welcome to brookline booksmith's author event series. my name is bonnie adderstrom and i'm the assistant events director here at brookline booksmith on behalf of all of us here at the store. thank you so much for being here. we are grateful to be back in person and appreciate you choosing to spend your tuesday evening with us because of your support. we can continue to celebrate the important work of authors like

beau. i do have just a few housekeeping items to mention before we get started. please remember to keep your phones on silent for the duration of the event. this event is being recorded. i'm sure you saw the c-span camera back there. we also do have a live stream over on this ipad here. the audience is not visible on the ipad, but if you don't want to be live on youtube try not to walk in front of it if you pre-ordered a book or would like to purchase a copy or five. those are available at that counter in the back there, but we'll be signing at the end of the night and lastly there is a q&a at the end of the event. so get those burning questions ready in your head. now it is my pleasure to introduce one of the most recognized figures in the global debate debate community both so his new book good arguments how debate teaches us to listen and be heard tells the inspiring story of his life in competitive

debating and reveals the timeless secrets of effective communication and persuasion. the book begins with bo's family moving to australia from korea when he was eight years old. he writes about his struggles as a young immigrant trying to fit into a school setting that alienated non-english speakers and the unlikely activity that helped him to find his voice debate. jamaica kincaid called good arguments a book. so timely and needed in this fractioning world. we are living in. but was a two-time world champion debater and a former coach of the australian national debating team and the harvard college debating union. he's written for the new york times the atlantic cnn and many other publications. he's worked as a national reporter for the australian financial review and has been a regular panelist on the primetime australian debate program the drum. we are lucky to welcome him to the boston area as he is currently a jurist dr. candidate at harvard law school everyone.

please join me in giving a warm welcome to bo so thanks very much and good evening. this feels to me like a kind of a homecoming some of my closest friends in the world are in the audience as our family members and the camera crew from c-span the cable satellite public affairs network. so i'm very pleased to be here with you. good arguments is a book about my education. and so i want to acknowledge the presence of mentors and booksellers and colleagues friends my aunt who came from seattle and my mom who came from australia each of you play many roles in my life, but it's in

your capacity as teachers that i want to acknowledge you and to thank you and to thank you for being here tonight. i would like this to be a kind of a conversation, but i recognize that i owe many of you an explanation of what i've been doing these past several years as i wrote this book. so i'll talk a little bit about what led me to write this book. i'll talk about what's in the book and i'll talk about what i think about it now that there's been some distance since i finished the book and since i've started talking quite an intensively about it. and then i'll take your questions and comments. so the story starts in the third grade when as an eight year old i moved from south korea to australia where i grew up. and i very quickly learned that the hardest part of crossing language lines is adjusting to real life.

conversation much more so than reading or even writing? and the reason for that for any of you who have gone through that experience. is live conversation has so many interruptions and about faces and jagged rhythms. and all of those difficulties tend to compound when it's a disagreement. because the passions tend to run people's facial expressions don't really match what's coming out? of their mouths and there's a kind of attention in the air that keeps you from expressing yourself as clearly as you might even otherwise. and so going through that experience on the playground and in classrooms and all the other places where i grew up. it didn't take long for me to tire. of the effort and the pain and the self-disclosure that such

arguments entailed. and i resolved at a point not to disagree at all. but to wear a soft smile to not along and to keep my thoughts to myself. things changed for me in the fifth grade when i joined the debate team. and this was an unusual choice that i made of the strength of a single promise. and that was the promise that in debate when one person speaks nobody else does. and to someone who was used to being interrupted or spoken over or just spun out of conversation that seemed to me the promise that i had been waiting for. and when i stood there in the amphitheater for my first debate in elementary school with all the eyes on me. i saw the crowd as a kind of. i saw in the crowd a certain kind of a piece. and it wasn't the blankness of

