443. How to be more interesting

0:04 Hello everybody, I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of your twenties, My twenties, our twenties. Just a reminder, this episode and all of our other episodes are now on Netflix, so if you're somebody who likes video podcast, this is the place to go for full transparency. This is a new thing for Netflix as well, and we would love for them to hopefully ask us to do another season, So

1:00 if you haven't checked it out, if it's something that interests you, our full video episodes are now over there. Now is the time. It really does help me and the podcast out, so I'd really appreciate it. But let's get into the episode today. I am bringing you all a classic how to episode. I do these every now and again for topics that kind of aren't unified by a singular psychological concept or explanation. Or theory, but they have so much depth to them that they deserve their own category of episode. We've done how to avoid settling in your twenties, how to manage your anxiety about the future, how to do hard things, how to get out of a funk, how to anything, And today we are doing my favorite so far, a personal topic I cannot shut

1:50 up about, which is how to be more interesting. There was a very famous journal paper published in the journal Nature last year talking about how in our digital age, people are increasingly bored and increasingly boring, and a consequence of how much time we spend online is that we are all very slowly losing our distinct personalities. Nobody is interesting anymore, nobody is different, nobody is special. Maybe you feel that way about yourself, that you're not as interesting even in your own mind, you aren't entertaining yourself as much, you're not fascinated by yourself, that maybe you've lost a little bit of dimension to your personhood and your personality.

2:33 I want to say, you are not alone. And today we are going to examine why you are feeling that way. Why our current environments plural are creating a standardization of thought, interest of personalities and the very best things you can do psychologically, socially, neurologically to become a more interesting person, someone who people feel inexplicably drawn to and excited by and invested in, and also how to become more interesting to yourself as well. It is a big episode without further ado, let's get into it. So the first question, and also I guess the hardest question to answer, what actually makes somebody interesting? What intrigues us psychologically as humans and as people and as a species. The thing is

3:32 whether somebody is interesting or not operates on two kind of levels, or two planes. The first level is highly subjective and it's based on our own preferences. Somebody talking all day about football might be the most boring thing in the world to you. Counting rice would be more fun, but it would be endlessly interesting to others. I love talking about sports, but every time I do, I can see that my friends are probably a little bit bored by it. It's not as interesting to them. And it works the other way. Somebody could have the coolest job in the world, but you just can't bring yourself to be interested or to care because personally, like you're not invested in that you just your brain doesn't light up

4:17 in the same way. But there is a difference between being subjectively interested in someone and someone being objectively interesting as an individual and people who have that special source, that special something. It transcends everything external. It transcends things like a job, It transcends hobbies, stories, appearance, and it comes from a deeper place, meaning that I guess, no matter what they talk about, who they're around, whether they have the most tedious job in the world or the most interesting there is. And we all know somebody like this, there is something about them that still draws people in based on their character, based on how they hold themselves.

5:04 It's like a little bit of their soul is just like on fire. Okay, So what is that factor made up of? What is that objective factor? How do we identify it? Firstly, the most interesting people in the world are those who are actually interested in others. They go deep, They have a genuine curiosity about you. They find the world fascinating. In fact, twenty one study had eighteen hundred participants talk to each other in pairs. People who were given a list of deeper questions to ask about the other person. The other individual actually found them more interesting as a partner. They came off as more enjoyable to be around. People felt like they wanted to know more about them purely because of the questions and the depth

5:51 they were going too with the person they were sitting across from. I think the reason for this is that this kind of behavior is so rare. It's so rare to find somebody who's genuinely interested in other people. Also, their questions, their interest in us leaves a bit of a disclosure gap where we're talking more about ourselves, we're sharing more, and so they kind of remained mysterious peaking our interests. Crucially, people who are interested in others, I also think they ask questions to understand. They ask questions not just to debate or assert their views, but because they are genuinely curious and they want to expand their worldview.

6:31 They ask questions because that is just valuable to them. Whatever answer you give them, they don't care. It's endlessly fascinating because of the way that you've answered it and because it's probably different to the way that they would answer it. And that means that also when they go and have conversations with others, they contribute to a greater and deeper level. There was this guy I used to work with when I worked in consulting, and he would ask these like piercing questions, questions you would never expect to be asked, questions that probably nobody has been asked before in the history of humanity. And I remember we were like collectively just so fascinated by him, because someone who is able to get that information out of people,

7:13 because you would answer him, you would tell him all this stuff about you, he must have some pretty good stories of his own to tell if he can get that kind of level of intimacy with somebody, even just like completely casually. Also, I think the reason these people are interesting is because we simply like talking about ourselves.

