What's the Science Behind the Perfect Party?

It's basically every funny person in the world attended it. It was pretty crazy to read about some of those original lessonel cast members and some of the people that are just now such superstars. But you've got Steve Martin there, and Monty Python, the SCTV folks like so many others that were all in this one place. Yeah, And and during the night, somewhere along the way, they realized that Gilda Radner is really sick and this is probably the

last time anyone's going to see her. And when she tries to make her exit and say her goodbyes, Bill Murray just picks her up and uses her as this like improv prop and makes her laugh really really hard, and then he passes her off to someone else and they do that, and in the entire nights just spent where people are just passing Guilder Radner around and using her as an improv prop and making her laugh and and just sounds like the best party in the world.

But that wasn't the party I was talking about. So this is way arts here and it feels way more doable for us to get to. But in Berlin, this artist through a same hype party, and the whole idea was that you got everyone's hype forehand, and then he constructed all these slip on platform shoes that were at the entrance, and before you could come in you had to put on these giant blue foam shoes, and once you did, everyone who walked in the room was exactly the same height six ft six six ft six, And

so what what's the point of this? So really it was just an experiment to see how your behavior changes, Like you know how on TV talk shows the host often has his chair jacked up super high and that changes the dynamic. But the idea was, what if everyone is exactly eye to eye, what does it mean when we're all one height and I kind of love the idea of how if you play with the settings, or you know, you play with how you invite people, or even how you provoke controversy at a party, you can

actually make for more meaningful and more memorable interactions. And that's exactly what I guess. Pierre Parker authored the new book The Art of Gathering is here to talk about. Let's dive in a their podcast. Listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson, and as always I'm joined by my good friend man guest show Ticketer and sitting behind that soundproof glass assembly a mix tape for his next house party. I hear these are pretty raging events.

That's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil. Yeah. I took a peek at the tracks Tristan's flowing together. It's got everything from like Beethoven B sides to Mahavish New Orchestra to Spice Girls remixes. It's pretty um eclectic. I gotta be honest, I wouldn't expect anything less from Tristan. But you know, today's show is more than just setting the

mood with a soundtrack. We've got Prea Parker, author of the new book The Art of Gathering on the show, Now, if you've ever wondered what's the right size for a party, or how do you gently tell someone they're not invited to a gathering? Or something even bigger, like how do you bring NFL players and owners together in a way that makes them both feel at ease and then has them leaving experience feeling bonded. Pria has this amazing amount

of experience and insight. So Pria Parker, welcome to part time Genius. Thank you for having me. Now. We're fascinated by your background. You know, from the world you were bridging as a child to the events you organize and consult on now and I was curious before we get into all the conversation around gatherings, I was hoping you could just tell us a little bit about your background and conflict resolution, and then of course how you grew

that background into starting Thrive Labs. So I was born in Zimbabwe, perhaps uncommonplace to be born, and I come from two different world My mother is Indian, grew up in um in India, born and raised, and then immigrated to the US for graduate school and met my white American father in Iowa, where he's from. And for about thirteen years they they were married, they traveled the world together. My mother is a cultural anthropologist and my father is

a hydrologist. And so I was born in Zimbabwe. And um, fast forward nine years from my birth and they separated. UM we were living in Virginia at the time, and both within a few years remarried, and I ended up I'm an only child. I ended up basically traveling back and forth every two weeks between these two radically different households.

Um My my mother is Indian, remarried an english Man, and that household was really a kind of very liberal, staunch democrat, vegetarian, kind of Buddhist Hindu athe isst household um and kind of all the creatumas new a g as my husband likes to say. And my um my father remarried, and he remarried a white American Caucasian American woman and they are Evangelical Christians. And basically I was part of both of these households. And my um you know, I think it deeply, deeply informs my work. And I

basically realized that these two families gather differently. They use different you know, code words, they used a different language, um, And they have fundamentally radically different views of the world. And yet I, as a biracial you know, half Indian, half white American UM, young woman, was considered by both families to be fully a part of their families. And so I, UM, I guess it's no no surprise I

end up in the field of confic resolution. But I that early experience really shaped me to um try to kind of be curious about and better understand why and how people come together and why and how people come apart. That's pretty amazing. I do want to talk about how you find common ground in these conflicts and how you make gatherings interesting by by having the spice of personalities there.

