In this episode, Sam and Shaan discuss the nature of conflict in relationships and business, using personal anecdotes and the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” framework from Dr. John Gottman to analyze why arguments happen and how to handle them. They explore the concept of “skill issues” in communication, the importance of avoiding the “tit-for-tat” mentality, and the value of viewing disagreements as opportunities for growth rather than personal attacks.
Topics: Conflict resolution, relationships, communication skills, business partnerships, emotional intelligence, Dr. John Gottman, personal growth
The Nature of Conflict [00:00]
Sam: All right, we need to talk about this. Um, the podcast is either going to end today or we’re going to figure this out. Was that dramatic enough for you?
Shaan: [Laughs]
Sam: Okay. Um, Sam, can we start? Can I start with an apology?
Shaan: Yes.
Sam: Can I say sorry? I was, let me check my notes. I was a little pissy yesterday and you were on the receiving end of me being a little pissy. We had a a fight, an argument, a disagreement, a lover’s quarrel. I don’t know what you want to call it. We had something and I want to talk about it here. Not just because I’m a sicko and I’m like, “Ooh, this is good content, Jerry Springer,” but also mostly because I found it I thought about it a lot afterwards. I found it kind of fascinating. And at first I felt really bad. I don’t know about you, but I felt really horrible the rest of the day. So without discussing the specifics, I want to talk about what I learned after that fight. Can we do that?
Shaan: Okay, yeah.
Sam: Okay, so here’s the story. We got in a fight yesterday and I wouldn’t even call it really a fight.
Shaan: It’s like a every six months there’s just disagreements that we had to work through.
Sam: Exactly. And like most things, it starts off as a misunderstanding, turns into a disagreement, which leads to an argument, which leads to a fight, then it kind of de-escalates into a grumpy agreement and you sort of move on. And can I first tell you why I even wanted to talk about this?
Shaan: Yeah.
Sam: Do you know who J.J. McCarthy is by any chance? He’s a rookie football player. He’s a quarterback for the Vikings. So he’s a he’s a rookie.
Shaan: Yeah, I don’t know who he is, but I know the name.
Sam: Football, he just got drafted and like any, you know, a team that sucks, they draft a quarterback, they’re hoping he’s going to turn the franchise around. And he just had their first like preseason game, not even in the season yet, and he threw an interception while he was playing. So after the game, he’s doing an interview and I I’m scrolling on Twitter and I see this. And I’m seeing this after we have our fight. And the interviewer asks him, she goes, “J.J., you go out there, you want to perform well, but, you know, you throw that interception and I’m sure, you know, that didn’t feel great.” You know, what just talk me through, what was going through your mind and how are you feeling after doing that? And this guy’s response was epic. He goes, “What was going through my mind? What an opportunity.” And she goes, “What an opportunity?” And he goes, “Yeah, I mean, this whole my my success and my career is going to be based I’m a quarterback in the NFL. My success in my career is going to be based on my resilience, my ability to bounce back from mistakes. I throw an interception, what an opportunity to learn, to get better and to improve.” And I was like, “Whoa, fucking mindset alert.” You know, I I pride myself on mindset. I am a student of mindset. And when I heard that, I thought, “Wow, that was an uncommon response to a very common situation.” I would say most guys are down on it, but then they’ll lie and be like, “Well, I just, you know, next had to focus on the next play, just put it out of my head and then, you know, just just get better, you know.” But they’re kind of bitter about it. And this guy was so genuine when he said, “What an opportunity.” And so I kind of had that same thought where I was feeling bad after our fight and I thought, “I saw that clip and I thought, okay, what an opportunity for me to learn here.” And the reason I think it’s an opportunity for me was, we joke on this podcast, I’m generally super laid back. Like, I don’t really get easily bothered. I pride myself on a good mindset, but of course, I’m a human being. I mess up, which is why when I get bothered, it’s rare and I suck at it. And so I wanted to tell you some of the things that I reflected on afterwards. I have like five to seven thoughts. Can I just read them out to you?