7:32 The interested person is interesting because they get us to talk about our favorite topic, and we kind of confuse talking with that and enjoying that with enjoying them. They become more interesting. And it also means that they're often very good conversationalists, even if they say very little, and they are great unifiers. Even in a group conversation. Someone interesting can almost effortlessly bring everyone out of their shells if needed. Here everybody's point of view. It doesn't look like a strain they create At times, this like collective conversational flow state for us to sit in. We are also drawn to people who are not just interested in us, but feel very authentically themselves. That's the second thing that

8:21 makes someone interesting. The reason for this is threefold. Firstly, we implicitly believe that for someone to be that secure in themselves, they must have reasons to back it up. There must be some deep personal well that they are drawing from that gives them this dimension and depth and confidence.

8:39 This makes us very interested in discovering what that is, What are they relying on, where does their self esteem come from, and why is it so amazing. Secondly, we find them interesting because our natural levels of curiosity just generally go up when we feel psychologically safe. Being around someone secure is a catalyt for that feeling. The reason for this is that we know that someone who is genuine and authentic and just kind and confident in themselves is a lot less likely to need to discredit or put others down to feel good about themselves. People like us, therefore, we just can kind of relax. Finally, I think we find authentic people interesting because some small part of us probably wants to be like them. We see their ease,

9:29 we see their confidence, we see their lack of embarrassment, we see their good stories, we see their depth, and we think, oh my god, how do I get that? I want to be on that level? And this spurs our interest in them. Almost is like a case study, Like they are a blueprint for how we can become like that and how we can improve ourselves. So interesting people are interested. They're authentic. Another thing that defines interesting people is that they just do stuff. They play outside, they make things, They adventure, They put their creative ideas out there, even if it's not perfect. They go to things alone, they travel alone. I was going to try and find like a more complex term to describe this,

10:13 and I was like looking in my psychology dictionary and I was like, what's the word for this? But really, like they just do stuff is the best way I can put it. These days, like they fill their days, they fill their lives. They play the game of life. Well, they're just an act of participant in their lives. The next factor that makes people objectively interesting is that they're not just authentic. They are a little bit different. There's something odd about them. Odd in the positive way. There's something divergent about them, as we would say, literally like the movie, They're divergent, Like our attraction and our gravitation towards these kind of people is driven particularly by like an instinctual love for novelty. The same kind of person

10:56 with the same personality, doing the same thing, shopping the same places over an over again, It just gets kind of boring after a while. Someone who stands apart from that, as an outlier, gets our brain paying attention because they deviate from an expected pattern that immediately spikes interest neurologically, psychologically, and especially socially. Now, our appreciation for these kinds of individuals tends to increase as we get older. Unfortunately, as children and as teenagers were very cruel to divergent thinkers, we're very cruel to divergent or different personality types because at that age, you know, group conformity and group allegiance just feels so important when we're children, when we're kids,

11:43 when we're trying to fit in. I still think they'd get the final word. I truly believe, truly, the weirdest kids always become the most interesting adults, always because they have formed their identity purely on vibes and purely on natural enjoyment a lot rather than external validation, and they probably had to go through some really difficult experiences to get there, Like they get bullied for years, they get excluded, only for people to turn around in their twenties and thirties and realize, like how insanely rare it is to have genuine interest and love for things, and how insanely rare it is to have a truly individual, unique personality.

12:25 Like they totally get the final word. Honestly, I was a weird kid. I think I'm an interesting adult. Not to toot my own own if you are this way, confirm my theory for me. If you're a weird kid, do you think that you are an above average interesting adult? Yes or no? I think the answer is yes. I want to run my own experiment. DM me if this applies to you, to take this a step further, though, because this is anecdotal, science does back up the fact that being eccentric, being different can actually have health and lifestyle benefits to beyond just being interested. There's this man called David Weeks. He's a psychiatrist. He's the author of the book eccentrics a Study of sanity and strangeness. He

13:08 conducted a ten year study on a thousand people who we would describe as eccentric. These people that was trying to think about some of the people he interviewed that was like an indigenous man who walked everywhere backwards. There were these two Californian people who believed they could hypnotize frogs, people who were a little bit out there. What he discovered is that his subjects suffered less from mental illnesses such as depression than the majority of the population. Fewer than thirty percent had ever abused drug or drugs or alcohol.

