Speaker 1: Part of citizenship and part of gathering with a small
Speaker 1: g is that all of us, whether we're guests or hosts,
Speaker 1: are participating, one beat at a time, in whatever might
Speaker 1: be happening. And all I'm saying is, wake up and
Speaker 1: decide what you want to attend and what you don't
Speaker 1: want to attend. And when you're thinking about being a host,
Speaker 1: think very deeply about what it is you're bringing together,
Speaker 1: because whatever you're doing will spread. Welcome to How to
Speaker 1: Citizen with Baritune Day, a podcast that reimagine citizen as
Speaker 1: a verb, not a legal status. This season is all
Speaker 1: about how we practice democracy, what can we get rid of,
Speaker 1: what can we invent, and how do we change the
Speaker 1: culture of democracy itself. We're leaving the theoretical clouds and
Speaker 1: hit in the ground with inspiring examples of people and
Speaker 1: institutions that are showing us new ways to govern ourselves.
Speaker 1: Over the years, I've attended several Democratic National conventions I'm
Speaker 1: talking Boston, North Carolina, Philadelphia, and Denver. But the best one,
Speaker 1: and really one of the most memorable political gatherings I've attended,
Speaker 1: it happened online during the COVID lockdown of twenty twenty now,
Speaker 1: at every major political convention, there's this ceremonial counting of
Speaker 1: the delegates where people from different states stand up with
Speaker 1: their little flags on the floor of the convention hall
Speaker 1: and say something like, the people of the Great State
Speaker 1: of Hawaii nominate YadA, YadA, YadA YadA. But we obviously
Speaker 1: couldn't do that in twenty twenty. Instead of cutting it, though,
Speaker 1: the organizers asked people to film themselves doing the roll
Speaker 1: call in front of something iconic that represented their home.
Speaker 1: It's time to begin our virtual trip around America. Alaska,
Speaker 1: we must elect the president who respect our voices, protect
Speaker 1: our waters, and address climate changed. Alaska cast seven voices
Speaker 1: Bernie Sanders and troll voices for the next President Joe Biden.
Speaker 1: North Carolina. I've been doing this for a long time,
Speaker 1: so let me just be playing black people, especially black women,
Speaker 1: on the backbone of this party. And if we don't
Speaker 1: show up, Democrats don't get elected. North Carolina cast thirty
Speaker 1: nine votes for Bernie Sanders and eighty three votes for
Speaker 1: the next President of the United States, Joe Biden. Maine
Speaker 1: My American Dream. I'm living in a twenty five acre
Speaker 1: organic farm on the lake, a roadside farm stand and
Speaker 1: a bedding breakfast. My husband and our aren corporate tycoons.
Speaker 1: We just want to make an honestly the US Virgin Islands.
Speaker 1: We bring in a greatance from the Virgin Islands of
Speaker 1: the United to six. We were young, Alexander was raised,
Speaker 1: were Castle A thirteen voots for Joseph our Biden. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this digital parade of delegates was a beautiful reflection of
Speaker 1: who we are because we got to see each other
Speaker 1: in our context. And I remember saying to anyone who
Speaker 1: would listen, that is the mirror of America. I want
Speaker 1: to see that looks like us. It felt like true storytelling,
Speaker 1: not just political pandering. Of course, there's always going to
Speaker 1: be some political pandering, but I think they produced the
Speaker 1: hell out of that gathering, which had the potential feel disconnected, awkward,
Speaker 1: and useless, and instead left me emotional and motivated. I
Speaker 1: think a really fundamental premise of our democracy is that
Speaker 1: we come together to figure things out, and we do
Speaker 1: it in a way that's non violent, that serves as
Speaker 1: many people as possible as best as possible, so we
Speaker 1: can all move forward. And I think it's pretty non
Speaker 1: controversial to say we're not doing great at that in
Speaker 1: many levels of our society, the way Congress operates is whack.
Speaker 1: Local school board meetings they're violent or nearly violent, and
Speaker 1: online discourse. I mean, I don't even have to explain
Speaker 1: that one do I from the political to the petty,
Speaker 1: which is sometimes the same thing. We have proven that
Speaker 1: we're out of practice at coming together meaningfully, effectively, or
Speaker 1: at all, and it's weakening our ability to self governor
Speaker 1: when we don't know how to listen or have a
Speaker 1: shared purpose when we gather, when we don't know how
Speaker 1: to interact with each other, it shows up everywhere. Think
Speaker 1: of it like this. If we don't know how to
Speaker 1: host a meaningful birthday party, how are we going to
Speaker 1: handle a council meeting. Look, we have a gathering crisis,
Speaker 1: and my friend Prea Parker, she's dedicated her life to
Speaker 1: addressing it. In her book The Art of Gathering, How
Speaker 1: We Meet and Why It Matters, Prea sharees practical guidance
Speaker 1: for creating relevance, meaning, and connection when we come together.
