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 aper?us (“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.