But before all that, I just want to talk about gatherings and and I know you say it's important to know why you're gathering, even when it's something familiar like birthday parties or bridle showers, And would you talk a little bit about that? Sure? So, UM, you know, I wrote this book The Art of Gathering, How we meet

and why it matters. And one of the things that I found over and over again, whether I was doing research and interviewing you know Japanese tea ceremony masters or um, you know, choreographers of circus is basically anybody who creates group experiences for others. Was the ones that kind of really took off and are transformative were the ones that were very, very very clear on what their purpose was

and what their purpose was. And one of the things that I've seen, particularly in our kind of more personal private lives, is we often confuse categories of gathering for purpose. And so what I mean by that is, you know, a birthday party, um, is actually not a purpose. I mean, we assume a birthday party is to celebrate a birthday, but that's what I would call a category. Or a wedding is to sort of get married. That's a functional

category um. And when we assume, you know, two people get engaged, they get very excited about having a wedding, or at least most people do, or they dread it or both. Um. But one of the problems that happens in a lot of wedding planning is once you kind of start getting into the logistics arguments about size, about style, about form um. And often one of the reasons that a lot of conflict can happen whether between the couple or between the couple, and they're kind of sets of parents.

UM is because there actually have for ideas of what the wedding is for and who the wedding is for, and so whenever you're gathering, the first question to ask, particularly when you think that the reason is obvious, is to say, what is this wedding for? And for some people, the wedding is to honor their parents and first and foremost and kind of at some level have a almost right of passage for the parents to say, Okay, we've done our job and our children are out in the

world and they now are starting their families. And if that's the case, then if you are debating who should be on the guest list, you may want to choose you know, your your mother's colleagues over your long lost

college buddy. In other cases, the purpose of the wedding might be to you know, united tribe from very different sides of the world or two very different walks of life, and the couple may say, you know what we want to have our larger community know each other and UM and hold us through this through this you know, marriage, UM, and our wedding is an opportunity for all of the people who wouldn't normally show up to come together and for us to make sure that they really meet and

have meaningful time together. And then you can talk about the guest lists or the food or you know, the table setting or even the place, because once you know what the purposes, you no longer have all of these other proxy wars battling out. Speaking of the invite list, one of the things you talk about, or that you say, is that when everyone is invited, no one is invited. And you know, I'm curious, like why is excluding people

from gatherings so important? And and on that note, if you are going to be excluding people, how do you manage the feelings of the people that you exclude or or the bobs as you call them. Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think one of the things that paradoxically kind of mess up or at least the loot some of our gatherings is this sort of age old adage the more the merrier um. And that saying comes from a spear of generosity, which I you know,

strongly recommend to have whenever you bring people together. Um, but whenever one of the things that that kind of happens in a number of different gatherings. Is that when we kind of invite anyone and everyone, it's hard to

have people connect over something specific. So, for example, if you're having a birthday party and invite kind of everybody you know, or or even as if it's a small birthday party, but you invite people from all different parts of your life, it may be hard for people to kind of connect over you know, they can have to figure out how what they want to connect on an over Whereas if you get more specific, So for example, okay, this year for my birthday, I want to really focus

on reconnecting with my siblings, or I want to cut out the people in my life that are bringing out the parts of my life that I don't really want to be doing anymore, and I want to really focus on the people that are bringing out the best in me. Um it gives you a clear sense of who you actually want to invite and who who you may not want to A friend of mine was recently invited by his grandmother to for her birthday. He lives in the US,

but his grandmother is in Germany. For him and his adult siblings to go to their grandmother's birthday, and the grandmother specifically said no partners, no children, and this was an extremely controversial invitation. And um, the partners felt, you know, some partners didn't care, some partners kind of felt badly. Um, some of the adult grandchildren thought this was a very strange invitation. Others didn't think anything of it. But at

the end of the day they decided to go. They said, you know, his grandma is getting old, she's in her eighties. Like it's kind of like a quirky, you know, quirky invitation.