13:42 He also found that eccentrics visited the doctor twenty times less often than the average person, and on average, they lived longer. Yeah, they were all more interesting. Were they also healthier? He said, Yes, we have to be careful here victually things with like when we say they didn't visit the doctor as much, you know, another explanation for that could be that these people weren't healthier, they just were more skeptical of let's say, Western medicine, more skeptical of like the system. They weren't less mentally unwell, they just weren't being diagnosed because of that skepticism, like we have to search for other explanations here because there are some.

14:24 But Weeks. Doctor Weeks attributed these findings, which are impressive, I have to say, regardless of why, to the benefits of nonconformity. He said, it's a health. It's a health plus. Those who don't repress their inner nature in the struggle to conform, they suffer less stress. Consequently, they are happier, their immune systems work more efficiently. They suffer less from the psychological pressures and the psychological cost of self silencing and self abandonment, meaning they have more fulfilling emotional lives, therefore and again allowing them to be interesting and expansive as people because their authenticity is nurtured. Whether they do that for others or just for themselves, they probably do

15:11 it for themselves. It doesn't matter. They're just more interesting. The final thing all interesting people do that's important to know is that they energize others. Maybe that's through stories, maybe it's through accomplishments. Maybe it's through their passion, their individuality, their self comfort. It doesn't matter. Whatever it is, it is undeniable that interesting people bring a force for life into any room they enter. They make others like want to learn more, want to do better, not through shame, not through comparison, not through judgment, but through expansion. And I think that is the most crucial element of their character.

15:52 Even if they're not nice people, the way they operate is still a bit of a human experiment, and in this way they become expanders. This is an idea that I'm stealing from my friend Aerophiles Substack. It's called crystal clear. This thing that she talks about is expanders and she says we all need at least three people in our lives who expand our sense of what's possible simply through the way they live. And she was basically asking me, you know who my three people were, Like, who are the three people that expand me? And this is so crucial because without these individuals in your life, the limits that you place on yourself are going to naturally be lower because the example hasn't been set. You cannot dream

16:34 bigger than what you see in some ways, and it's sometimes hard to be around people who are more accomplished than us because our ego is naturally very self protective. Our ego is very cautious of situations that could lessen our self esteem. But the outcome of being around expanders, being around interesting people is a greater sense of what is possible within our own lives, greater confidence that we can achieve what we want, and that's at its call, what's special about these kinds of people. So the next big question is if this is what makes somebody interesting, why are interesting people becoming harder to find? Why are we all becoming more boring? Like that Nature article kind of accused us of becoming We're going to talk about

17:24 that break down the three critical factors that are maybe making me boring, definitely making me boring after this short break. So I have a few explanations for you as to why we're becoming less interesting. But the biggest one is that the environments that we are in allow for less choice, and that is forcing all of us to become quite homogeneous, therefore less unique, therefore less interesting. Increasingly, we are all being funneled towards the same things, trends and viral content.

18:03 Whether you know it or not, they and I think you do, they are advising us. They are influencing you and what to buy what to enjoy, what movies to watch, what to eat, Hello, to buy chocolate. So we all kind of end up operating in identical ways, and that restricts our ability for divergence. We shop at the same handful of stores because independent stores can't afford to be in business. We stream the same shows because that's what we see other people watching, and that's the things that the studios. You know, the studios only make so many things that they know will be hits. Now we listen to the same songs that an algorithm pushes on us, or more likely a label has decided are worth pushing because the artist is the next big thing. We eat

18:46 it the same chains because small indie restaurants can't operate. We use the same apps because they're the ones that are functional. We even start speaking in the same language that we've absorbed from social media. That sounds unique, but it's not brain rot languages, I think is what they call it. It's this deep irony that the Internet has promised us infinite choice, infinite ideas, personalities, but has reduced our ability for complexity and for originality. There is actually an economic term for this. It's called global homogenization. The psychological way of describing it though, is like social and behavioral convergence. So basically, as our environments, influencers, context become identical,

19:35 we all start acting the same, meaning that the idea of niche things that are different don't really exist anymore. There was this really amazing BBC article written back in twenty fourteen that described this in terms of the expansion of global brands and how brands like Starbucks, McDonald's, like all of those have started eliminating distinct cultures. And the author of this article, his name is Mark Pagel. He used the example of Starbucks, and he talks about how countries used to have their own coffee chains, their own ways of consuming caffeine. Cities used to have their own coffee houses and roasters that were unique to them. Towns used to have the independent local joint. Now you go to Tokyo, New York, Sydney, Mexico City, you get the

