How To Argue With Someone | Buster Benson | Modern Wisdom Podcast 122

Buster Benson is an entrepreneur & writer. How do we have a productive disagreement with another person? The art of conversing with someone to create a useful outcome is not simple. Ego, biases, reputation and much more get in the way of an optimal environment when we oppose someone's point of view. Today we learn the steps we can all take toward arguing more productively and effectively. Extra Stuff: Follow Buster on Twitter - https://twitter.com/buster Buy The Art Of Productive Disagreement - https://amzn.to/2Qodd7O Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  It's considered like backfire effect or the boomerang effect where in a particular context, if the context is a battle or a tug of war, or you know, you're leaning back, you know, and if someone pulls on their side of the rope, you don't, you don't, you don't like, oh, cool. Let's go over there. You're like, no, I'm gonna pull on my side of the rope harder. And that's just the game, right? That's the game you're playing in that context. It's, you know, it comes from fight or flight. It comes from our survival instinct to be like, hey, if I'm losing, that doesn't mean I surrender. That means I fight harder. And, you know, psychologically, it doesn't make sense. And if you just look at it from like, oh, you know, why am I not hearing the information? And updating my mental model about reality and instead choosing to fight back?

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Because oftentimes your survival is at stake, at least historically, you know.

• 0:52Chris Williamson?

  You ready to go?

• 0:53Speaker 00

  Ready.

• 0:54Chris Williamson?

  Lovely. Well, what if I'm not ready? Maybe we should have an argument about it.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Sure, we can.

• 0:59Chris Williamson?

  We can indeed. And we're going to today. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Buster Benson. Buster, welcome to the show.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Thank you. So glad to be here.

• 1:08Chris Williamson?

  As you might have heard, we've been practicing our arguments, ready for you to tune in today. But we are talking about the art of productive disagreement today.

• 1:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:20Chris Williamson?

  Or are we?

• 1:20Speaker 00

  A nice, easy topic.

• 1:21Chris Williamson?

  Maybe we talk about something else. Maybe I argue with you and we talk about something else.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  I'm open for whatever you got. No, I love having a good disagreement. Part of the, you know, the most interesting part of research for this book was basically approaching disagreements in all parts of my lives. And, you know, I can tell you that that has led to, you know, all kinds of just like weird side effects of its own. So I like going down those rabbit holes and seeing where they end up. But yeah, so if you have any like pressing, like, you know, why is this thing so hard to talk about in public? We can talk about that. But yeah, the, I'm happy to also just like give a quick summary of the book too, if that's helpful.

• 1:56Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. Yeah, I think I've got, I've had some difficult discussions recently with people, not difficult as in we were at odds, but more, why is it difficult for us to have this discussion when it's not in as much of a collaborative environment? So your new book, Why Are We Yelling? Why did you write it and what's it about?

• 2:16Speaker 00

  Yes, okay, so I wrote it because I really needed to read this book. I think there's a lot of people that go out and, you know, write the book that, you know, they about what they know. My, my career has been in product development and engineering and entrepreneurship and, you know, it was Amazon and Twitter and Slack and how to a couple of my own startups, rent a bar for a while, it's all kinds of random things. And so I have a pretty personal relationship to arguing and disagreement that I'm, you know, I think everybody has in the runway. But it has been my job for a long time to facilitate sort of diverse groups of people that have different incentives, different goals, different skill levels, and helping them all come together and get something done.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  So that's sort of, you know, I've been interested in it for a long time in a professional sense. And, you know, I think part of what it came out of that was

• 3:08Speaker 00

  an acknowledgement that we're biased, we have blind spots, we don't see everything. We oftentimes fight for being right instead of fighting for, you know, the truth. And we don't really have, you know, as our, in an argument, when our heart rate starts to spike and our blood pressure starts to, you know, go up, our capacity to reason goes down, our, our interest in collaboration goes down, all these things. Basically, it's like, here's the time when you need all these skills and we're gonna just remove them all from you very conveniently and turn you back into like the fight or flight, you know, animal that you, you were billions of years ago, whatever. So my, my goal in writing this book was to take all of the knowledge in the world from all the experts, because there are so many books about this,

• 3:53Speaker 00

  about negotiation, about persuasion, about rationality, about using, you know, there's just like, there's a lot of stuff out there and it's all very good, it's all very, some of it's really dense and some of, some of it's really useful, but it's really hard to understand how that applies to our regular lives. And how do we use that at the dinner table? How do we use that in a one-on-one? And how do we use that when we're fighting with our spouse or, or, you know, a partner? How do we use that when we're, you know, just frustrated and angry and we have, we're tired? And, you know, when everything seems to be falling apart, all these things that like seem to compromise us and. And so I just decided to take a deep dive, immerse myself in all that stuff and try to synthesize it because that's what I love to do. I like to synthesize things and make it practical. So that was the hope.

• 4:36Chris Williamson?

  I think that that's one of the most interesting things that we can do, especially as we get older and we can draw from multiple different bodies of knowledge, different subject areas.

• 4:46Chris Williamson?

  Intellectual hero of mine, Naval Ravikant, talks about the fact that he thinks joining these things is one of the greatest pleasures that there is in life. And I have to say that the same is true for me. Interestingly, I spoke to Professor Paul Bloom from the University of Yale the other day, and he recently wrote a book called Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. And it sounds like you're pushing towards rationality here. How unbiased can we make ourselves? How appropriate can we make our responses?

• 5:15Speaker 00

  Not necessarily. So I wouldn't, I'm not pro rationality or against it. I think that they are, they're disciplines, and rationality is a discipline, empathy is a discipline,

• 5:27Speaker 00

  persuasion is a discipline. We need to find the thing that's actually the most practical for us to use. And I think that any of these disciplines, when taken to an extreme and applied, you know, they are very useful in a very constrained sort of sphere of sort of debate, right? Like if you want to be, apply science to all of your arguments, you can do that, but you need a laboratory, you need research grants. If you want to apply empathy to all of your disagreements, you really need to be super healthy and emotionally like sort of thriving in a way that you could actually spend all this stuff. If you want to use rationality, you need to be talking to someone that also, you know, wants to play by that rule, right? You can't take rationality to a basketball court and play, you know, play, play basketball.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  You have to take it to a rationalist and then you're sparring. But so I'm not for or against them. I think there's a time and a place and a context for all these things. But there is also this huge context of our everyday lives that, you know, where these things don't necessarily work.

• 6:26Chris Williamson?

  I understand. So we're talking about disagreement and the art of productive disagreement specifically. At some point, did you, did you define what you consider to be an argument or a disagreement?

• 6:38Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. So I have a, you know, an official definition, which is a disagreement is basically a difference between two perspectives that you find unacceptable. So it could be, I think A is better than B. You think B is better than A. If we're both cool with that, then no disagreement. If one of us thinks, I don't think it's okay for you to think that A is better than B, because B is definitely better than A, then we have disagreement.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  So it's really the unacceptable part. It's like, what is it that? That's what sparks us into the, you know, the need to prove someone right, or the need to actually converse with them about this.

