August 6, 2026 • 51 mins
I think we all instinctively know if we find someone interesting… or not. But how can we cultivate the skills of being interesting to others? In this episode, we break down the science behind what makes people interesting, talk about some easy things we can all do to tap into what already makes us unique, and focus on one of life’s greatest conversational hacks - learning how to be truly interested in others.
We explore:
• Why we all love interesting people
• How ‘digital saturation’ is making us more bored, and boring
• The importance of asking open-ended questions to unlock better conversations
• Why being truly unique is a status symbol
• The power of learning to talk to strangers
• Why social skills are actually just social courage
Watch on Netflix: HERE
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For business: psychologyofyour20s@gmail.com
Our favourite sources:
https://tedbauer.medium.com/are-people-more-boring-now-98105e03e20c
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-12130-004
https://thevectorimpact.com/how-to-be-more-interesting/
The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
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
(00:26):
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
(00:48):
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
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
(01:10):
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
(01:31):
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
up about, which is how to be more interesting. There
(01:53):
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
(02:15):
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.
I want to say, you are not alone. And today
we are going to examine why you are feeling that way.
(02:39):
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
(03:02):
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
(03:28):
and as people and as a species. The thing is
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
(03:49):
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
(04:10):
be interested or to care because personally, like you're not
invested in that you just your brain doesn't light up
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,
(04:33):
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,
(04:55):
there is something about them that still draws people in
based on their character, based on how they hold themselves.
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
(05:16):
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
(05:42):
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
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,
(06:04):
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
(06:24):
not just to debate or assert their views, but because
they are genuinely curious and they want to expand their worldview.
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
(06:45):
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
(07:07):
were like collectively just so fascinated by him, because someone
who is able to get that information out of people,
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
(07:28):
are interesting is because we simply like talking about ourselves.
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
(07:48):
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
(08:09):
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
makes someone interesting. The reason for this is threefold. Firstly,
we implicitly believe that for someone to be that secure
(08:29):
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.
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
(08:52):
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,
(09:16):
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,
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?
(09:37):
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,
(09:59):
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,
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
(10:19):
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
(10:41):
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
with the same personality, doing the same thing, shopping the
same places over an over again, It just gets kind
(11:02):
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
(11:22):
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
(12:03):
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,
(12:48):
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
conducted a ten year study on a thousand people who
(13:11):
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
(13:32):
such as depression than the majority of the population. Fewer
than thirty percent had ever abused drug or drugs or alcohol.
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
(13:55):
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
(14:17):
just weren't being diagnosed because of that skepticism, like we
have to search for other explanations here because there are some.
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
(14:39):
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
(15:04):
as people because their authenticity is nurtured. Whether they do
that for others or just for themselves, they probably do
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,
(15:29):
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
(15:50):
I think that is the most crucial element of their character.
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
(16:11):
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
(16:57):
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
(17:21):
of accused us of becoming We're going to talk about
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
(17:44):
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.
Whether you know it or not, they and I think
(18:06):
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
(18:28):
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
it the same chains because small indie restaurants can't operate.
(18:50):
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
(19:13):
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
(19:57):
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
(20:19):
to Tokyo, New York, Sydney, Mexico City, you get the
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
(20:42):
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,
(21:02):
use a certain language, use an identical way of forming ideas,
rely on specific sources and inputs, all of which are
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
(21:26):
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
(21:47):
a restaurant, plan our travel, itinerary, even get us from
like a to b even to give us advice to
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
(22:09):
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
(22:31):
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.
It reduced the distinctiveness of their behavior compared to others.
In other words, over reliance on AI tended to average
(22:54):
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
(24:03):
technological and cultural climate, individuality is now becoming the status simple.
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,
(24:28):
genuine curiosity cannot be replaced by AI. So now more
than ever, being interesting isn't just something that helps you socially.
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
(24:49):
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.
This is also, interestingly, I think, what also drives us
(25:09):
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
(25:29):
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
of that. Like, it is hard, it's difficult. You only
(25:51):
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
(26:13):
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,
or take a day off to follow your curiosity or
spend days like deep diving into something or your thoughts
(26:35):
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.
How do we circumvent that? I know I said that
sometimes individual choice doesn't count for much in this, but
(26:56):
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
(27:19):
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.
Talk more to strangers, because you just expand your world
view about a thousand times every single time you talk
(27:43):
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
(28:06):
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
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
(28:27):
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,
(28:54):
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
(29:35):
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,
(29:57):
a web between you and the other person. Generally asking
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
(30:21):
asking yourself, what details about this am I genuinely curious about?