20:22 same cappuccino, the same you know march or cherry frape. We all become united or shaped by these few things that have enough power or have enough money to influence us. When we used to have different experiences, the way we drank coffee, the way we ate food, the way we dressed used to be different. The rise of AI has also prompted some people to be even more worried about this, particularly due to something called the standardization of thought. Basically, the more we rely on these tools which have been programmed in a specific way, coded in a specific way, design in a specific way to give us a certain answer, use a certain language, use an identical way of forming ideas, rely on specific sources and inputs, all of which are

21:10 the same for all of us, the more we all start thinking, speaking, communicating, structuring arguments, structuring ideas in identical ways. There was this amazing article I just read from Columbia Business School released last year. It's titled AI is Making You Boring, so if you want to look it up, please do, and it talks about how a how dependency on AI is correlated to a reduction in creative and divergent thinking, which we know is a factor that makes somebody interesting, but that b The more we rely on AI to handle logistical things for us, so even if it's not creative stuff, but we ask it to choose a restaurant, plan our travel, itinerary, even get us from like a to b even to give us advice to

21:54 help us make decisions. The more we rely on it for that logistical stuff, the more we become like everybody else. Because it is giving people the same answers. It is giving you answers based on data, not based on you as an individual. Doctor Matts and her team who wrote this article, they examined what happens when people delegate their everyday decisions to AI agents. They studied one hundred and ten thousand real world choices made by one thousand US social media users. They analyzed what people selected when acting on their own compared to what they selected when they were asking an AI agent to choose on their behalf or make a decision based on an AI prompt. The results showed using AI pushed people towards more popular, mainstream options.

22:44 It reduced the distinctiveness of their behavior compared to others. In other words, over reliance on AI tended to average out human individuality. It just steered everybody towards the most statistically common or widely liked or repeated answer. It's why I am so insistent in my own life that I don't use AI for my decision making. I won't use it to think for me, regardless of how much time saving it is or how much efficiency it gives me.

23:16 I would rather the friction of having to spend more time on things, or the possibility of choosing the wrong restaurant, or choosing the wrong place to visit, or making a bad choice. I'd rather that possibility than the certainty and the promise of losing myself and losing my uniqueness to a technology and becoming dependent on something that it's becoming increasingly evident is very cognitively and psychologically damaging. You know.

23:41 The studies coming out on this are just shocking, and it really actually really scares me sometimes, especially when we're talking about being interesting and maintaining individuality. This is a huge threat. How can you be an individual person when every choice is made by a machine that tells everybody else to also make the same choice. Now, I've seen very interesting arguments that have said, because of this current technological and cultural climate, individuality is now becoming the status simple.

24:08 When everybody is the same, everybody is converging around a norm. Good taste becomes increasingly rare, and it becomes increasingly interesting. It's also, as some thinkers believe, the most AI proof skill and asset. Genuine individual thought, genuine interest, genuine passion, genuine curiosity cannot be replaced by AI. So now more than ever, being interesting isn't just something that helps you socially.

24:37 It isn't just something that maybe makes people more attracted to you or helps you in dating. It's important for you career wise to be an interesting person and to have a unique identity. However, I will say I think the final factor I would bring up is just a lot of us becoming less interesting because we are also becoming more time poor as well. That's making it harder for us to pursue the active is the interests, the hobbies, even the kind of deep thinking that makes us unique.

25:05 This is also, interestingly, I think, what also drives us to rely on our algorithms and to rely on AI as well, because when we just have so little time, they simplify the time we need to spend thinking, which to us feels like something we can, you know, give away to a machine without a doubt, Like when you have to work really long hours and then you have to commute on top of that, and then you have to take care of yourself, maybe your children, maybe a pet, maybe you know somebody that you perform caregiving tasks for when you have to do all these other things that necessitate healthy living, like exercising, making home cooked meals, socializing, sleeping, and then you're meant to have a personality on top

25:49 of that. Like, it is hard, it's difficult. You only have twenty four hours. So I don't want the focus of this episode to be like, you're not interesting because you're lazy. You're like you're not interesting because you spend too much time using AI or social media. No, no, no, no, it's not the case. Sometimes it is that we are just so tired all the time, and there are so many different things vying for our attention, important things that being interesting is not a priority. You know, it would be so much easier to be interesting if you had like a mysterious source of income that allows you to travel all the time, or a mysterious source of income that allows you to take on creative projects on a whim,

26:29 or take a day off to follow your curiosity or spend days like deep diving into something or your thoughts or your ideas. That's just not an option for most of us. That's just not an option. We have to be very clear about that. So those are the three major factors that are making us feel less interesting collectively, They all kind of tie into this like branch under capitalism.