• 7:14Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. It comes from a good place. I think sometimes it's that we want, we think you, person A, would benefit from my view, person B. If you had my view, your world would be better and my world would be better. Therefore, I should get you to do it.

• 7:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, there's, there's a selfish aspect to it and there's a selfless aspect to it. You know, this is how we learn about the world, right? We have to go out and talk to people that know things we don't know. And we have to take their knowledge and link it up to what we do know. And that's inevitably going to cause differences of perspective. That's what we want. We want to go talk to people that know things we don't know.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  The process of integrating differences is a skill that we have not been taught very well. We haven't been taught ways to, we, we, we tend more to the anxiety we feel about like, okay, well, I've got this B is better than A thing in my head. I'm not ready to change that yet. That makes me uncomfortable. How can I mash their version of things into my head in a way that I can keep that, which oftentimes requires you to say, well, A, this person thinks A is better than B, but they're wrong. And so I'm gonna put that, that's how I'm gonna like link it up. I'm gonna put into like, there are some people out there that are wrong, and then there's me.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  And now it's coherent versus trying to actually decide like which one is the best. Or, or is there a possibility that they're both, you know, it's okay for you to think that and me to think this and that's totally fine.

• 8:42Chris Williamson?

  I understand. So do you have a framework that people can follow that they can look at? Where, where do we start with the book?

• 8:48Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes. So this book is framed around eight things to try and meant to be. Things that, you know, are each in their own, um, a big practice, a big way to pull together lots of experts and a lot of research and my own personal experiences and all that into something that's like, hey, try this. And those eight things are, um, you know, we don't have to cover them all, but they are, they're thing, the first one is watching how anxiety sparks in your head. So like, when you enter a disagreement, um, try to notice what sparks that anxiety so that you can work backwards and think, okay, well, what was threatened? What was my, my value or my identity or my feeling or what felt threatened?

• 9:28Speaker 00

  And then you can use that to, um, ask that person, like, did you mean to threaten this? Or did you, were you saying that for some other reason? Um, because most disagreements are oftentimes mistaken threats. They, they're not actually trying to threaten you. They're actually just ranting about something or there's, you know, trying to say something, but they're saying it in a very sloppy way. Um, so that's one. Um, and I have like tips around how to do that with like disagreement journaling and, and sort of private journaling and that kind of thing. Number two is to talk to your internal voices. So a lot of us think with our, you know, with voices in our head, and we, we, we find ourselves sometimes like when we're, when our blood pressure is up, we get angry and we tell people to shut up and we just try to stop the argument.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  And when we're with friends or we're at work, we're trying to be more professional, we use like logic, we're like, okay, well, what's the evidence for this? And how would you prove that? And let's see what happens. Um, and there's another one that when those two things don't work, um, is like, oh, I just, I'm gonna opt out. I'm gonna avoid this conversation because there's no point in me talking to you. You're not gonna listen to my reason. I don't wanna be overbearing and, or you're being overbearing to me. I'm just gonna escape. I'm gonna avoid everything. Um, and I call that the voice of avoidance, which is the one that, um, tends to have creeped into our lives the most, turns out. Like, there's so much in our lives where we just decide, you know, to avoid the problem, um, for some reason or another. Sometimes it's because you wanna keep the peace. Sometimes it's because it's, you think it's useless. And that's where the frustration

• 10:57Speaker 00

  comes in, was like, we don't, we would want to be effective here and we're choosing not to. That sort of annoys us. Um, and so really giving names to these voices and, and starting to think about which ones talk up when and when are they most applicable is one of those chapters. Chapter three is To develop honest bias. So really thinking about cognitive bias and how you can both see it in yourself and learn to see it, see, see how it creates problems around you and how to address the problems without having to necessarily diagnose everyone as biased. Because that's sort of what tends to happen is like we point, we go around trying to say like, you're biased for this reason, and you're biased for this reason. Meanwhile, the things

• 11:40Speaker 00

  are just getting worse and worse. I, I, I advocate for just like focus on the effects of bias and try to fix the damage that's being caused. Because that's something that's tangible. It's, you know, it's right in front of you. It's also the thing that's hurting the people. And then over time, you can sort of work backwards into, you know, what caused this? How do we prevent it from happening in the first place? But so those are three that we start the book with. And then there's five more, but I won't go into them because I've been talking a long time.

• 12:08Chris Williamson?

  Hey, I'm absolutely, I'm absolutely loving it. I'm sure that the listeners will be as well. I think it'd be, once we've had a little chat about those, I think we, we definitely go through the remaining chapters because I don't want to, I don't want to leave that open loop. One of the, one of the interesting things you said there, I, I certainly know that for myself as someone who likes to think about things in a more of a cerebral way. And you can sometimes break down a disagreement very cerebrally, you know, just go back through thinking fast and slow and start just picking up Daniel Kahneman quotes and studies, throwing them at someone going like, no, like self-serving bias, argument from authority, like you just, you know what I mean? And it's like, well, hang on a second, like you totally bypassed

• 12:53Chris Williamson?

  the actual purpose of using biases and working out where logical fallacies come from, which is to use them to progress the argument forward, not to break the fourth wall of the argument and turn it into this weird sort of dick measuring competition about who knows the most biases.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  Right, right, right. Yeah, that's, that's the danger I would try to avoid. And, you know, full disclosure, like that's how, that's where I started too, you know, as a PM at Twitter, we were always, we were obsessed with a list of biases. And we would always try to like pick them out in other people's arguments and really game.

• 13:23Chris Williamson?

  What's a, what's PM? Sorry?

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Oh, a product manager.

• 13:27Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  So I was.

• 13:28Chris Williamson?

  Briefly, what does that mean?

• 13:30Speaker 00

  Sorry. So, um, you know, the teams, the, the, it was at, I was at Twitter at the time. You have engineers, you have designers, you have a marketer. The, the product manager sort of works with them all and like comes up the strategy. Tries to identify which things are launch blockers, which things are, are bugs that need to be fixed first. Whether or not the quality is high enough. You also have to wrangle with like the execs and other teams to figure out, you know, how to get your resources. How do you prioritize your projects and that kind of thing? So it's half of it's like, you know, managing your team and sort of figuring out like, how do we all work together effectively? And half of it is sort of managing your relationship to the rest of the company.

• 14:07Chris Williamson?

  That must be a very good breeding ground to develop negotiating skills. Finding middle ground, compromise, ensuring that different stakeholders are satisfied, et cetera, et cetera.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's definitely, that's, um, where I realized I was, I had particular skills in there. And also like, I had a long way to go, uh, early on. And not everyone liked that role. So it was something that I was really drawn to. It's like, this is a meaty challenge. I'm never going to like master this to the extent that I get bored, right? So.

