The Art and Science of Gathering

how we gather. In her book The Art of Gathering, Priya encourages us to focus on what actually matters when we get together. What I wanted to do is detail hangele gathering from the stuff of gathering, from food, from hosting. Even this Martha Stewart archetype that like, the way to host well is to prepare a crudities three days in advance, to be an expert in food, to be an expert in floral, to be an expert in aesthetics, and all

of those things create beauty and meaning. But they're the hygiene, right, it's not actually what do you do with these people on today's show? How we can stop obsessing about the stuff of weddings, dinner, parties, and celebrations, and instead remember why we're coming together in the first place. I'm Maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plants, a show about who we are and who we become in

the face of a big change. If you're anything like me, when you first think of a gathering, logistics are top of mind, details like location or what should beyond the menu. But since I'm not a detail oriented person and I'm terrible at logistics, organizing gatherings stresses me out. And this is pretty unfortunate because those of you who listen to the show know how much I love connecting with people. It's my favorite thing to do. Prea's work has changed

the game for me. She's helped me rethink why and how we should get together. I think one thing that really drew me to your story, Prea, and to your work is that you approach the art of gathering from such a fresh perspective. Right It's not from the vantage point of an event planner or an organizer, but instead as an expert in group dialogue and conflict resolution. And so I'm wondering what inspired you to work in this

area in the first place. I think, perhaps like most of us, so much of my work very much stem from how I was raised and what I bumped into as a child, then as a young person. I'm by racial. My mother is Indian, an Indian immigrant, and my father is white American, And for the first ten years of their life and their marriage together, we lived in a number of different countries. I was born in Zimbabwe, and we moved to the Maldives and to Indonesia, and eventually

moved back to the States. And within a year of moving to Virginia, they separated. And when they did, everyone myself included, was shocked because they never fought. And so that was the first signal to me, like, oh, all is not what it might appear to be. All is not necessarily always well, and that conflict isn't always observable, that there's many codes that are happening within a relationship.

But then within two years they remarried other people, and I would leave my mother and stepfather's house and it was and still is an in British kind of globally minded New age, meditating progressive household, and I would, I mean, I would come downstairs in that home, and the first question that I would be asked in the morning, is like, tell us about your dream, like, tell us about your dream last night, like literally like, and our conversations would

be about dream interpretation. And then I would travel to my father and stepmother's house. And it was and still is a white American Evangelical Christian conservative Republican church, going often twice a week, dogs in the house, meat eating, kind of like all Americana. And I became a contact resolution facilitator in college in part, I think because I lived in these two households in which how they began their meals was completely different, how they celebrated or marked

indication was completely different. What they considered obvious was completely different. You know, you had had extensive experience in the conflict negotiation space in facilitating group dialogue. Was there a defining moment when you realized this work really meaningfully intersects with the way that we think about gatherings, because I don't think everyone would have connected those dots. Such a good question. You're incredibly insightful, and I actually don't think i've shared

this before. I knew that what I was trained to do as a group facilitator, how to connect people quickly. How to get people off their scripts? Right, if you're coming together, how do you prime these people? And how what do you do in a room to get them to not say what their pre prepared stump speech was, but kind of shift them into a lane of conversation where they're surprised themselves by what they're sharing or revealing.

How do you create the conditions where people are open to one of my teachers, Keith Johnstone, calls being altered by each other? And I knew that so much of what kind of outside of this field of facilitation were taught around groups and gathering tends to be about stuff, right. It's almost like the proxy in the bookstore or the library is cookbooks. Right, if you want to if you're

going to gather, here's a cookbook. And I what I wanted to do is detangle gathering from the stuff of gathering, from food from hosting the Martha Stewart archetype that like, the way to host well is to put crewetaise, you know, prepare your crew totaise three days in advance. And this is there's nothing wrong with that, but it becomes so gelled into this is the only form of gathering and to be an expert in food, to be an expert in floral, to be an expert in aesthetics, and all