Speaker 1: Rethinking and reimagining the ways we spend time together. It's
Speaker 1: essential to improving the way we practice democracy and to
Speaker 1: the way we citizen and while our previous guest, Tim Phillips,
Speaker 1: gave us a sense of how dangerous they're growing political
Speaker 1: divide is in our country. Priya is giving us the
Speaker 1: tools to start addressing that tension and disconnection in our
Speaker 1: own communities. She's a facilitator and strategic advisor and liked him.
Speaker 1: She's trained in the field of conflict resolution. She has
Speaker 1: been the last twenty years guiding leaders and groups through
Speaker 1: complicated conversations about community identity and vision in moments of transition.
Speaker 1: I first met Priya and her husband, the writer An
Speaker 1: and girded us before they were husband and wife. Back
Speaker 1: in Paris over a decade ago, Annan was speaking at
Speaker 1: a museum and I was there as part of a
Speaker 1: delegation of young civic minded Americans touring through Europe. Anna
Speaker 1: Impriya were the only other young people in the room,
Speaker 1: so we were all like yo Americans, young people, brown people, Yeah. Hey.
Speaker 1: It was super exciting and a sea of really old
Speaker 1: art loving white French faces. They ended up joining our tour.
Speaker 1: The three of us traveled together a lot more from there,
Speaker 1: and we quickly realized we had a lot in common.
Speaker 1: During that time, I had the opportunity to attend many
Speaker 1: of their gatherings from neighborhood walking tours. Preya became known
Speaker 1: for to their wedding in India, where by the way,
Speaker 1: I did a great stand up comedy set. It was
Speaker 1: super funny. There's no tapes. You're just gonna have to
Speaker 1: trust me anyway. I can't count the number of times
Speaker 1: I've had dinner at their place, met fascinating folks, and
Speaker 1: left feeling full both intellectually and gastro Intestinally, so Priya
Speaker 1: has been practicing what she preaches even before most of
Speaker 1: us knew she was preaching it. As I think on
Speaker 1: this entire season, Priya is answering a question posed by
Speaker 1: an earlier guest, John Alexander, who asked, how do we
Speaker 1: invoke citizenship as practice? And I think Priya answers with
Speaker 1: some really valuable tangible tools for us to get out
Speaker 1: of our rut and try new things and challenge old
Speaker 1: assumptions about how we show up citizen Together. After the Break,
Speaker 1: Priya Parker on how gatherings are about people, not logistics.
Speaker 1: Pria Parker is a facilitator, acclaimed author of the Art
Speaker 1: of Gathering, How We Meet and Why It Matters, and
Speaker 1: executive producer and host of the New York Times podcast
Speaker 1: Together Apart, we have been a part of each other's
Speaker 1: lives for over a decade, and I got to see
Speaker 1: her becoming the queen of gathering through a small series
Speaker 1: of intimate friend events that she did in New York
Speaker 1: City called I Am Here Day. And this was an
Speaker 1: intentional exploration of a neighborhood all day long and was
Speaker 1: mind blowing. It really changed my relationship with other people
Speaker 1: that I knew, It changed my relationship with New York City.
Speaker 1: She's had a huge positive impact on my life professionally
Speaker 1: and personally, and it is a thrill to have her here.
Speaker 1: Welcome Priya Parker, Thank you there today. What a treat,
Speaker 1: What a thrill. You are the master of many things,
Speaker 1: but one of them is openings and introductions, and I
Speaker 1: feel really touched. I'm so happy to be with you. Yes,
Speaker 1: so so Pa. Look, you're somebody who really knows how
Speaker 1: to host. Let me know if you have notes for
Speaker 1: me later, taking copious notes. But your work has moved
Speaker 1: help people move away from this idea of gatherings as
Speaker 1: exercises in logistics, things to coordinate, to putting the focus
Speaker 1: on relationships. Can you just talk about that important shift
Speaker 1: from the logistics focus to the relationship focus. I, as
Speaker 1: you know, am a group conflict resolution facilitator. That's my training,
Speaker 1: that's still my day job. And so much of what
Speaker 1: I learned with my peers as we were young Green
Speaker 1: facilitators is we were trained to basically think about how
Speaker 1: to bring a group of people around specific need and
Speaker 1: kind of get them off their scripts. Figure out how
Speaker 1: do you help people meaningfully connect without all having to
Speaker 1: be the same. How do you help people meaningfully connect
Speaker 1: despite sometimes because of their differences. Yeah, and so much
Speaker 1: of what I was trained to do very kind of
Speaker 1: minute by minute. How do you actually set up questions?
