Nobody ever asks the second one.

A woman at a birthday party where she knew two people started counting questions, mostly to survive the evening.

Over about two hours she counted twenty three first questions. What do you do. How do you know Sam. Where are you from.

She counted four follow ups. Three of the four came from the same man, who she later found out had been at the party for forty minutes and had been invited to two other things by the time he left.

What the first question is for

The first question is a formality. It is a slot everyone knows how to fill, and the answer is pre packaged: the job title, the city, the connection to the host. Nobody has to think, which is the point of it.

Then almost every conversation does the same thing next. The asker takes the answer and pivots to themselves.

"I moved here from Lisbon last year." "Oh, Lisbon! My sister went to Lisbon. She said the food was unbelievable."

Perfectly friendly. And the other person is now finished. They have delivered their fact, it has been received, and the conversation has relocated to somebody's sister.

The move

Ask about the thing they just said. Not the topic, the thing.

This is why it works. Everyone has been asked the first question forty times and has a smooth answer ready. Almost nobody has been asked the second one, so answering it requires actually thinking, and the person notices themselves being interesting.

People do not remember what you said. They remember that they were interesting near you.

Three that always work

• What made you. Any decision they mentioned. What made you leave, what made you pick that, what made you say yes.
• What was that like. Turns a fact into an experience, and gives them permission to have had a complicated time with it.
• The repeated phrase, as a question. They said it was a bit of a mess. "A mess?" Two words and it opens the whole thing.

Why it is hard

Because to ask about what they said you have to have been listening to it, rather than using it as the loading time for your own next contribution.

That is the whole difficulty and it is not a moral failing. Composing while somebody talks is close to automatic, especially in a room full of strangers where you are worried about being boring. It also feels exactly like listening from the inside, which is why people are so confident they already do this.

The tell: if you know what you are going to say before they have finished, you were not listening for the last few seconds. Everyone does this. The people who are easy to talk to just do it slightly less.

Counting your own

This is worth measuring once because the intuition is so unreliable. Take one real conversation and count two things: how many questions you asked, and how many of them were built out of what the other person had just said rather than starting something new.

The second number is usually very small, including for people who consider themselves curious. It is also the number that moves fastest once you know it, because unlike most things in this area the fix is a single specific move you can decide to make.