• 14:41Chris Williamson?

  And was, was it a similar role at Slack as well?

• 14:44Speaker 00

  Slack as well. Yep. And I had that at, at Amazon and most recently at Patreon. So it's, it's a role that is pretty common here in the Bay area. And it, but it's also ambiguous. You go to every single company that's slightly different. It's always a, a function of the culture and how that, that company works.

• 15:00Chris Williamson?

  That's a, a very interesting sample of some huge quickly growing companies for you to have developed these skills in.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's definitely a crucible of, of like excitement and torture and.

• 15:14Chris Williamson?

  Battles of fire.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was at Amazon in ninety eight when it was just like books and music tabs were up and the video tab is going to come up soon and the auctions was going to come up. And that was right out of college. I remember being like, wow, this is so, I feel like I'm in the middle of some like weird, weird, wild hurricane that's happening. Yeah, but yeah, I feel really lucky with being in the right place at the right time and a lot of, in a lot of ways.

• 15:42Chris Williamson?

  It really, it really sounds like you have been. So, you know, the listeners will know, but you won't. I'm a club promoter, so my job involves me mediating between the venue owner, which we're not. Our staff, there's about five hundred of them that work for us, fourteen of them are the managers, and then there's teams below them. The customers, the police, the council, licensing authority, marketing, you know, and we, we cross all, all different sectors of the business. So me and my business partner will do accounting, will do projections, will do the marketing, will do the copy, will do the HR, will do the hiring and firing, will do literally everything. So, you know, juggling, juggling these, these particular skills is something that I enjoy. I like,

• 16:28Chris Williamson?

  I like the challenge, which, you know, given your track record of companies that you've been at as well, I think that you must have that too. So we've had, we've had the, the first, the first three. There was one, I think it was number two that you mentioned about why you're talking to your internal voices, checking yourself on your internal voices. So there's an Eckhart Tolle quote from The Power of Now where he talks about conceding that conceding that your point is wrong in an argument is tantamount to the ego's destruction. And I often think about that when I'm having a discussion with someone and the listeners at home will know this as well. You're having a discussion with someone and you think, right, this is irrefutable proof that what you're saying is wrong.

• 17:12Chris Williamson?

  And they don't change their mind. But no, hang on a second. Like I've just, I've literally, I've given you it. It's there. There's the, there's the thing. And rather than that, they dig their heels in further and they double down on that position. Is that the sort of thing that you, that you discovered in that?

• 17:25Speaker 00

  Absolutely, absolutely. That's, you know, it's considered like backfire effect or the boomerang effect where, you know, we don't, in a particular context, if the context is a battle or a tug of war, or, you know, you're leaning back, you know, and if someone pulls on their side of the rope, you don't, you don't, you don't like, oh, cool, let's go over there. You're like, no, I'm gonna pull my side of the rope harder. And that's just the game, right? That's the game you're playing in that context. It's, you know, it comes from fight or flight. It comes from our survival instinct to be like, hey, if I'm losing, that doesn't mean I surrender. That means I fight harder. And, you know, psychologically, it doesn't make sense. And if you just look at it from like, oh, you know, why am I not hearing the information?

• 18:07Speaker 00

  And updating my mental model about reality and instead choosing to fight back? Because oftentimes your survival is at stake, at least historically, you know.

• 18:18Chris Williamson?

  It feels like that, right? You know, anyone who's been in a really heated argument knows that that feeling when it's, you really get going and you almost, you're no longer listening. It's a game of tennis. It's a verbal game of tennis. You wait for that person to finish speaking, or sometimes you don't, and you just single minded. You got the blinkers on like a horse in the race, and you're just going for it.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  Yep, yep, yep. And we're all, yeah, it's like really hardwired in our brains. We were really, we benefited a lot from it over time. Because there's so many arguments that can't be resolved with reason. You know, if something is like, hey, you know, I want to have my house right here on this hill, and you want it too, but I'm bigger, I have worse, I have, you know, I have more swords and soldiers on my side. So I gotta have my house here. Or, you know, like, I want these goats. These are my goats, you know? You don't, you don't resort to property rights. You don't take it to the court of law. You just settle it right there. And so this is how we settle most of things. Like, if you look at a two-year-old and that has their favorite toy, they don't,

• 19:21Speaker 00

  you know, reason about why they should keep the toy. They just yank it and start screaming. These are, they work in a pre-verbal sense, even, even a pre-cognitive sense, they work. So they're, they're deeply down there. But, you know, what, what gets us into that battle mode is interesting because we don't have to operate in that battle mode all the time. We don't, and most of the time we're in that mode, we're not actually fighting for our survival. We're fighting for something stupid or something very abstract. And even if we're wrong, we're not gonna die. We're not gonna be kicked out. We're not gonna, you know, starve in the cold, you know? So we should look at that. That's why I'd start with like. Where does anxiety spark and sort of listen to the internal voices? Because that's the point where there's this crossroads.

• 20:05Speaker 00

  You'd be like, am I going to go down? Am I going to turn on my battle mode? Or am I going to turn on my friend mode? Or am I going to turn on some other mode? And you don't have to go into that mode.

• 20:16Chris Williamson?

  So is there, there's a choice at the beginning. I'm going to guess that turning on or not the anxiety mode forms the foundation for the other elements and the chapters. Is that kind of right?

• 20:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I try to spend time helping build the instincts and the practices to avoid the mode altogether. Because most of the time you don't need it. If your, if your health or your safety is in danger, yes. Resort to the voice of power and to be like, I just yank it and try to hold on to it. Whatever it is, but you know, most of the time we're arguing with each other right now. We're not, we don't need to do that. We, we actually benefit from learning something new. We actually benefit from building a relationship. We actually benefit from enjoying the conversation and building new connections. So all these other things that we could get out of a conversation can be productive and can make it productive in a way that's way more rich and way more enjoyable, way

• 21:13Speaker 00

  more fulfilling than who's right. So there's a, there's a bunch of that around like, what are the other fruits of disagreement that we can focus on that it turns out are like way more interesting and fun?

• 21:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the conversation I had with Professor Paul Bloom from the University of Yale. We finished talking about why we think that the podcasting platform is so enjoyed and seen such growth at the moment. And it's a cliche to say it's the fastest growing platform on, on earth after Twitch TV. And you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. But is that just because of AirPods or because Joe Rogan's a boss or whatever, whatever? But I think one of the main things is that it's, it's one of the few places where you can have two plus two equaling five with regards to a conversation. You know, I don't want the best podcasters, some, some bad podcasters do this, but I don't want to come into this conversation with you. I don't have an agenda for me to come out looking like the cooler guy.

• 22:11Chris Williamson?

