Do you struggle with small talk and feel like you never have anything interesting to say? Patrick King reveals the key habit that turns curiosity into a powerful social skill. Learn how asking one simple question every day can make you more engaging and likable in conversations.

⏱ CHAPTERS

0:00 Intro

1:49 Training Aliveness and Noticing More

2:59 The Power of Curiosity

5:50 Replacing Judgment with Curiosity

8:43 Separating Fact from Fiction in Conversations

13:42 Asking Questions Out Loud

17:09 Building Confidence Through Humility

20:29 Influences and Unspoken Thoughts

22:44 The Importance of Being Curious

25:00 Engaging Conversation Partners Effectively

30:21 First Contact and Follow-Up Questions

If you're looking to boost your conversation skills and become more interesting in daily interactions, stick around! Patrick King shares tips on how to develop the daily question habit to cultivate genuine curiosity and engage others in small talk that feels natural and meaningful. From improving your likeability through better body language to building self-confidence and charisma, every episode is packed with practical advice to help you master social skills and communication.

You ever sat through dinner with someone and realized 20 minutes in, you haven't asked them a single real question?

I used to do that constantly.

Not because I didn't care, but because I'd basically stopped being curious about anything, including the people right in front of me.

Today, we're covering the whole arc.

How to actually wake your curiosity back up.

Why asking why out loud is one of the most likable things you can do?

And once you've got a question, how to follow it up so the other person actually feels it land?

This is from Patrick King's book, How to be Interesting, the Art of Magnetic Conversation, Genuine Curiosity, and Becoming Someone People Never Forget.

The King's argument across this stretch of the book is that, interesting isn't a personality trait, it's curiosity expressed as an actual habit, all the way from noticing more, to asking better questions, to following up on the answers you get.

And here's what we're covering in this episode.

King starts right at the foundation.

Before any of the conversation tactics, there's just the raw habit of paying attention.

Here's Patrick King from How to be Interesting.

Before you can be interesting to anyone else, you have to become genuinely interested in the world around you and in the people moving through it.

These first two chapters train the raw material of aliveness, noticing more than turning that noticing toward the most fascinating subject there is.

Curiosity is the first and simplest way to send the aliveness signal.

A mind still reaching out into the world is one that's unmistakably alive.

1.

Train yourself to notice more Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why.

Bernard Baruch

Curiosity is the desire to know.

Curiosity is a state of heightened arousal, a condition where we yearn to find out, learn, or understand something.

This desire to investigate, explore, and uncover is as real as the desire for food or warmth, and it's for its own sake.

We seek out new information not because it leads to something else we value, but because the information is its own reward.

Curiosity is the ultimate life-affirming orientation.

It's opposite.

Premature certainty.

For me, the shift started with something almost embarrassingly small.

The morning after that dead dinner, I opened a note on my phone and made myself write down one genuine question.

Not a clever one.

Just something I'd always skated past.

Why do we clink glasses before we drink?

the next day I did it again.

What is a shadow actually made of?

How does my landlord decide the rent?

That first week felt faintly ridiculous, like homework I'd assigned myself for no reason, and most of the questions led nowhere.

A few pulled me down rabbit holes I'm still in, but within a couple of months something had changed.

I had things to say, because for the first time, I was actually paying attention.

I didn't have a name for it back then.

These days, I just call it the daily question.

One honest question written down every single day.

It sounds far too small to matter.

It's the single most useful habit in this book.

And if you take nothing else from these pages, take that one.

It costs 30 seconds and it quietly turns you into someone who notices.

the daily question, the smallest possible engine for becoming interesting.

The ability to seek communicates something deep about us.

I'm intelligent and alert because I know how to look for answers beyond my immediate surroundings.

I can learn and interested in learning because I can amend my current views according to new things I discover.

I'm capable of adapting and growing because I can acclimate to my environment by figuring out how things work.

I'm broadly optimistic and hopeful because I actually expect to find something of interest out there.

Few things draw people toward you as reliably as visible curiosity.

If that seems like an exaggeration, consider what life looks like without it.