26:51 How do we circumvent that? I know I said that sometimes individual choice doesn't count for much in this, but I do think there are some things that you can do if this is a prime already for you, if you do have the time and the space, and you do have the desire to be more interesting as a person to others and to yourself. Okay, let me get into my tips, shall I. Firstly, I want you to remember the cardinal rule that we talked about, like at the very beginning, the most interesting people are those who are interested in others first, and the most direct pathway to showing this interest and embracing this is twofold. Firstly, talk more to strangers. Secondly, learn how to ask better questions.

27:33 Talk more to strangers, because you just expand your world view about a thousand times every single time you talk to somebody who has a different story to you. The stories you hear, the interactions you have, the perspectives you gain, the side quests you end up going on. Like it puts you more in touch with humanity in general. It makes you more interesting because you just aren't only in your own head, and when you're talking to these people like you are doing something that is so crucial if you want to be more interesting, which is not just ruminating and letting your own thoughts be the only kind of like compass for your reality. We become quite boring and uninteresting when we only believe that the thoughts we

28:19 have could be the correct ones, when we only see our own perspective. Talking to strangers a is just fun if you can get used to it. I know it's hard if you're an into it, but it is fun when you lean into it. Be it's good for you. It's good for you psychologically, it's good for you cognitively to just see the world, even for a second, through the eyes of somebody else, and to take that in as an experience. Now, when you're talking to strangers, or even talking to friends or colleagues or family members, whoever, if you want to do it, well, stop making the focus be on you. Most of us implicitly ask questions searching for a specific response. Searching for a specific answer, We ask specific questions to direct a conversation in our favor,

29:14 maybe even back to us without realizing it. Let's all be honest, we've all we have all asked a question, ask somebody a question, I should say, because we wanted them to ask us the same question back. We can admit that we've done that before. But good questions are what we call pro collaborative and pro narrative building. So they don't just bring about answers. You're not just mining for detail. They build on it, and then they build on that, and then they build on that, and they create a structure. They create a story. They don't just look for They're not just creating random distinct answers to random distinct questions. You're creating a narrative. You're building something, a web between you and the other person. Generally asking

30:00 open ended questions, often ones that begin with what, how, why. It's a great place to start. This is because it just allows people to answer in ways that represent their opinions rather than just state facts about themselves, which is very, very valuable. Then it's about taking their response and genuinely asking yourself, what details about this am I genuinely curious about?

30:29 It's not about can I ask a better question. What is a question I actually want the answer to? What if I never thought to ask someone who does this thing for work, or who lives in this neighborhood, or who has that specific hobby, or who's visited that country. I call it detail mining. Once you ask a question, right, you've cracked someone open. The stuff below the surface is always going to be better. If someone says they're a teacher, that's your entry point. Don't move on. Ask them like, Hey, what's the funniest thing a child has ever said to you? You?

31:00 What are the parents like? Like, what, what's the craziest thing you've ever seen in the lunchboxes? If they work in retail, what's the craziest thing you've seen someone try and shoplift? Like? What's Don't ask about details, ask for stories. The other thing to remember about being a good conversationalist and a person who is curious about other people generally, like just curious, like really wants to know. It invites people in with that curiosity is that you have two ears in one mouth, use them accordingly. It's like a very ancient proverb, two ears, one mouth, use them accordingly.

31:35 There is this a professor, doctor Guy H. Katova I think is his name, and he's been studying listening for well over a decade. Literally his expertise is on listening, and one of his main insights is that you can tell if a conversation is good or not not by what people are talking about, not by who's talking, not by how much people are speaking, but by looking at the listening patterns instead. Counterintrue, right, But the more listening the better. We think that good conversations have a lot of float. No, the better people rate the conversation. The people rate conversations higher and better when they are when more listening is involved, because it facilitates more introspection, facilitates

32:16 more self disclosure, facilitates more vulnerability, and there's actually normally a through line in the conversation. He also says that in reality, the listener, you, the listener is often the one who sets the tone of the conversation by using back channel behaviors, which are verbal and nonverbal cues, physical non physical cues that affect the conversation on an unconscious level.

32:42 There you go, You are in charge if you are the listener. Also by being a listener again, you become more interesting because you absorb all of these stories and perspectives and tidbits and facts and insights that others just miss because they only want to talk about themselves or they only want to talk about something that they're interested in.

