This is actually great advice. Not to scare anyone away (since I know the point is to have interesting conversation....), but the techniques discussed are essentially identical to what they teach during sorority recruitment practice. (I assume it's the same for fraternities, not that anyone cares). During recruitment, each girl will talk to hundreds of potential recruits in a short amount of time and has to be a very skilled conversationalist in order to assess the personality and interests of the other person. You're taught to steer very basic small talk ("What's your major?" "Where are you from?") into directions to find something unique and interesting about the person, and you only have a couple minutes to do it. They practice this for many, many hours a day leading up to recruitment. After a few weeks of this, you really can talk to anybody about anything.

The point of the post is to make conversations interesting, so you need to be able to steer the talk from mundane to something better, without making the other person feel like they're being pulled to one of your pet topics. Best way to do this is practice. Improv comedy is actually a related (and equally practicable) skill, interestingly enough...