This is Help Wanted, the show that makes your work work for you.

I'm Jason Pfeiffer, editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

And I'm money expert Nicole Lapin.

On Tuesdays, Jason and I answer the helpline and help callers solve their work problems. And on Thursdays, I give you one way to improve your work and build a career or company you love.

And it starts now.

Nicole, I have a theory about small talk. Ready?

Ready. I hate it.

Okay. I was just going to say, do you like small talk? No. Who likes

small talk? And that's the next part. Does anybody like small talk? I don't know. Nobody likes

small talk. Maybe chatty people. No, nobody likes small talk. If you surveyed 100 people, you said,

do you like small talk? Zero percent of them would say they like small talk. So here's the

theory, right? Everybody says that they hate it. And yet everybody is stuck making small talk.

So my theory is that everybody is stuck doing a thing that they think somebody else wants to do.

But in fact, both parties want to escape it. And the

problem is that we don't know how. That's my theory. So then how do we make big talk?

That's a good question. How do we make big talk? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today in a way.

This conversation today, inspired by this thing that was posted on Reddit, the thing

that's eating the entire internet. We're just going to read it. It's a little bit long, but I think

it's really useful. What we're going to hear is a person who doesn't feel like they are good

at socializing, which I think that they're quating socializing to small talk, and they're worried that it is

impacting their career, which I think is a very interesting thing to unpack. So let me read this,

and then Nicole, you and I shall discuss. Okay, here's the person on Reddit. Just a few months

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