Speaker 1: How do you set up the space so that people
Speaker 1: feel protected, not so overwhelmed by a space, but also
Speaker 1: not excluded. Had very little to do with what we're
Speaker 1: taught in popular culture about what makes for example, a
Speaker 1: good dinner party or a good baby shower, or basically
Speaker 1: nice like silverware. Yeah, paint the onesies and then the
Speaker 1: baby will come, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever. But this
Speaker 1: very deep focus on stuff like I often say, if
Speaker 1: you go to a bookstore, you walk into a library
Speaker 1: and you look for a kind of like the gathering section.
Speaker 1: You'll go and you read a lot of cookbooks, right,
Speaker 1: or flower shaping skills. And it's not that those things
Speaker 1: don't matter. They absolutely do their incredible skills on their own.
Speaker 1: But over time we've conflated the shaping of things with
Speaker 1: the shaping of people. And I love food as much
Speaker 1: as the next person. I love a beautiful space as
Speaker 1: much as the next person. But how do you basically
Speaker 1: put people back at the center of our interactions and
Speaker 1: how do you think about designing interactions that help people
Speaker 1: feel like they belong but they also aren't disappearing. You
Speaker 1: mentioned the goal of getting people off their scripts. Why that?
Speaker 1: What is the danger or the risk of letting people
Speaker 1: stay attached to their script and what does it mean
Speaker 1: to knock them off of that routine? Scripts serve us
Speaker 1: in certain ways, like we are taught how to professionally
Speaker 1: introduce ourselves or we're taught and different cultures have different scripts.
Speaker 1: I went to the University of Virginia, and I learned
Speaker 1: very quickly that one of the first things people ask
Speaker 1: you is what are you? And I had to learn
Speaker 1: very quickly my answer to that question. Right, So all
Speaker 1: of that to say is in so many of our
Speaker 1: modern life where we're meeting people we don't necessarily know
Speaker 1: this kind of corporate culture or like entrepreneurship culture of
Speaker 1: like the pitch has infiltrated, friendship has infiltrated, community has
Speaker 1: infiltrated dinner parties, like if you go to My husband
Speaker 1: grew up in Europe. For some part of his life,
Speaker 1: I lived in different countries because of my parents work.
Speaker 1: If you go to most other is changing, but most
Speaker 1: of their countries. If you have dinner, multigenerational dinner and
Speaker 1: anyone's home, you can leave after twelve hours and you
Speaker 1: have no idea what anyone does for a living, right,
Speaker 1: it's a deeply yes. I had a direct experience of
Speaker 1: that in Europe, this summer bonding connecting, no idea what
Speaker 1: people do for work. Whereas a brunch recently in California,
Speaker 1: I felt like the person assumed I was an investor,
Speaker 1: you know, and we're just like in this my growth
Speaker 1: turnets and look and we opened up these many locations
Speaker 1: and I'm like, Hi, what's your name again? Yes, it's
Speaker 1: like the self launch, right, Yeah, And so part of
Speaker 1: a script is scripts help people know how to navigate
Speaker 1: an uncertain situation. They're not bad necessarily, but part of
Speaker 1: what we were taught in conflict resolution was that often
Speaker 1: moments of authenticity and connection happened when people got off
Speaker 1: their scripts, when they say the thing they weren't planning
Speaker 1: on saying, when they're not representing their institution, when they
Speaker 1: give their sprout speeches rather than their stump speeches. Those
Speaker 1: were the moments in which all of a sudden, again,
Speaker 1: as a dialogue facilitator that's trying to shift the relationship
Speaker 1: in the room, those were the moments of light. Those
Speaker 1: were the moments where people stop being a monolith. I
Speaker 1: think you have developed many kind of shorthands and quick
Speaker 1: rules for anyone to think about in terms of any
Speaker 1: gathering that they're considering. You know, a birthday party, which
Speaker 1: should be pretty simple. Can you quickly give us some
Speaker 1: of pre as hacks on like the questions we should
Speaker 1: be asking how you might prepare your own absolutely the
Speaker 1: down on dirty everyone can just like fast forward to
Speaker 1: this part of the podcast. Step number one. So the
Speaker 1: first is the biggest mistake we make when we gather
Speaker 1: is we assume that the purpose is obvious and shared. Oh,
Speaker 1: I know what a birthday party is? Oh, I know
Speaker 1: what a staff meeting is. Yeah. And also in so doing,
Speaker 1: we skip actually asking what is the purpose, and we
Speaker 1: get too quickly to perfecting form, which is almost the
Speaker 1: same as focusing on the stuff. It's over the people exactly.
