris voss

goodreads.com for chest chris voss all the crap we're reading over there it's not crap why did i say that it's a horrible thing my book's over there it's crap uh but everyone else's books over there is awesome so go over there and read and subscribe and whatever i'm just i'm just improvving myself into a hole at this point. Let's see if I can dig myself out. That's half the fun of the show. Go to all the groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. What will he do next?

So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become

a great leader as well. Or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Today we have an amazing author on the show. His book is awesome too, I should mention, not crap, as opposed to my book, you'll find on goodreads his book is coming out i believe let's see tomorrow tomorrow it's it's hot off the presses it's got that fresh print smell you can still get high off of good arguments how debate teaches us to listen and be heard by bo sale uh boat i have your not pronounced so. There's a bit of a missed opportunity there, Chris. It could have been Bo So on the Chris Voss Show. Bo So on the Chris Voss Show.

Yeah, that definitely would have been awesome. I normally ask people that in the pre-show, the green room, but we're having a little too much fun. So he, you, he, you is going to be on the show talking to us about his amazing book and what's inside of it and what it all means. He is the two-time world champion debater and former coach of the Australian National Debating Team and the Harvard College Debating Union. One of the most recognized figures in the global debate community.

He has won both the World School Debating Championship and the World's Universities Debating Championship. He's written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, CNN, and other publications. He has worked as a national reporter for the Australian Financial Review and has been a regular panelist on the primetime Australian debate program, The Drum. He has graduated from Harvard University, received a master's degree in public policy from a university that I cannot pronounce. I'll let him tell me here in a second. He is a jurist. Tenguang. Is that right? I went to public school. He is currently a jurist doctor candidate at Harvard Law School, which I clearly never went to. Welcome to the

show, Bo. How are you? Thank you so much, Chris. I feel like I should read a bio for you. You know, my audience is sick of me. They've had 12 years of this and they already know enough about me as it is. That's why we have guests on the show is because they don't want to hear anything more about me. Welcome to the show. Congratulations on the new book coming out tomorrow. Is this your first book? It's my first book. There you go. Congratulations. Yeah, it's my first book there you go congratulations yeah it's about to be out there man yeah it's been a number of years and and it comes to some kind of fruition tomorrow now you mean you may want to call up somebody who put this on there because it's the

number one bestseller in search engine optimization did you notice that yet on amazon that i think it must be because of my last name is that what it is oh yeah but i'm happy you take the w's where you can you take the wins where you can mine's uh number one and number uh one million or something i don't know in being in the in below one million the top below one never mind that makes no sense so what to motivate oh give us your plugs your dot coms where people can find you on the internet please hello boso.com hello b-o-s-e-o.com i'm into the rhyming thing and that's my handle on twitter and instagram also there you go so what motivated you want to write this book? So I graduated, when I was graduating from college, right after I won the second world championships,

Trump was elected president and we went through one of the most divisive kind of presidential cycles we'd seen in recent history. Really? We might disagree about that too. No, no. Was there something that went on the last five years that was kind of crazy? And then, as you said in the intro, I moved to China the year after that. And that was the start of the trade war between U.S. and China.

I went home back to Australia and i covered an election that mirrored in some of the divisiveness and rancor what we had seen here in 2016 and i covered that as a political reporter so it felt like everywhere i went there was disagreement and disagreement felt like a feature of our age and and and in some ways the great challenge and there have been all this you know amazing work kind of diagnosing the causes of that and thinking about the you know the structural reasons why it came about but not a whole lot said on what each of us might be able to do about it as citizens as people in our private lives as well. And I found myself looking back to this really formative period of my life when I was a competitive

debater and a debate coach. And I wondered whether this tradition and practice had something to say and some answers to provide at a time when so many of our conversations are stuck and when so many of the answers that we want seem to be outside our grasp there you go i wrote the book yeah and if you thought the last five years are fun wait till this week when the when the january 6th yeah so airs it all out yeah evidently it's uh gonna be quite the experience yeah it's it seems so peaceful last five to six years i don't know wait was there was there a coronavirus so so this is pretty good

so give us an arcing overview of the book if you would please so the book is in two parts the first part talks you through and coaches readers through the basic elements of debate. And those are making an argument, understanding what a debate is about, how to respond to an argument, using language to bolster your case. There's chapters about knowing when to disagree and when to let something go. There's a chapter about learning to argue with bullies, right?