Shaan: Yeah, and I I might have a few as well.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse [03:49]
Sam: So, first one, fights don’t start as fights. And what I mean by this is, you never start in you never start a conversation intending to fight, nor do you even really see a fight coming. And the way the analogy I was using in my head was like, “Oh, a fight is like a forest fire.” When a forest fire happens, the explanation they usually come to is, “Well, there was like a bunch of the what do they call it? Like the dry bush or whatever, like the kind of the dead sticks that that go on the ground and it’s sort of this accumulation, this pile of sticks that nobody really clears out.” And it’s not a problem until somebody drops a cigarette on it. And it it could be something that you just squish out with your foot right away, you put it out, there’s no big deal. But if you don’t put it out right away, that accumulated dry stuff can catch fire, it can become a wildfire, it can it can tear down a whole forest. And so that was my first observation was, man, that the debris on the on the forest floor is kind of like a hidden danger. It’s a dog that’s not barking and you have to make sure that if a cigarette does drop on it, you’re you’re able to kind of immediately put it out or clear it out ahead of time. That was the first thought.
Shaan: Which by the way, the reason why that’s very easy for you to say that, that’s very hard to address. And the reason it’s hard to address is because a lot of times people, particularly me, and I know you do as well, you have this idea where you’re like, “I don’t want to ruffle feathers. I’ll just go with the flow.” And if you do that too often, then you’re like, “Shit, I’ve been going with the flow. Now I’m bothered.” And that’s a very hard balance to implement of like, when do you go with the flow or when do you say, “That’s not my preference.”
Sam: Right. That describes it to a T. Either avoid confrontation, that’s one reason to just like let it go type of thing, but you don’t really fully let it go, right? Like 10 to 15% lingers. Or, in my case, it’s it’s a lot less of I avoid confrontation, it’s more of I don’t want to let myself get bothered by something small, so I ignore it. I think I ignore it, but like 10% of it lingers. And if you ignore too many things, that 10% can start to add up and if unaddressed, it’s that stuff on the on the forest floor. Okay, so here’s the second one. Fights are natural. That was the second thought I had. I wrote down in my little diary here. Fights are natural. We’ve been working together on this podcast for four years. I can count probably three serious arguments or disagreements that we’ve had that felt uncomfortable to deal with. Maybe there’s been some other ones that I’m forgetting, but like, it’s understandable. You work together with somebody for four years on a project, you’re going to have disagreements. In the moment, it doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel natural. Logically, you know, “Hey, this is normal,” but in the moment, it feels bad.
Shaan: And let’s emphasize how bad like when I argue with you or when I argue with Jordan or Joe, my my other partners, like it ruins my week. I hate that feeling. I think you are a little more comfortable with confrontation, but for people like me, like these Midwestern nice people who have been raised to just swallow just swallow it. You just you live life like resenting others sometimes or like you just don’t fucking complain. I hate it. I hate like there’s been times where I’ve had to fire someone and I won’t fire them for a year because I just don’t want I just don’t want to do that conversation. I hate it. It bothers like I I like I wake up in the middle of the night.
Sam: It ruined my night. I was going to show you my I’m wearing a Oura ring. I was going to show you my sleep score. It was terrible. I slept three hours last night. I woke up in the middle of the night at 3:00 a.m. and I ate three pieces of cookie dough from like a Nestle’s bacon bake, whatever it’s called, break and bake.
Shaan: Yeah, break and bake.
Sam: Dude, I wish I had a break and bake. That would have made me feel better. I just woke up feeling shitty and it’s it remind like the analogy here is in your diet, you can wake up feeling shitty. I at least I do this as my like my evolution from guy with a horrible diet to trying to be better about it is I know when I feel shitty and it’s either because I just DoorDash Taco Bell and that was just a bad decision and I’m paying the price for that. But also, even if you do the right thing at the wrong time, if I eat a very like a full meal but I ate it at 10:30, it doesn’t matter if I had grilled chicken and whatever, if it was a healthy meal, if I eat too late, I’m just going to feel bad. Right? So you could do the right thing at the wrong time and get pain, you could do the wrong thing at the wrong time and get pain. And for me, this was surprising because usually, if I have a confrontation, it’s usually a relief because I’ve been I’ve been trying to avoid having it and when I do have it, I normally feel quite relieved. And this one, I felt awful. I felt terrible. I couldn’t sleep. It was such an unusual feeling for me, which made me think I didn’t do it right.