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.
(30:43):
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?
What are the parents like? Like, what, what's the craziest
(31:04):
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
(31:24):
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.
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
(31:47):
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
(32:08):
people rate conversations higher and better when they are when
more listening is involved, because it facilitates more introspection, facilitates
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
(32:28):
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.
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
(32:51):
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.
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
(33:13):
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
(33:35):
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
interesting people go deep. They go deep, They value depth,
(33:56):
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,
(34:22):
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.
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
(34:45):
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,
(35:07):
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
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.
(35:29):
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.
But I was like, Wow, that's so cool. You can
start collecting something, get really obsessed by it, you know,
(35:51):
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.
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
(36:11):
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
(36:34):
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.
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
(36:57):
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.
This is a really crucial point of this whole episode.
Being interesting requires effort, and it requires, at times a
(37:17):
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,
(37:40):
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
right back with us. As we said before, the break
(38:09):
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,
(38:31):
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
podcast every single morning. Learn how to identify every single bird, tree,
(38:53):
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
(39:15):
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
self growth deliberately and in a different vein to everybody else.
(39:39):
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
(40:01):
thing is, most of these cells will die unless we
engage them in some kind of effortful cognitive learning experience.
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,
(40:23):
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.
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,
(40:45):
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,
(41:06):
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.
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
(41:27):
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.
We send them out to people. So if you like
(41:48):
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
(42:11):
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
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
(42:33):
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
(42:53):
as an adult, because I think they are so underrated.
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.
(43:14):
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,
(43:35):
like literally three days ago, we went to the Maritime Museum,
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
(43:59):
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
(44:20):
a lot of what I've been saying. I'm going to
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
(44:45):
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.
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.
(45:08):
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
(45:29):
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
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
(45:52):
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
(46:13):
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
of warmth, confidence, authenticity, and charisma, and whether or not
(46:36):
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
(46:58):
if you enter a situation with genuine openness and with
a intrinsic knowledge or belief that they're gonna like you.
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
(47:21):
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.
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.
(47:46):
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
(48:09):
think that I'm interesting, I find myself interesting. Of course
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,
(48:32):
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.
It's a nice thing to have. But they like themselves.
(48:54):
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.
And what a beautiful, easy way to wrap up this episode.
(49:14):
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.
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
(49:36):
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
(49:56):
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
them and what makes them feel good and what they're
(50:16):
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
(50:39):
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
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.
(50:59):
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.
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
(51:20):
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.
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.
(51:41):
And until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle
to yourself. We will talk very very soon.
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
(00:26):
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
(00:48):
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
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
(01:10):
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
(01:31):
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
up about, which is how to be more interesting. There
(01:53):
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
(02:15):
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.
I want to say, you are not alone. And today
we are going to examine why you are feeling that way.
(02:39):
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
(03:02):
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
(03:28):
and as people and as a species. The thing is
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
(03:49):
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
(04:10):
be interested or to care because personally, like you're not
invested in that you just your brain doesn't light up
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,
(04:33):
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,
(04:55):
there is something about them that still draws people in
based on their character, based on how they hold themselves.
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
(05:16):
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
(05:42):
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
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,
(06:04):
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
(06:24):
not just to debate or assert their views, but because
they are genuinely curious and they want to expand their worldview.
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
(06:45):
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
(07:07):
were like collectively just so fascinated by him, because someone
who is able to get that information out of people,
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
(07:28):
are interesting is because we simply like talking about ourselves.
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
(07:48):
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
(08:09):
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
makes someone interesting. The reason for this is threefold. Firstly,
we implicitly believe that for someone to be that secure
(08:29):
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.
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
(08:52):
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,
(09:16):
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,
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?
(09:37):
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,
(09:59):
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,
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
(10:19):
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
(10:41):
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
with the same personality, doing the same thing, shopping the
same places over an over again, It just gets kind
(11:02):
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
(11:22):
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
(12:03):
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,
(12:48):
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
conducted a ten year study on a thousand people who
(13:11):
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
(13:32):
such as depression than the majority of the population. Fewer
than thirty percent had ever abused drug or drugs or alcohol.
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
(13:55):
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
(14:17):
just weren't being diagnosed because of that skepticism, like we
have to search for other explanations here because there are some.