Let's just go. And I spoke with my friend when he came back from this birthday party, which is basically time with his adult siblings and cousins, and he said it was one of the most beautiful times he'd ever spent with his siblings and sense because they met for the first time as adults without any of the other roles that they play in their life, you know, husband or wife, father, and so they were able to connect as adults for the first time in the way that

they hadn't been able to since they were thirteen. And this kind of slow, beautiful, open time with their grandmother was this like gorgeous meaningful time together that they wouldn't have been able to have or what at least would have been different had they also been tending to their

spouses needs and their children's needs. And so it wasn't that they should do that necessarily every year, but it was actually the wisdom of the grandmother in exclusion and being willing to take some heat for it that allowed for some space for them to come out and kind

of play as adults. I love that, and I love um that phrase used purpose as a bouncer because it just feels really liberating, especially for someone like me who does them to just wanted to invite everyone and uh um and uh allow as many bobs as possible to come. But I do have one question about magic numbers, and you talk about this a little bit. I'm always someone who never knows the right amount of pizza order for things, and I like knowing that they're like specific numbers that

are useful. Can you talk about like the certain types of gatherings and how many people you need to make those more effective? Yeah? Absolutely. You know, I'm a facilitator and I work professionally with groups to um, you know, to kind of have great transformative experiences for them. And so groups of six tend to be great for great conversation um when all six are you know, actively participating, so whether it's a dinner or whether it's a support group.

But the drawbacks of six is that if somebody isn't fully engaged, you know, you can't really bear deadweight, um. And it's also difficult, if agan, to bring on your purpose to have university of viewpoints. Eight to twelve is kind of a great number for small group experience where it's still lovely and um and if well facilitated, everyone can talk. And above that, you know, that's a good

size for a kind of a buzzy party. People can still look around and over a few hours can meet you know, everybody in the room or the majority of people. But it still feels kind of intimate, not overwhelming, and and kind of works as a you know, as an energetic gathering. You're probably not all sitting around table, but

you're milling around. And for weddings, you know, for my wedding between a fifty and you still feel like you're being held by kind of your community, um, but it's not so overwhelming that you have no idea who's there. We have lots more questions for Prea, but first let's take a quick break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius,

and we're talking to author Prea Parker. You know, I'm curious when you think about other meetings that maybe you're not organizing, guessing it's pretty tough for you not to it kind of post mortem those events. You know, you think about recent gatherings that we see on TV, whether it's the White House correspondence dinner or the way the NFL owners got together to talk about, you know, the players kneeling. Do you look at events like that and

think about how they could have been executed more effectively? Absolutely, And to me that's actually, you know, one of the things I think is most interesting, and I think, um, you know, one thing that friends say to me after they've read this book is that the Gift and the Curses you never look at it gathering the same way. Again, to take the two examples you mentioned. With the first the NFL meeting, it would actually happened a while ago.

It was recently leaked to the press, which is why some of the news Again, but last October, after Colin Kaepernick started this kneeling, you know, these kneeling moments and kind of this call to action to other nfls to join NFL players, to join NFL owners and a number of players to come to their headquarters in New York to have a meeting about you know what they called the quote kneeling issue and um. The tapes of that meeting was recently released. You can listen to how the

meeting kind of went down. And first of all, it was I think awesome that they fought to gather in that way. So I would say the first thing is that in a moment where there is multiple moments any time in a game where uh player can choose to kneel um and to activate a symbol that is extremely controversial in the public eye and means different things to different people, the idea for the owners to bring together the players and to actually talk about this is a

great thing. So the first thing I'd say is, whoever thought about doing that, is it was on the right track. Um. The second thing is I think once they actually decided and I haven't spoken to anyone from there, so this is all you know, me speaking about it from far. You know, one thing about a gathering is to think about how you seek people. Where is the gathering they decided to do the NFL headquarters. So on one hand,

there's a lot of authority there um and gravitas. On the other hand, it is the at some level of the owner's turf. Um. And they sat in a circle as far as I understand, with the players and the owners sitting in every other chair to kind of show equality, which I would say is also good. But when you actually listen to the tapes of the conversation, the they're broadly talking past each other um, And what I would say is you zoom back out over and over again.

The players keep coming back to the idea that Kaepernick is that they believe as being blackballed from the league. Kind of their language, not mine. Um. And the owners basically are still are trying to focus on damage control, and they're worrying that that this sort of as they call the kneeling issue is actually literally affecting their bottom

line and his upsetting fans. And as you listen to the conversation, they're basically talking past each other, and one of them, what I would say is going, if I was working at the organizers of that meeting, be two step back ahead of time. And day. What is the purpose of this meeting beyond kind of showing us, you know, symbolic UM camaraderie. What do you actually want to get out of this meeting? Do you want to come to an agreement you on both sides to better understand where

they're coming from. Do you want to focus on kaepernack because that might seem it seems like the players can't uh get over the idea precondition to actually talking about whether or not they're willing to kneel. Do you want to have the focus of the agenda be kneeling? And so basically, I think one of the problems with that meeting was that it wasn't clear what its purpose was, and then the structure of how they actually allowed people