The “One-Time” YouTuber Strategy [40:00]
Sam: By the way, can we get to use the one-time and one-time only YouTuber thing to do where it’s like, “It’s all over. I’m shutting it down. We we quit. Uh, we’re breaking up. Here’s why.” Some some version of that.
Shaan: Yeah, I remember thinking I’m like, “Oh, like let’s let’s tend it.” You know what I mean? Like it totally broke my frame where you’re like, for some reason, making him not cry just for two seconds is significantly more important than a any like large business conversation. I thought that was like kind of interesting.
Sam: 100%. Um, all right, I have a couple more and then we can we can stop, you know, hugging each other. So, this I wrote a category, “What did I learn about myself?” Because I I noticed as I was doing the, you know, I I I I my coping mechanism was like, “Ooh, this research is fascinating. Ooh, this framework is cool.” And I was like, “All right, all right, but I’m kind of distancing myself from the cold hard facts of my own behavior and my own mistakes.” And I want to tell you what I wrote under “What did I learn about myself?” I said, “I made the cardinal sin.” The cardinal sin in any relationship is measuring. I remember, um, once meeting uh this guy Stan Chudnovsky. Stan Chudnovsky is a very successful businessman.
Shaan: Facebook and Google?
Sam: Uh, not Google, but Facebook, yeah. So he first was a entrepreneur, he created uh him and his buddy James Currier have been business partners for like 20 years. And they have like a great business marriage. And I was hanging out with Stan once and he was telling me about like what they did with Tickle and how they sold that for like whatever to to, you know, like $100 million dollars to Monster and then they created this other company, this other company, this other company. And then Zuck recruited him and Zuck like recruited him for like 10 years and finally, you know, he he finally went and worked with Zuck and he ends up running Facebook Messenger and he’s had an amazing career. And I said, and one of the cool things was when he went to Facebook, I was like, “How did James handle that? Like now he’s doing all the work for that like they they co-founded NFX, this like fund in this incubator and they are accelerator and they and now you’re going and taking a job at Facebook? Like doesn’t that put some stress on the relationship?” And he was like, and he kind of laughed and he was like, “It’s not that that’s not an issue, but like, you know, we have such a strong partnership that like we it’s great and that worked out great.” And I was like, “How do you guys do that, man?” I was like, “Cause I want to work with somebody for 20 years. Like that’s a when I think about winning, what winning looks like in my life, that that’s what winning looks like. Uh, find somebody amazing, just do projects with them for 20 years. Find a handful of people that I could do that with.” And um, he told me, he goes, “Oh, the secret’s very simple.” He goes, “The first thing is um, turn it into a giving contest.” He said, “98% of the relationships you you are in are taking contests.” Meaning, you are trying to get out as much as you can. You’re asking, “What am I getting out of this relationship?” That’s the fundamental like underlying questions. “What am I getting from this other person? What am I getting out of this?” You don’t realize it, but you you don’t realize it until you get into a tit-for-tat scenario, meaning they didn’t do this, so I’m also not going to do that. They did this to me, so I’m also going to do that to them. And you get into this tit-for-tat contest is measuring and basically it makes the pie smaller. He goes, “The beautiful thing about James is that James is constantly trying to figure out how to make our relationship pie bigger.” Meaning he’s just thinking, “How do I give more to this relationship?” And he doesn’t measure even when I’m not giving as much, he just gives, he just keeps asking himself, “How can I give more?” He goes, “The beauty is that if you if you’re with somebody who’s wired that way, and you start to do it too, your relationship pie grows like crazy.” And I remember hearing that and being like, “This is the way. That is the wisdom. That is the fundamental truth about how to do this.” Tony Robbins has a very similar framework around the four levels of love. One of the that he calls the tit-for-tat thing, he calls it whoring. He’s like, “I’ll give to you if you pay me basically. It’s like, I’ll put out for you if you if you put out for me.” And he’s like, “Most of us run around our whole lives whoring, um, and most of the relationships we have there and and that is the root cause of why you get into these patterns, these negative patterns with people because it’s in game theory terms, if every time one person, even accidentally, shortchanges the other, and then you intentionally shortchange back, and then they pick up on that and then they shortchange back, like what are you left with at the bottom? Very little. Um, but it is very common. And I think that was the the cardinal mistake was I was measuring what I was getting instead of focusing on what am I giving and how do I give more because that’s just who I am. Whereas what I was doing was saying, “How can I give so much? Because then I’m going to get back.” And that’s fundamentally like a measuring scenario where instead, it should just I I want to I want to roll differently. So I think that was the probably the biggest mistake I made. I I think.