Speaker 1: And so the first thing to become a more artful gatherer,
Speaker 1: and I think a more artful citizen seek yes, is
Speaker 1: to determine and to actually ask what is the need here? Yeah,
Speaker 1: what is the need in this community at this moment?
Speaker 1: What is the need when I'm thirty two versus forty
Speaker 1: two versus eighty two? And who are the people in
Speaker 1: my life that might be able to address that need
Speaker 1: this year? And then figure out the form. Don't start
Speaker 1: with logistics, And instead of asking should I throw a party? First?
Speaker 1: Ask am I lonely? Am I board? Do I need
Speaker 1: to shake things up a bit? Am? I kind of
Speaker 1: disillusioned with my normal friend gang? Like, what is actually
Speaker 1: it's actually the art of paying attention what is happening here?
Speaker 1: And gatherings are kind of these excuses to make us
Speaker 1: make decisions about how we spend our time and with whom.
Speaker 1: So I'll give a simple example. Years ago, I had
Speaker 1: a friend who turned fifty, and he said to me,
Speaker 1: you know, most I'm not really a birthday person, like
Speaker 1: positively or negatively. You know, it doesn't I've never worried
Speaker 1: about aging. It's not a huge deal to me. But
Speaker 1: fifties feeling a lot, and I want to do something.
Speaker 1: And he kind of, he said, his wife kind of
Speaker 1: helped him think about it. Why are you why are
Speaker 1: you so anxious about this age turning the stage? And
Speaker 1: he thought about it, and he said, I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people in my life I've watched as they
Speaker 1: turned fifty, many people basically start contracting. They take less risks,
Speaker 1: they take, they don't move to the same cities that
Speaker 1: they would have. And I'm kind of terrified by that.
Speaker 1: And yet there are some people I know who, even
Speaker 1: when they turned fifty or sixty or seventy, continued to expand.
Speaker 1: What if I threw a weekend or a dinner where
Speaker 1: I invited the people in my life who have always
Speaker 1: represented expansion, right, So what he did, first of all,
Speaker 1: he paused first and didn't say what form should this
Speaker 1: birthday be? And he just paused, like the first step
Speaker 1: of actually artful gathering is looking in. Yeah, then the
Speaker 1: second thing is He then found a specific, disputable need.
Speaker 1: It's really specific and disputed. You're only going to invite
Speaker 1: the people who expand in your life, like what are
Speaker 1: you going to say the people who contracts like sorry, yeah,
Speaker 1: especially if you're married. Well, in part I said this earlier,
Speaker 1: gatherings often force us to face ourselves. This is why
Speaker 1: weddings are often sites of conflict. This is why funerals
Speaker 1: are sites of conflict, because gathering is an act of
Speaker 1: line drawing. What is this about? Who is this for?
Speaker 1: And who should be here? And who should not be
Speaker 1: and who should not be here? And I'll just say
Speaker 1: the third tip is artful gatherers, as hosts or guests,
Speaker 1: are really good at meaning making and meaning making often
Speaker 1: at the beginning of an event or a gathering in
Speaker 1: the invitation, but also when they arrive. So, just to
Speaker 1: close the story, at the beginning of this birthday weekend,
Speaker 1: it's birthday dinner. He dung his glass as he recalled
Speaker 1: it to me, and he said, I realized I was
Speaker 1: terrified turning fifty, and I realized what I just told
Speaker 1: you earlier. And each of you sitting around this table
Speaker 1: to me have been examples and beacons of adventure and
Speaker 1: expansion and people who I always look to when I
Speaker 1: think about the decisions I want to make. What would
Speaker 1: they do? Yeah, as I turn fifty, I want to
Speaker 1: thank you for showing me that there's many ways to
Speaker 1: do this, and I want to ask you to keep
Speaker 1: me honest in those moments where I want to contract. Yeah, wow,
Speaker 1: welcome thirty seconds. Yeah, he's changed the whole thing. He
Speaker 1: switched here. I feel changed just hearing it, because there
Speaker 1: it's not just that he had a purpose. He made
Speaker 1: it clear to them and then they feel a sense
Speaker 1: of ownership of and honoring and you feel, yeah, like
Speaker 1: you chose me not just to be at your party, yes,
Speaker 1: but for this thing that I do for you, which
Speaker 1: is its own gift, the acknowledgement of the gifts of others.