And the kinds of people who go in with bad faith. People like me. And so the first part is kind of trying to illuminate what I describe as a sort of a physics of disagreement, right? So these are regardless of what it is that we're actually talking about, what are the dynamics that shape that discussion? So it's talking people through that. And then the second half applies it to some of the areas in our day-to-day lives

where disagreements are really salient. That's in our personal lives, that's online, and that's in education and schools. And so it kind of goes from right from understanding the very basics of debate, then being able to apply it. And it reads in some ways like a memoir, because I wanted to take readers from knowing nothing or not knowing very little about competitive debate and the kind of the secrets and the wisdom that it contains to knowing quite a lot about it. And the other person that had to make that journey was me

because I didn't know anything about it. And I thought by walking people through that kind of life journey, I could not only bring them into where it is I'm coming from and the limited perspective that I have, but also to try and take them on that kind of educational journey. Does the book tell you when you stop debating and just punch people in the face? I'm really not the person for that. All right, Dan, that must be another book. So give us a little bit of your oranges story because you started this very early on. And how did debating become important to you?

So I moved from South Korea, where I was born, to Australia when I was eight. And the hardest part of making that move for me was real life conversation, kind of like what we're doing now right because and it's especially difficult when we're disagreeing because the passions are running your facial expressions don't always match what you're saying because you're in the grips of something and so i sort of decided and i think this is something that a lot of kind of people when they immigrate or when they're feeling sort of marginal do which is just they learn to be very agreeable right and they learn to nod their heads and and agree and and keep your heads down essentially but i sort of stumbled onto the debate team because it promised

a very odd thing which is when one person is speaking, no one else speaks. Right. And that idea that I could be heard in that way was so attractive to me. And once I got there, I saw that the kind of intimacy that I wanted, right, of friendships that I wanted, of being able to tell the truth about what I believe and to hear them respond and to be able to come back to that. I learned that that comes from disagreement, candid, honest, thoughtful disagreement, maybe more so than it does by just getting along. So I was kind of hooked. And I pursued that passion. I probably started when I was about 10 years old. And in some ways, I've been going ever since. Now you move from South Korea to Australia, correct? That's right. Yeah. And so was your first debate when they tried to force you to eat that nasty Vegemite crap?

I give all my Australian friends, I have a whole mess of Australian friends, the nicest people in the world, and I give them so much crap about Vegemite. Yes. I mean, it's a product that doesn't yield to reason. There you go. I like that analogy. You know, in my later years, I really love debate. I like watching debates. I probably should have been an attorney. I do like arguing, but I'm probably not a good debatist of any quality, but I'm more prone to hit rather than

arguing. It feels like a threat. No, I'm not threatening you. I don't want to debate you either. So you are a champion. So I'm not even going to win. I mean, this is one of the reasons I'm not married is because I don't like debating or I don't like people talking over me and telling me what I should think. That's a joke, too. No, it's not. So anyway, you know, Christopher Hitchens is one of my favorite debaters. I love watching those debates where they sit down, they have rules, and they have setups. I remember watching, oh, who's the great debater who did The Nation, and then the African-American gentleman who debated him in the 60s or 50s.

Famous debate. Baldwin and Buckley, maybe. Baldwin and Buckley, yeah. We've had a few authors on that have talked about that debate, and I've watched it. Oh, that's right. Yeah, wonderful. And so I've always been interested in in the you know you you watch the formality of it the presentation of it the rules and stuff like that

and and i i love watching those types of debate settings because at the end you know the audience kind of decides who wins yeah for sure for sure and and and they're not it's not a very involved infrastructure is it it's actually very simple involved infrastructure, is it? It's actually very simple stuff. Just saying when I'm talking, you're not talking. And we roughly get to talk for an equal amount of time and we take turns, right? It's a kind of a soft infrastructure that creates a kind of an architecture really for how we're doing this thing. And it's very adaptable to real life in my view and giving a little bit of thought, not only to what it is that we're saying,