of those things create beauty and meaning. But they're the hygiene, right, it's not actually what do you do with these people? And what I wanted to do is kind of write a book for the rest of us. And you know, I'm not a good cook. I you know, I don't have a fancy house. I you know, I wanted to demystify and kind of bring what facilitators are taught to do into every day democratic, normal gathering spaces, whatever normal means to you in your context or community. And basically

it's like that ratatui. Like anyone can cook, anyone can gather, And I wanted to demystify how anybody can create a meaningful gathering for their people in a way that is transformative, memorable and isn't a waste of time. Yeah, and when you approach it with a human first perspective, it really does feel accessible for so many of us. I mean, I am the worst at logistics and planning. I am not a detail oriented person. Organizing things is like my

worst nightmare. I've yet to enter that phase of adulting, and so it felt like you were just speaking my language, because I felt like you were making gathering something that felt so inaccessible to me as defined by society at large, because I am so bad at that sort of stuff, something that maybe I could thrive and excel at. That makes me so happy. So let's dig into this very valuable wisdom that you have, which is we focus so

much on the logistics of gatherings rather than the human component. Yeah, we're just forgetting. We're losing touch with the primary goal of gathering. And so you say that one of the first things we should do is ask ourselves a very foundational question, which is the why question. Why are we really gathering? Do you mind saying more about that? The biggest mistake we make when we gather is we assume that the purpose is obvious and shared. Oh I know

what a wedding is, and so does everyone else. Oh I know what a board meeting is. Oh I know what a dinner party is. And then because we assume we know what it's for, we skip too quickly to form right long eye, white dress or red dress, going in a circle seven times round a fire or board meeting. You know, one long brown table, twelve white men, and instead when we pause and actually ask, Okay, why are

we doing this? What is the purpose? What is the purpose of this of my birthday party or my birthday not even birthday party? What is the purpose of my birthday this year? What do I most want to mark? What do I most need in my life? Do I want to reconnect with a friends who've actually lost touch with and as I feel like I'm kind of starting to lose my way, I actually want to double down?

And what would it look like if I actually hosted a party for just the friends who I knew before I was twenty and we all share or talk about or do something we used to do together and then reflect on who we've become and what our regrets are and how do I find my way again? Or is like the deepest need of my life in this moment

to reconnect with a sense of adventure? And actually, what I want to do for my birthday this year is like go to the fishing docks and watch the fisher people pull in their fish at five am and invite my friends who would only say yes to that crazy invitation to come with me. And so often because we don't pause to actually ask why our imagination gets incredibly stuck and we focus on perfecting the forms that we already know. And so when you pause and actually ask

why am I doing this? What is the need? It actually opens up an entire world of how we could actually spend our time together. But it's also incredibly relevant and moving because you're then inviting specific people that makes sense for that need, that feel like they're of use rather than being used. Right, It's not like how many people can I get at this party? Oh gosh, it's like, oh, who are the people in my life who give me courage?

What if this year I only invited them to come together and bring me like poems or objects that give them courage because I just need a little bit of courage blown my way this year. Yeah. But because we're like okay, candles and pointy hats, we're actually going on autopilot and perpetuating forms that no longer necessarily make any sense. Yeah.

You say that a common mistake is to confuse having a category with having a purpose, right, Yes, that if you identify the category, Oh it's a birthday party, it's a funeral, it's a baby shower, that naturally lends itself to a purpose, but it's actually a very distinct process to define the purpose of the gathering. And there was one anecdote that really stuck out to me, and it

was around a woman's baby shower. And the whole time I'm reading this passage, I'm like, you go, girl, like she was so awesome in the way that she was thinking about the true goals she had for this baby shower. Do you mind sharing that story? Sure? I mean, I love the example of a baby shower in part because people have such strong feelings about them either way. So I've talked about them a lot because we feel like, oh,

there's only one way to do a shower. I don't want to have a pin a diaper on a baby thing, like why am I doing this? It's often because we're so stuck to form. It's either like I don't want a baby shower or like I'm going to go through this thing and it's kind of I find it kind of silly. But my community wants to bless me, and this is the form that we do in our community instead to pause and actually ask what does my actual