Speaker 1: He moved. He moved it from the category that many
Speaker 1: of us can fall into of using them. Yeah. Right,
Speaker 1: gatherings can also be kind of transactional. I have an
Speaker 1: art museum launched get bodies in the room, right, like
Speaker 1: we gotta get and who's got a lot of followers.
Speaker 1: So he moved from using them. It's a very subtle
Speaker 1: shift to making them of use in the deepest sense
Speaker 1: of that word. I often say gathering as culture making.
Speaker 1: They are going to remember that for the rest of
Speaker 1: their lives. They are going to remember, Wow, that's the
Speaker 1: way he thinks of me when they start thinking about decisions.
Speaker 1: Am I contracting or am I expanding? Do I choose? Right?
Speaker 1: This is like the way we gather reflects our norms,
Speaker 1: our beliefs, and so often positive or negative. Like Trump
Speaker 1: rallies are great gatherings. They are full of purpose and
Speaker 1: specificity and boundary and emotion and ritual and symbol and
Speaker 1: their lines like watching shows like the Circus and watching
Speaker 1: the lines outside of a Trump rally versus outside of
Speaker 1: a Democratic contender rally, like there is a fundamentally different
Speaker 1: ritualistic experience going on. Gatherings are morally neutral, yeah, and
Speaker 1: they spread values. Whatever the values are, they're spreading them.
Speaker 1: How does that work if the gathering itself has kind
Speaker 1: of harm associated with it, or if if it can
Speaker 1: lead to harm. Can you just clarify where morality sits
Speaker 1: in terms of not all gatherings are made equal in
Speaker 1: terms of the impact they can have on folks. The
Speaker 1: tool is morally neutral and it can be good used
Speaker 1: for generative health, and it can be used for deep harm.
Speaker 1: Hitler is one of the greatest gatherers in history. M Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's a technology, technology and sense too. And I'm
Speaker 1: saying this in part because people often associate like, oh,
Speaker 1: gathering sweets, Oh gatherings fun, Oh gatherings word, and in
Speaker 1: part because it's like, don't be fooled, right, don't be
Speaker 1: fooled by the rocks that I got, Enny, And this
Speaker 1: is exactly it's like when you can see we're actually friends,
Speaker 1: my terrible terrible, like you know, nineteen ninety three. References
Speaker 1: are coming out so often either we under value what
Speaker 1: this is, Oh, it's just a baby shower. Well, because
Speaker 1: somebody thought it was a sweet idea at some point,
Speaker 1: and they're trying to literally figure out what to do
Speaker 1: in terms of the activity. Decided it could be fun
Speaker 1: to focus on the moment of gender revelation. Literally, if
Speaker 1: you look at this history of this new phenomenon, it
Speaker 1: was like, how do I feel this time? Yeah, where
Speaker 1: is there an unexpected outcome? What would be interesting to
Speaker 1: this group? And then over time, in some places it's
Speaker 1: been co opted or has become problematic to assume or
Speaker 1: even to think like, why is all of the things
Speaker 1: that we're doing over the course of these two hours
Speaker 1: focusing on revealing their gender. Yeah, And if I look
Speaker 1: at that example, you're celebrating a life, You're welcoming someone
Speaker 1: into the family, Like is your primary purpose really the
Speaker 1: information of communicating the gender of the child? Rarely starts
Speaker 1: like that. That did not start on a need based
Speaker 1: analysis exactly, and it became focused on the form. It
Speaker 1: became colors and all this other distress. And so often
Speaker 1: I love the example of a baby shower in part
Speaker 1: because it's that kind of Trojan horse where it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: the sweet little thing, and actually, like these are moments
Speaker 1: of norm formation and so slightly shifting that, you know.
Speaker 1: I have a friend who, for her she and her
Speaker 1: partner did not want to have a baby shower, traditionally minded,
Speaker 1: but she realized she did have a need. And as
Speaker 1: she paused, she thought, Okay, I have these two needs.