When curiosity drains away, a person starts treating life as something that simply happens to them.

The word why drops out of their vocabulary, and open-minded inquiry comes to feel like a luxury they can't afford.

Even without knowing why, people tend to keep their distance from flatness.

Instead, replace judgment with curiosity.

Consider the following exchange.

Person A.

We had Ethiopian food this weekend.

It was delicious.

Person B. Ugh, pulls a face.

No, thank you.

Person A, you don't like Ethiopian food?

Never tried it.

A lack of curiosity is the lack of the desire to know, or in this case, to experience something like Ethiopian food.

But some of us take it a step further.

We don't just admit we lack knowledge, we decide we already have it, when our knowledge is nothing more than a negative preconception.

We're judgmental, in other words.

Person B has no idea what Ethiopian food tastes like or whether they'd like it, but their knee-jerk response is to negate.

They'll never try it because they've already convinced themselves of what the experience will be like.

Uncurious is walking past an open door without interest.

I don't know what's in there and I don't really care.

Judgemental is closing the door and telling yourself, you already know what's on the other side.

I've already made up my mind.

Making mental shortcuts like this is only human, and we all do it.

But foregone conclusions can quietly kill your ability to connect with your world.

To stay open, receptive, and willing to learn something new.

We don't try new things because we've already told ourselves how it will unfold.

We don't ask thoughtful questions because we assume we already know everything about a person.

We don't uncover our mistakes because we don't think there's anything to improve on.

Most of us are more judgmental than we think.

Here are a few ways to train yourself out of the habit

The next time you catch yourself making a statement, pause and convert it to a question or put, I wonder if, in front of it.

Ethiopian food is weird.

It's rigid and limiting.

The door closes.

Is Ethiopian food weird?

Swings that door open again and you reclaim the possibility of learning what Ethiopian food is actually like.

say I don't know when that's what is true.

I don't like that kind of food carries an unnecessary finality.

I don't know if I like that kind of food is closer to the truth than it gives you the chance to honestly find out.

Separate Fact from Fiction

Start to think of judgment as a form of laziness, i.e.

deciding what you think, and then assuming that that's how it actually is.

What is objectively true?

And what is just an assumption, preference, or automatic response?

Instead of Ethiopian food, eww, weird.

Try.

So, you say it was delicious?

What did you have?

Whether you make this shift out loud or just in your own inner monologue, replace foregone conclusions with inquisitiveness.

You don't have to like, accept or approve of things to be curious about them.

In fact, you don't have to have any opinion at all.

Just notice.

And don't be in any hurry to resolve things either way.

Stop taking things at face value.

Concrete pragmatism is useful, but being too literal can dull our curiosity.

Things aren't always what they seem, and to fully understand life, we need to lift the veil and look beyond what's immediately in front of us.

This isn't about naval gazing or mistrusting everything you hear.

It's about moving from passive acceptance to active evaluation.

Looking is perception, but looking deeper takes an extra step.

Processing and interpreting what we see and thinking about what may lie underneath it.

Mindfulness has its limits.

Awareness can help you notice that an apple falls from a tree, but asking why it fell and what it says about the hidden mechanisms of the physical universe, that takes real curiosity.

Plus, it's way more interesting.

Think about intention.

Notice what people are saying and doing, but also pay attention to why they might be doing it and what their words and actions mean to them.

At level 1, you read a news article and simply have a reaction to it.

At level 2, you read it, have your reaction, then ask about the article's author and their motives.

Think about context.

Don't just observe phenomena as they unfold.

Be curious about the arena in which they're unfolding.

At level 1, you're annoyed because a colleague was rude to you at a meeting and you focus on the rudeness in how much you don't like it.

At level 2, you consider the circumstances that may have led to it and what the bigger picture might reveal about their behavior.

Are they stressed?

Jealous?

Dog just died?

Think about mechanisms.

Don't just look at the last visible step of the process, be curious about the bigger webs of cause and effect it belongs to.

At level 1, you're a tourist at a luxury golf resort in a desert country, and you notice water restrictions and frequent mention of drought.

mildly inconvenient, but you think nothing of it.