but how it is that we're interacting, right? And what the rules of that are. I think those are things that we've forgotten to be more thoughtful about. And it's not that one concern you might have about it is that it's artificial giving people an opportunity to be heard you actually get the fullness of their character and of their views a little bit more than you would if you were just jumping on top of one another yelling and screaming and and i share that you're feeling exactly chris like some of those very public debates and the spectacle of it. That's not something that debaters shy away from and that I don't shy away from in the book, because it is the case that sometimes with these kinds of titles about having civil discussions and so on, sometimes it requires us to be like kind of little angels sitting around, you know, being perfectly virtuous. Whereas we know that disagreement and debate involves things like spectacle, involves things like performance, involves things like the use

of rhetoric to try and stir people's emotions. And those things need to be managed to some extent. And they contain traces of darkness sometimes. But kind of a conversation without those elements is often a conversation without life in all of its complexities. And I think that's something that debate brings out and something that gives it a kind of a vitality. Do you feel that we've lost that ability? Because I watch all these old college debates, you know, they go back hundreds of years, it seems. And, you know, now, and we've had authors on that have talked about this, and I'm seeing it myself, you know, now on college campuses, we have this shout down movement, this kind of woke stuff. And I'm a Democrat,

moderate Democrat. So there's a part of my party that's into this stuff. And there's no debate. They're not allowed to debate sometimes. You can't even have comedians on college campuses anymore. And, of course, we have this whole thing with social media where, you know, everyone just argues and blocks each other. And, you know, there's – I don't know about all that. Do you talk about any of this in your book about, especially about social media, I guess? I mean, it certainly forms the background to the book.

And I do get into social media in the last chapter about technology. And we can talk a little bit about that. But the, you know, I'm not sure I would go all the way with you on the framing about the climate on campus. I just, you know, I was a reporter and I'm just that you're describing. On the other hand, a university really is a kind of an ongoing conversation. And there is a lot of debate and discussion in a way that I didn't just as a kind of a normal working person out in the world, didn't always get to experience. So I don't think it's a kind of a single, no single description kind of captures for me the experience of what it's like being on campus. But I would also say on some of those kind of the chilling of debate, right, that a lot of people have expressed concern about. And you're talking a little bit about it, Chris. I think it has a little bit to do with the sense that our capacity to disagree well has eroded. And once you're no longer confident that by sitting across the table from one another,

we can have a good discussion, a respectful discussion, then the impulse to want to shut it down or to shy away from it or to organize with people who already agree with us, now those options become a lot more attractive, right? And so when we're talking about a kind of a loss, there are losses of shared values, there are losses of shared truths, right? There are losses of shared values. There are losses of shared truths, right? There are losses of shared institutions in some instances. And I'm not sure my book obviously offers no single solution to any of those, but the place where I really want to make a contribution is we've also lost a

shared set of skills of how we disagree with one another which used to be a kind of it was seen as the basic requirement of citizenship this is what people were taught in schools is rhetoric and oratory and debate so that you could participate, right, in living with your fellow citizens and in governing yourselves, right? This is what the founding fathers talked about in this country. So there is a loss of skills and with it a loss of common faith in what disagreement can do for us, can do in our lives, and can do in the lives that we share and i am hoping to to invite a kind of a revival in that yeah and i i wholly agree with what you said i i i you know i see that like you

know sometimes speakers can't even speak and they're being shouted down i mean i know there's there's i mean sometimes there's real extremist people showing up you know somebody wants to promote nazism or something or something you know anti-semitic stuff or something that's really out there but you know sometimes it's just it's almost like we move from a logical reasonable style that people use in debate to an emotionalism like that just doesn't mean you feel good and stuff. So I don't know. I just, when I see it on campuses, I see videos.