or the hardness of a wall, but it was the stillness of a river. it was something it was a kind of stillness that i could do something with. and at that moment i became hooked on this activity to which i've given most of my life so far. and what i learned along that journey was that debate had a bunch of other rules in addition to when the speaker speaks nobody else does. that there was turntaking just the way that when i had to go you would get one too, and i would get a chance to respond that everybody who's involved in a debate would get equal time in which to speak that there would be a set topic. to which we had agreed to direct our remarks to focus on for the duration of our time together. and those rules which were simple enough for children to

learn and to internalize and to practice. form the kind of an acoustics against which good conversations and arguments could unfold they couldn't always guarantee that the conversation wouldn't be hostile or that it wouldn't lead to conflict. but it gave us a better chance than anything i had encountered to allow such conversations to unfold. i learned soon after that debate also gave us a bunch of strategies and advice and hacks to be able to navigate those rules to be able to compete and ultimately to win at them. and that wisdom which traces back all the way to kind to rhetorical education in ancient greece to similar traditions in the east and talmudic traditions that all of that kind of wisdom had been given the sharpest most practical application in debate

because generations of speakers like me had learned to compete and to argue within this trend within this tradition. i found as i went along that journey that the disadvantages that i felt or the sense of marginality that led me to pursue that activity in the first instance was a source of strength. that in having to listen before you speak in having to read a room before you made a contribution. you learned that in order for a message to kind of carry across it has to be a two-way conversation between listener and speaker. but as with anything where the lessons are. deep and weighty and difficult to understand it's the kind of thing that you had to be taught multiple times and the first passage that i thought i'd read to you came when i was in the 12th grade after i'd been

competing for about seven years competing at my first world championships where i met some of the friends in the audience today. at this competition and it's in the lead-up to the world championships for high high school in antalya turkey. and my coach who was this kind of big burly australian brilliant guy had told us to call bull. something a little bit more when it came to responding to our opponents and this bit of advice induced in me a flashback. and and this is where i'll read from. for most of my life i had been terrified of conflict. behind the brutalist main building of my elementary school in seoul had been an unpaved patch of dark orange dirt. there away from adult eyes the

older kids learned with their fists the uneven weight of bodies. the scuffles lasted a few minutes two kids circled each other mustering the courage then broke orbit to the animal noise of a cheering crowd. in the pivotal moments that ensued strength never failed the losers what broke first was the will? i watched this unfold in the first grade and learned that proximity to violence solicited in me a gastric response. the asset salad might guts then rose to the back of my throat. the one could safely watch these fights as a member of a crowd i felt in my bones the thinness of the line between spectator and participant. so i stayed at the other end of the school the side with the gardens and parking spots and kept my uniform bleach white. over the next decade.

i developed this gut instinct into a full-fledged ethic a theory of how one should move in the world. in my everyday life. i tried to dodge ignore hide from altercations. i made an art form of non-answers and deflective jokes. the reward of assiduous avoidance was like ability. whereas friends lost days of their lives to petty fights. i relish the comforts of getting along. this view of conflict aversion as a life hack had a long history. under the guises of propriety complaisons agreeableness and good manners it appeared everywhere from ancient egyptian papyrus scrolls quotes silences, how you establish establish your superiority over him. to how to win friends and influence people quote there is only one way under high heaven to get the best of an argument and that is to avoid it. the wisdom of such advice seemed to me self-evident in the 21st century.