need right now? I'll give a couple of examples, so one is I was advising as coaching a woman on her baby shower. She had two different parts of her of this kind of baby shower. One is, she was terrified of labor. And she invited six of her friends and each of them brought a bead of a different color to put together into a necklace, and each bead basically representative value that she already has. They know her to have, right, your sense of bravery, your sense of awe,

your sense of humor, your sense of wonder. And as her friends, as her mentors, they've seen this quality that is already within her, and they were inviting her to tap into something that was already within her to know that she could do this. And then they put that into a necklace for her to wear or at least

take with her to the hospital. And then there's a second part of the ritual in which in the evening she and her husband invited friends, men and women to come have dinner together and to share stories of different elements of the things that they loved about how they

were raised. And part of the act of that that was so radical, I mean, it's so simple, was that it was inviting both men and women, people who have complex relationships with their parents, like all of us, right to share, to come into conversation and to reflect together. They're shifting the culture. Who should be part of the

conversations around parenting just the mothers? No, not if you want to coequal parenting, right, who should be invited early on, well before you give birth to think about, well, how are we going to structure these rules? And so that dinner not just was helpful to them, but it began to shift the assumption of all of their roles around how they want to begin to raise their children. Yeah,

I absolutely love this story for many reasons. I think one of them is, you know, this family together is figuring out why it is that they want or need to have a baby shower and in the mother articulating

I'm terrified of labor. It helps reduce stigma around the pregnancy experience absolutely where you know, women are told in society, oh, it's supposed to be this magical time where you're glowing and you can't wait to birth new life, and that does not reflect the reality of so many women's experience going through pregnancy and giving birth and the kind of anxiety and alienation that can accompany every part of that process, and so I love that in defining the purpose and

meaning of her gathering fully, it had a broader societal purpose to it as well. Absolutely, So to summarize, we want to ask ourselves that why question, why are we really gathering? And we want to commit to this bold, sharp purpose? And I want to know what are just a couple of examples of purpose statements that you think are really good, just to give our listeners a sense of the kind of specificity that you have in mind when you're talking about purpose. That's such a great question,

you know. Taking a simple example of a pool party, okay, right, neighbors is like, let's let's have a pool party. So an unhelpful purpose is let's have our neighbors swim. Right, let's get in the pool, right, that's an activity. A good purpose is let's toast a pool party in order to remind and help shape our children so that they know that neighbors aren't scary. A helpful purpose helps you make decisions at the deepest essence, What is it that you actually need in this moment? Well, it's been a

long time since we've actually brought people together. And I grew up in a neighborhood in which children ran between households, and I want to see if we could create that for our children. And I really deeply want them to know their neighbors and feel like this is a place where everybody's looking out for each other. All of a sudden, you have your marching orders. Okay, so we're going to

invite our neighbors, not our friends. We're going to invite the people within three walking blocks, or we're going to invite people within our apartment building, or it gives you an orientation, It helps you understand why are we doing this, and how do we begin to think about who to invite? Yeah, and this speaks to something you've already mentioned, which is

the next step is to figure out who. And what I found so interesting that you share in your work is that a guest list is as much about who you don't invite as it is about who you do invite. That was so interesting and it really flipped it around for me. And the reason you say this is that we can tend towards over inclusion, right to avoid hurt feelings, to pay people back for times they've invited us to something.

But you caution caution against this because you say that way of thinking can really jeopardize the quality of the gathering. You know, you may have been raised the way I heard this quite often, like the more the merrier, that's always one more seat at our table. And there's there's a spirit of generosity in that, and I and I think gathering is an act of generosity. But in part because we don't ask what the need is first, We actually don't know how to exclude people or why to

exclude people. We have no rationale for excluding people, right, we back into it in our work context. You show up to a meeting, maybe it's a TBD hold on your calendar. You show up and it's a you know, a product design meeting, and you enter the zoom room or you enter into the conference room and you know, you look around, it's like, why is legal here? It changes the whole tenor of the meeting. Yeah, exactly right. But we're always doing this, we're kind of backing into it.

