A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation — Daniel Menaker

A Good Talk is, like The Art of Teaching, too vague to be useful. The central thesis of the book is that most conversations are boring and most people aren’t good at calibrating what others will be interested in. That’s probably true, but A Good Talk won’t help you much with it: you’ll get a history of talking, long conversations excerpts that I skipped, and a whole chapter about “chi.”

The actual issues one should be addressing include: how do I convey status through conversations? How do I avoid rote, boring, and predictable answers? How do I tell effective stories? You won’t learn from A Good Talk. But you will learn them in an overtly sexualized book like Neil Strauss’ The Game, which I mention occasionally because, although it’s putatively about picking up women, it’s really about how to hack modern social environments and not be boring and overly transparent.

Many if not most women are probably aware of how boring many conversations with men are: where are you from, what do you do, where’d you grow up. The Game’s central question is how to avoid those conversations. Some of its answers are manipulative or algorithmic in a way that’s probably not optimal for life outside of bars, but at the very least it a) tells a story (the story of Strauss’ growth from schlub to player) and b) has more concrete, actionable advice that can be applied by men or women. It’s both more fun than A Good Talk and more practical, even if your purpose isn’t to pick up women (the woman I’ve been dating read it and laughed on almost page).

The Game is trying to get somewhat closer to social reality than social fantasy, and the first step to doing so is disregarding what one initially perceives to be good graces and good manners. This doesn’t mean becoming utterly indifferent to other people, but it does mean recalibrating what one says so that you aren’t repeating the same dull topics over and over and that you are attending to what others are saying and thinking, as well as the way they’re acting. If you pay attention to some of those features, you’re probably ahead of 80% of the rest of the people out there.