if one feature of our public life was the absence of reasoned arguments another was growing rancor and enmity between political opponents. in this era furious politics and culture wars conflict seem to be noted. not only a prudent life choice, but also a virtue. turning the other cheek scripture said was neither stupidity nor weakness. it was wisdom. the mood around the table was tense. in most training sessions bruce gave instructions and we wrote them down. as an elna as in an elite kitchen we ask for clarification, not justification. but this time was different. calling -- seem to be at odds with everything. we had been taught about treating our opponents with respect. it smacked of the dark side of the force. bruce looked around the table he

adjusted his glasses scratched at his beard. i'm not asking you to do this just to get ahead he said. right now your defaulting to agreement without really listening to the other side's arguments. you're deferring to the opposition without giving them the more basic courtesy of hearing them out. i glanced down at my notepad. the column for our opponents arguments were sparse a handful of words and short phrases scattered its length in a random constellation. i understood that the default to agreement was not an ideal strategy. however, i was learning that it could also amount to a kind of self-deception. pretense and the other persons argument was too strong when in fact their rank and stature had overwhelmed us. besides you don't actually agree with the opposition on any of these points. do you bruce said his voice slowly rising? no, you're just holding your tongue.

that's cowardice the same as saying mm-hmm interesting and hiding you actually think. direct rebuttal isn't just something we do for ourselves. it's one of your basic obligations as debaters. you owe your opponents a proper response to their arguments and with it a chance to improve. you you owe it to the audience to present the other side of the story. the more bruce spoke the more i recognized in his advice a strain of optimism. roboto was a vote of confidence not only in ourselves but in our opponents. one that contained the judgment that the other person was deserving of our candor and that they would receive it with grace. calling bull entailed faith in our ability to make something positive out of disagreement. by contrast conflict aversions seem to be premised on a much darker set of assumptions. it held that disagreements were

bound to be ineffectual if not divisive and outright. constructive it was a view that could have arisen only from an even dimmer judgment about people. that we could not be trusted to do right by one another. i was not sure which of the two perspectives was, correct? but as bruce brought our last training session to an end. i felt i had arrived at a good question. could rebuttal be more than a destructive force in a disagreement. so i was so possessed by that question and the joy of all the discoveries that i was making as i trained in. kind of the way of an elite athlete except nothing like that as i try to climb the ranks of of competitive debate. i followed it all the way here

to harvard college where i competed for the team and many of my teammates are here. and i traveled all around the world with my debate partner fanella who's sitting in the last row as is his wand. to try and really master this art that i had had made mine and in january 2016. we won the world championships for the university competitors. under the tutelage and part of our coach alex and and some other seniors on the team. if the book stopped there. it would read as a kind of a triumphalist. sports type memoir of all the different matches that we had lost in but then ultimately prevailed in but of course in 2016. this country went through one of

the most devices presidential election cycles that it had seen electing president donald trump whose rise was fueled at least in part by his performance in the debates. the year after that i undertook a master's program that was designed to be a kind of a bridge between china. and the united states between the west and china and i studied for a year in beijing and i saw the kind of the optimism. with which we begin with which we began the year and the program sink into some of the most fraud periods that that relationship had seen in recent years as the trade war between the two countries began. the following year i went home and i was a newspaper reporter and i covered.

an election that mirrored many of the most divisive and toxic elements of the political side cycle that we had seen. in the united states in 2016. and it seemed to me. through those events. that a truth began to crystallize about our time which was that we are living in a highly polarized age that polarization and internal division within countries and between countries was going to be maybe the defining challenge of our time. and in that in the beginning of those days, it was hard to see. that disagreement and conflict could be anything other than a source of weakness and of potential conflict. both within and between countries what followed was a

large number of books giving detailed explanations of how it is that we came to this point. historical reminders that democracies could in fact die and talking in broad. strokes about the structural problems that had produced the moment that we were living in. it was at that time that i as a kind of a reporter joining the ranks of a profession trying to understand. what kind of time we were living through but also hungry for some kind of answers? on what we could do about it. not just at the level of the institutions or the structures in which we were living but as in our day-to-day lives as citizens that i started thinking back to my days as a competitive debator and especially my

childhood as someone who got started in this activity. and the conclusion that i came to was that in this period of great loss? in this period of the loss of shared values the loss of shared truths that we had also lost. a common set of skills for how we engage with one another in disagreement. the skill of argument and that was the kind of impetus for writing this book. and what came out? was both the kind of a toolkit. and a testament and this book offers readers both the kind of the basic lessons that's required to master this activity that they might not be familiar

