How To Argue With Someone - Buster Benson - #122

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, yes, hello, humans of Podcast Land. Welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is Buster Benson, and his most recent book, Why Are We Yelling? The Art Of Productive Disagreement, is kind of the beginning of a little lineage, I think, of books about how we have productive conversations with each other. I know that Scott Adams' most recent Loser Think book is kind of similar, just helping people to figure out how their minds work and how to communicate with other people and how to remove their biases and stuff like that. It's a really interesting topic. And I think that a lot of this desire for people to have better conversations stems from the fact that we don't indulge ourselves in these deep, meaningful chats. If I was to give you a single piece of advice, it would be to try and sit down with a friend for 30 minutes to an hour, at least once per week, and just have a discussion, leave your phone outside of the room and just talk about anything, anything which is meaningful to you or interesting to them. Learn to ask questions and hopefully the framework that Buster gives us today will help you to mediate things that you don't agree on and also to find some common ground with new things that you do. So yeah, if you enjoy it, send it to a friend who can't argue for shit. Please welcome Buster Benson. You ready to go?

**Buster Benson** (1:40)
Ready.

**Chris Williamson** (1:40)
Lovely. Well, what if I'm not ready? Maybe we should have an argument about it.

**Buster Benson** (1:45)
Sure, we can.

**Chris Williamson** (1:46)
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.

**Buster Benson** (1:53)
Thank you. I'm so glad to be here.

**Chris Williamson** (1:54)
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.

**Buster Benson** (2:04)
Yes.

**Chris Williamson** (2:06)
Or are we? Maybe we talk about something else. Maybe I argue with you and we talk about something else.

**Buster Benson** (2:11)
I'm open for whatever you got. I love having a good disagreement. Part of the most interesting part of research for this book was basically approaching disagreements in all parts of my lives. I can tell you that that has led to all kinds of just like weird side effects of its own. I like going down those rabbit holes and seeing where they end up.
If you have any pressing like, why is this thing so hard to talk about in public? We can talk about that. I'm happy to also give a quick summary of the book too, if that's helpful.

**Chris Williamson** (2:43)
Amazing. I think 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?

**Buster Benson** (3:02)
Yes. I wrote it because I really needed to read this book. I think there's a lot of people that go out and write the book about what they know. My career has been in product development and engineering and entrepreneurship, and I was at Amazon and Twitter and Slack and held a couple of my own startups, ran a bar for a while, and just all kinds of random things. I have a pretty personal relationship to arguing and disagreement that I think everybody has in their own way. But it has been my job for a long time to facilitate diverse groups of people that have different incentives, different goals, different skill levels, and helping them all come together and get something done. I've been interested in it for a long time in a professional sense. And I think part of what came out of that was 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 the truth. And we don't really have, in an argument, when our heart rate starts to spike, and our blood pressure starts to go up, our capacity to reason goes down, 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 going to just remove them all from you very conveniently, and turn you back into the fight or flight animal that you were billions of years ago, or whatever. So 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, about negotiation, about persuasion, about rationality, about using, 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 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 a partner? How do we use that when we're just frustrated and angry, and we're tired, and when everything seems to be falling apart, all these things that seem to compromise us.