At level 2, you wonder whether the resort itself may be contributing to that drought and how your presence there as a tourist is an indirect cause of the water restrictions you're experiencing.

There's always more to a thing than its surface, and a curious mind wants to find out what.

Getting conspiratorial or meeting everything with knee-jerk skepticism is too far, but life gets much richer when you dig just a little beneath the surface.

Not all information carries the same weight, not every opinion has the same value, and not every frame is a foregone fact of life.

Kavya, active evaluation is not judgment.

We're learning to read between the lines, not passively deciding whether we like the lines or not.

Here's one of the best lines from that section.

Uncurious is walking past an open door and not caring what's inside it.

Judgmental is closing that door and telling yourself you already know.

Most of us think we're being just decisive.

We're actually just skipping the interesting part.

I started doing King's daily question thing almost as a joke.

One honest question a day.

30 seconds.

Nothing clever required.

Six weeks in, I wasn't smarter.

I was just paying attention, which turned out to matter a whole lot more.

And really, that's the hinge into the next part.

Once curiosity is switched back on, the next skill is just being brave enough to say the question out loud.

Here's Patrick King on why saying why and how out loud is one of the most quietly powerful things you can do in a conversation.

You've heard it before, children come into the world with voracious curiosity, but life soon knocks it out of them and eventually they stop asking questions.

It's a common story because it's a true one, but it doesn't have to be that way.

The reason children ask more questions and learn the answers is that they're braver about it.

Adults shy away out of plain fear, fear of looking ignorant, fear of losing their perceived expertise, fear of causing offense or wasting time or worse, fear that there is an answer and that you won't like it.

Our schools and universities reward the right answers, not the right questions.

We'd like to see end results, not processes, so curiosity is seldom valued.

Over time, if admitting you don't know something carries enough of a penalty, your natural curiosity gets dampened and you convince yourself you've graduated into the expert role, the person who answers questions not asks them.

It's tempting to default to the same tired assumptions rather than investigate from scratch, but that habit quietly erodes our curiosity and how interesting we are as people.

Happily, our fears about asking questions are unfounded.

People who ask questions are perceived more favorably, not less.

Warren Burger, author of A More Beautiful Question, explains how the people who ask the most questions in life tend to also be the most creative, professionally competent,

innovative and socially successful.

According to him, questions are catalysts for change and can shift perception and perspective in powerful ways.

A beautiful question shifts the way we think about something and often sets in motion a process that can result in change.

Entrepreneurs, or at least the successful ones, do a great job asking beautiful questions.

They almost have no choice.

But their whole reason for being is to disrupt, innovate, solve a problem no one else is solving.

Asking questions isn't just a good idea professionally but socially.

Research by Huang et al.

in 2017 found that people who asked more follow-up questions during conversations were rated as more likeable.

It's an important finding that shines light on what actually makes people like you, not saying interesting things, making them feel interesting.

Far from revealing your ignorance, asking a question shows self-assurance.

It means you're secure enough to accept that your current position could be improved, that you could learn a thing or two, and that somebody else could be the one to enlighten you.

confidence and humility together.

A surprisingly likable combination.

Try this.

The next time a random question pops into your mind, speak it out loud.

Do bald people get dandruff?

Which orange came first, the color of the fruit?

Are there emergency exits in prison?

Do blind people see black or just nothing?

And what could that nothing possibly look like?

Playfulness and curiosity draw people in.

Being a know-it-all does the opposite.

Try this.

The next time you're talking to someone and you're curious about something they've said, don't hold back.

Ask them.

Many of us refrain from asking questions because we don't want to seem rude or nosy, but asking actually shows that you're paying attention and interested in what you hear.

Hey, so I know you keep saying that you're an actuary, but I have to be honest, I'm not really sure what that is.

I'm curious about what you actually do day to day.

There's nothing especially magical about the word why.

We can ask a pretty banal why question that doesn't actually probe for any new information.

And likewise, we can ask an enormously useful question without using this word.

It's the spirit of why that matters.

Notice patterns other people miss.