with. but it also makes the case that it is possible to build a community around and not despite disagreement and offers the world of competitive debating as a kind of an example that shows some of the limitations to be sure but also some of the strengths and possibilities that can be gordon when we face disagreement and we engage with it rather than avoiding it. so the book is organized in two parts the first half steps through what i consider to be the basic elements of debate. a topic argument rebuttal rhetoric and the choice to engage and disagreement or not. and then in the second half i apply that to different areas of life whether that be dealing with bullies and and people who argue in bad faith in education in relationships familial and romantic and i think a lot about in the last chapter.

how we disagree online and the role that technology can play in that? throughout there are different strains. there's one strain. that's a kind of a memoir that walks through my journey with this activity. there are pedagogical moments where i'm teaching some lessons or skills that come out of the debating world and there are more essayistic reflections on the time that we're living in and some of the themes set i've spoken about so far. the more i wrote and the more i thought about it the more i saw life in debate and i saw debate in life and in this second excerpt that i'll read. it's a set of reflections on a kind of a important political moment in australia in 2018 when we had a kind of a national

plebiscite for whether to allow same-sex marriage or not. and this was about a discussion that took place in the church where i was raised in the aftermath of that vote which thankfully was in favor of same-sex marriage. so i'll read here from the chapter on relationships. it begins with a kind of a church-wide meeting the first of two that was called. discuss this issue people started people started filing into the main hall around 2 pm. they carried over facial expressions from whatever they had been doing before some were smiling others were working things out. parents told the children to go play for a while. the pasta acquired man with the

work ethic of a farmer was already seated. he opened the meeting with a prayer for wisdom. in the beginning the conversation was stilled. senior members of the community outlined the facts of this difficult situation the mood in the room was not unpleasant but was training in the manner of treading water. that the hour would pass without a single interesting development rendering this a failed but harmless experiment seemed entirely possible. then an older woman near the front of the room raised her hand. she was acquired and conscientious member of the community one whose faith had been cultivated through periods of undisclosed suffering. by this time most people had let their minds wonder far enough to miss this subtle gesture and its intimation of purpose. scripture is clear on this point.

she said why are we even discussing this question? her voice favored the words themselves were audible, but the meaning of the sentence was ambiguous suspended between a joke and indictment and a plea. hiroshi continued she seemed to discover a new resolve. the intention was formed ran through the rest of her speech like an iron rod. it's steadied each syllable and imparted to them a trace of metal. the purpose of a church is to uphold the faith. that means saying yes to what is right and no to what is wrong if we bend to fashions, we lose our integrity. for a while the room was quiet. the speaker slumped back in her chair and seemed suddenly fragile. those who had been waiting for their turn hesitated. a young parent a young parent slipped out of the door. to check on a child then something broke.

the next few speeches were flexed with unreasonable anger and an earnestness that teeded on the brink of tears. time between contributions shrank time between ideas shrank time between words shrank and soon the room was a buzz on every register of sound. the arguments raised were various and they did not always intersect. even moments of genuine contact released their own kinds of poison. in response to one person's argument that opposition to same-sex marriage would confirm public perceptions about the church as an outdated institution. another said that's ridiculous nonsense. but what was ridiculous? conclusion or the reasoning or the area of concern or the person raising the point? all of the above or none of them such ambiguity left to linger could spoil the air. the discussion at church wound down after more than an hour to

an unedifying close. no decision had been reached but that could wait. there would be another session at the same time next week. the minister who had been quiet throughout the discussion ended the meeting with a prayer and a request. thank you for your contributions this afternoon. i asked that you go home and think about your fellow congregants. try before we meet again to think about things from their perspective. his instruction reminded me of a technique from competitive debate called side switch. much of debate was an exercise in certainty. the moment one received emotion when adopted the mindset of a person who was completely convinced of that point of view. one clung to this feeling of absolute conviction to make arguments think objections display passion. but there was also a window between the end of prep and the start of around when one led in

