September 15 2025

know the players of the game

my initial theory

I brought up this working hypothesis with a few friends.

The best conversation trick in all walks of life is to know what’s best or most prestigious in as many fields as possible.

My logic was along the lines of this: Everyone is obviously involved in some industry, domain or has some interest. By knowing the ‘best’ in their industries, or hobbies and being able to name-drop it in your conversation with them, it prompts the discussion towards a direction they are obviously educated or passionate about. And people talk the most when they are knowledgeable and opinionated.

Say the biggest football clubs, the most prestigious private equity firms or the greatest fashion designers.

It’s like talking to foreign friend and casually dropping a national dish or word in their native language. They’ll go ‘wait, how do you know that’. My experience suggests a similar reaction with this approach, knowing their interest.

With the suitable follow-up, you’ve set yourself up for a mildly less awkward conversation. The hallmark wisdom of conversing is to get people talking about themselves.

I got pushed back that this theory assumes that one must be interested in prestige for this to work. Similarly, with the wrong person, you also come off with the risk of being unable to discuss further beyond your surface understanding: being able to talk the talk but not walk the walk.

I’ve spent some time refining the idea.

your interest should be benchmarked

I’ve since consolidated my theory to this:

Know as many players in as many games as possible. And know the benchmarks of the game.

I use the word _game_ as a loose term in place of industry, domain, hobby, interest etc.

I think it ties into knowing the nuances in excellence for each field or art - it gives you something to notice and look for. A side benefit of basically trying a bunch of things in life is that you get to experience what is hard. Shaving 5 minutes off a marathon seems easy on the outside, until you hit the roads and try it out yourself.

Just to name a few examples:

  • To talk to a runner, having a mental benchmark of what a fast km is helps ground the conversation.
  • To talk about watches, know the main brands and the ‘if you know, you know’ type of features of watches, like the type of band or nuances in bezel color.
  • To talk about coffee, know the difference between espresso machines, cold brew/drip coffees, or the AeroPress.
  • To talk about suits, know the difference between an Italian vs American tailored cut or notice collar gaps and oversized suits.

Asking questions is an innocuous way of employing this technique, without appearing sort of overly aggressive or dismissive of their field. You don’t have to actually know too much about how the espresso machine actually makes the coffee - you just need to bring up that you are aware of the difference and nuances of their interest.

getting the ball rolling

This strategy works best for getting the ball rolling - once their initial comments are out, you switch back to the regular conversation tricks from Dale Carnegie or whatever power law from Robert Greene. Or whatever rocks your boat.

It gets the awkwardness out of the way.

Emil once told me about his friend who claims to have watched movies just by having read their Wikipedia page summary. This strategy sort of reminds me of that, just don’t cap too hard though.

I guess it definitely takes some innate curiosity to be able to channel effort to grasp the greats across various domains. Maybe there is an optimal strategy for knowing the players and benchmarks in this list of 4-5 domains and being able to deploy it with 80% of the population; I’m thinking knowing one sport (e.g, Basketball/Football) will be pretty high leverage. Knowing the latest of something (celebs/songs/movies) also works quite well. I will have to put more thought into refining a more optimal list, though - perhaps an essay for another day.

Footnotes:

I wrote this mini essay to get my productive spirits up again. I’ve been having lots of thoughts on AI, policy, and general reflections recently, resulting in too many half-finished pieces. They shall see the light of day soon.