33:01 You become like a documentarian of everyday life, and then you get to bring those stories to future conversations. Okay, I feel like I've labored on that point. If you want to be interesting, be interested, ask good questions. Let's move on from that. The second thing you can do to make yourself more captivating and fascinating to others, and just to make your life more interesting to you as well, is to choose a niche thing that you love and get really good at it, even if this niche thing makes you no money, even if it's really weird, even if it's literally of no use at all, even if it's uncool. Of all the things we've mentioned about interesting people, this is the one I haven't included, and that is

33:49 interesting people go deep. They go deep, They value depth, they value trying, They have layers to them. They have stuff they really care about, and they show that through the investment of effort, time, skill, patience, care. Even the most boring hobbies in the world, and I'm sorry if I'm going to say something, I'm sorry if this is your hobby, but like stamp collecting, bird watching, fishing, lock picking, sorry if that's your hobbies. But if you go deep enough, you will find and I'm sure you can say this is true, you will find something truly fascinating. You will encounter a whole new dictionary of terms expertise and skill.

34:34 You will encounter the gossip of these communities. And the more you go deep, I also think the more you enjoy something because you can because there's more like layers and levels of it for you to like push up against, and that contributes, of course to the growth of your personality through the growth of a skill. I think a lot of us stay in the shallow end of things, especially in the age of instant gratification and fast open me, because it's very easy, and we're tired, and if it's not immediately rewarding, if we're not immediately good at it, if we don't immediately find something interesting about this thing, we abandon it. But if you want, if you're priority in listening to this episode, is you really want to

35:17 expand yourself, you have to stay a little bit longer. You have to really much like in a conversation, like drill, drill, drill deeper into your passions to get to the good stuff. And I will say, it doesn't have to be a hobby. It could be a part of history. You know, heaps about my friend Holly, we knows a ridiculous amount about Anne Boleyn. We went to Greenwich the other day. I was like shocked. I was like, this, you're so interesting to me. Obviously she's my friend, so she's already interesting.

35:46 But I was like, Wow, that's so cool. You can start collecting something, get really obsessed by it, you know, rare copies of a book, badgers, trinkets. I met a guy the other day who had a collection of five thousand comic books, and I think I scared little bit because I was like, I had so many questions for him.

36:03 I was like, when did that happen? Where do you store them? What's your favorite one? Because how interesting is that? Like, depth is the secret to a full and interesting and meaningful life. On that a bonus tip, if you will, you can literally make researching your hobby. I've seen so many people talking about this online. There's one girl in particular and I'm sorry I can't remember her name. She's so cool, and she has this notebook of topics that she thinks are interesting, or like people in history she hears people mentioned, or like random building. She'll like see a building and be like, oh, I wonder when that was built. I wonder you know who that celebrity was married to. I wonder how this thing came to be.

36:44 And she has this little notebook. And when she's bored, so like say she's commuting, or she's like in a doctor's office, instead of doom scrolling, which just feels like the natural impulse these days, she'll open her little book and she'll be like, okay, when am I going to research today? And she researches, and she gains knowledge, and she gains tidbits, and she gains facts that other people value.

37:07 This is a really crucial point of this whole episode. Being interesting requires effort, and it requires, at times a departure from your norm. If you really want to curate an exciting internal and external life that draws others in, that is magnetic, but also which fascinates you the person living it, you have to get off your phone and back into your life. You have to make conscious choices to pursue the thing, the hobby, the collection, the research, the interest that causes a bit more friction but brings about a lot greater psychological, emotional, and cognitive reward. I want to get into that a little bit more, actually, the importance of friction, But I do have to take one more short break here, so I promise I'll be

37:58 right back with us. As we said before, the break being more interesting, and I know there's a lot of things to keep track of, so I'm sorry. But being more interesting is about cultivating your external life to reflect your internal interests and actually pursuing them and putting effort into the things you enjoy. And another way to do that is by setting yourself small challenges that make you work for something that could be a physical challenge, yes, also an intellectual challenge as well. Have a purpose, have a mission, have a goal you're working towards, and make it fun and interesting and weird. Read like one genre of fiction book every single month, and at the end of the year, have twelve. Listen to a daily news

38:48 podcast every single morning. Learn how to identify every single bird, tree, wildflower in your local park. Memorize every country on a map, Visit every museum in your city. Give yourself projects that have no obvious reward other than becoming somebody who knows things and can say I did this weird thing. I just set this weird goal and I did it. The point isn't that these specific pursuits are inherently interesting. It's that they expand the catalog of ideas, stories, and perspectives that you carry around with you. You stop becoming somebody who simply consumes whatever the algorithm serves up to you, which, don't get me wrong, that's me. But you stop being that, and you start becoming someone who has pursued knowledge, pursued

39:35 self growth deliberately and in a different vein to everybody else. The beautiful thing is that this doesn't just make you more knowledgeable. These challenges don't just make you smarter. They change the way your brain works beyond intelligence. There was a twenty eleven paper published in Behavioral Brain Research that shows that in adulthood there is this new generation of neurons that can be found in the adult hippocamp The thing is, most of these cells will die unless we engage them in some kind of effortful cognitive learning experience.

