If you’ve ever tried chatting with a public figure, you probably know what I mean by “hitting the cache”. They produce slick soundbites that sound smart-ish, and could plausibly be connected to the question you asked, or what you said. But the responses aren’t bespoke. It’s like they have a lookup table, and compare the vague topic and sentiment of what you said to their roster of prepared responses, and return the best match.

This is not unique to public figures. I do it. I think almost everyone does it to some degree. And the degree tends to correlate with how often they get asked the question. (The same way a webserver serves cached versions of the most frequently-requested, slow-to-load pages.) Since public figures get asked the same questions a lot, it makes sense that they serve most traffic from the cache.

The cache can have good stuff in it, but it’s never as interesting as interacting directly with the origin. The cache is stale. The cache is optimized. The cache is safe.

How do we bust the cache?

The first step is to notice that we’re hitting it in the first place. If you are happy with the response you get, there’s no reason to bust the cache.

But if you’re talking to a performer, and they have a fake, glassy-eyed smile, and go through all the correct motions, while obviously being totally checked out, you’re not asking the right questions. Clearly, you are asking boring questions that everyone asks, and saying boring complements that everyone says: otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to leave the interaction on autopilot.

Sometimes, just awareness can bust the cache. The person realizes they’re talking to someone who is listening, rather than just waiting to talk. Respect demands respect.

But people giving canned responses sometimes aren’t even there to notice whether the person they’re talking to is paying attention.

In this case, a better approach is to try to ask a question that they’ve never been asked before — or make an observation astute enough to pull them back to reality. The question should be something that they are excited to answer: something that makes them learn something new by answering. ^[1]

(Corollary: if you’re an interviewer, you have to do a lot of research, so you can build on everything they’ve already said, instead of starting from scratch.)

It sounds like a contradiction that someone could learn something new by answering a question. Isn’t that just spitting out something they already know? No, I don’t think so. Ideas evolve in dialogue, and a good question can demand synthesis of existing knowledge, rather than parroting it; or make someone realize they know something, and have for some time, without knowing that they knew it.

In this way, busting the cache is a gift. It lifts the conversation out of the usual fan/boss/co-worker dynamic, into something more alive. It lets the person you are talking to have novel, original thoughts, rather than repeating the thoughts they’ve had before.

If someone starts talking the moment the other person finishes, chances are it’s a cache read, and not even a cache read responding to the full content: a cache read that was queued up in response to the first part of what was said.

If someone says, “ah, that’s interesting”, or “weird!”, or “hmm, good question”, and then stops to think, agonizingly, for an awkwardly long time, with a sort of bulging wide-eyed look, you might be about to get a fresh shipment of thoughts and feelings.