to talk. Basically, that doesn't seem like there was a structure, and so it was a bit chaotic and they just kept on talking in circles. And so so when I look at a public gathering like that UM, one of the things that I look at is, how could they if they have this incredible moment where they're bringing together UM players and owners for probably one of the first times in the league's history, how do you actually structure the gathering so that it meets its intended purpose and

what is the purpose were that gathering? You know, the place you host a gathering allows for all sorts of different options in how you gather. And it's not just logistical. You know, if you have a room that if it's twenty people, or room and it's people. But basically, any time you're thinking about a gathering, you should have the place in the space work for what how you want people to show up and what you want them to be thinking about. So let's just play with this NFL

meeting for a second. They hosted at the NFL headquarters. Imagine had they, as you said, held it in Selma. Imagine if they held it in ferguston Um. Imagine if they held it in a stadium with fans in the seats watching as long as they agreed not to speak, and then and they miked up the players and the owners and actually had a dialogue about what does this kneeling thing mean? And had the audience and NFL fans agree to listen but not boo or cheer, you know.

Imagine if they had it in an owner's home over dinner. Imagine if they had it at Colin Kaeperneck's mother's home. Imagine if they had it at the Trump Hotel in Washington. Each of these choices are should be very intentional choices, and by the way, will be interpreted by people in all sorts of different ways. I could see fans being very angry that a meeting like that would be held in um Selma or in Montgomery, or in any places

that have symbolic you know meaning. But all of that to say is the same thing is true for you know, a birthday party or a book event or a a a sales meeting. And one of the ways to really think boldly about the way you gather is to think about having your place really work for you. So if you are having you know, I know a publisher that had a book event in a cemetery, um and already, no matter what they do in the cemetery, they've already transformed people's relations ship to the book and to the

author and to how they remember that event. And so one of the things to think about is you're gathering is where and how and what kind of strange venues might you want to gather in? You think about, um, what you're saying about the NFL thing like if they had picked a venue like Selma, or the owners and the players had walked across the bridge together or you know that that that you could have really established a very different feel for this meeting, and how interesting that

that could have been. You know, you talk about a scene in the book where there are these four important leaders that are attending a dinner event uh, the night before a meeting, and there's this fifth really important world leader who wants to attend it, but doesn't want to go to the dinner, just wants to go to the

meeting the next day. I was curious, like, how do you convince self important people, or you know, even people who are gathering an event but are shy to fully participate and buy into sort of the cadence of the meeting and the various events that that are orchestrated or plan for a reason. I mean, so it's a great question, and what you're kind of talking about at some level

is the larger question of legitimacy. So in the example in the book, we had a meeting on a Wednesday, let's say, and um, it was a meeting where it was important that the leaders that were coming together basically interacted in a way that they wouldn't normally otherwise and started to come with the spirit of openness. And so one of the things that I did with had a dinner the night before that was more like a dinner party or even like a wedding party than a than

a kind of a work meeting. You know, there's candles and um wine and like stories and structure and um. And there was a state leader who couldn't make the dinner the night before, or didn't want to or wasn't willing to kind of come. And at some level, one of the things that you are grappling with when you're designing and experience for other people, UM is communicating with them.

One that is important but to whether or not your your event kind of has legitimacy um and and what I mean by that is whether or not people are buying into your vision of what this is for and whether they need to be there or not. At any time you know two or more people come together, you know, decisions need to be made often over the course of any type of gathering, and basically who's in charge and who needs you know, if if there's conflicts, how do

you actually deal with it? And so at some level depending on the context. So in an organization, if you're doing a gathering and there's a dinner the night before, UM, in part because people have signed contracts and the authority lies with the UM. You know, with the boss, you can actually require people to show up to a dinner. And by the way, that shouldn't be used lightly. So I often say when I'm working with companies and they say we can require people to attend the night before,

I often say, please, don't require them. I want them to come of their own volition, because people behave very differently if they're required to be somewhere versus if they decide that they want to go. UM. And similarly, you know, with a wedding or with with with a kind of

social gathering. UM. You know, to me, if people aren't coming to whatever it is you you planned, I always say, like, pick up the phone and call them, UM, you know, if this is something that's important to you and explain to them you know what it is, and UM on why you'd love for them to be there. Texts, you know, email, Instagram, everybody's online, but I rarely hear anybody's voice anymore. And UM and actually just making a phone call. It goes

a long way. You know. I was amused by the list that you put together of the fifteen ways to make conferences suck less. And and because you know, Mango and I have been to so many conferences over the years, and so many terrible conferences over the years, and you know, I don't envy those that have to put them together, because it does seem like a really difficult thing to put together a good conference, and so when you go to a great one, it's really that much more impressive.