40:09 It's called neurogenesis. When we do engage these cells, we basically are able to rewire our brain inform new patterns. But also it helps prompt more divergent thinking, more imaginative thinking, a greater sense of self. Remember that term from before divergence. We keep bringing it up well when it comes to our intelligence, when it comes to our creativity, our personality.

40:33 Having a greater ability for divergent thinking means that you are better able to connect ideas that to other people would seem unrelated. You're better able to connect spontaneous thoughts, You're better able to use your imagination to be original. This expands how interesting you are as a person, because you end up having cognitive patterns that are completely different to everybody else. You end up not just having the same thoughts and ideas all the time, and you're not just having the same thoughts and ideas as everybody else, but ones that are unique to you based on things that other people aren't trying. I have been doing my own version of an intellectual challenge recently on my sub stack.

41:16 I'm going to shamelessly plug it right now, but every single week I have challenged myself to review one psychology study fully from beginning to end, and to summarize it in seven hundred words or less. That is fifty two papers in fifty two weeks, beyond the research I already do for this podcast, and I'm just learning so much I can I can feel my brain thinking differently. If that makes sense. You can follow along if you want.

41:44 We send them out to people. So if you like sign up with your email you get every single week and you study to your inbox once a week. It's like literally takes like five minutes to read. If your goal is to become more interesting and to have more interesting things to think about or to contribute to conversations, this is an amazing resource for that. But again, like I said, it's just changed how my brain operates. It changes what I bring to conversations. That's enough. I'm not gonna talk about anymore. That's enough self promotion. Let's get into my final two tips, one of which is very much on the theme of just do shit, which is actually planned things for your weekend. Don't just expect the

42:24 weekend to come and it to be full of lots of fun stuff by accident. Learn to be the friend who initiates plans. Learn to be the friend who looks up what is happening in the area you live in, who knows the exhibitions, the markets, has the bucket list of places, hikes, breweries, towns nearby, go by yourself or go with other people. Invite them into your quest for a more interesting life. I speak a lot, a lot a lot about the importance of having a bucket list as an adult, because I think they are so underrated.

42:56 A bucket list is basically like having a plan or a direction for how you're gonna spend your free time. It is like having a gym routine, but for your leisure. It is a gym routine for your time off, and it gives you like a sense of like, Oh, I don't have anything to do today, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna actually take something off this list of things I want to do. Something me and my friends, and in terms of talking about inviting people in something that we've been doing every couple of weeks, is that one of us has to basically plan an outing for the rest of the group. We go to national parks, We went to Richmond. The other day, we went to Greenwich, like literally three days ago, we went to the Maritime Museum,

43:38 we went to a ber festival, we go to like art festivals. At the very least, it gives you something to say in your Monday meeting other than just like, yeah, my weekend was fine, Like yeah again. I want to link this back to early points. What makes somebody interesting. They're authentic, They have passion. They also know the importance of novel experiences and the way this shapes your character, the way this shapes your worldview, and the way that it shapes your interest in the world around you. When you are interested in the world around you, it is infectious people become interested in you. In return. For my final piece of advice, though, I'm going to completely contradict a lot of what I've been saying. I'm going to

44:22 contradict one of the major through lines of this episode. I know I've been going on and on about how I just said interesting people are interested in others. You get it. By now I've made the point. Another thing we need to do to be more interesting, though, is to let people be interested in us, and to accept that we have something to say, and to accept that people like us for our own authentic pure reasons and to put those parts of us on display. Often we expect that people aren't going to be curious about us.

