Two or three stories worth a dinner, every day
It's called Smalltalking: at the end of your daily briefing, two or three short true stories you've never heard, chosen to be told out loud. Read them once and they're yours — and each one tells you when to drop it.
- You read news all day, yet at dinner there's nothing worth telling: everyone already knows it, or it splits the table, or it's just grim.
- The most interesting people you know never quote today's headlines — they always know the story behind things. You wonder where they find them.
- You've tried the 'fun facts' pages: anecdotes everyone has seen, half of them unverified, and the one you retell gets debunked at the table.
Turn it on, if you want it
Smalltalking stays off until you choose it: one switch in Settings (or the card in the Overview), free trial included. The rest of your briefing doesn't change by a word.
Every day, at the end of your briefing
Two or three short stories, each from a different world: the hidden mechanism behind something you touch daily, the origin nobody suspects, the number that recalibrates how you see a common thing. At most one comes near your interests; the others roam.
Tell them — one read is enough
Each story is written the way you'd say it: one protagonist, one turn, at most two numbers, ending on the detail people repeat. Underneath, the right moment to use it — 'when travel comes up' — so it resurfaces exactly there.
Why the news doesn't work at a dinner table
Today's news is the worst possible repertoire for conversation: the big stories everyone has already read, the divisive ones start the wrong argument, and much of the rest is bleak. Small talk runs on different material — stories without a date, that work identically in five years and ask nobody to pick a side.
It's a genre of its own, and it has to be built on purpose. That's why Smalltalking doesn't summarise the news cycle: it looks for the story behind things — systems, origins, crafts, people nobody famous mentions — where nobody at the table has the advantage of having read it this morning.
What makes a story retellable
The test isn't 'is it interesting?' — it's 'can you retell it tomorrow, from memory, after one read?'. To pass, a story needs one protagonist, one turn and at most two numbers: if it needs a preamble, a chart or a footnote, it doesn't get in.
And it has to open a conversation, not close it. A list-style fun fact produces an 'huh' and then silence; a good story produces a question — 'wait, how?', 'since when?'. That's the difference between trivia and conversation, and it's the bar every story is picked against.
Never the same story twice
Every story declares its own territory — 'venice canal maintenance', 'barcode origin story' — and the system remembers them all: new stories must dig somewhere else, not next door. If the model insists on a well-worn territory, that day ships with one story fewer, or none at all.
It's the same discipline as the gem that rescues empty days, which came first and learned its lessons early: a beta reader noticed that seven very different headlines were one story told seven times, and wrote in. Since then the check is on the territory, not the headline.
True, and safe to repeat in public
You'll be telling these stories to real people, so the bar isn't 'plausible' — it's 'holds up when checked'. Stories are written only where the facts are solid; an uncertain figure gets written around instead of invented; and the famous 'facts' that are actually false — goldfish memory, the Great Wall from space — are banned by rule: they're exactly the ones that get you corrected at the table.
There's a dinner rule too: no politics, no religion, no fresh tragedy, nothing that splits the table or ruins an appetite. Charm, not edges.
A touch of you, and plenty of world
At most one story a day may come near your interests: that's the one that makes you the expert at the table, the bridge between what you follow and whoever is listening. The others roam wide on purpose — history, science, language, geography, the economics of everyday things — because small talk exists to step outside your bubble, not to confirm it.
If you listen to your briefing as a podcast, the stories close the episode: they arrive spoken, already in the tone you'll retell them in.
Listen to a sample briefing
30 seconds, the product's real voice.