Do you do any sports? Tennis/golf clubs are great for meeting people. Gyms as well. You can't expect to have a new bff in 2 days, but you will meet people from all walks of life and maybe it will click with one or two.

As for the talking part, I think people need to be good listeners, but at start, people need to be great storytellers. If you have a story or two about you/something, that is funny and you can intrigue people, you can be sure folks will stick around...

'Regarding the recent crime wave, when I was a teenager and I went camping with some friends and we noticed we ran out of toilet paper while one of us was on the can... not having a lot of options, we had to resort to crime... we went around trailers..... etc'

Seems harmless enough, but its a story I tell a lot with a bit more details and pauses, takes about 5 minutes, makes people laugh (we were caught stealing the Toilet paper) and opens up folks.

If you have a few funny real stories to tell, you will always find engagement from folks much nicer than 'ohh so what do you do? any kids? etc' that most people end up doing

From the body language you describe it sounds like those people don't actually want to continue talking with you (for whatever reason). Carnegie is great. Follow up by reading a book or two about body language. While it's far from a hard science, it'll give you some more insight into what a person is thinking/feeling.

I think the Carnegie book isn’t that great, because it’s easy to misinterpret the rules. An often mentioned strategy is to be a good listener. This gets repeated ad nauseam, but is it actually true? I found that people become more open if you put a story on the table first. It’s like an investment. You open yourself a little bit and tell something about yourself, whereas a question about the other person asks them to trust you first.

This is true. The first step in any relationship is establishing goodwill or even just lack of malevolence (which if it's romantic and you're pursuing women is extremely important). Everything else comes after. People want to talk openly about themselves, but not unilaterally.

That's true. I read Carnegie's book as a teenager and for a long time tried to be the best listener, which I think I became. I asked thoughtful questions and rarely opened up myself. That's not the way things work. In my experience, one needs to have interesting stories before other people open up.

My wife is actually working on growing a company to solve the new-to-town-how-do-I-meet-people problem, which we had when we moved to Austin. She runs speed friending events and helps folks who hate small talk figure out what to ask in conversations to break through it. Right now she's actually hiring people in other cities and teaching them how to run the same sort of events.

What city are you in?

(Feel free to email me)

Me, too. Moving to a new city really sucks. You lose the "networking effect" of becoming friends with your friend's friends. Makes me miss college.