Fredrik Härén has a habit I keep turning over in my head.
He interviews one person every day about creativity. Not one a month for a podcast. Not one a quarter for a keynote. One a day. He mentions it almost in passing in a LinkedIn post from July 2025, right after a conversation with a marketing consultant: "I try to interview one person per day."
Fredrik came on my podcast, Corey-osity Unleashed, and this is the idea from our talk I return to most. Not his books. Not the keynotes in 75 countries. The daily conversation.
So here is the question I want to put to you. What would change if you had one properly curious conversation every day?
We Are Bad at Predicting Who Wants to Talk
Most of us assume other people don't want to be bothered. The research says we have it backwards.
In 2014, Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder at the University of Chicago ran a set of experiments on commuters. They asked people on trains and buses to do one of three things: talk to a stranger near them, keep to themselves, or commute as normal. The results are in their paper, Mistakenly Seeking Solitude.
The people who talked had a more positive commute. And they lost nothing for it. They rated the ride as no less productive.
Here's the part I love. A separate group of commuters predicted the opposite. They expected a nicer trip in silence. The researchers traced the mistake to one belief: we underestimate how interested other people are in talking to us. And because we never try, we never find out we were wrong.
One more finding from the same paper. In a lab waiting room, the people on the receiving end of a conversation enjoyed it as much as the people told to start one. The good feeling runs both ways.
I saw a thread trending on Reddit this weekend, a photo titled "High school in 2004" with over 18,000 upvotes. One of the best comments said the charm of the era was the lack of phones. I don't think phones stole our curiosity. I think they gave us a polite excuse to skip it.
Deeper Is Less Awkward Than You Fear
Fine, you say. Small talk on a train is pleasant. But a proper conversation, the kind with real questions, feels risky.
Epley went after this too. With Michael Kardas and Amit Kumar, he ran a series of experiments with everyone from graduate students to financial executives, and published them as "Overly Shallow?" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Some pairs of strangers talked about the weather or their favourite TV shows. Others got questions like "When is the last time you cried in front of another person?" and "What are you most grateful for in your life?"
Before the conversations, people expected the deep ones to feel awkward. Afterwards, they reported the conversations as less awkward than they had expected, and they felt happier and more connected to the other person than they had predicted. Across a dozen experiments, people kept underestimating how much they would enjoy talking with someone new.
Read those two studies together and you get a simple picture. We avoid conversations we would enjoy, and when we do talk, we stay shallower than we need to. Both mistakes come from the same place. We guess wrong about the other person.
The Question After the Question
Curiosity isn't the first question. Anyone asks the first question. "How was your weekend?" "What do you do?"
Curiosity is the second question.
A team at Harvard studied this in live conversations, including face-to-face speed dates, and published it in 2017 as It Doesn't Hurt to Ask. People who asked more questions, and follow-up questions in particular, left their conversation partners liking them more. Speed daters who asked more follow-ups got more agreement to a second date.
The researchers explain the effect through something they call responsiveness: listening, understanding, validation and care. A follow-up question proves you heard the answer. Nothing else does it as well.
And the catch? People in the study did not expect question-asking to make them more likeable. So once again, we underrate the thing which works.
When a critique of the speed-dating analysis came out, the same authors published a reply and stood by the result: asking more questions, especially follow-ups, increases liking.
What Hosting a Podcast Taught Me
I host Corey-osity Unleashed. The name is a pun on my surname, and it is also a confession. I like asking questions more than I like answering them.
Every guest shows up with something I didn't see coming. Garry Ridge left me with a single daily check: "Did I do my best to learn today?" Ian Pettigrew made me rethink hope as something you practise, not a mood you wait for. Fredrik left me with this post.
None of those ideas came from my first question. They came from the third or fourth, after the guest had warmed up and the rehearsed answers ran out.
Here's the uncomfortable bit. A podcast forces good habits on you. You prepare. You listen for the follow-up. You let silence sit. A normal workday forces none of it. In a corridor or a one-to-one, it's easy to nod along while you plan your reply. Same person, different habit.
Fredrik's daily practice closes the gap. It turns the studio behaviour into a normal day.
Why This Matters More If You Lead People
My research found 99.5% of people surveyed have had at least one type of bad boss. Almost everybody. My view? Plenty of those bosses weren't cruel. They were incurious. They didn't ask. Or they asked one question, took the first answer, and moved on.
Your team is full of people you have never had a proper conversation with. You know their job titles and their current tickets. You don't know what they would change if they ran the place, what they are proud of outside work, or what worries them about next quarter.
And if the Epley research holds at work, they are more willing to tell you than you think.
A daily curious conversation isn't a programme. No budget line. No survey. One person, one question, and then the question after the question.
The Five-Day Version
Fredrik does one a day, every day. You don't need to start there. Try five working days.
Pick one person each day. Rotate. Someone on your team, a peer from another department, the new starter, the person on reception, a customer. Pick at least one person you would normally walk past.
Bring one real question. Not "how's it going?" Try one of these:
- What's the most interesting problem on your plate right now?
- What did you want to be before you ended up doing this?
- What's something you know about this company which most of us don't?
- What would you stop doing here tomorrow if it were your call?
Ask the second question. Whatever they say, follow it. "What makes it interesting?" "What happened next?" "Why this one?" This is where the conversation starts.
Talk less than half the time. You are there to learn, not to be interesting.
Write down one thing. At the end of the day, one line. What did you learn from this person you didn't know yesterday?
At the end of the week, read your five lines. I'd bet at least one of them changes how you work with someone.
The Real Cost of Skipping It
Every day you don't ask, you guess. You guess what your team wants, what your colleagues think, what your customers need. The Epley and Kardas studies show we guess badly about other people, and in the same direction every time. We assume they are less interested, less open and more awkward than they turn out to be.
Fredrik has built his working life on the opposite assumption. He assumes the next person has something worth hearing, and he goes and asks.
So who is your one person tomorrow, and what's the question after the question?