the uncertainty. side switch in the last five minutes before the start of a debate do one or more of the following. one take out a new piece of paper. imagine that you are now on the other side of the motion brainstorm the four best arguments in support of the position. 2 review your arguments from the perspective of an opponent think up the strongest possible objections to each claim and write them in the margins. 3 imagine that you have won the debate from the opposing side write out the reasons why you won including the mistakes made by the opposition. next steps varied one could revise an argument to answer possible objections or plan rebuttal against opposing arguments one could strategize to block the other side's parts to victory. but the basic idea was the same. set aside the certainty of one's convictions and see things from

another point of view all in order to improve one's chances of winning the debate. from this switch position side switch gave us the first-hand experience of the subjective experience of this objective reasonableness of other beliefs. for a time we felt what it was like to believe ideas that contradicted our own. we traced the steps of how a sensible person us could arrive at conclusions that might otherwise have seem alien. from this switch position. we also saw ourselves in another light. we entertain the possibility that we might be the ones in error that our beliefs were the results of certain choices and assumptions and not others that we might be the ones who had to be tolerated accommodated or stopped. that opposition to us was natural and expected. together these aspects of sites which pointed to a certain way

of thinking about empathy. whereas most people viewed that term as referring to a spontaneous psychic connection or a reflection of virtue debate is new it as an understanding achieved through a series of actions. this vision of empathy was unexciting. it could not for goodness or imagination only paper and pen. but the upside was that it gave us something to do when our other faculties imagination virtue emotion intuition had failed. it asked us to get to work precisely when we were stuck. so that's what the book is like. and and i finished the first draft of it about a year ago, or i handed in my manuscript about a year ago. and i thought i was done. and it turns out that is the

beginning and not the end of the process. and so i've now had a chance to step away from it a little bit. but i'm having to talk about it, you know every day. and when you're riding a book it encompasses the four corners of your world right? you're in this google doc and you don't know where land is and you're just kind of swimming around in these ideas. but once you're done, you see that actually it takes up quite a modest amount of space in the world. it's not that big you can sort of see it in the back and and the ideas themselves though important occupy only a piece of the puzzle. i think an important piece and i

want to talk it down but only a piece of the puzzle and what i've been thinking about as i've kind of toured this book and and thought about it is two things that i thought i'd close with today as a way of inviting your thoughts and and beginning the discussion. and these are sort of two puzzles or concerns that i have that i'm still working through the answers on. the first is that debate as a dyad has two faces and that some of the things that make it in my mind are worthwhile activity something worthy of our attention are the same features that open it up for abuse and exploitation. so an activity that celebrates spectacle. opens itself up to fakery an argument that relishes disagreement.

can provide openings for aggression? that a sport predicated on open-mindedness can open itself to lies and to abuse. and i think this is a puzzle that doesn't have any obvious answers because it's not that you can excise and clearly excise the bad aspects of debate. put it away and just keep the good parts because each of those features has a kind of doubleness and i think the best we can do is to kind of manage it. but i don't think it's a problem that goes away. the second thing is you know when you're publishing a book and you think about where on the wall it's going to fit you sort of think.

it's making a contribution to a certain question. and this is most straightforwardly of course a book about debate. but it's an answer to the broader question, which is how should we disagree? which itself? is only one sliver of a broader question, which is what do we do about the fact that each of us are different. but that we must coexist that we're not different. just along relatively straightforward lines like racial or sexual or sexual orientation type divisions, but that each of us in the fullness of who we are are quite different from every body else, but that we have to share this space and this time together disagreement is one answer to that question and i'm suggesting in this book that it's something that we should be more attentive

to but it's only one answer to that question. and that broader inquiry of how it is that we can live in the fullness of our differences and still get along a question that feels as urgent to me. now as it did when i first encountered it as an eight-year-old. and in an immigrant to a new place, i hope to spend. the rest of my life trying to answer that question. and i'm really i'm really pleased to share with you tonight. an early and first attempt at making a contribution to that. so thanks very much for coming and i really look forward to hearing your thoughts.