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
(14:39):
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
(15:04):
as people because their authenticity is nurtured. Whether they do
that for others or just for themselves, they probably do
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,
(15:29):
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
(15:50):
I think that is the most crucial element of their character.
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
(16:11):
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
(16:57):
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
(17:21):
of accused us of becoming We're going to talk about
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
(17:44):
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.
Whether you know it or not, they and I think
(18:06):
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
(18:28):
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
it the same chains because small indie restaurants can't operate.
(18:50):
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
(19:13):
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
(19:57):
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
(20:19):
to Tokyo, New York, Sydney, Mexico City, you get the
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
(20:42):
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,
(21:02):
use a certain language, use an identical way of forming ideas,
rely on specific sources and inputs, all of which are
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
(21:26):
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
(21:47):
a restaurant, plan our travel, itinerary, even get us from
like a to b even to give us advice to
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
(22:09):
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
(22:31):
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.
It reduced the distinctiveness of their behavior compared to others.
In other words, over reliance on AI tended to average
(22:54):
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
(24:03):
technological and cultural climate, individuality is now becoming the status simple.
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,
(24:28):
genuine curiosity cannot be replaced by AI. So now more
than ever, being interesting isn't just something that helps you socially.
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
(24:49):
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.
This is also, interestingly, I think, what also drives us
(25:09):
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
(25:29):
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
of that. Like, it is hard, it's difficult. You only
(25:51):
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
(26:13):
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,
or take a day off to follow your curiosity or
spend days like deep diving into something or your thoughts
(26:35):
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.
How do we circumvent that? I know I said that
sometimes individual choice doesn't count for much in this, but
(26:56):
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
(27:19):
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.
Talk more to strangers, because you just expand your world
view about a thousand times every single time you talk
(27:43):
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
(28:06):
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
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
(28:27):
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,
(28:54):
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
(29:35):
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,
(29:57):
a web between you and the other person. Generally asking
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
(30:21):
asking yourself, what details about this am I genuinely curious about?
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.
(30:43):
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?
What are the parents like? Like, what, what's the craziest
(31:04):
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
(31:24):
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.
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
(31:47):
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
(32:08):
people rate conversations higher and better when they are when
more listening is involved, because it facilitates more introspection, facilitates
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
(32:28):
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.
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
(32:51):
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.
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
(33:13):
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
(33:35):
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
interesting people go deep. They go deep, They value depth,
(33:56):
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,
(34:22):
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.
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
(34:45):
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,
(35:07):
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
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.
(35:29):
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.
But I was like, Wow, that's so cool. You can
start collecting something, get really obsessed by it, you know,
(35:51):
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.
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
(36:11):
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
(36:34):
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.
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
(36:57):
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.
This is a really crucial point of this whole episode.
Being interesting requires effort, and it requires, at times a
(37:17):
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,
(37:40):
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
right back with us. As we said before, the break
(38:09):
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,
(38:31):
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
podcast every single morning. Learn how to identify every single bird, tree,
(38:53):
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
(39:15):
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
self growth deliberately and in a different vein to everybody else.
(39:39):
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
(40:01):
thing is, most of these cells will die unless we
engage them in some kind of effortful cognitive learning experience.
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,
(40:23):
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.
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,
(40:45):
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,
(41:06):
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.
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
(41:27):
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.
We send them out to people. So if you like
(41:48):
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
(42:11):
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
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
(42:33):
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
(42:53):
as an adult, because I think they are so underrated.
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.
(43:14):
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,
(43:35):
like literally three days ago, we went to the Maritime Museum,
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
(43:59):
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
(44:20):
a lot of what I've been saying. I'm going to
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
(44:45):
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.
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.
(45:08):
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
(45:29):
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
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
(45:52):
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
(46:13):
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
of warmth, confidence, authenticity, and charisma, and whether or not
(46:36):
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
(46:58):
if you enter a situation with genuine openness and with
a intrinsic knowledge or belief that they're gonna like you.
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
(47:21):
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.
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.
(47:46):
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
(48:09):
think that I'm interesting, I find myself interesting. Of course
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,
(48:32):
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.
It's a nice thing to have. But they like themselves.
(48:54):
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.
And what a beautiful, easy way to wrap up this episode.
(49:14):
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.
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
(49:36):
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
(49:56):
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
them and what makes them feel good and what they're
(50:16):
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
(50:39):
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
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.
(50:59):
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.
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
(51:20):
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.
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.
(51:41):
And until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle
to yourself. We will talk very very soon.
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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