Autism

I recently asked that an old childhood friend of mine and his gf. Obviously, they found it hard to answer and a 'weird question'. But what they eventually settled upon as answer was "everything, but mainly other people, the current situation of these people, or their own current situation"

Whenever I'm in a group of NTs, I typically just step back and observe. Seems to me that they talk a lot about other people in various ways - those that all or most of the people in the conversation know personally, famous people, and/or people that only the speaker knows and are informing the rest of the party about. This always seems to take up a surprising percentage of the conversations and sneak into other topics as well (e.g. If the topic is about painting a wall, some other person that painted a wall recently will get mentioned).

They also seem to talk about the weather (classic), traffic, the price of various items (petrol, milk, taxis, electricity, etc), any local events, TV shows/movies, and restaurants a lot. But all of it at a very superficial level, no one seems interested in doing deep dives into any particular topic or even being very specific about anything. Any and all information is typically anecdotal with no one being inclined to research further into anything being said, just the fact that it was said by someone seems to be enough.

My general impression is that their goal is to fill up the air with inconsequential words. That seems to tick the "being social and maintaining friends" goal for them, and any sort of information gained (e.g. Restaurant recommendations or life updates on a friend) is secondary.

NT here. Usually, it's more or less whatever.

What has been going on lately, are you working on something specific? What're your hobbies like, etc.

It depends on familiarity with that person, and it depends on what I think that person would be into. I'd love to grok out over games I've played recently, but not everyone is into that, so I assess the situation first. My wife is also NT and she's mostly the same. She wants to grok out over all her pencils, markers, paints and other art stuff.

I usually keep the grokking out to my youtube channel :P

I guess you could classify these things as "small talk", but I like knowing what my friends are doing and what's going on in their lives.

I saw someone else mention they talk mostly about other people, but I don't necessarily do that too much. At least not in the gossipy way.

If you have any more questions, hit me up :)

My impression has always been that NT vs ND conversation differs in a few specific ways:

1. Small talk (or lack thereof).
2. Experience-specific topics (eg. autistic individuals might share a conversation on specific aspects of their experience being on the spectrum, whilst NTs probably have the same conversation but from an NT perspective).
3. Amount of detail/time spent on a topic. Excluding the NT/ND experience topics in (2), I don't think they actually differ all that much in the range of subjects they cover. It is just that they might cover five topics in an hour-long conversation in moderate detail whilst those of us on the spectrum might spend the entire hour discussing a few specific points of one topic. I think this is best explained by the monotropic vs polytropic model.