Kashton and Roberts in 2004 found that

People rated their conversation partners as more appealing, warmer, and more likeable when those partners demonstrated higher curiosity levels.

And this had nothing to do with how physically attractive they were.

In a 2011 study, Cashden and colleagues found that curious people are more at ease with the ambiguity of meeting new people.

Because they can relax, they put others at ease too, and the interaction feels warmer.

Curiosity can be directed two ways, at the person you're talking to, or at the world in general.

The first makes the other person feel valued and reduces awkwardness.

The second signals your own emotional health, intelligence, and vitality.

Ideally, you do both.

So, notice people and ask questions about them.

But that's not all you can be curious about.

Try to notice incentives, contradictions, mysteries, and ambiguities, hidden motivations,

The next time you're out in the world, challenge yourself to pay closer attention to what's happening around you.

What trends do you notice?

Consider the aesthetics of things, the architecture you're moving through, the style of people's clothing, language, and mannerisms.

How are people influenced by the culture around them?

Be the fish that notices the water everyone is swimming in.

What are music, politics, and entertainment like?

Why are they that way?

And what influence do they have?

Listen to what others are actually saying.

Notice not just the content of their conversations, but the motives, assumptions, and emotions behind it.

What themes keep recurring?

What aren't people saying?

compare and contrast.

Why does one person do a thing that another never even considers?

How does someone's stated motivation compare to their hidden one?

Look at humanity as though you're from an alien planet.

What has become invisible to you because you're so used to seeing it?

What unspoken rules does everyone follow?

What's funny, unexpected, or tragic in your world right now?

Try it on an ordinary scene and it comes alive.

Sit in any coffee shop and watch it like an anthropologist who arrived on earth yesterday.

Why does everyone lower their voice by roughly the same amount, though no one agreed to?

Why do two strangers both reach for the same door and then perform an elaborate little apology dance?

Why is the person at the corner table beaming at a glowing rectangle and who is the invisible other person on the far end of it reshaping that smile in real time?

Why do we tip here but not there?

Cue here but not there.

None of this is exotic.

You've seen it 10,000 times, which is precisely why it's gone invisible.

The interesting person is just the one who flipped the lights back on and started asking.

You don't need a more fascinating world.

You need to stop pretending you will already understand the one you're sitting in.

Takeaways

Curiosity is evidence of life, and premature certainty is its opposite.

Swap judgment for questions.

Put, I wonder if in front of your snap opinions.

Look past the surface.

Get curious about intention, context, and mechanism.

Ask why and how out loud

Question askers are liked more, not less.

One of the stats you should pay attention to is from the same Huang et al.

study that shows up later in this book, too.

People who ask more follow-up questions are rated as more likeable.

Full stop, not smarter, not funnier, just more likeable.

And King is right.

There's nothing magic about the actual word why.

A dumb why question is still a why question.

It's the willingness to admit you don't already know that does the work.

Now, once you've got the curiosity and you've actually said the question out loud, curious where it either lands or falls flat, what you do with the answer you get back.

And here it is, Patrick King citing that exact study, then walking through exactly what separates a shallow follow-up from one that lands.

This is from How to be Interesting.

In 2017, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published a paper by Huang et al.

showing that responsive and engaged conversation partners were rated as significantly more likeable.

And the main way they signaled that responsiveness?

Asking thoughtful follow-up questions?

Everyone knows it's a good idea to ask questions, but contrary to popular belief, there is such a thing as a bad question.

If the goal is to make people feel seen, then the method is to ask meaningful, reflective, follow-up questions.

These questions demonstrate three important things.

We've been present and listened.

We've understood and processed what we've heard.

We care enough to try and find out a little more.

One unconnected question after another is not listening.

It's just an interview.

Instead, make your questions build on one another.

Each question should connect to what's already been shared and slowly deepen the message being unfolded instead of just bouncing the topic around on the same shallow level.

Take a look.

So what do you do for work?

I'm a pediatric nurse over at St. Michael's.

Cool.

You been there long?

Yeah, about five or six years now.

I love my job, honestly.

You live in the area?

Kind of.

I have a 20 minute commute, so it's not bad.