And I'm curious if you could share just a few of your favorite ideas for how to put together this type of active gathering. Mm hmm. It's a great question. And you know there are conferences are on the rise, and more and more people, um, More and more companies are starting to have you know, confidence wings and conference arms. Media companies are starting to have live events. So this is something that work. I you know, I think we're going to see more and more of So it's a

really important question. I would just say, kind of simply, the two principles that I think make conferences fantastic um our, intimacy and heat and UM. What I mean by that one on the intimacy side. You know, there's all these studies that show that, um, that people can connect much more when you share your vulnerability and things that you

aren't working as well. Burnee Brown Um and sociologists like her popularized these ideas about intimacy often between two people, and I would just take that principle and apply it to groups into larger, too larger gatherings. So, UM, when a couple of a couple of things under intimacy, the first is um to have people share in small groups or in large things that aren't working rather than things

that are. So one of the things that I talked about in the book is, you know, rather than training everybody to kind of give their two minutes stumps speech and all of you know, like how great you are, what you're doing, how kind of clients that you serving, or you know, whatever it is that you're doing your company, to flip it around and give a sprout speech which basically sharing all of the things in your work that you actually are still curious about that you don't know

the answers to that you're trying to figure out. And people are much more interested in kind of wanting to know what's not going well and how they may actually help. UM. One of the groups that does this well that I've come across as the House of Genius, and they have

read it about in the book UM. They have gatherings all over the world where they invite ten or twelve people to come together to constitute what they call a house UM and UH invite two or three entrepreneurs to come in and get forty five minutes each to talk about what's not working in their business or what they need help with. And then UM those twelve people give

them all sorts of advice and ideas. It's a very structured process, UM, but basically it ends up being, you know, a really interesting evening because implicitly you're saying I need help, and we tend to want to help each other. The second thing is to do dinners where people share stories and experiences from their life. UM. That demonstrates some kind of struggle or some kind of um, you know, confusion, because we at the end of the day want to

connect with each other in meaningful ways. And so I think conferences that allow both space but also structure for people to share what's actually going on in their life to me are much more interesting. And then the second part is heat. And what I mean by that coming as a confique resolution facilitator, is anything that kind of gets people's temperature, you know, rising in the room. Um. It can be things that are controversial but controversial that

still serve the purpose. So controversial for just kind of controversy's sake isn't particularly interesting, um, but controversial when it kind of taps the core values of a community can be extremely invigorating. We tend to avoid the things that we think might you know, rufflesome feathers, and actually from a perspective of gathering, those are the ones that actually, you know, people want to stay in the room for,

so if it's a you know, a church gathering. Um. One of the people interviewed for the book was a secretary of the Society of Friends, basically Quaker communities, and she said some of the best meetings that they had had m this is the Philadelphia community Circle of Friends. Society Friends was when they began to consciously have meetings around whether or not to allow gay marriage in there to acknowledge gay marriage in their communities, and um, rather

than avoiding it, they actually structured meetings around it. And debates um in the Quaker format, which is if you're moved to speak, speak and that you know, people come alive when they're talking about and struggling with and listening to one another about the things that most um define them as a community. And I'm curious too about the openings of conferences. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah,

you know, I think openings are extraordinarily important. And one of the things that conferences can do is in the first few moments any in any type of gathering, people are walking in and wondering, you know, what's going on here? Do I want to be here? What part of myself do I show? Can I be jokey or should I

be more formal? And um? We as organizers often vastly underestimate the importance of kind of setting the tone and um and creating a environment where people have permission to go up to each other and and find ways to kind of go in and so UM. One of the ways of a inference that I UM that I love that I spoke to for this book is it's called Spark Camp and it was started by five friends in the media industry, and one of the things they do

early on their weekend gatherings. There there's their captive seventy people, so that maintains an intimacy but still a buzz the first night of the gathering, so I guess Friday night they do introductions, you know, as many conferences do the less than you would think. But the way they do introductions is they take the weight off the guests for having to introduce themselves and either be you know, stuck in their humble brags or you know, all of the

