Conversation starters

Using about $4,000 they had saved up — Richard was an engineer, Chris worked in banking — they opened Conversation in a space in Kensington, in the unincorporated Berkeley Hills, and filled it with rented furniture and houseplants. They assembled a cohort of 22 part-time conversationalists with an ad that called for “warm people, all ages who can converse easily with others.” It was an eclectic bunch that included a few Berkeley students, a retired mechanic, a cancer survivor, an artist whose husband was a physics professor at the university, and a former marketing honcho named Engel Devendorf. 

Their collection of chatters were picked based on simple metrics: Did Christine and Richard feel comfortable chatting with them? And were they good at listening and talking? (As someone who converses with strangers for a living, I think Richard and Christine are pretty good at both.) And they didn’t want any mental health professionals, even if many responded to the classified ad that they put in the local papers. Conversation, the business (but also, arguably, the action), wasn’t meant to replace therapy, nor did they think it could.

Conversation officially opened on January 6, 1973.

It was a business that did exactly what its founders promised: The Braunlichs had set up 14 semi-private booths, all tastefully decorated, with an unlimited supply of coffee and tea for every person who stopped by. An early brochure also promised wine, but that idea was quickly put on ice; it’s probably not a good idea for conversationalists to get hammered.

The business, Chris and Richard admit, didn’t gain much traction from the start. By the first month or so, they had gotten only around 40 people through the door. Their optimism about the power of conversation was kneecapped by the reality that it is a tough sell to get people in the door for anything, let alone conversations, for $5 for the first half-hour, and $3 for every subsequent half-hour — the equivalent of $50 in 2025 for an hour of chat — even with a bottomless pour of warm beverages. (Students and over-65ers could get in for about half that, $4 an hour, which is still a pretty penny.) Some people thought that it was just a coffee shop with a high cover charge.

Their clientele, as Devendorf told one news outlet, were generally people with disposable income and some problems that didn’t warrant professional help. An early customer was a divorcée who was new to the neighborhood, who needed someone, anyone to chat with. One regular was a theater actor who used Conversation to run his lines; another was interested in getting car repair advice from a mechanic.

Whatever issues Conversation had, it seems, could have feasibly been addressed with more time. There was some demand here that they had tapped into, even if they were shedding $1,000 a month to keep the place open.

What mainly sank the business, according to the Braunlichs, was the news coverage it got. After getting written up by the local press almost immediately, the story of Conversation went global, often with salacious, sometimes nasty headlines. The Oakland Tribune dubbed Conversation a place “where talk isn’t cheap.” Newsweek called it “a sadly modern kind of coffeehouse”; the Toronto Star had an especially bad-faith read, branding the Braunlichs as employing “verbal prostitutes.” The National Enquirer, of all places, gave their business the fairest  explanation of what Conversation’s whole deal was all about.

“There were people who thought we were out to rip off everybody. There were people who thought, ‘You guys are doing a wonderful thing.’ There were people, just a few, who just took it for what it was, but not very many,” Richard told me.

Unfortunately, their 15 minutes of notoriety didn’t bring many new customers. Whatever curiosity prospective customers may have had was obliterated by the press surrounding them. Ads on easy-listening radio stations and local newspapers weren’t enough to keep the conversation going. 

Conversation shut down after 10 months or so; the Braunlichs were out $10,000 in total, but at least they didn’t get into debt. They kept their day jobs while Conversation was open, too.

Speaking from the vantage of 2025, they were clear, over the course of multiple conversations, that Conversation would not, could not change the world. They had no grand ambitions about it beyond the idea that it would be nice to get people talking to one another. 

Today, everyone seems to crave conversation more than ever. San Francisco is overrun with companies offering chatbots, aspiring third spaces, friend-making services, and dinner parties that promise to ameliorate the loneliness we’ve created for ourselves. They all promise in ways big and small to change the world; none of them ever quite do. 

Most aren’t even able to help two strangers have decent conversation.

The couple now lives in a more rural part of the East Bay, and spend most of their free time working not in conversation, but in conservation: Chris is the board chair and CEO at the Orinda-based nonprofit ConservationVIP, which organizes volunteer conservation trips to far-flung global destinations. 

Their past as conversation maestros has come in handy here, too.

“Although the purpose of the organization is environmental, what people usually remark on when they come back is how much they enjoyed being around other people,” said Christine.

It’s telling that most research on the contemporary loneliness epidemic notes that rates of people who feel lonely have gradually risen since the 1970s. The Braunlichs may not have known it at the time, but the idea that everybody could use a person to talk to once in a while, was as true then as it is now.