Shaan: Is that your list?
Sam: I have one last one, but it’s a positive one. So I’ll end on a positive note, which is the best relationships are bigger than you. So me and my wife used to argue a bunch when we were dating. We actually ended up breaking up right before we finally got back together and ended up getting married. And we broke up because I was like, “Dude, you’re just upset all the time and I don’t really know what to do. Like I’m just being me and like if that upsets you, we should be together.” And she’s like, “No, I’m not upset. I’m just I’m like, you’re upset. We’re upset a lot. We’re fighting a lot. This is too much. I don’t want to do that.” How long were you dating when you broke up and how long did you break up for and then how long until you got married?
Shaan: Okay. I think something like we were probably dating for two years, my guess. Broke up for one month exactly. And then got back together and it was it’s been amazing ever since in a a unbelievable kind of way. Meaning, you know, most people are like, “Oh, people don’t change.” And if my friend was in a relationship and I’m like, “Okay, so y’all were fighting all the time, you broke up for a month. She got back together and was like, “No, no, now I’m going to be cool about everything.” I’d be like, “Dude, come on. Are you serious? What are the odds of that?” Like, what are the odds that like it’ll just all turn around? And then it it actually did. And one of the things that I would say it turned around like uh a 180, like a full turn. It turned around like 130, which was great, huge improvement. And then when we had kids, it’s now a full 180 where I told my wife the other day, I was like, “Dude, when’s the last time we fought?” And she’s like, “I don’t know. I don’t know. Do we have time to fight?” I was like, “Exactly.” I was like, “The best thing about kids is that both you and I have an unspoken agreement, which is, okay, first of all, we no longer doubt each other’s intentions. I know you were trying to be great for me and I’m trying to be great for you and we’re not perfect. That’s okay. But second to that is, when we do disagree or have an argument, we only let ourselves suffer for like 90 seconds. Whereas you were saying like, dude, when I have a confrontation like that, it ruins my week. It used to ruin our week, then it started to ruin our couple days. Now it ruins literally 90 seconds, but it’s like, “Yo, we got to be awesome parents and we got to like function. We got to go to gymnastics right now.” It’s like, “Are we really going to like make this car ride uncomfortable?” Like, dude, how about we just agree to this like totally let that go and just get back on the good foot. We’ve been doing that now for the last like three or four years and it has been amazing. It is a miracle. It is something I would not have believed and if my friend told me, “Yo, that’s how it’s going to go,” I’d be like, “Um, you’re bullshitting yourself.” But I think that principle is the best relationships have something that’s bigger than just yourself in it. You you can’t really be selfish. As a parent, you you know, your selfishness goes down when you have kids just because it’s really about, at least for me, I should speak for myself, life is very much in service of them and I I I want I will give up so much that I used to never give up for them. Um, and that and I feel like in a way, the podcast thing is great for us because it’s something bigger than us. Like let’s say we didn’t have the podcast, I probably after that last interaction, probably wouldn’t have talked to you for a few months just out of like, well, we don’t have to talk. So why would I talk? Whereas the podcast is like, “No, I got to make this right,” which made me think, “What can I do better?” which made me grow up and be a little bit of a better person today.