so the just for the microphone at the back, there will be a store microphone. and a boom microphone so you're going to be? very audible so questions. or comments hello beau. hi. congratulations. thank you and you take this should identify us the author of an upcoming book on wine with bloomsbury. yeah, i feel you on the journey nothing over but this value and really excited to read your book. i was curious. you said you finished it. about a year ago. you turned it in which probably was six months five months after

and january 6 in the us capitol and i was curious if you discuss or examine in your book anything about conspiracy theories or misinformation and this sort of strategies to hold space with people whose truth is fundamentally. not true. yeah. yeah. so of course the problem of misinformation and and group organization of the kind that you're describing has lots of different overlapping sources and and not all of them are going to be addressed by the kinds of things that i'm advocating for this book, but where i do think it connects is? what is it?

about the state of our populace that we can be kind of vulnerable. to the sort of the twisting of the truth of demagogic speech right and one answer to that an incomplete answer, but i think a part of it is the kind of the atrophy of the skills that i've been describing of a population that cannot distinguish between good arguments and bad ones of rigorously supported ones and not rigorously supported ones that doesn't trust itself to engage with the opposing perspective. i think that's a population. that's especially vulnerable that lacks a certain kind of immunity to the sort of bad faith actors and sort and the sorts of abuse that you're talking about. so and i hope it's not just

covid that's making me think along these terms, but but you know you want to think about why is civic health important a part of it is immunity i think to what might otherwise be contagions of thought and and that would otherwise spread. hi both, actually. and so my question is what kind of rethinking have you been doing through both debating or writing this book and the premise is sort of i think debate is one of the best forums to cross examine our prior beliefs and i was wondering if there are certain emotions or cases or just carnivance that you have examined and re-examine and revised or stances on. yeah, enjoy your debator, you

know about that. you know one thing is you know debaters often complain of not being able to form strong convictions because the nature of our sport is you're given a random topic and a position and told to go and over the course of your career. you've basically argued both sides of everything right? and so there's a kind of a mercenary quality potentially to that and the sense that you're kind of always in this. primordial zone of you could go either way kind of thing and i used to see that as a real limitation of debate joy, and i used to make the same complaint. but nowadays i think. it it's not so much that debate is antithetical to strong

conviction, but that it does call for a different understanding of that term which is conviction is not something always that we bring into a discussion that we god zealously but rather it can be something that we take out on the other side now, of course. the belief that we come out of on the other side is going to be a bit more nuanced and textured. but i think it's a mistake to think that. extremity of the position is the only marker of the strength with which you can believe in it. that the kinds of ideas that debaters tend to have which is this double-ness. right and and it's kind of difficult that in like the one book that has ever ever been published about celebrating debate i can't thinking about it's limitations that that doesn't mean. i don't believe in it all the

same and that the strength of my belief is lesser for that. so. that's something i've been rethinking. what conviction means and and how it connects to the kinds of conversations that i'm advocating for? yeah. heybo, hi point of information. i'm kidding the question i have coming from india multilinguistic country is how do you engage with the role of language and particularly rhetoric in the context of debate particularly when? you know you have people of different languages in the same country and and actions or other non-verbal forms of building community and engagement might

be easier or more effective than trying to cross those linguistic divides. what is that? okay, good question, but i didn't write a book on the topic. it's a challenge but it is there is also an opportunity in it, right and what i see in. and you know there are probably some universals. right that underlie different cultural understandings of rhetoric, but there's a lot that's different. and i saw that. when i was involved in the debate community even here versus in australia and certainly china is very different. and the reason why i think it