You almost like what is this thing for? Based on who's in the room. And when we don't first ask what is the need? Why are we actually here? We over include and it's not rocket science. Like often if it's four people or six people, eight people. All of us are like this. We calculate what we share based on the person who we least know in the room, not with the person with whom we have the best relationship with. It's a different party based on who's there.

It's a different meaning, it's a different wedding, and so who you invite actually shifts the conversation. Speaking of weddings, when we're back from the break, Priya and I take the time machine back to my wedding day. Because weddings can be especially thorny. They have a lot to teach us about the art and science of gathering. We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plan.

You know, it's interesting, I'm thinking back to my wedding planning process and I'm just remembering that Jimmy and I and I don't think we're alone in this. Part of the guest planning process was literally trying to take account of all the people who had invited us to their weddings. Right, you really, you really don't want to hurt people's feelings. You want to create a sense that there's reciprocity. By the way, if you're listening to this and we're at

my wedding. You were on the top list. You're not on this, You're not on this back, You're you're all in. Okay, just to be clear, No, But more seriously, I think you talk in the book about how Obama's aunt told him if everyone's family, no one is family, and you've kind of extended that to this domain as well, which is,

if everyone is invited, no one's invited. You capture the sentiment. Well, you have a phrase called the kindness of exclusion, and and I like, help me out here, prey, because I do feel like if I were to planet wedding today, i'd probably go through the same process because I don't want to upset anybody. And so I want you to help me build courage in this moment to think differently about who is on that guest list and who's not

on the guest list. Gathering is an act of line drawing, and we don't like to think of it that way, but it is. It's an act of persuasion. I have a vision for a specific time, in a specific place, to move your body in your mind into that space right with these other people, like won't you come on in?

And by definition like sometimes the constraint is the living room or the porch, right, But every gathering is an act of line drawing what is the need and given that, who is in and who is out for that temporary moment in time, And there's certain gatherings where who is

in and who is out becomes incredibly symbolic. Right. So, Yeah, some of the gatherings were talking about weddings, baby showers, those end up becoming also kind of like litmus tests, right, a friendship, and so it's just starting to deeply become intentional about why are you actually doing this? So, so part of what's complex about modern life is most of us are negotiating multiple value systems at the same time. Yes, well said, and so in a wedding there are multiple

obligations that actually come from different value systems. So one value system is the collective value system of reciprocity, and some of that is a collective reciprocity. You and I both have Indian backgrounds, like many Indian weddings, and my cousins eies are like literally seven hundred eight hundred people. Yeah, my parents wedding head over a thousand people, Yeah, exactly, And we look at that from the West, at least from the US. Often it's like, how do you even

know all those people? But that's actually a very specific individualistic value system in which the assumption is you or your parents have an individual link and maybe even a meaningful relationship to everyone there. That is just not true. Yeah, it's a value system in which it's actually multiple generations of reciprocity and who gave who and loan and who gave who When one person's cousin was sick and they slept on their living room floor thirty five years ago,

then they right. It's a different cultural system. And so in a wedding, the planning process becomes this incredibly powerful set of negotiations and conversations between the couple and often between the couple and the parents. And so one of the reasons weddings are so chaotic or feel, you know, emotionally incredibly difficult, is because it's a lot of cutting, and it's a lot of line drawing, and often we're sorting ourselves out. Do I fundamentally want to invite everybody

else who invited me to their weddings? And we find we'll just make it twenty more people. It'll be a larger wedding than we thought. But I want to be part of communities of reciprocity, and that's what we've landed on. And that's okay, that's a legitim at purpose. The core purpose of your wedding might actually be to honor the generation behind you. That's okay, right, I'm not like that's why this is actually a freeing construct is because you

decide what the need is. The problem is going in blindly and kind of backing into stuff and basically not choosing your life. Yeah, and I think it's freeing. And it's also not a one time decision either when it comes to planning a wedding in terms of negotiating those values. Different values can express themselves over the course of an event. Right. So when it came to my wedding, you know, my husband comes from a Chinese tradition, my parents come from