I just go, wow, man. Like, like, I mean, in your case and your field, what you guys do is you sit down and you have a reasonable,

logical debate about it. And go ahead. I mean, yeah, no, no, I, I,

I hear that., I mean, yeah, no, no. I hear that. And I mean, one point where I might just reframe it a little bit is on those two things. And it's obviously not a precise division between emotional response and a rational response. But I think one thing that I believe and that I think is a really big part of debate is you wouldn't want a discussion without either of those. And where one dominates completely and obliterates the other, that's often not going to be the richest conversation you've had, right? So if it's all emotion, it can be difficult. If it's all reasoning, whatever that might be, without the emotions, that's probably not as fruitful either.

So the kinds of discussions that I think tend to the other side that they can engage with, but also has the kind of the candor and the personal engagement of being clear about where it is that you're coming from. Yeah, I agree. So if I read the book or people get the book, I just was looking that it's on Audible, so I'll probably be listening to it. Am I going to learn to be a better debater? Am I going to learn some of the techniques that you've learned to be a champion? For sure, for sure. I mean, the second phase of my life after I've competed at the highest level was to coach, right? And debate is a kind of a tradition that it contains about how to do things like making an argument and knowing what its actual parts are, those are practices honed over many generations. the strength of the ideas in this book don't owe to me completely. They're things that I was taught, and it's not even clear where it began

because it was refined over many different people's experiences and iterations of teaching. But it's certainly how I've taught a generation of students, and I worked hard in writing the book to try and put it in a form that would bring everybody to the highest level that I could kind of manage within writing this book and then to apply in their daily lives. So my hope is it will teach everybody to disagree better in their private and their public lives. And through that, kind of as we were saying before, to regain a kind of a confidence in what disagreements can do for us at home, in our workplaces, and in the public square.

Yeah, and we need more of that. I would totally agree with you. And this can be used in so many different formats. People think of this as just a, well, if I'm in a college setting for debate or something like that. What are some formats where the ideas in your book and concepts can be used maybe in everyday life? reasons why i think it's more accessible than perhaps other other kind of bodies of knowledge is that we know children can learn to do it right so it's not you know a thing that requires normal background or something like that i started when i was 10 and but it's one of those things where with a lot of things that are worthwhile, it's easy to get started, but hard to master, you know, and so it is kind of along that journey. And so there are, I think about it a lot, for example, the chapter about learning when to quit disagreeing or learning which disagreements are worthwhile or not, right? And I give a kind of a four-part checklist

called the RISA checklist, where you check whether the disagreement is real, it's important, it's specific, and the two sides are aligned, right? Those kinds of insights onto the disagreements that tend to be worthwhile and those that tend to degenerate into something worse. I use that a lot at home and in the disagreements that I have with romantic

partners, with family. And so it sort of starts around the kitchen table for me. And then, you know, when I was working at the newspaper, I think so much of, and you might know this as an entrepreneur, Chris, like so much of the kind of work we're doing now is you're basically arguing in meetings, right? And you're trying to persuade one another and you're trying to pitch and you're trying to make sure that your vision is the one that kind of carries the day. So there's obviously a huge, it plays a really significant role in the workplace. And you're seeing this in the most recent version of the Netflix culture deck. It's something like the more higher stakes a decision is, the more debate there's going to be, right? There's a kind of a one-to-one sort of correlation there. And there are lots of other areas where I think it will be useful. But

to go back to where we started, I think it's really needed in our lives as citizens as well, man, in the way in which we talk across political differences and try to remind ourselves that the ways in which we talk to one another, the ways in which we persuade one another that's also the way in which we govern ourselves in a democracy yeah so bob just wrote in he says this isn't my question bob says will this help me win arguments with i can't guarantee you're gonna win all of them my guy i can't uh but it sounds like it'll help you format them better and and but what i what it has done for me is it has taught me to be more deliberate right about the kinds of disagreements that i have so i think i having thought about it a lot and you know as a competitive debater you think you're pretty good at this kind of thing. And you know, the sound the departing partner makes

is something like you're debating me again. And so I think you learn. So you learn the strengths of the format and you see its limitations too, right? So I do think there are things that, you know like laying out your your ideas in an organized way as you were saying before chris saying that just earnest belief and emotional commitment is not kind of enough sometimes right you you really want to engage positively with what they're saying but also seeing where the limits are. That I think is an important thing that debate brings to the table. And maybe the most straightforward answer to the question is, it's not so much that it will help you win any given argument,