Speaker 1: One I'm terrified of labor, and two, neither me or
Speaker 1: my partner want to raise our children mostly how we
Speaker 1: saw our parents raise us. What do we do? And
Speaker 1: so they ended up having two gatherings. One was she
Speaker 1: gathered six female friends had been through the process of birth,
Speaker 1: and they created a little ritual. She asked one of
Speaker 1: our friends to do it, and the friend invited all
Speaker 1: of us to bring a quality and a story of
Speaker 1: our friend that we believed would also serve her in labor. Yeah, courage, resilience, humor,
Speaker 1: remember this time when we were blah blah blah, and
Speaker 1: you like, I give to you humor. And then the
Speaker 1: second thing they did is they invited who are we inviting? Right?
Speaker 1: What is it a political act? Why are women the
Speaker 1: only people invited to baby showers? If we're expecting and
Speaker 1: asking for men to also co parent, where do the
Speaker 1: roles start from the very beginning, before the kid's even here?
Speaker 1: Who actually needs this knowledge? So they invited both men
Speaker 1: and women to share a story from their life of
Speaker 1: one way that they were raised that they loved and
Speaker 1: one thing in their own life that they would want
Speaker 1: to let go of. And they had this beautiful dinner
Speaker 1: and everyone understood the purpose and they could choose if
Speaker 1: they wanted to come and share that kind of thing
Speaker 1: or not. You can totally not come. But again, it's
Speaker 1: like movings to being used to being of use, and
Speaker 1: every other person at that dinner table. I promise you
Speaker 1: was listening very closely. Huh, how might I want to
Speaker 1: raise my kids? What are the norms? What are they expect?
Speaker 1: What language are we using to talk about this? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And part of what I part of citizenship and part
Speaker 1: of gathering with a small G, is that all of us,
Speaker 1: whether we're guests or hosts, are participating, one beat at
Speaker 1: a time in whatever might be happening. And all I'm
Speaker 1: saying is wake up and decide what you want to
Speaker 1: attend and what you don't want to attend, and show
Speaker 1: up in the ways you want to. When you're a guest,
Speaker 1: and when you're thinking about being a host, think very
Speaker 1: deeply about what it is you're bringing together, because whatever
Speaker 1: you're doing will spread. Wake up. I'm fully awake, and
Speaker 1: I'm remembering. I mean, I have a big fandom for you,
Speaker 1: as well as for Chris to Tippett and on being
Speaker 1: and I remember hearing your conversation with her, and you
Speaker 1: said something very close to the following that gathering is
Speaker 1: a political act with a small P. I like how
Speaker 1: you lowercase the letters, and that anytime we're bringing together
Speaker 1: three or more people, even works with groups of two,
Speaker 1: there are these power dynamics that exist in those relationships
Speaker 1: and in those groups. And that's not necessarily a bad thing,
Speaker 1: but it's an opportunity for generous authority, right to use
Speaker 1: your power as the host for the good of the
Speaker 1: group to achieve its purpose. And coming back to first principles,
Speaker 1: when I say that gathering is a political act, small
Speaker 1: p what I mean about that is it is a
Speaker 1: context in which power is up for contestation. And this
Speaker 1: is true any time people come together, but particularly I
Speaker 1: define a gathering as any time three or more people
Speaker 1: come together for a purpose with a beginning, middle, and end. Okay,
Speaker 1: so take something super simple a book club. A book
Speaker 1: club is a wonderful example of these core questions. What
Speaker 1: is this for? Is it to see each other and
Speaker 1: have an excuse to come together and like the book's
Speaker 1: kind of on the side, and like I really like
Speaker 1: having kombucha or t Or is this fundamentally to make
Speaker 1: us more informed environmentalists? Or is this fundament mentally to
Speaker 1: shift the patterns away from hanging out at the bar
Speaker 1: and substituted for something else. The second thing is book clubs.
Speaker 1: When I say decision making, oh, it is one person
Speaker 1: facilitating conversation is it a free for all? Are we
Speaker 1: going to talk about chapter one, two, three, four or five? Six?
Speaker 1: And you can kind of see. I mean, I love
Speaker 1: book clubs as cultural examples because they sound really like
Speaker 1: sweet and book clubs are full of drama, like how
Speaker 1: long you know? So and so always talks over everyone else? Well,
Speaker 1: how come they come they haven't read the entire book?