Indian tradition, and so on. The guest list were absolutely people that we may have never met before, but we're very important to both of our parents. That was just it almost felt like a non negotiable that written into the purpose of our wedding statement was making our parents happy, making our families happy. On the other hand, you know, Jimmy and I poured a ton of time into thinking thoughtful about how to create this Chindian ceremony where there

was the blending of two cultures. We spent a lot of time writing vows and yeah, we felt that was the most sacred aspect of the whole ceremony. And so that was one moment where we had to part from cultural expectations around inclusion. And I still remember to this day, was so uncomfortable writing to a few people saying Hey, we're actually going to do a kid's free ceremony was so painful, I think, I mean, my mom was probably just like, what is going on in this Western world

that we live in. It's ridiculous. Yes, of course it was so antithetical to the inclusive vibes of an Indian wedding. But that was a moment in the process where Jimmy and I were able to draw a line for ourselves and say, Okay, look, kids can come to the celebration part the reception, but we just need the ceremony to really be an adult gathering because of the way that we're approaching it. And so I like the complexity there, which is like you don't have to give everything, but

you also don't have to take everything. It's an gootiable process throughout, and you're making distinctions. So part of what you're doing is even within a contract of a wedding. And again this is true for conferences, this is true for retreats. Is there are multiple gatherings within the gathering, and so you're actually having some sophistication to say, at this place, this is the need, and therefore this is

going to be the circle. At this place, this is the need, and therefore this is going to be the circle. You know. And so you and you're then fiance having these conversations with each other, having these conversations with your parents. You know, I heard you say earlier our part of our purpose, or written to our wedding statement, was to make our parents happy. You know. That is like there, I'm sure there were certain things you would not do

that would make them happy. I might slightly shift it to say what I hear part of that statement is is to in certain important ways to honor the traditions and desires of our parents. That's right, and in other ways to break from that, to carve out new ways. Exactly to know what to break and what to keep. To summarize for our listeners, we've talked about the why question why we gather. We've also talked about the who right, who should be on the guest list, who should not

be on the guest list? How should we think about where we gather? Rooms come with scripts, right, So, like how you behave in a nightclub is different than how one behaves the same person right behaves when they walk into a conference room. And there's going to be a common theme here. You're who should stem from what the need is, what the purposes of the gathering. You're aware should also serve the purpose and also timing of day so you know, I'm a contact resolution facilitator and in

the context that I often work with. Some of that is also power power related, right if you're bringing together a team or are a family where a lot of the rupture is actually about some people having too much power and other people not having enough, you don't host the gathering at the site of power, right like so, so some of that is like literally, who's turf is this on and where? And do you have it in a neutral place or do you have in your home

or do you have it whatever it is. Yeah, and because we are trained to act in certain ways in certain environments and bring expectations to certain environments. I think the biggest lesson from you is rewrite the order of operations. Do not book the venue first, which I think is all of our instincts. Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna book a venue and then let that dictate everything else. It's going to dictate how many people I can invite, it's going to dictate the kinds of events and in activities

we can engage in. We're like cooking our lasso to the wrong star exactly, you got it. Yeah, And I mean just some kind of the math. So density creates different kind of behavior, meaning how many actually bodies are within a square footage borders kind of matter. So an example at a restaurant, this is one of my favorite tips. My friends often like they're like, don't want to be seen with me because I will go and insist on

ordering the chairs in a restaurant. If you have six people going together to a table, instead of having three people on one side and three people on the other side of the table, put one person on each basically the head. Otherwise you're like leaking energy. You want to close the circle because that actually shifts the conversation. It actually gives a border in a way that turns two lines into a group, and the conversation changes. The way people feel safe or not changes, who can enter an

exit changes. But we often assume, however the room is set up, is the way it has to be, and like facilitation one to one at any context, is you go into the room and you shift the furniture so that it serves the purpose. Yeah, I mean you were joking about the fact that, like your friends don't want to come to your restaurant gatherings because you'll force them