Shaan: Before you uh put a bow on it, let me say one thing. So when we have that argument, also when I have any argument with anyone in business, I like this little thing gets in my head where I’m like, I like sometimes I’m like, “You know what? I don’t want to do business ever again. I don’t want to like I don’t want confrontation.” Like, you know, it’s like when you’re losing a board game and you just like, “Fuck this game,” and you like flip it up upside down. Like sometimes I’m like, “I don’t want any of it. I’m out. I don’t want any of this. I don’t want any drama.” And the reason I like reading history and biographies is I’m able to see people I admire and like some of the issues that they’ve had. And I think I’ve said a bunch that like all great men are bad men, meaning anyone who you admire, like who’s achieved greatness, whether it’s a president or a CEO, like there’s people who dislike them because they’ve had to kill like someone. Like, you know, like in war, but you’re like, “That war was unfortunately good, but there’s down huge downsides.” And I think about like to do anything interesting in life, whether it’s business or whatever, it involves confrontation and it involves tension a lot of times. That is such an uncomfortable feeling, but it’s sort of like working out where it’s like you got to do that to make your muscle strong. But I and I and I hate it when it’s happening and I have to remind myself like, “Don’t burn it down. Don’t walk away from everything. Like you can achieve what you want. You just have to go through some arguments sometimes.” But it’s sort of like when you let’s say you had a company with 100 employees and let’s say 26% of those employees are unhappy. That’s like a pretty good ratio. So you have roughly 75% of people who are happy. But that means that every single day, if there’s 26 days in the work week or in the month, work work days in the month, someone’s going to bitch to you. Do you know what I mean? And someone’s going to bitch to you every single day. And what it does to you is it makes you think everything is bad. And it’s really hard to switch your psychology to be like, “No, not everything is bad. I need to compartment compartmentalize these two things.” And it is a I’ve gotten better as I’ve gotten older, but it’s that is a huge issue uh for me personally and I think it’s an issue for a lot of people where they they face some adversity and I typically human adversity, like tension between people is I think my opinion, the hardest one and the most common one. And the reaction is, “Fuck it.” Yeah, I have that reaction. I have that reaction super fast. I think even on the thing yesterday, I was like, “All right, forget the whole thing then.” Not the podcast, but like the situation we were arguing about, I was like, “Oh, forget it. Who cares even then.” I do that all the time. I do that all the time and I have to I have it’s a really hard thing to say, “Is my future self going to be happy or sad that I made this decision in this particular moment?” It’s really fucking hard to nail that. Do you also read the kind of history and biographies? Because it’s like the problem is 100 times bigger than your current problem. Like whatever the tiff is with your wife or with your neighbor or whatever it is, it’s like, well, I just last night spent four hours reading about these guys who were shipwrecked and like, you know, Yes, that’s one of the reasons why. It’s like, “Oh, okay. Problems are relative.” That’s I read it for that reason to it’s sort of like when I used to box and I used to get my ass kicked in the morning, I was like, “Oh, everything else, the volume’s way turned down.” Like I just got beat up and it’s okay. Like I don’t mind. Like and that’s sort of why I like reading biographies. I also like reading them because I like seeing this is a normal feeling that I am having. It is it is okay. And that is like a a cool thing about reading about these people is when I’m in these moments, I think, “Don’t burn it down, don’t walk away, don’t don’t do these things. It is normal to have this and you have to accept that like in order to do anything interesting, conflict is part of that.” And often times, conflict or constraints is where beauty and art is created. Do you know what I mean?