might be a possibility not knowing very much about the particular context you're talking about is when you have people with two quite different ideas of what good rhetoric is and they converse. it's usually the case that there's some kind of third that emerges right and that there is a lot of borrowing that happens. and so what begins as kind of a clash between fairly unitary things tend over time to generate something new? and rhetoric perhaps more so than almost anything else requires careful management, right? because there are those possibilities for abuse but that kind of cross-cultural. translation and evolution i think can be to a country's

great strength. there's one here. hibo, hi yeah, so i am a lot more torn about like the value of competitive debate in achieving some of the outcomes that you discussed for many. but one that i think sort of rides off what you said about convection that i actually think the opposite thing about conviction and this is my experience. i never debated at the levels you did, but this is my experience in terms of what i think competitive debate faster than me and what i've seen in my friends who competitively debated as well, and i actually think in my experience competitive debate. sort of structurally incentivizes people to not express uncertainty in conversations not express certainty uncertainty answered yes, or a feeling of i don't know what the answer to this question. yes, or and i think part of that comes from a feeling that you

need to win a conversation. which and i feel like sometimes a more collaborative approach in conversations can be very useful. yeah, but you sort of like piggyback off what the other person said take the best of what they said sort of build on each other and recognize that neither of you really knows. and sort of thinking what adversarially which i think debating sometimes incentivizes can sort of get in the way of that type of vulnerability, which i think can grow friendships and sort of build. consensus that spus know that's deep and like all of the ways i would want to foster conversation. so i thought i'd love to get some feelings on that. i love that. i love that. the very particular way in which debate is adversarial is it's like a contest right? and it's also a game. and it's a game with rules that has winners and losers in the

way that the kinds of conversations that we have day-to-day may be shouldn't and the thing that i would say is and i don't use that word game in a pejorative sense at all, right. we use games to learn things all the time, but the thing about a game is that times has to end right and so part of what i'm suggesting in the book is debate as a game as a sport has all of these lessons that i think are. positively transferable in it into our day-to-day conversation, but it's a problem when all you have is the game and the sport of it. right, and and i think a part of it is i guess you practice it in your own life, which is knowing when to stop being a debater. um, and and i guess i make that

calculation. within individual conversations, too of when do i think debate is no longer the right set of tools and i have to reach for negotiation or mediation or collaboration or some of those ideas that you described so think there's something to be investigated further about games and our approach to them that might help us kind of make more progress on that. question at the backend also at the front. oh, yeah on the next presidential election the republican national committee has said they will not engage in any debates with the democrats. so with the press that yeah, but but there's an alternative. the republicans in their primary are going to choose a candidate. and he's not going to formally face to face. debate either biden or whoever's

or whoever replaces biden, but the press will force a debate not a form of debate on a stage but on a one-to-one basis for each candidate. one to one against one another no. no the press will let's say john doe is the is candidate for the republicans. yeah, and so cnn and fox are going to interview this individual. oh i see to get his or hers point of view connor and the democratic candidate. so the debate will not be on a face-to-face basis, but it'll be kind of ad hoc. i think i would favor the face to face option fair enough fair enough fair enough and and there is, you know a kind of a limitation to the way in which a lot of these political debates happen at present, which is they

do devolve into dueling press conferences or or almost a kind of a brawl really where it becomes about a show of dominance rather than an actual debate and so, you know and and i think you might know more empirically about. what? in a formats that are considering that i do but my hope is not only that we arrange a debate but that we have a society in which our leaders but also we do as citizens have a clearer understanding of what engaging in an actual debate looks like and develop the skills to be able do that and that within the round and the encounter when there's always the desire or the temptation to turn it into something other than a debate to make it a shouting match or name calling or something like that that we be able to resist that and to remind one another that it's a

debate that we're having and not something else. the question there and here hibo, hi, i think one of the more striking images for me from the readings was that when you were. behind the school and keeping your shirt white while other kids were choosing to fight. um, i'm wondering if you could comment on the line that you tried to draw through, you know teaching your reader about about argument but through narrative nonfiction and how much of your your personal story you wanted to include in your book and and you're thought process as writer. yeah, yeah. yeah, they should they should you know parents should tell their children not to ride memoirs when they're when they're in their still in their