to move the chairs. But not a joke. It does speak to a part of this process that can feel quite uncomfortable, which is you know you talk about how as the hope, it can be very important to define rules in advance of an event, right, So I talk about the idea of pop up rules versus etiquette. So etiquette kind of traditionally comes from monolithic cultures or communities where whatever is considered to be polite is assumed and learned from the culture, which can work when everybody is

raised in the same way, but in diverse societies. The way one person's raise is different from the way another person's raise, and when we are inventing new ways of coming together, we all have different assumptions of how to be and making the implicit explicit is actually an equalizing act in a diverse community. And that doesn't mean you have to be controlling or you know, super didactic. You can do it in an incredibly fun ways, so simple

example this comes from Anthony Rocco. He's an experienced designer, he's in the art of gathering. He was in charge of creating these like secret society member nights. You would walk into this room, didn't know anybody, and someone who was standing at the door and they were like, welcome, drinks her in the back. There's only one rule. You can't serve yourself a drink. You can serve anyone else

a drink, but you can't serve yourself a drink. It was a slight tilt that gives people social permission right to look out for one another. And one of my favorite examples is a journalist who hosted what she called the worn Out Moms Hoot and Nanny and it was a dinner party and she invited other moms who like her, she believed to be worn out and the invitation on it. She said, there's only one rule, and that is if you talk about your kids, you have to take a

tequila shot. And again, like it was fun, it was playful, but it's also slightly radical in the sense that she's saying we can come together with a shared identity of being a parent and we don't have to talk about our kids. Yeah, right, we can talk about so many other things. And so when I say pop up rule, it's really starting to just think about what is going to make people feel safe. What is the context though, and this is true in virtual gatherings as well, like

who's going to be there? And how do I orient myself so that I know that whatever success looks like here, I can choose to engage and as a guest, I can truly choose if I want to be there or not. Yeah, I mean, I believe that what you're proposing can absolutely help lift the quality of the gathering, help achieve its purpose.

But one reason why it's hard for people to establish rules in advance is that it does go against the norm, right, and it just takes a lot to be the first mover to establish new norms, especially when the costs can feel very high, like I might offend a friend or they might see this as a very patronizing move or paternalistic move like don't tell me who gets to or

who's drink right, that sort of thing. And so I just wonder, given like you said, it can it can actually lead to a better gathering, It can foster greater inclusivity. How do we build the I'm just trying to think about the right the right word here, but it's like it takes some goal to be willing to say, yep, I'm inviting you to this thing, but there are terms

and conditions. Yeah, and unless you're prea Parker who has a book that's literally called The Art Gathering, so you kind of get like a hall pass for establishing those rules because they're like, Okay, she's an expert. Like, how do I maya establish these rules without feeling like wildly self conscious and insecure and worried that I'm going to

offend people? Well, first of all, I don't have a hall pass, So like, I mean, I imagine your friends are like my friends, Like it's my friends who tease me the most, right, So so literally now in my gatherings, I outsource. Oh that's interesting. I outsource like often almost to a fault. I outsource to the person in the room that's the most unexpected person to ding the bell or to run the game. Right, It's like I understand power and context. And so I'll say a couple of things.

One is, all pop up rules are not good, Like I wouldn't create this pop up rule in a vacuum. First, what's the need? Then? Is this need perceived by my guests? Or am I in lala land? Right? If you're trying to shift the way you do Thanksgiving or shift the way you do Stater, it's not going to work. You send out an email to everybody and say, you know what, let's do it differently this year. No, you organize, you rally, You text the cousins that you know hate the same

way that is done every year. You start to have conversations with them, You ask them what they might need. You then go to the grandmother who actually secretly is also bored and doesn't like cooking for two days and wants to shift it but doesn't know how. Right, if you pre work exactly, do pre work and all I'm saying is it's the beginning of the conversation, not the end.

