Bo Seo - Good Arguments: What the art of debating can teach us about listening better and disagreeing well

Could not be more timely or valuable

Kevin Rudd

The rare book that has the potential to make you smarter and everyone around you wiser

Adam Grant

Exhilaratingly well-written and persuasive

Annabel Crabb

Good Arguments

What the art of debating can teach us about listening better and disagreeing well

Bo Seo

Australias two-time world debating champion

I gave this book multiple standing ovations while reading it. Exhilaratingly well-written and persuasive, its an elegant and urgent work of advocacy for productive disagreement. We live in an age of pointless, savage, almost recreational discord. But in this elegant book, Bo Seo has charted a path towards productive disagreement. And hes done it with such charm and generosity that its a very hard book to put down. Annabel Crabb, author of The Wife Drought

This is not just the electrifying tale of how Bo Seo won two world debate championships. Its also a user manual for our polarised world. I cant think of a more vital resource for learning to sharpen your critical thinking, accelerate your rethinking, and hone your ability to open other peoples minds. Good Arguments is the rare book that has the potential to make you smarter and everyone around you wiser. Adam Grant, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Think Again and host of the podcast WorkLife

This excellent book begins with the challenge faced by a schoolboy whose family moved from South Korea to Australia. From school debating to university dialogue and on to witnessing global political conflict, Bo Seo identifies how debate and argument are essential to human understanding. Out of good arguments comes a synthesis. It has been so from the time of Socrates, to the world of Khrushchev and Mandela, and of Putin and Zelinsky. He argues that debate is central to human freedom even as our world faces dramatic challenges for human survival. Distinguishing good arguments from unconvincing rubbish has never been more central to human survival and to achieving love for one another. The Hon Michael Kirby AC CMG, former Justice of the High Court of Australia

I adore this beautiful story of a young persons journey from fear of conflict and altercation to embrace of wonderful disagreement and argument. In this touching memoir, debate is not a mere activity but a way of life that offers hope of a cure for a diseased society. Good Arguments is essential reading! Jeannie Suk Gersen, John H. Watson Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and author of A Light Inside

From two-time world champion debater Bo Seo, a thoughtful, instructive and eloquent meditation on the art of debate and why its central pillars fact-finding, reason, persuasion and listening to opponents are so valuable in todays alarming ecosystem of misinformation and extreme emotion. When Bo Seos family immigrated from South Korea to Australia, he was a shy, conflict-averse eight year old who worried about being an outsider, and in Good Arguments, he recounts how debate not only helped him to cross language lines, but also gave him confidence and a voice of his own. Michiko Kakutani, author of The Death of Truth

Good Arguments is a book so timely and needed in this fraction-ing world we are living in. It assumes that a quarrel is something you first have with yourself, get it out of the way and start to respect and listen to the person across the room from you. Seo has written a book that forces us to think and then speak as the philosopher he knows is right on the tip of every tongue. This book is brilliant and a pleasure to read; in the end, he instructs us not to win but to convince and unexpectedly, it teaches how to persuade for words are deployed as weapons of love. Jamaica Kincaid, author of See Now Then, Mr. Potter, and The Autobiography of My Mother

I had lots of conversations about political and social issues with Bo Seo when he was a student at Harvard, and I never felt even, for a second, that he was being disputatious or even argumentative. On the contrary, they were delightfully agreeable. Now I understand why: it was because Bo Seo is a debater, in fact, one of the best debaters in the world. If you want to learn how debating can help you become a more engaging conversationalist, a more broad-minded thinker, or even, maybe, just a better human being, you must read Good Arguments. Louis Menand, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Metaphysical Club and The Free World

Today, more than ever, we see the importance of navigating disagreements constructively. In his new book, Good Arguments, Bo Seo offers some tips we can all use in doing so, drawing on his deep experience as a champion debater. Stephen A. Schwarzman, New York Times-bestselling author of What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence

For Jin Kyung Park and Won Kyo Seo

B efore my ninth birthday, I lost the ability to disagree. I experienced the loss as a kind of erosion: there was no disabling moment, only a slow and steady fade. In the beginning, I resisted. Though the words caught in my throat, I found ways to spit out my objections. But then I tired of the effort, risk, and self-disclosure that arguments entail. So I began to linger in the silences between speech and, once there, told myself I could find a way to live in this safe and hidden place.

It was July 2003 and my parents and I had just moved to Australia from South Korea. The decision to immigrate in pursuit of fresh opportunities in life, work, and education had excited me in the beginning, but now in Wahroonga, this quiet, wealthy suburb in the north of Sydney, I could see that it was a folly. We had left behind good friends, food made with actual spices, and 48 million people who spoke our language. And for what? The alienation I felt in the refrigerated aisles of Woolworths or atop the jungle gym at the local park had the irritating quality of being boldly chosen.

In response to my complaints, Mum and Dad were sympathetic but unmoved. I got the sense from how they repeated the word transition that discomfort and confusion had been accounted for in some grand arithmetic.

My parents were somewhat dissimilar to each other. Dad grew up as part of a sprawling, conservative family in a country town on the easternmost point of the Korean Peninsula. Mum was raised by urbane progressives in Seoul. He eschewed material comforts; she had an instinct for glamour. He loved people; she prized ideas. However, the stages of immigration brought to the fore qualities they shared: a fierce independence and a determination to realise their dreams.

I spent these early weeks in Sydney in the back seat of a rental car as my parents zipped around town working through a list of tasks. Furniture purchases, tax file number registration, an apartment lease each tied us more closely to this city but none inspired a sense of attachment. When I asked if there was anything I could do, my parents said I had only one job: Find your feet at school, okay?

The locals in Wahroonga knew the primary school in their suburb as the Bush School. Surrounded by a wildlife reserve, the school campus was always on the verge of being overrun by plant life. Thickets of bush clawed against classroom windows and ear-sized mushrooms bloomed on the seats of the abandoned amphitheatre. In the summer, the place was lush and green. But on this wintry Monday morning in August, my first day of third grade, the leaves shimmered pale silver and the boundaries of the campus were covered in shadows.