Speaker 1: Well are you actually reading the book? How come she
Speaker 1: always gets to choose the one? How come they always
Speaker 1: get to decide whether this fiction or nonfiction? We're reading
Speaker 1: too much? Right, And so I use it in part
Speaker 1: because we don't have They're not loaded and baggaged contexts,
Speaker 1: but they're wonderful examples of in any group, a group
Speaker 1: or a gathering has to decide or fall into how
Speaker 1: do we actually share time? And every time people come together,
Speaker 1: you're kind of deciding who has airtime? What are we
Speaker 1: actually talking about? And that's a question of power. It's
Speaker 1: shorthand for power in a gathering context is decision making,
Speaker 1: what's the agenda, who's at the table every single time
Speaker 1: we come together. It's actually a navigation between people about
Speaker 1: how you're going to spend their time. And it's the
Speaker 1: role of the host to basically enforce the reasons that
Speaker 1: we're there. And there's lots of ways to do it,
Speaker 1: but gathering is a political, small p political act, which
Speaker 1: is people have to coordinate how to be and then
Speaker 1: when they go off the rails, how are you going
Speaker 1: to reinforce and get people back on track? For me,
Speaker 1: that's a great transition to a different type of gathering
Speaker 1: of democracy, this vaguely defined project for many of us.
Speaker 1: But follow me on this, on this train, and it
Speaker 1: starts again with something you've written that what makes a
Speaker 1: gathering successful is put in place beforehand. And when I
Speaker 1: think about some of our rituals around practicing democracy, preparation
Speaker 1: is required going into the voting booth prepared much more
Speaker 1: helpful than just showing up cold trying to figure it out.
Speaker 1: And when we define citizen as a verb here, it's
Speaker 1: like understanding your power, investing in relationship, showing up and participating,
Speaker 1: valuing the collective. That all has some preparation baked into it.
Speaker 1: How do we apply this guidance, this preparatory guidance around
Speaker 1: gathering to approach the ways we come together for more
Speaker 1: explicitly civic purposes. So past baby showers, and birthday parties.
Speaker 1: We need gatherings for our democracy to literally function, and
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about school board meetings, some of which have
Speaker 1: gone way off the rails in so many of our experiences.
Speaker 1: What can we take from your experience and knowledge of
Speaker 1: gathering to apply to these critical infrastructure functions of our
Speaker 1: sometimes flailing democracy. I mean, the first thing is, I
Speaker 1: don't think of this as a binary. That there are
Speaker 1: civic gatherings and non civic gatherings and so often part
Speaker 1: of civic life, like all get to school boards, but
Speaker 1: the school board, when I say, it's not binary. Part
Speaker 1: of the reason these school boards are falling apart is
Speaker 1: in part because wealth, a lot of different reasons, but
Speaker 1: in part because we have fundamentally different norms and values
Speaker 1: and understandings of what's actually happening in our culture and
Speaker 1: more and more in our baby showers, in our birthday parties.
Speaker 1: We are lacking bridging infrastructure. So sociologically, there's groups that
Speaker 1: have bridging meaning, like you have a Republican and a Democrat,
Speaker 1: you have a Yankees fan in a Red Sox. We
Speaker 1: will go to dinner together. It's okay, We'll put our
Speaker 1: baseball politics aside and then there's bonding, which is sort
Speaker 1: of like and like, And basically, over the last fifty
Speaker 1: years in the US, at least, our bridging infrastructure has collapsed,
Speaker 1: and it's in part because our social and public infrastructure
Speaker 1: has collapsed. The privatization of everything has also led us
Speaker 1: to having more inequality and also having less civic shared
Speaker 1: spaces in which people who have difference spend time together.
Speaker 1: And so the first thing I would say is when
Speaker 1: we think about our civic life, one of the underlying
Speaker 1: purposes or needs and perhaps all of your gatherings is
Speaker 1: to really think about this larger project, which is who
Speaker 1: am I inviting and how do I make space for
Speaker 1: people who aren't exactly like me? And in conflict resolution,
Speaker 1: one of my mentors is a man named Harold Saunders,
Speaker 1: and he trained my peers and I in this very
Speaker 1: specific process called sustained dialogue. You bring people together, you
Speaker 1: talk very explicitly about your backgrounds. But he would say
Speaker 1: to us, always, don't become sustained dialogues salespeople. So often
Speaker 1: what we actually need is shared experiences where we're literally
Speaker 1: talking less. Dialogue is one form of communication, and sometimes
Speaker 1: it's incredibly helpful and sometimes there are so many landmines
Speaker 1: that actually, what you need to remember is that there's
Speaker 1: other ways to be. I'll give one more example. A
Speaker 1: woman wrote to me recently about her church and as
Speaker 1: a small church in North Carolina, and she basically wrote
Speaker 1: to me and she said, like many churches in this country,
Speaker 1: we've been doing a lot of missing of each other.