I'm in Lakeview near the mall.

My apartment's tiny, but it works for me.

Oh, is that the blue apartment block?

Right opposite the mall?

I think I know it.

You renting?

No, I own it.

Paid the mortgage off last year, actually.

Here, Speaker A is asking plenty of questions with their low quality.

Notice how every question completely ignores the answer that came before it and barges ahead in a new unrelated direction.

Speaker B provides several opportunities for more depth.

But Speaker A ignores them all in favor of yet another surface-level question.

The result is a fractured, boring conversation.

This interaction is not a disaster by a long shot, but Speaker B likely doesn't feel seen, heard, or valued.

And they definitely won't think of Speaker A as

Interesting.

For that matter, they probably don't feel like they're coming across as interesting either.

Here's the difference that quality follow-up questions make.

So what do you do for work?

I'm a pediatric nurse over at St. Michael's.

Oh, wow.

I've never met a pediatric nurse before.

I'm curious.

What would you say is the best part of the job?

That's easy.

The kids, of course.

I mean, it can be incredibly difficult at times, but I just adore them.

They're the best patients in the world.

The best patients in the world.

That's really sweet.

Are adult patients and kid patients really that different?

I don't know.

It's hard to explain.

It might sound weird, but in a way, kids just don't feel as sorry for themselves as adults do.

And I like that.

Does that sound weird?

No, not weird at all.

But I've never thought of that before.

Maybe being innocent actually makes you stronger somehow.

It's pretty obvious which conversation is more interesting and which is likely to get more interesting over time.

Importantly, the second thread gives both speakers a chance to reveal themselves with greater depth and sincerity.

Though they started in exactly the same place, these are two very different conversations.

They both last about as long, but the second one really moves, and it's because of the thoughtful follow-up questions.

The pattern is simple.

Call it the follow-up ladder.

Listen carefully to what you're told.

Ask a question that expands on the most interesting or emotionally resonant part of the message.

The follow-up ladder.

Each rung builds on the last and the conversation deepens on its own.

Climbing this ladder is the communication ingredient at work.

The moment your curiosity actually reaches another person and they feel it.

Here's the part that still surprises me.

That silly daily question habit didn't just give me things to say.

It changed how people responded to me.

I remember the exact moment it clicked.

I was at a wedding, seated next to a retired structural engineer.

I'd had written off a year earlier as a long evening.

On instinct, I asked the thing I actually wondered.

Is there a building you drive past and quietly worry about?

He lit up.

40 minutes later, he was sketching load paths on a napkin.

And as we stood to leave, he shook my hand and said, I never get to talk about this.

Thank you for asking.

The question I'd once swallowed for fear of looking ignorant turned out to be the exact thing that made people lean in.

Nobody has ever thanked me for a clever opinion.

They thanked me for asking.

The same principle applies well before the follow-up question start, right at the moment of first contact.

The follow-up letter assumes you've already got a conversation going, but the very first rung, the opener itself, follows the same law.

You're still trying to give the other person something to grab,

Consider how you introduce yourself at a party.

Most of us reach for a resume line, hand it over, and hope it does the work for us.

Hi, I'm Dan.

I work in logistics.

Oh, cool.

I'm Priya.

Nice to meet you.

So, yeah, big turnout tonight, huh?

Nothing is wrong here, exactly.

But nothing is offered either.

I work in logistics is a label, not a door.

There's nowhere for Priya to walk in.

So she does the polite thing, hands back her own label, and the two of them are left standing in this small talk desert.

And notice Dan's fallback when the silence gets heavy, a comment about the turnout.

It's the conversational equivalent of checking your phone, a way of looking busy while nothing happens.

Now, watch what happens when Dan offers a specific, slightly self-revealing detail instead.

Hi, I'm Dan.

Full disclosure, I only came tonight because a friend promised there'd be a dog, and I've been scanning the room for 20 minutes.

Okay, I respect the priorities.

I'm Priya.

Any luck?

Not yet.

I'm starting to think he lied to me.

What dragged you out?

The second version works because Dan gives Priya something to react to.