20s, and i didn't at the beginning right and i thought would be a kind of an essayistic. maybe a manual, you know, it was that for a period of time. but i don't read manuals, you know, and and there is also a kind of and i was thinking the more humble thing would be to do a kind of a an impersonal, you know, here's what i know, but now having written it this way, i think like whenever i read just an nonfiction book, i think well, how do you know that? you know, where are you coming from? right because you're you you are somewhere when you wrote it you grew up somewhere. and you saw things from? this height and in this location and there are going to be limits to that. there are going to be perspectives that are added from that. so it came about because i

thought i had known. quite a bit about debate by the time i started writing. i thought most readers would know very little about debate because it's a kind of an insular funny little community. and that bridge i found really hard to that distance. i found hard to bridge and no matter how well i try to ride how clearly i tried to write i couldn't really do it. and make a better writer could have maybe but i couldn't and so i thought actually, i know someone who knows very little about debate. and then learn and that was me. and i thought if i can take readers from a position where? we're kind of evenly matched on how much we know about this activity and we work our way up together. that'll be the way to do it. and so that's why it reads the way it does. what time for one more? okay. sorry.

hi, um, i have not read your book yet, but i look forward to it the idea that debate with the big d. yeah would have lessons for mere mortals like me who don't do it, but do a lot of debate with the little d. yes. it's very attractive but to ask some very practical questions. my world is israel palestine. okay, so when we are discussing or debating whether it be on social media by email in real life on zoom or whatever folks are not listening to one another. yeah, they are not interested in the logic or holes of each other's debate. they're not even generally responding to the content of what someone else is saying it goes very quickly to personal attack an accusation.

distractions all kinds of non debate stuff because folks have not agreed to these rules that are the scaffolding or the container that you say is so valuable. yeah. so what can we who actually need to learn how to resolve problems across these very profound lines of difference that are not just about ideas but about identity and it feels existential to people how do we do that? yeah, i liked i liked how you said it in the question actually, which is that. you've not agreed to these rules, right and i think and and those rules about how we have the conversation isn't it? right and so in the world of as you say big d debate every disagreement begins with a kind of agreement, which is we're going to sort out our differences this way and not a different way and maybe

importantly for the particular issue you're talking about we agree when we're not going to tackle the whole issue in one go. we're just going to talk about this question that we can meaningfully make progress on within this limited amount of time that we have. and so when you were talking about the different channels and media across which these disagreements happen. each one has different acoustics of the soil that i was describing earlier. each one has different rules and some of those rules might be more amenable to the kinds of conversations that we want to have as opposed to others right here. i'm thinking about social media versus face-to-face discussions with some of the rules that i've that i've been discussing so i would you know. think about and i think this is something we need to do as a society think about.

that element of agreement that comes before the disagreement, which is agreeing to a common set of rules and a common set of practices that we're going to abide by in order for the conversation to go well and it may be that we're not always able to get such agreement because of some of the reasons that you talked about but thing that gives me some measure of optimism is that this shouting across one another works for very few people. in my in my estimation that many people are exasperated by it that they're tired of that the tide because of it and that there is some room for experimentation and people looking to do things are different way. so that's kind of what i'm banking on really i hope it's true. all right. thanks so much. i'll stay around i'll sign books and i'll take any further questions. thank you.

welcome to the event. we are going to discuss the bin laden papers, which is nelly lahood's excellent new book, which got very favorable reviews already in the washington post now, he was subject of an entire segment on 60 minutes on sunday.