  Right? And you know, that's not your agenda. Yeah. What we want, what we, I mean, you know, I think you're pretty cool as it is living in the Bay Area. So I'm in northeast of England, I mean, Winterfell.

• 22:24Chris Williamson?

  And but what we're trying to do is we're trying to have a conversation. It's one of the few places, the last bastion of where conversations aim to make two plus two equaling five, where it's like you, you know, some stuff and I might know some stuff. And then together we we create and we're like, oh, wow. Both of us have come to a new conclusion. And the weird thing about it that I think is important is that we know that we're being held to account by an audience that's going to be rigorous at checking us on our bullshit. Because if it was just a conversation between the two of us, you might be able to lie more or bend the truth. I might be able to, I could tell you that I was like a ex professional football player or whatever, whatever. But I can't do that because I know that someone out there is going to go, that's, that's bullshit. You

• 23:09Chris Williamson?

  can't say that. So you're actually held to this incredibly high level of intellectual rigor and honesty and dignity and virtue and integrity and all that stuff. So is I, you know, the, I suppose, what's, what are your thoughts on these sorts of long conversations and stuff like that? That's being a breeding ground for productive disagreement?

• 23:26Speaker 00

  Absolutely. In fact, you know, even through my own experience, I've been on a few podcasts now, and every single podcast host I meet is so like intuitively understands these points. Because you're on a, you know, daily or weekly, you know, cadence, doing them, right? And you so you know, you know, that, you know, asking good questions is important. You know that, you know, enticing people to sort of fill in their own arguments for something, and show that share their own perspective and share their story is important to the conversation. And you have the time and the context and the circumstances to allow space. If you don't, you're not looking for the sound bites, you're not looking for the zingers necessarily. So as far as I'm concerned, like, yeah, the book could have

• 24:10Speaker 00

  just been like, be a podcast host.

• 24:16Speaker 00

  We all just need our own podcasts and we all just need to be on our podcast because everything about it, I agree, is just like it's conducive to longer, maybe this is why they're happening right now when we need this kind of thing and why they're growing so fast is because this is, this is the antidote to, you know, the, the breaking news and the headlines and the, you know, the rants and all that hot takes and all that stuff. So.

• 24:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it is, you know, it's one of those things that I'm hearing from so many different angles at the moment, that long form conversation is something which is lacking. We need to allow people time to think out loud and voice their thoughts with nuance and subtlety and error without jumping on them and saying it's this and saying it's that. And, you know, I mean, we, I asked Paul Bloom essentially, why is it unmoral to be racist the other day? Like, that's a very difficult question to ask someone without them going like, looking at you like you're a Holocaust denier or something. I was like, no, no, no, like I really, I'm fascinated. What is the evolution? And he, he gives you time, do you know what I mean? He gives you

• 25:19Chris Williamson?

  time to go through it and he questions himself and the audience get taken on that journey. So, yeah, you know, everyone that's listening, I've said it a million times. I think that it is a good tool to use to sit down with someone that you know well for about half an hour, once a week, put your phones outside of the room and just talk about anything, talk about something you see in the news, don't have anything else on, and just have a conversation. Because for me, I get so fired up knowing that I get to speak to someone like yourself or Aubrey Marcus or James Clear, whoever it might be.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah.

• 25:50Chris Williamson?

  And if you don't have that outlet, you don't realize how much you're missing it.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I'm, I'm being swayed. I was originally for this book and I make a podcast and it seemed like so much work and so hard. And I know that is a lot of work and it's very hard, but I see the benefits in, in like just the, the people that are drawn to it and do the work, you know, you're all very open minded, gracious. You can see both sides. You're oftentimes like not polarized extremely on one side or the other. You can, you have a perspective that's large enough to. To hold, invite guests that disagree and have conversations that are difficult. Like, all these things are exactly what is said in the book. And we may not all be able to be podcast hosts, but we are all people that have dinner with people. And we're all people that go on walks with each other.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  We're all people that have conversations and write letters and all these other things that we can do. So, yeah, I think it's great. And I'm definitely reconsidering my choice to not have one.

• 26:49Chris Williamson?

  Good, good. Well, I would definitely have a subscriber, at least you'd have one. So, we've got three chapters in. What are we on to next? Number four, what are we working on?

• 26:58Speaker 00

  So, number four is to speak for yourself. And this is sort of, you can always bring this back to the other ones. Each one sort of builds on the past ones. But speaking for yourself, I found, especially online, is an easy guardrail to help keep conversations on track. When you start speaking for other people or imagining what, you know, how often do you say like, or you hear people say,

• 27:23Speaker 00

  "I can't understand why you would believe this or why you would do that. Well, you must be an idiot, or you must be a racist, or you must be a terrible person." There was a question, there was a question like, "I don't understand something." But you don't ask it, right? All you do is you take your uncharitable stereotype of that person and you plant it into their head and you say, "Okay, well, you must have this terrible projection that I have, and therefore I can judge you and I think I understand you, but I really only understand my stereotype." And so, if you ask people to speak only for themselves and they are trying to talk about something that they can't talk about from their own perspective, you're forced to go find someone that can go and do that for you.

• 28:05Speaker 00

  And so, find the person that can speak for themselves about the thing you want to understand.

• 28:11Speaker 00

  And so, use that person to give you information instead of your own imagination to do that. And, yeah, so that leads into the next one, which is sort of paired with it, which is like asking questions that spark surprising answers. So, once you have that person there, like, how do you, you don't just say like, you know, "Are you a terrible person?" You know, speak for yourself. "Try to convince me that you're not a terrible person." Those are terrible questions.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  You can ask questions that are much more open and be like, you know, how did you form this belief? Do you even have this belief? How would you articulate your position to me? How are you misunderstood by people like me? How have your beliefs been useful in your life? Who do you look up to that has this quality? And just try to like, start to try to see the world through their words. And again, you know, using the fact that they come from a different life as a source of information and have curiosity about it. So ask really big, open questions.

• 29:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that little batch of questions that you've suggested there would elicit, you know, hundreds of hours of interesting conversations between people.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, and even people that you hate.

• 29:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a lot of people that I disagree with that I think, you know, I want to know, in fact, the people that you agree with more likely have similar motivations to you because you've already selected for one thing that's in common between the two of you. Whereas if you don't even have that thing in common, you're like, oh, wow, you must have a really different worldview.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's really quick to see that, you know, to see that if you're asked the right question. You're like, oh, yeah, my, you know, I grew up here with these circumstances, with these, you know, this environment. And you're like, oh, wow, tell me more, because I don't know anything about that. Right?

• 29:57Chris Williamson?