A detail with a little warmth, then a little confession in it.

He isn't performing.

He's handing her a thread.

Notice who that he closes with a question that hands the thread straight back.

What dragged you out?

Detail plus warmth plus question is the whole engine of a landing introduction.

A good opener isn't about being clever.

It's about giving the other person an easy, obvious place to step in.

The same move rescues the harder moment, disagreement.

When someone says something we don't share, the anxious reflex is to defend our turf and pull the shutters down.

Honestly, I think video games are a total waste of time.

See, I completely disagree.

Some of them are more demanding than most novels.

That's just snobbery.

Well, that hasn't been my experience at all.

Both are now braced against each other, and the conversation quietly dies.

Not because they disagree, but because the disagreement was handled as a border dispute.

That's just snobbery is the tell.

It doesn't answer the person.

It dismisses them.

And once someone feels dismissed, they stop being curious and start defending.

Two people defending is not a conversation.

It's a standoff with better manners.

Compare.

Honestly, I think video games are a total waste of time.

Oh, interesting.

That's the opposite of my experience.

So now I'm curious what you've played.

For me, a couple of them are the hardest thinking I do all week.

Really?

Maybe it depends on the game.

The second version doesn't surrender an inch of Speaker B's actual position.

They still think those games are worth every hour.

What changes is that B leads with curiosity instead of correction.

Contrast the two openings.

See, I completely disagree.

That's just snobbery, slams the door.

Wow.

That's the opposite of my experience.

So now I'm curious what you've played.

Holds one open.

That single word.

Curious.

Keeps the other person on the same team.

and the disagreement becomes something to explore rather than a wall to defend.

And look at Speaker A's reply.

Maybe it depends on the game.

A moment ago they were entrenched.

Now they're thinking out loud, softening on their own without being pushed.

That's the quiet magic of the approach.

You don't win the other person over.

You make it safe for them to move.

Warmth that turns out is not the opposite of honesty.

It's what lets honesty land.

Don't be afraid to share yourself.

The final element is self-disclosure.

Being a genuinely good listener and asking thoughtful questions is a rare skill.

And it's certainly necessary to be a good conversationalist.

But it's not sufficient.

We're not trying to be therapists, after all.

We're trying to be interesting.

And to do that, we need to deliberately take the risk of showing up as the people we actually are.

We'll discuss this more in the next chapter, but many people mistakenly believe that others will like them more if they just work hard enough to be extra nice, accommodating and attentive.

In other words, completely center the other person and make themselves invisible.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Interesting people genuinely and bravely share themselves.

They show up and contribute by injecting energy and specificity into the interaction.

Some people live truly fascinating lives and have wonderful, intriguing things to share, but they never share them.

I used to think being a good conversationalist meant having a lot of questions ready to go, but that is the wrong instinct.

The questions aren't the skill the listening in between them is.

If you're thinking of your next question while they're answering the last one, you're just running an interview.

And as King points out, this doesn't stop at follow-ups.

It's baked into how you open a conversation too.

I work in logistics.

It's a dead end because it's a label, not a door.

The people who come across as interesting aren't smoother talkers.

They just hand you something with a little detail in it, something you can actually grab.

Same logic even applies when you disagree with someone.

The instinct is to correct them.

And the second you do, they stop being curious and start defending.

That swap, that's just snobbery.

For that's the opposite of my experience, so now I'm curious what you've played.

You keep them on your team instead of across the table from them.

It really is just a ladder.

Each question building on the last, instead of bouncing sideways.

If you take one thing from all three of these – curiosity, the courage to ask, and the follow-up – they're really one skill in three stages, and the whole thing starts with just noticing more.

If this works for you, how to be interesting has a lot more of it – openers, self-disclosure, all of it, and it's linked below.

Alfred Brendel, the classical pianist, told us this.

The word listen contains the same letters as the word silent.

That's something to sit with the next time you're tempted to chump in with your next question.

If you want the main story behind why I started paying attention to this stuff in the first place, that's over on my main channel.

Here you can hit subscribe.

There's a lot more of Patrick King's work coming.