44:57 They don't want to know anything more about who we are. They're just asking because they have to. But this is something which psychology has shown can become a self fulfilling prophecy. If we go into every situation thinking everybody here is more interesting than me, nobody really cares about what I have to say. And if this is coming from past wounds of being rejected, and you walk in and you have this attitude of like I really shouldn't be here, I don't think these people are gonna like me. The sad thing is is that they probably won't because unconsciously we're sending out these signals that are like leave me alone, don't talk to me. Instead, we need to reframe having good social charisma as actually just having social courage. We

45:40 really need to learn to accept unsuppressed parts of ourselves that we might think other people are going to find too much or boring or awkward or difficult, because again psychology shows that it's not so much about what we talk about, but how we talk about it and how we show up and our curiosity about the world. Basically, people can tell when we're coming from a place of authenticity or not. There was a study from two thousand and nine that looked into what qualities are present in people who are generally consistently liked and In this study, participants were invited to join a social group, Their introduction was filmed, and then that introduction was assessed. Three sets of observers independently rated each of these individual's genuine sense

46:31 of warmth, confidence, authenticity, and charisma, and whether or not they liked them. What this study found is that warmth being open fully accounted for the link between expecting acceptance and actually receiving it, confidence, being social mood, even motivation like it didn't. It wasn't as significant, It wasn't correlated as positively. You are more interesting, you are more likable if you enter a situation with genuine openness and with a intrinsic knowledge or belief that they're gonna like you.

47:06 They're gonna like you because you like yourself. They're gonna like you because there is something about you that is deep and interesting and fascinating. There was another study, I think it was the same study, but a second round that where they wanted to see, like do people who have genuine warmth and openness are they accepted? And it was with this group of straight men and they basically were told they're going to interact with this very attractive woman.

47:31 And some of the men were given like these cues or like these clues that this woman would reject them, and others weren't. And in the study, the men who were subliminally convinced to expect rejection, their behavior was done for. They came off as cold, they came off as not very nice, They weren't liked by the observers. But the men who weren't told that they were at risk of being rejected remained warm, remained open, They were more liked by the observers. It doesn't matter if you think you're going to be rejected or not. You just can't think it if you expect to be liked by other people, if you go in believing that, like, people are gonna think that I'm interesting, I find myself interesting. Of course

48:12 they're gonna believe that. If you go and convince that people are gonna find you fascinating because you are, because because you have something to offer, because you pour into your own internal world and that once more, if they don't, that's fine. That is what creates the more positive, self fulfilling prophecy that makes you more interesting. And this, my friends, this is the core of what we have been talking about all day. Yes, an interesting person has depth. Yes they have curiosity for others, they have passion, they're a bit different. More often than not, they just don't think too deeply about acceptance from others because they either know it's guaranteed or they know that it's just a bonus.

48:52 It's a nice thing to have. But they like themselves. They have this entire secret guard and this entire inner world that they can return to. They have internal acceptance that frees up more mental space to just do life, to just do things, to just be passionate, to be interested. And I think that's really what we're trying to curate.

49:11 And what a beautiful, easy way to wrap up this episode. The most interesting people in the world don't care if they're interesting. They care if they're enjoying themselves, they care if they're challenging themselves. They care about like it's a cliche to say they care about having fun, but it's true.

49:28 That's like the secret to life. They care about getting the most out of their life, and I think that is conclusively at the end of the day, what you need to focus on. Don't worry so much about is this person going to like me. Don't worry so much about trying to curate a life or a presence that is, you know, that is likable or that hits on certain factors that you think are going to make people think you're better or worse than you are. The most magnetic thing is that you just like choose something that you enjoy, choose a collection of things that you enjoy, and just like are led by genuine passion for them, and go deep and let that devotion kind of expand outwards and capture people and be genuinely curious about what it expands

50:13 them and what makes them feel good and what they're passionate about. Like that is really the secret. Took me like fifty minutes to get there, but I hope that it was helpful. I hope that you learn something. I hope that it inspires you to just rethink some of the choices you're making, but also rethink some of the beliefs you have about whether or not you're interesting, because I promise you you most certainly are. I meet you guys, I meet listeners like yourself, and every single one of you is just as interesting as the last. And I'm always endlessly fascinated by how you guys are always doing the coolest stuff and know yourselves much better than you think you do. So yeah, I think this is just

50:50 a little probably a reminder. I'm sure you're already doing so much of what we spoke about. I want to thank our researcher Lucy Davidson for her contributions to this episode. If you enjoyed it it, please check out an episode on Netflix. It really does help us out. I feel like I'm begging, but it's yeah, it really does help us, and we put a lot of effort into it, so it'd be great if we could see you over there.

51:11 You can also follow us on Instagram. Confirm that theory I have. If you were a weird kid? Are you an interesting adult? Yes or no? Actually leave a comment down below, like, if you've made it this far, you're listening on Spotify. If you're not, you can DM me If you're listening on Spotify, yes or no? Do you think you're more interesting as the result of your childhood weirdness.

51:31 I definitely think I am. You can follow us on substack, you can do all these things. There's additional research down below. Just go go check it out if you so desire. And until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very very soon.