  So I'm coaching a company out in Germany. And one of the particular guys that I'm working with at the moment, he was asking about how to be a better conversationalist. He's quite forthcoming. He's got a lot to say and he's clever and he's quick. But he knows that he grates on people. He knows that he can come across a little bit abrasive. And he asked me for some sort of heuristic or rule to use. And I was like, I want you to ask one question for every statement that you make when you have a conversation with one of the guys in your office. Like, and even you can put what you want them to do into your question. So you can say, okay, what do you think is a solution to this? Or how would you go about doing this? Or can you tell me why you think that?

• 30:42Chris Williamson?

  You know, and if you realize that, it not only does it help you to understand their point of view. And if you can ensure that you're letting go of your ego and that you haven't got your battle mode on and that you're not pulling too hard and do the things that we've discussed beforehand. And you're, you're prepared to be sort of moved by the tide of the conversation. You can just sway from left to right, however it goes. Again, you two plus two equals five in that conversation.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Yeah, it's a skill. And again, I don't think people have been intentionally practicing this or being taught this skill, but the actual skill is not, you don't have to go and get your PhD in asking questions. You can actually just put, you know, write down five questions, put it in your pocket. And next time you go out, you know, and talk to someone, just like, review it really quickly before you go in and be like, okay, I'm gonna ask those questions. And then ask them, and then see where it goes. And it's self reinforcing, because once you start doing that, you realize how enjoyable it is to hear people talk about something that you weren't expecting them to talk about. And to hear someone's own words to describe something. And so I like this one, because it is like, one of the first

• 31:50Speaker 00

  most obvious reinforcing loops, where you get an instant gratification from a good question.

• 31:55Chris Williamson?

  You really do. I think certainly before doing this podcast, I'm an only child. And that meant that I had a very, very single minded, solitary, selfish worldview, which I probably still do. And my friends, my friends will probably accuse me of still having that. But it's a lot better since doing the podcast, because I have a genuine curiosity of what other people say. And I can't, I can no longer turn that off. So someone will get kicked out at the front of one of our club nights, and I'll be stood on the door, and this person will be shouting and screaming about why the door staff have kicked them out. And I'll be asking them like, oh, so what, like, tell me about what you do for work. And like, fuck off, mate, I want to get back in. Like, I'm very interested in your backstory, please.

• 32:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, that'd be a good podcast series right there.

• 32:35Chris Williamson?

  Oh, God, standing on the front door. Honestly, if I had one of those body cams on that the police wear, it would be, it'd be savage. We had Halloween last night in Newcastle. And like, wait, there's nothing better than seeing a guy dressed up as a Ghostbuster, fight a guy dressed up as a Power Ranger, and the door staff tried to split them up. And me being like, excuse me, gentlemen, can you tell me about where the moral virtue that's starting this situation has come from, please? Chris, go back, go back.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  You're from different universes. I mean, how are they gonna resolve anything?

• 33:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I know. That's from different, that's really correct. But yeah, the asking questions thing, super easy heuristic.

• 33:13Chris Williamson?

  Moving on, number six, what we got?

• 33:15Speaker 00

  Okay, so number six is building arguments together. So this is another thing that I like to practice. And I think you have to get good at the questions first. But building arguments together is basically like, let's just put aside my position for a while. And let's really work on making your argument or your side of the position as strong as possible. And I can help you by both seeing it from the outside as well. And you can help from seeing it from the inside. We can look for the answers to my questions together. We can look for, I can look at the evidence that you have and sort of help you explain it in language that I can hear better. All these things where you're now, rather than trying to tear apart their argument, you're trying to build it up.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  Because in an ideal world, a disagreement would be something that you can learn from. And you can only learn from the best version of the argument. So that means you need to find the people that can best represent the argument and help them make it stronger. And this is a collaborative exercise. And you could just do this with almost anything. There's a best argument for even the most wrong positions. And you can make a best argument for flat earth. You can make the best argument for the world being on top of a stack of turtles. And by doing that, you're like suddenly you're back into your creative mode. You're back into your like, okay, well, let's make this work. And you're doing it with somebody that has a lot to contribute. Because our enemies and our opponents actually are the best at spotting our own blind spots.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  And we're the best at spotting theirs. And if we're actually working together, there's a huge amount of benefit from using that knowledge of each other to make each other stronger.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  Ultimately, you might build up the argument, like, okay, well, I still don't believe the earth is flat. But I had a lot of fun doing that. And maybe during the process, they might be like, okay, well, and I had an experience where I talked to a globalist. And they didn't try to hurt me or tell me I'm an idiot. I opened the door to them, asking you questions about your argument or like how you got to your side. Because I gave you some of my time, they might eventually want to give it back.

• 35:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so I'm thinking of two examples here, which you might be familiar with both. I think it is Charlie Munger, who says that he refuses to have a position on anything unless he can state the other side's better than they can.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  Right, right, exactly.

• 35:34Chris Williamson?

  That's an amazing heuristic. And then you might have seen the Pangborn philosophy discussion between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. And they started.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  They tried to do this.

• 35:45Chris Williamson?

  They did, they did what's called steel manning. Is that right?

• 35:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:48Chris Williamson?

  Steel manning.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Steel manning.

• 35:49Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain what steel manning in argument is?

• 35:52Speaker 00

  Steel manning is, is, is a version of this, which is like, I'm going to try to articulate the, you know, the best case of this argument. It doesn't necessarily require the other person to be involved, which I think is a crucial part of it because they actually have a lot more of the information than you do. Um, but yeah, it's, it's basically saying, hey, if I don't think that, um, it's moral to, um, you know, not vaccinate your kids. Um, I could create the steel man argument of that, of the other person's side by trying to use evidence and as good a faith, you know, notion as possible. So like, imagine someone like this and this and this. And in that case,

• 36:32Speaker 00

  um, you know, I can see why, you know, they don't have time to go give their kids vaccinations and that's why they don't do it. Or they live in Nigeria. There's no access to clinics, you know, whatever it happens to be, but taking everything on as good of faith as possible. Um, sometimes it's also called the principle of charity, um, of just, you know, helping them. I think the crucial thing that they all sort of triangulate on is that we're usually in the mode of trying to tear people's arguments down. And that, um, makes us not see the strengths versus when you steel man, you sort of do the opposite. You look for the strengths and you look to make them stronger and you look to, you know, try to imagine, because that's when we're arguing on behalf of ourselves, that's what we're doing. We're imagining it in its best light. We're not imagining its flaws. Um, so it helps you with that empathy a bit.

• 37:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, I agree. And again, to come back to the, the asking questions part, a lot of the guys that work for us, you can imagine there's a million micro decisions that need to get made about club nights. Who's working this week? What are the hostess outfits? Should we do confetti or should we do bubbles or should we do whatever? And everyone has a different point of view. And a lot of the time I've noticed that the guys that work, there may be, uh, eighteen, nineteen up to twenty one, twenty two. And a lot of the guys like to make statements about things as, as fact, but then they're never actually prepared to look at what the other side is saying and understand that. Um, and then another thing, I wonder whether you've come across this, you probably will have done.