I often say to my clients gatherings are trojan horses because you think you're planning the scent of like event with just all the logistics, but actually the higher state makes the gathering. But more it's a forcing mechanism for people to actually make the implicit explicit, to say what do they care about? Who should be invited in, why, how should we actually spend our time? And that ends up becoming this conversation where the gathering becomes just a

symptom of thinking and decisions. It's the process of getting there that shifts the community. As we think about structuring gatherings, it can be so tempting to try and avoid any kind of controversy or conflict, right, to avoid hot button topics. But you do caution against this way of thinking, you know, I said earlier when our conversation first began. When my parents separated, everyone was shocked because they never fought. Yeah.

And as a facilitator, I work within a lot of organizations, within movements, within intergenerational families, and particularly in the workplace. This is slightly changed of the last two years but so much of our context, so many organizations, so many teams,

suffer more from unhealthy peace than from unhealthy conflict. And part of meaningful gatherings or effective gatherings is to begin to understand how do we talk about the things of relevance to our community without burning the house down right, And so I'll give a simple example. It could be Thanksgiving, It could be a family reunion with a lot of complicated dynamics, it could be a retreat with a lot

of tension. One of the kind of simple principles in facilitation, but it's incredibly helpful, is people's stories and experiences are almost always more interesting than their opinions, and so to find structures that allow people to share their stories so you're still having meaningful conversation without getting into the you know, cold war or hot war. And so you know, I

talk about this book. I have a process in vented called fifteen toasts, and we created in part to help larger groups have meaningful conversation that's equitable, that's interesting, And you choose a theme. It could be conflict, it could be vision, it could be beauty, it could be anything, and you ask people at some point in the night to stand up old school style if it's available to them, ding their glass and share an experience or a story that no one else in the room has ever heard about,

what it's taught them about, whatever the theme is. And the only other rule is that the last person has to sing their toast, and that just kind of moves

the night along. We tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater because there's so many mind fields we decide not to talk about anything, but there's actually ways to still have meaningful conversation and connect without all having being the same, and in certain contexts, asking people to share stories or share experiences is a much better way than getting into a debate about whatever recent thing. Oh yeah, I mean very hard to have so many defenses up

when people are just sharing sharing personal stories. I would love to end on a personal note. You know, A slight change of Plants is very much about personal stories of transformation, and I'm just so curious to hear how has working in the area of gatherings changed you as a person, You know, your worldview or your understanding of human beings at our core. It's changed me as a person in part because I often thought like change kind of happens out there, or like I don't really know

or understand where and how culture happens. It just kind of happens. And I think what working specifically and deeply in the field of gathering is it's helped me realize that there's a successible way that's already in our life, it's baked into our everyday life, that is kind of like a magic wand the way that we come together is invented. We literally make it up or someone else did,

and then we're following it. And it's just it's like we can choose and help persuade other people and shape them and grapple with how should we actually spend our time. And I think I used to kind of like a child, I thought of like as magic as like out there, like you know, superpowers are in TV shows. And I think what it's made me see is like this is a form of magic if you define magic as creating a set of ingredients that have the possibility to alter things,

to alter people, myself included. And so I think it's changed me by feeling like magic is closer than you think. Thank you so much, Thank you so much for having me. I loved it. It's it's beautiful to be in conversation with you. Hey, thanks for listening. Next week, we'll replay one of our most popular science episodes, The Science of Quitting, with Annie Duke. The following week, we'll hear from one

of my favorite singer songwriters, Jason Izbel. After wrestling with addiction, Jason realized that most mainstream narratives about sobriety were too simplistic, so he wrote his own. As time passed, I came to terms was the idea that there were good things and bad things about the person that I used to be. But at first it was really hard to do because there was a danger, you know, at every turn, I

was looking for ways to keep myself from backsliding. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written an executive produced by me Maya Shunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our story editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our sound engineer Andrew Vestola, and our associate producer Sarah McCrae. Louise Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith

helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow a slight change of plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Shunker. See you next week. Side note, Um, you know I love my husband Jimmy very much and I hope we do stay together forever. But the number one reason why I hope we stay together is because I don't have it in me to plan the second wedding.

It's too much. You're too much. Sorry,