My friends in Boston are very intellectually motivated. Many have completed PhDs and hold academic jobs, but even the ones who do not seem taken by an intellectual impulse that motivates the continuous sharing of discovery and invention across a wide swathe of topics, with some (classical music, cooking, self-motivation, business planning, science) coming up more often than others.
The intellectually motivated is a conversationalist par excellence – he manages to intertwine lines of thought between different minds, having one person pick up a thread where another stopped, with both initiator and receiver fully accepting those thoughts as their own. Those conversations are long and thematic, and continue for months and years, taking on lives of their own.
This is a good life.