• 38:01Chris Williamson?

  People are a lot more prepared in a disagreement to say why another thing is wrong than to offer a solution.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  Uh huh, right. Yeah, I mean, this is always the case. I call this like arguing at the gate. So for, I mean, take any issue, we're often just trying to point out the flaws of the other side. We're not talking about what are, what we would do if we were allowed to do with a thing that we're trying to do, right? Like, there's an example today of like, you know, with the Facebook ad policy, I don't know if you follow that or not, but they're trying to say like, you know, Facebook should ban political ads that are blatantly lying about stuff. And, you know, there's a good case for it. And, you know, there's a lot of, you know, heat around this right now, but no one's talking about what that policy should be. Like, what, how would we censor political ads in a productive way? There

• 38:51Speaker 00

  are plenty of countries that do. And some of them are tyrannical countries. And so we don't, we know that that's not just enough to censor ads, but we also have to create a good policy. And that's so you don't, you can leave the gates. Like, say, imagine that we resolve this disagreement somehow. What would we do with that victory? We, how would we actually be, how would we execute on the, on the answer? And it's, it's surprising how little we actually think about that.

• 39:19Chris Williamson?

  I think that's, that's certainly something that I see arguing at the gate. Is that what you called it?

• 39:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. That's arguing at the gate. It's, that's just all that Twitter is to me. I don't know whether it's a, a result of the character limit that a lot of the time you are restricted to just put in like, this is my point. This is the hardest hitting bit of it, which is usually a criticism of your point. But yeah, we default, we default to that, don't we? Because recently Twitter said that they're banning all political ads. Is this, is this a second order effect? This Facebook pressure, a second order effect, do you think of the Twitter thing?

• 39:55Speaker 00

  I think they're both sort of swirling in that same, same discussion. Facebook more so because they're much bigger. But yeah, Twitter and LinkedIn and Pinterest also recently came out saying that, you know, even before Twitter, that they are gonna not have any political ads. And it's applauded by a lot of the critics of Facebook. But it also opens up a whole nother question of like, okay, well, how will you draw the line?

• 40:18Chris Williamson?

  Where do you define a political ad? Yeah. What if Donald, what if Donald Trump's undergone a body transformation and he wants to sell you his, his like six week beachbody program or something?

• 40:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, so like now we're moving like we're moving into another gate and we're now after like what counts as an issue, a political issue and can I advertise about it? Um, and it's gonna be just as heated. It's a little bit more nuanced, which I think is good, um, but it's still gonna be a hard one, I think.

• 40:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, this, the fact that people are so prepared and you know, I am as well. I, you know, there's inflammatory stuff that I see online and I get a visceral reaction and I wanna reply or say that you're stupid or whatever. But

• 41:02Chris Williamson?

  a lot of things, it's, everything is so complex. Everything's so, so difficult. The real world's incredibly messy, incredibly chaotic and it's increasingly we're just not having very good conversations about things. It doesn't, it doesn't really seem on the whole to be getting that much better. I'm aware that I live in this wonderful podcast utopia where it's just me and some person that I've had a bit of a chat with over email chatting about something that that fascinates us both. For the vast majority of people, it's not that, especially for the guys at the top of the tree, you know, like if you'd someone who's real, real, like typical, normal mainstream media, you got your thirty second snippet sat on a panel with like five other people who all disagree with you.

• 41:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's hard. I mean, we weren't ever in this situation before where we had a giant audience and, um, no context for who we are, what we, what group we're in, all kind of things. So I think it's really

• 42:03Speaker 00

  it's sort of, you know, the, we're, we're in this learning phase of a new technology, a new environment, and we're making all kinds of mistakes. We don't have the skills. Um, but it is an opportunity to step back and, and first, you know, have a bit of sympathy for everyone that's sort of flailing and failing in this context because none of us are good at it. Um, and give people a chance to develop as people and to learn from mistakes and, um, to learn from each other. Um, and I, I think, you know, having one-on-one conversations is, is a lot easier than having one to a million person conversations. Um, and so we can build that skill up from smaller, smaller circles and smaller situations and build our confidence and

• 42:43Speaker 00

  you know, create new cultural norms about how to disagree. I, I think that's just part of the process we need to go through as a culture. It's like, let's learn these skills, starting from the very basics. And I, you know, it's still very early in our, in our evolution on terms of like, how do we exist on online as humans?

• 43:02Chris Williamson?

  Very much so. Have you, have you seen those political debates? I don't know if they have them in the States. I know they have them in the UK, where the audience members have a button that tells them, that shows at the bottom of the screen. I think it's called the worm. So you can imagine there's lines for each of the candidates moving across the screen like that. And then they go up and down as they say different things and you can track. And it's, oh, red, red said something really bad, or blue's made red silly, so red looks worse and blah, blah. Have you seen those things?

• 43:31Speaker 00

  I have. Yeah, they do it for debates. Yeah. And I've seen them also done in like a town hall kind of situation.

• 43:39Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Like, there's a, there's a, there's a methodology around it. I don't think it's great because it turns, it turns conversation into a sport, right? It turns it into who could score points, who can like get the zingers, you can, you know, sort of make the other person look like a fool. It's definitely not about coming to an agreement or seeing things eye to eye.

• 44:01Chris Williamson?

  Very adversarial, isn't it, doing it that way?

• 44:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the intentions are good. And there's a bunch of, you know, and, you know, perhaps in a court of law, or, you know, when you're talking about policy and very specific problem spaces, it would work. But I think at a national level, political debates, it's not good. It turns it into a football game.

• 44:22Chris Williamson?

  Yep. I think, again, another Sam Harris-ism, I think he was talking about when he either does debates or just generally panel shows. So this could be either adversarial or collaborative. And he was saying that a lot of the time, the person who comes out feeling like they were the best, wasn't the person who was the most lucid, or the person who articulated their argument the best, or whatever it was. It's if you get one huge raucous laugh from the crowd. Like, if you got the biggest laugh, you won.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 44:53Chris Williamson?

  Which is bizarre, because, you know, Sam, Sam could be talking about some real contentious, serious topics, like the, the reality of Islam in the West, or the, the laws surrounding abortion, or the, the concept of consciousness, or whatever it is. And then someone makes a funny joke, and it's like, oh, he won. You're like.

• 45:12Speaker 00

  I know, I mean that because you're there to be entertained. So that's that's what you're there for, then the laughs will definitely give you the points. And I call them zingers, where there's a whole science, I think, to zingers, where, you know, you're not actually talking to that person, you're just trying to make them look foolish. You're mostly talking to your own side about like, you know, how can I be the best sort of soldier or the best, you know, flag bearer of my side and like say things in such a way that just, you know, create bewilderment or confusion in the other side, or taunt them, or, you know, all these things where it's very social, but tied back to war behavior again, where, you know, the the goal is definitely not to get along.

