The quest for interesting conversation

Stay informed with free updates

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.

The nearest thing to stress in this job is having to come up with ideas each week. Some arise from private thought. Some, though fewer than most imagine, come from reading. But much the richest source is conversation. And so the most important “work” I do is the cultivation of interesting people. I know the secrets of how and where to find high-grade talk. Readers might care to know a few. 

Avoid dinner parties

The distracted host gets up once more to check on the fricassée. The guests, several of whom have just met, pause at intervals to overpraise the cooking. On top of all this, as we are in someone’s home, pressing a point too hard in conversation is just awkward. The result? Fragmented chit-chat. No chance of developing an argument. The language of dinner parties is a blur of second-hand aperçus (“This is the end of the end of history”) that we might call podcast-ese.  

Take it out of the domestic space. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas cited the role of the coffee house in the flowering of western thought. These allowed intellectual life to move out of private domains into an argumentative “bourgeois public sphere”. Well, for late-1600s coffee house, read restaurant, bar or indeed coffee house. Something about the neutral setting equalises people and loosens tongues.  

The Dubai test 

Soon after meeting someone, mention Dubai. If it provokes a smirk, and a jibe at the crassness of the place, that is useful. You can filter that person out. 

Knocking Dubai took over long ago from knocking LA as the blandest opinion in the world. The case for the Gulf city? The transfer of power from the west is visible there as it is nowhere else: in the Asian big-spenders, in the Russian sanction-dodgers. You needn’t like the place, but to not find it stimulating is to not find this century stimulating. 

Look for people a notch or two down: those who were too dreamy to be leadership material

Lots of places are diverse. Dubai is cosmopolitan, to an extent London alone among western cities can touch, and that spirit infuses the old quarter near the airport as much as the bling centre. Looking down at the city, and at new-money Brits who love “Doobs”, has come to characterise a certain kind of box-ticking, not-very-elite elitism, like having an Elena Ferrante on the go.

Of course, someone can be anti-Dubai and interesting, but we don’t have hours on end to find out. We need heuristics, rules of thumb, to triage the original from the generic, and none works better than the Dubai test. (By the way, of the most bankable conversationalists I know, those who most often inspire columns, four live or have lived in Dubai.) 

Don’t seek out the highest-fliers

The top person in an organisation won’t be its most interesting. Hence the emptiness of chief executive philosophising. Managing people and processes requires high intelligence, no doubt, but not so much intellectualism, if that means a taste for abstract thought. Look for people a notch or two down, then: those who were too dreamy to be leadership material.  

A caveat: while it is rare for the executive temperament and the intellectual temperament to coexist in one person, it isn’t unheard-of. Isaac Newton ran some important organisations after founding classical mechanics, which I suggest bolsters his claim as the ablest individual who ever lived. (Tossing out statements as sweeping as that is another useful filter, by the way. Interesting people will enjoy running with the question of who was the ablest human being. The pedestrian mind will nitpick. “How can we judge?” etc.) 

Listen for the passing remark

And so to the rule that shapes my life. People don’t know when they are being interesting. Someone will yak away for an hour on their core theme and then, as we settle the bill, mumble something en passant that unlocks an entire column idea. The gold is so often in the digression. 

So while it is true that, compared to those who raised me, I have never done a day’s work, I am condemned to a life of perpetual listening, lest a globule of someone else’s insight gets lost in the wind. A columnist is never “off”. The cost of freedom is said to be eternal vigilance. This charmed job asks much the same price. 

Email Janan at [email protected]

Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen