Often I think this is unnecessarily confrontational and it can come off as aggressive. Here are three useful "hacks" for humans:
1. Just sit there and say nothing. People naturally want to fill that empty void so will start talking. Just engage on whatever subject they bring up; or
2. Alternatively, make a general uncontroversial statement. This has to be tailored to the situation. Your interests, their interests and context. Something like "I can't believe how crazy the NFL postseason was this year"; or
3. Ask a noncontroversial question. Yes/no questions tend to be worse than non-binary questions. A good template here is "How do you feel about X?" where X isn't something like "Trump" but is more like "boneless wings being chicken nuggets".