• 45:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so there's Andrew Doyle and Konstantin Kissin, who are two comedians, political comedians in the UK. I've spoken to them both recently, saw them at the Edinburgh Fringe, and both of them said the same thing about, I think they call it applaud comedy, which is where the comedian doesn't necessarily say something funny, they just say the thing that the audience agrees with the most. And then they get these big like, yes, yes, yeah. And you're like, well, it wasn't even funny. It wasn't, it wasn't funny. You just said something that you think, like, you can't say that anymore. Like, that's a classic one, you know, like, and it just, oh, well, anyone who thinks that free speech is being attacked is like, yeah, yeah, of course.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, or he's like, who here is from New York, you know, it could be anything that's loyalty based about like, you know, what is it, what is it, how can my tribe be be heard right now? And that will get the applause, right? So.

• 46:46Chris Williamson?

  Paul, Paul Bloom, the other day, when I was talking to him, you may have heard of this particular experiment. So he said that you put people into a room and you get them all to flip a coin. So like 100 people in a room, you get them to flip a coin, roughly 50 heads, 50 tails, or whatever it might be. And then you put them on opposite sides of the room, and you go to the tails people, and you know, so what do you, what do you think of heads? And they're like, wow, they're a bit sort of stupid, aren't they? Like, they're just not as clever as us, and blah, blah, blah. And you're like, you have been selected by the most arbitrary, random chance, literally the most arbitrary, random chance that you can get. And we're still drawn towards being tribal.

• 47:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, there's something emotionally rewarding about being part of a tribe. Like, we want to belong. And the way that we build status within a tribe is by, you know, being a good member of it, which means like sort of protecting the tribe, projecting confidence, all these sort of safety increasing traits that signal that our tribe is going to be okay. Even if we were on two sides of a cliff in the winter and like, you know, who knows why the bridge broke, but you know, we were on two different sides. We want our, we want our side to survive the winter. And, you know, it's, it's, it makes sense if you just think about, you know, how many, you know,

• 48:07Speaker 00

  generations of our society have benefited from these preferences. It's, if we ended up preferring like, it was like, well, the other side probably doesn't have blankets. Let's go give them our blankets. You know, your, your tribe's not going to survive.

• 48:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I suppose as well, this probably highlights where the difficulty with subtlety and nuance comes in as well. Because if you're part of X tribe, they want you to swallow the ideology wholesale. And any give that you might not be singing from the same hymn sheet is actually, oh, well, maybe, maybe busted, maybe, maybe he doesn't belong.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  Maybe he's not on our side.

• 48:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, maybe he's on the other side. And that's why, again, Paul was talking about, for instance, someone who's very, very left leaning, but has contrary views to do with abortion law, or someone who's very, very free speech, but thinks that the internet needs to be policed more heavily, or whatever it might be. And, you know, that, again, it's hard for everyone to try and work out what their views are. And we need productive disagreement for you to help me understand what I think and for me to help you understand what you think. So, right, we've got two, two chapters left. We've got seven and eight.

• 49:21Speaker 00

  Yes, I want to say one more thing about that, though. Because like, there is, there is so much to say about this tribal stuff. It's really the underpinning of all of our thoughts around disagreement, which is like, if you even just look back at birds, you know, birds can't, will kick members out of their flock if they're caught stealing. You know, if, if there are times when there's scarcity and one bird is eating all the food and never going out hunting, that bird will be, you know, exiled or ostracized from their tribe. And so this sense of like, you know, bird to stay in the group, you have to contribute. And the worst punishment of any group is to be removed from the group. Like, that's how we enforce all of our laws, is like, if you don't follow the rules, we kick you out.

• 50:05Speaker 00

  And that works as long as, you know, in the past, you know, you kick someone out and they probably end up dying, right? Because there's no other group that's going to take them in. Now we kick people out and they're like, oh, hey, you know, troublemaker, come over to our trouble tribe. We're going to help you become stronger and we have all these other weapons we can, you know, and we're building this new, you know, argument that's going to, and we're going to go attack them next, next year, you know, in 10 years. And so the things that worked in our tribes the past of like, you know, follow the rules or else. Now in a world where everyone can find a community, no matter how sort of fringe you are, and those fringe groups can become stronger and more angry at you. Like, the, the, the feedback loop is now, where you kick out, it's going to come back,

• 50:49Speaker 00

  you know, 10 times stronger in the future. So it's just an interesting dynamic that requires different instincts for us to, to manage. So anyway, the last two are sort of relevant. So one of them, the second to last one is to cultivate neutral spaces. So spaces, you know, sort of speaking of tribes, where you don't have to always signal loyalty to the group. You don't always have to repeat the ideas of your authority figure. You don't always have to even like, you know, be productive in that group. But like, so imagine a dinner table or, you know, something where anyone can bring an idea to the table. It could be a bad idea, it could be a good idea, those kinds of, that, that makes it neutral on terms of ideas, where no one has to endorse the idea, just by, in order to talk about it.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  You can talk about it, you know, and be critical of it, but it's welcome to the table. And the second level of that is like, who's allowed in the room? You know, can, can anyone arrive into the room and, and present their ideas? Can we allow, you know, terrorists and Trump supporters to the room to tell us like, what's wrong, what's going on with them? The danger that we fear is that like if we invite them to the room, they're gonna come in and attack us and you know, we'll give them validation and all the stuff that you know that they came to do in bad faith. But a truly neutral space would allow ideas to flow in and out, good and bad ones, and it'd allow people to flow in and out, good and bad ones over time. And some places can cultivate this and others, it becomes obvious that that's not gonna ever happen.

• 52:16Speaker 00

  You know, when other interests like, you know,

• 52:21Speaker 00

  revenue or, you know, costs are involved, you have to make choices about who can be there and who can't. And slowly over time, that creates systemic problems where people are undervalued and unhappy and marginalized and, you know, whether it be, you know, the poorest people in the country or the most disenfranchised people in the country, or it be the people that were previously, you know, in the ruling class but are now being neglected, you know, like everyone can feel outcast in that sense and unwelcome to the main group. You know, how does all this talk about like elites sort of like criticizing the common people? The common people are feeling displaced and they're not, they don't feel like it's a neutral space. So I think there's ways for us to work on that.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  And then the last one is sort of a meta point, it's sort of trying to wrap up the whole thing, which is to rather than reject reality, reject that the world is like this, just like accept that, you know, we have our problems. No one's, no one's perfect. We all have a, you know, a thread of between good and evil that goes between us. None of us can be perfectly one or the other. And we have to get into the fray regardless with people that are imperfect because we too are imperfect. We don't need to use purity tests to like test loyalty, but rather get it, get sort of working on the problems and start, you know, getting making progress on that stuff instead of trying to just make sure that the whole world is perfect before you agree to go touch it. You don't have to

• 53:52Speaker 00

  wait for politics to be completely revamped to become a politician. You don't have to wait for, you know, the tech industry to be completely revamped. You don't have to wait for any industry to be fixed before you go in and try to help make it better.