but that it will allow that argument to go from a potential source of division to a source of kind of progress and collaboration and sharing between the two partners. And you might lose the particular issue, but as long as we are turning our disagreements into a forceful, I think that is also a, that's also a win yeah i totally agree with you in fact i just realized you you probably shouldn't put the fact that you're an author of this book in your tinder profile because uh you're just you're just you're giving away the goods like everybody's gonna ever meet you is this gonna be like oh man this i'm never gonna win a debate with this dude um so that's probably why it's an uphill battle that's probably why it's in the search engine optimization section of Amazon.

I get it now. So, yeah, I'm really interested in this because a lot of times with social media, I'll put up arguments and sometimes I'll catch a lot of flack and then I'll develop it. And so I'll be like, okay, let me pull that down and let me readjust this. Sometimes delivery, you know, I'm, I'm kind of known for being a little too harsh or sharp, if you will. And sometimes people can't get over the sharpness and you hear the delivery, but like you say, it's a skill. It really is. I like forming and playing with the, with an argument and, and, and going, you know, I love toying with

the whole aspect of it. I probably should have been a debater. I probably wouldn't be good because, like I said, it always ends in violence. But that's the joke around here. You talk about a few people that you cite in your book, from Malcolm X and artificial intelligence. Do you want to talk a little bit about how that plays in your book? Sure, sure.

Maybe I'll pick up on the artificial intelligence thing, because it relates to kind of what you're saying about social media. So IBM developed as part of the same kind of tradition of projects that go back to Deep Blue, you know, the computer that played Garry Kasparov in chess and the Jeopardy champion that took on Ken Jennings, they decided to make a kind of a champion debater. And it faced off against a really fine debater, Harish, who is a contemporary of mine on the debate circuit. And, you know, I mean, the machine had extraordinary abilities, such as being able to pull out all the studies that favor its side of the case,

right? But ultimately, the audience watching thought Harish was more persuasive. And in particular, the kind of the human element, right, of being able to respond empathetically to what the audience might need to hear at that time, Being able to modulate voice and your use of words to change the kind of the climate in the room. Those are really essentially human skills. And I think those are things that really allowed them to the person, the human, to kind of prevail. And I worry a little bit about the ways

in which our arguments online tend to make us more machine-like you know we use hashtags and we make our contributions very easy to kind of categorize and sort by algorithm right and so when i think a bit about social media and a lot of the same kind of ideas that you're saying there chris there are you know one of the things that being a debater makes you really attuned to is the acoustics in a room right and and how that and what's the environment in which this conversation is taking place and if in a debate room you have people with equal opportunity to talk and a guarantee that they're going to be heard,

social media is in some ways the opposite, right? Some conversations get privileged because they're the most incendiary or, you know, and it has a lot to do with the follower base that you already kind of have. And so there is a kind of a debater sensitivity to what conversation should be that I think helps us diagnose the ways in which disagreements online can be problematic and maybe more important for us

to be able to insist on something better, right? Once we have a sense of what it is that that makes for good disagreements, for good conversations to be able to insist on that. And debate is not the only lens through which we can make that kind of do that kind of analysis. But I think it's an important one that hasn't really been in the conversation so far. And I'm hoping to bring that to the table. I think it's a very welcome idea to the table to get back to those original things. You know, I mean, we're at a point now where we're so lazy.