Sam: Yes. Um, 100%. That that makes a lot of sense to me and I think is pretty wise to be honest. Let me ask you a question. Have you ever heard the phrase somebody say the slang “skill issue”? You’re not a gamer and you’re not like 17 years old, so you might not be like part of this like subculture where one of the like common internet slangs is just “skill issue.” And what “skill issue” mean like somebody will describe like a huge problem, they’ll be on Reddit typing like this whole thing about how the this is bad and this is hard and this this thing out of my control, whatever. And then somebody will just “skill issue.” And I think it started with gaming, which is like they’re complaining about the game and then somebody who’s better at the game will just say “skill issue.” And what it fundamentally means is like there are so many things that we describe as outside of our control or just fundamentally hard or impossible, that’s actually a skill issue. Meaning if you had the skill, you wouldn’t be bitching and whining about this. Um, that’s how I felt about yesterday, meaning when I started reading the Gottman stuff, I realized, “Oh, skill issue.” Disagreeing and arguing is a skill and I have a skill issue. I am not as good at it as I could be. And the reason why is, um, when I’m reading his stuff, he’s got all these different words to describe things. He’s like, I was reading his like encoding of the arguments. I was like, “Cross complaint.” I’m like, “Cross complaint, what’s a cross complaint?” I’m like looking it up, I’m like, “Ooh, yeah, yeah, he just did that. He he did a cross complaint.” Like, that’s what that was. That’s why that didn’t feel good. And he’s like, “Yes, but.” And I was like, “Oh dude, yeah, I did a yes, but where I agreed, but then I like undermined my agreement right afterwards by the next sentence I said.” Um, and I realized in the same way that uh I once read like, “Intelligence is the number of distinctions you have on a subject.” What that means is, if uh if you talk to Eskimos about snow, snow, we like I have one word for snow, snow. They have like 15, 18, 21 different ways to describe snow. The snow that’s a little bit runny, the snow that’s really hard, the snow that falls fast, the snow that like behaves differently because they live in the snow. They had they had to become intelligent about snow. They had to create a vocabulary that described the distinctions because they mattered in their life and they were familiar with them. Whereas somebody who’s not not so skilled and familiar with snow only has one word. In the same way, as this guy was describing argument dynamics, I realized, “Oh, skill issue. There are a bunch of words for snow that I don’t know when it comes to arguing and arguing well.” I think he’s even got a book called like “Fight Right” or something. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s like I’m going to go read that. And so that was the last uh interesting takeaway, which is yet again, skill issue. Uh so many things in my life just come down to that. “Oh, losing weight is hard.” No, no, no. Skill issue. I used to have this asshole friend in college. He used to say, uh, “The only way you get good at drinking and driving is through a lot of practice.” And I’m like, “You’re a horrible human being, but you might be right.” Uh and uh that’s sort of That’s kind of like this. That’s kind of like this. So you got to fight a lot in order to like uh uh learn how to do it correctly. Um, okay. Well, Sam, I’m sorry for all of those reasons that I just said. And and it it’s mutual. You prepared this, so it’s going to sound like you’re well, you are uh it sounds like you’re being the bigger the bigger man and I and I want to let and I want to let you know that uh everything is mutual. Uh I I feel like uh it sounds like you well, it sounds like you’re in some ways you’re you’re you’re sort of acting that you didn’t blame me for anything. You only blamed yourself and I and I want to let you know that that’s not actually the reality. You just you just used more words than I did. Your word count was higher, but that doesn’t mean that the the feeling is different. Okay, I understand. Perfectly perfectly way to say it. That’s it. That’s the pod. By the way, can we get to use the one-time and one-time only YouTuber thing to do where it’s like, “It’s all over. I’m shutting it down. We we quit. Uh, we’re breaking up.” Like the one time you can fake you can fake your own death, you can fake retirement, you can fake your breakup and everybody wants to click to see the goss and then they, you know, it’s the boy who cried wolf. You can only do it once, but you get a hell of a lot of clicks that time. So I think we should use it this time. We should title this whatever, you know, is this the end of the podcast? Or yeah, it’s over. Sorry guys. You know, you know, Sean’s apology or like uh uh we’re breaking up. Here’s why. Some some version of that.