• 54:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so the the first point that you've talked about there, I suppose with cancel culture and blockades around particular rallies or speeches, where they, one of my ex podcast guests and a friend, Alex, who's at the University of Oxford, Steve Bannon was going to go and talk and some students had just blocked the street. They were like, no, no, you can't go, you can't go listen to him. We're not going to let anyone through to listen to him. Right. Well, I mean, if his ideas are that bad, you should be able to say at the Q and A at the end, just zinger the hell out of him, make him look a fool. But it's easier, it's easier to just try and shut down the argument entirely. But bizarrely,

• 54:49Chris Williamson?

  it always, it almost always seems to work against people. You know, Ben Shapiro needs like 14 security guards with him whenever he goes to go speak on campus and all this sort of stuff. And then, yeah, with the, with your final point there, the, the fact that you need to accept the world as it is, I'm finding that mechanism appear in so many different areas of life at the moment. And as a good piece of advice for anyone who's listening, if you are continuing to come up against the same problem, you know that the world shouldn't be that way, but it continues to manifest. It's like, sorry, but the world isn't changing as fast as you want it to. And you just, you just need to account for that. So we say all the time with the, with the managers or with some of the staff that

• 55:32Chris Williamson?

  work for us or whatever it might be, we wish that they would be sufficiently autonomous with X task that we don't need to remind them. But after three weeks of them not doing it when we don't tell them despite the fact that we scheduled for them to do it, you're like, that this is just a thing where the world is the way it is. And I'm going to have to send them a message on the morning that reminds them to do the X task or the Y task or whatever it might be. And that, that, that appears to be rolling forward for everything because we want the world to just. Happen, right? We want it to be this autonomous beast where we do the work once and it just scales beautifully as this like evergreen utopia.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  Right, right. We have all these expectations. We don't want it to, you know, we have an expectation and when it doesn't line up, that makes us a little bit anxious. And so we can either decide like, okay, well, there's something broken over there. I'm going to stay away from it. Fix yourself. Or we can help develop that and help them improve and get involved ourselves. But yeah, it is a hard instinct to overcome. It's very tempting to want to just hide the problems over there and say, hey, you got a problem, go fix it. Versus being the part of the of the solution.

• 56:47Chris Williamson?

  I suppose that manifests as one of the as the third option that you spoke about earlier on, which is just to exit the conversation thing as well, right? It's like, oh, well, look, this is this is just pointless. I'm not even going to bother, not even going to bother engaging. Yeah, well, I mean, if there's one surefire way of making the certain that the world's not going to change, it's doing that.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah.

• 57:11Chris Williamson?

  So to wrap up, if you were to give the people that are listening, your

• 57:18Chris Williamson?

  one favorite single heuristic or rule or piece of advice when it comes to having a productive disagreement, what would it be?

• 57:28Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I think that the the overall

• 57:34Speaker 00

  desire that I would sort of want to plant in people's heads is that we can get better at this, like we can become, you know, 1%, 5%, 10% better at disagreeing productively. And the only way we can do that is by practicing. So find the arguments out there that, you know, the disagreements that you're avoiding currently. And one that's within like the the skill level, not too hard, not too easy. You know, especially at first, if you don't know where you are on that scale, practice it and intentionally try to get better. This is a, this is like going to the gym, right? This is how we get along with each other is a skill we need to develop in ourselves because once we develop it in ourselves,

• 58:14Speaker 00

  we can feel it in ourselves. We can sort of remember what it's like. We can expect others to also have that. And I think that's one of the only ways we can. An act change in the world is to expect our leaders to be better, expect our, you know, the people above us to, to be better, but we can only expect that of them once we know what it is ourselves. And so, you know, I think we can start there to begin. And, you know, once, once you get hooked on it, I think, you know, you'll, you'll find every conversation to be like a little adventure that, you know, it's, it's gonna, you don't know where it's gonna go. It's gonna be, it's gonna be unpredictable because you're no longer just guard railing it or trying to shut it down. And it leads to really interesting things. It's highly rewarding. So I just, you know, I hope people turn this into a practice. It's, it's a,

• 59:01Speaker 00

  that's my goal.

• 59:02Chris Williamson?

  I like it. I think we've, we've used a really lovely framework today. It's certainly something that I think will challenge a lot of people. They've got a lot of biases to overcome visceral responses to things, emotion, the ego, all the, the, the things that manifest themselves, burble and pop inside of our brains. But yeah, you know, like I say, go, go and have a conversation, have a long conversation with people, have a think about what we've spoken about.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  On a podcast, start your own podcast.

• 59:29Chris Williamson?

  Honestly, I'm telling you, well, the stupid, the stupid thing now is that you can do an IG live, a dual IG live with someone else. I'm actually gonna start doing this for the podcast. I'm gonna do just a weekly 15 minute chat with someone else. It's not, not as structured, not published on any of the platforms, but it'll just exist. But you can, anyone can do that. Everyone got some form of social media. And you're like, okay, well, so what was it that, that Chris and Buster said, oh, I need the, I need the external accountability of someone else that's going, that's gonna be listening to hold me to like high level of rigor and blah, blah. There you go. Like, you know, just press, press a button, press go live button and get one of your friends to join you. And, you know, that, that might, that might nourish the, the particular

• 1:00:11Chris Williamson?

  thing. So why are we yelling? The art of productive disagreement will be linked in the show notes below and it's at Buster on Twitter. I mean, that's the advantage of being one of the first guys on Twitter, isn't it? When you get to get at Buster.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  Yep, yep, yep. I had at Instagram too, but then I accidentally canceled the account.

• 1:00:29Chris Williamson?

  No way. You had at Instagram?

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. But, you know, a little sloppy.

• 1:00:38Chris Williamson?

  You could have held them to such a ransom for that. Or just used it to shamelessly promote your own book.

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:00:46Chris Williamson?

  I love it. If there are any other places, are you mostly on Twitter? Is that where it's best to find you?

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  Mostly on Twitter. You have a blog at busterbenson.com. I'm on Medium at Buster as well. So, but Twitter is really the best place to start. And I'm open, you know, any at mentions will get replies. So I just like to talk to people.

• 1:01:06Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Well, as I've said, everything that we've spoken about will be in the show notes below. Of course, Why We Yelling: The Art of Productive Disagreement is linked. And as always, if you follow that link, you'll be supporting this podcast at no extra expense to yourself. If you enjoyed this episode, go follow Buster online. Haslam's got a great handle on Twitter. Like, share, subscribe. You know all of that good stuff. But for now, thanks very much, Buster. It's been awesome, man.

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  It's been great. Thank you so much.