It started with a particularly talkative fellow on a business trip. I grabbed a bite on a bar stool to kill a couple hours before my flight. The man on the stool beside me loved the sound of his voice.
I had seen a TV program about privacy issues that demonstrated how easily an average person could extract information from strangers by engaging them in a conversation. My new friend brought this to mind because he hadn’t asked me a single question, or paused for that matter, in fifteen minutes. It occurred to me that I could learn a lot about him and tell him nothing about myself, so I did. I figured our time was short, so I should just keep him talking, which proved not to be difficult. This became my Secret Agent Interview Game.
The idea is to build a mental dossier, like an Agent on a secret mission. I just put whatever I can into it. Work, family, hobbies, history, and health are topics people like to talk about. If you like specifics, any innocuous detail is a good starter, like Favourite Breakfast Food. It’s information anyone will readily give out, but it takes practice to work it naturally into conversation.
The easy part is not talking about yourself. People rarely ask more than cursory details in a series of rhetorical questions; name, rank, serial number sort of stuff. The difficulty is in asking good questions to keep someone talking and to steer the conversation in a direction you are interested in, all the while keeping track of it all. It’s just the refined art of conversation, but it sounds cooler if you call it the Secret Agent Interview Game.
It started as a way to pass the time with strangers, but it’s worked it’s way into other relationships. I now remind myself to play it with my wife when she comes home. Ask questions, listen to the answers. It works as a spouse, and I think it will be great as a bartender, or a father. It’s one of the reasons I’d like to have a daughter, I do better with girls. In fact, should I have a son, one of the few sage pieces of advise about women I could offer is just a fundamental of the Secret Agent Interview Game. “Son, do you know how you get a woman to tell you her secrets? You ask her.”
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