awkward ways one wants to introduce oneself. And the conference organizers give the conference what I think is such a gift, which is they spend time ahead of time researching every single one of their seventy guests, who often they don't know themselves, and come up with these short, whimsical introductions. And they gathered together in a room and they actually

read aloud each person's introduction without naming them. Um, and they say, when you hear your helf stand and so they may say, you know, this person met their husband at a beekeeping convention and um. They are also one of the foremost minds on artificial intelligence. They grew up in Alaska, but actually because their parents were part of the Air Force. They lived in twelve states before the

age of sixteen. And what happens is, you know, our eyes are kind of darting around trying to figure out who it is, but also you're not sure if there's somebody else in the group that met their husband at a beekeep being gone, you know, so sometimes you know, two or three people stand up and then everyone laughs and they have to kind of keep listening. And this

is brilliant exercise where it's interesting. Everybody is engaged because you don't want to miss your own introduction, but everybody's also engaged because there they're You're they're giving you seeds of information that you can then go up to each of the other sixty nine people in the room over the course of the weekend and have three or four

different ways into conversation with them. And so they think very beautifully about how do you early on give non awkward or at least less awkward ways for people to approach one another in meaningful ways about their work and also about things that have nothing to do with their work.

More questions for PRIA after a quick break. I love the idea too of you um sitting out and charting out heat maps would you talk about in the book and to orchestrate some of the heat But I'm also curious about these two interesting events that you've pulled together. One is fifteen Toasts and then these I'm here days, And I was wondering if you could just talk a

little bit about that. Sure, So fifteen Toasts came from this experience of going to events and having kind of amazing people in the room, but feeling um that the kind of modus operandi was showing off or or talking

about how great everything was. And specifically I was at the World Economic Forum one of their annual meetings in Abu Dhabi, and a colleague and I Tim Labret, who were serving on the same council, realized that in all of these meetings, even though we're supposed to be talking about new models of leadership or values based leadership, it tends to remain very heavy UM. And you know, or is an opportunity for people to kind of promote their

company's latest initiative UM. And so we we we decided to run an experiment where the night before we gathered fifteen people from a number of the different councils and invited them to come together over dinner off the record, though UM we all agreed we could share what happened

at the dinner but not attributed to specific person. So Chatham House Rules and fifteen Toasts basically was this um experiment that we kind of made up along with my husband, where everybody is asked to give a toast at some point in the evening to a theme and you choose the theme. The first one we ever did was what is a good life? Not is what is the good life? But what what makes for a good life? But you can choose a theme that the group would be interested in.

It could be rebellion, it could be um borders, it could be what does it mean to be American? It could be anything. And over the course of the night, people you know, clink their glass old school style, stand up and share a story and experience from their life UM that relates to the theme. And the only other rule is that the last person has to sing their toast.

And what that does is it kind of speeds along the toasts because basically most people used in the U S context don't want to sing um, and so it's this kind of playful way to get people to UM do take a smaller risk, which is which is giving

their toasts. Um. And what happens over the course of the night is you hear stories that are still along a kind of organizing principle that people would never kind of share in you know, in the in the context like that, but when you hear about somebody you know, falling in love for the first time or experiencing heartbreak. Um. Or I remember one story that was shared in a dinner that where the thing was strangers. Somebody shared that their mother's life was saved because a stranger happened to

be walking past her. Their mother fainted, hit their head on the ground, started bleeding. A stranger happened to walk past them in the same moment called the police and save their life. And because of that, the person sitting at the table like existed, it was born. Um. There's so much more after this dinner that you could go and talk to, you know, talk to this person about then if she simply told you that she was the

VP of sales that you know, such as such company. UM. And so what fifteen toasts does and you could use any format, but it allows people to share stories and experiences um that are kind of you know off the perhaps theme of the conference or kind of selling something um but basically makes them complicated and human, and most people want to talk to other people who are complicated in human, because that's what each of us are. The book is called The Art of Gathering, How We Meet

and Why It Matters, and it's available this week. But Priya, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks again for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of how stuff works and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do the important things we couldn't even begin to understand. Tristan McNeil does the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme song and does the MIXI MIXI sound. Jerry Rowland does the exact producer

thing gave. Louesier is our lead researcher, with support from the Research Army including Austin Thompson, Nolan Brown and Lucas Adams and Eves. Jeff Cook gets the show to your ears. Good job, Eves. If you like what you heard, we hope you'll subscribe, And if you really really like what you've heard, maybe you could leave a good review for us. Thanks for the points Jason him