Our debates sometimes are just tropes or memes. And half of them are, you know, they're being played by some manipulative person who's, manipulative person whose trope isn't real. It's either some racist-based thing with some agenda or it's totally fake. Johnny Depp, I don't know. I can't make up anything off the top of my head right now. But you know what I mean. There's those tropes that are out there that people love to pass around. And then you go on the trope verification sites like uh snopes or whatever

and you know you find out that that that whatever that event was never happened but we're so lazy like that's what people's that's what people are arguing now they're just like i'm just gonna put up a meme and there you go i just gave you the political discourse for the 20th century i think that's right i think that's right and, you know, I had a very similar thought about, you know, the memification of our discussions, where I'm part of it, as you say, it may be a kind of an unwillingness to do the difficult work of argument. Another might be, you know, we're so accustomed to kind of seeking out agreement, actually, right? So when we're reaching for slogans, it's not that we're even really disagreeing with the person in front of us. It's often us saying that so we know the people on our side knows that we believe in the same things that they do, right? It's a kind of a rallying cry. And part of the work of debate, I think, and good arguments is to restore the primacy of the actual encounter between you and me, right? It's not you as representative of some random group

and me of something else, because we, in the fullness of our humanity, are much richer than the Democratic say something, you respond. I have to say something back that's better than what I said. And together, we're kind of progressing towards a deeper understanding than we otherwise might. And we can't do that if we stay on script and repeat what has already kind of been planned out for us in some ways. Yes, yes. I'm going to agree with you by holding up the clapping, slow clapping meme. I appreciate it. I haven't read your book.

It didn't end too well for us. It didn't end too well for Leo. I had to set that up. It was a cheap setup. Cheap joke setup by Chris Fong. We do a lot of cheap jokes on this show. Keep people laughing. So I'm really interested in the book.

I think it's going to be amazing. I think it's something, you know, people need to learn. And I have always been interested in building better stories and building better debates because I want to win them and beat other people without punching them because the judge says I can't do that anymore. And I want to get that ankle bracelet off. So there's that. Anything more you want to touch on or tease out about your book though before we go i know i threw you with the ankle bracelet i did i'm just concerned more

than anything it's it's it's a callback joke we go too often for me for me chris this this is a time when it's very easy to shy away from disagreement, I think. And actually, I wince a little bit at all the punching jokes because I was in Taekwondo as a kid. And it was a way for me to kind of overcome real shyness and conflict aversion. And I couldn't even get through it because I was so conflict averse. So this kind of urge to run away from disagreement is not just a kind of political stance that I see out there in the world. It's something that all of us have inside us, right? And in the kind of the, some of the stuff that you were talking about, no platforming and those kinds of things, that instinct is something I feel every day, right? Because no one really,

very few people I think run towards disagreement, right? But the only thing that kind of shakes me away from that stance of aversion is a kind of a belief and really a kind of a lived experience that says disagreements can be something better, that it can be something more. But in order for us to do that, we do have to undergo a kind of an education. And I like that you're saying consistently, Chris, there has to be work, there has to be learning, there has to be effort. And I suppose the last thought i'd just leave people with is my strong belief that that is a worthy thing to which to devote that kind of effort and that kind of work there you go there you go and i figured out how to beat you in debate i just

bring out violence what you get i throw you off i threw you off the game. I think it's the jokes. Bring out violence and parole agents. Yeah. Keep people on their toes. I seriously doubt I'd ever be in a real debate. So let's make that clear. It's been wonderful to have you on the show, Beau. And I really support your book.

I just ordered it on Audible. And I want people to check it out because learning debate more, and of course learning debate prep more too, like know what you're arguing about. It's so amazing to me how many people you know they just post tropes or some spin they heard from some politician or or maybe a non-news source that claims to be a news source and and and they they put nothing behind it and to me i don't know i'm different i think you'd look like an

idiot if you quote stuff that isn't true. But you know, what do I know? I am an idiot. And I look like an idiot, evidently. So there's that. But Beau, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs. HelloBeauSo.com. I enjoyed the conversation so much, Chris. Thanks for having me. Thank you. And we enjoyed having you as well. Thank you very much. Thanks, Monis, for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Forge has Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button on youtube.com, Forge has Chris Voss. Order up the book, wherever fine books are sold. But remember,

stay out of those alleyway bookstores because you might need some tetanus shots after that, or you might get mugged, one of the two. There's some violence there. Good arguments. How to debate, or I'm sorry, how debate teaches us to listen and be heard. And we tried to do some of that on this show. It comes out tomorrow, so pre-order that baby and get it in your hands so you can enjoy it as well. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe.

And we'll see you guys next time.