Speaker 1: We haven't actually gathered to congregate in over two years
Speaker 1: in person, so we've literally missed each other. And then
Speaker 1: the racial uprising has revealed fishers within our church that
Speaker 1: we didn't know we're there. And it is fundamentally getting
Speaker 1: down to like our core beliefs about the Bible, our
Speaker 1: core beliefs about how we come to know what we know,
Speaker 1: like it is as existential as it can get. What
Speaker 1: do we do? And I said, well, what do you
Speaker 1: think is the first deepest need in this community right now?
Speaker 1: And she said, people are so deeply in their camps
Speaker 1: and there's so much distrust that I think we need
Speaker 1: to remember why we enjoyed each other in the first place.
Speaker 1: We kind of need to grow the love. And so
Speaker 1: she threw a parking lot party and she convinced her
Speaker 1: board to rent a dunk tank and the core of
Speaker 1: the parking lot party was dunk the deacon. Yes, right,
Speaker 1: and we can all come together around that like throw
Speaker 1: that ball. And I love this example so much in
Speaker 1: part because again it's like even then you think, like, okay,
Speaker 1: the preconceived form of a church that's in conflict because
Speaker 1: we need to come together and stare at each other
Speaker 1: and talk about the most important parts of Christian theology. Right,
Speaker 1: it's so easy to get into we have a problem.
Speaker 1: We should come and talk about a problem. Yes, and
Speaker 1: sometimes yeah, And sometimes that's why it's like, look, part
Speaker 1: of what this woman is doing is she was paying
Speaker 1: attention and really looking at It's almost like reading a
Speaker 1: body and trying to figure out, like where is this unhealthy?
Speaker 1: And part of what I love about this was she
Speaker 1: then you know, I taught how to go and she
Speaker 1: said it was so fun and people kind of came
Speaker 1: and their arms were kind of across. Not everyone came,
Speaker 1: but there was like the band did cover songs and
Speaker 1: people there was a baked It gave people something to do.
Speaker 1: It was in the parking lot. Also very interesting the
Speaker 1: location of gathering matters. It wasn't an inside the church,
Speaker 1: but it also wasn't at some fancy venue where people
Speaker 1: could be like, this is what we're spending our money on. Right,
Speaker 1: She defended the purpose of the dunk tank and the
Speaker 1: purchase of it or the rental of it, and then
Speaker 1: she said later, she said, you know so many people
Speaker 1: the ways their bodies looked after from where literally their
Speaker 1: body language. Yeah, as they left, it was like there
Speaker 1: was some relief. And so I can't tell you how
Speaker 1: many people told me, wow, I needed this. So needs discovered,
Speaker 1: needs found, and also needs met. It's a nonlinear approach
Speaker 1: to some of the challenges we're facing into and maybe
Speaker 1: the best gathering isn't a debate or a dialogue, but
Speaker 1: it's a dunk tank. I experienced this with the America
Speaker 1: Outdoor show I made, which allowed me to experience the
Speaker 1: country and all this difference on literally different terms, different ground.
Speaker 1: Oh we're kayaking together. We're in the same boat, very
Speaker 1: different from being on the same dais completely with a
Speaker 1: card in front of me labeling me this and labeling
Speaker 1: me that. The idea that shared experiences can be the
Speaker 1: foundation on which we build more productive dialogue. It's a precursor, right,
Speaker 1: So the prerequisite and that you can shift the energy
Speaker 1: between people again by uniting them in dunking their deacon
Speaker 1: and creating just like having different staring at a zoom
Speaker 1: screen right right experience, and that that energy shift. It
Speaker 1: is a democratic process as well. So many of us
Speaker 1: are educated in like a formality it involves a town
Speaker 1: hall and involves a speaker and a box and a podium,
Speaker 1: and you say, oh, it could involve a dunk tank
Speaker 1: and you can grow the love that way. Election day?
Speaker 1: Is this explicitly democratic ritual that we have that is
Speaker 1: a bit tortured for for a lot of us. Is
Speaker 1: there something you would do to change about our ritual
Speaker 1: gatherings and events in these moments of election days themselves?
Speaker 1: How could you reimagine a reapproach that I think your
Speaker 1: question is really interesting to kind of to zoom out slightly,
Speaker 1: which is like, which are the national civic rituals that
Speaker 1: we should actually rap meaning around and which should be
Speaker 1: so like just the facts, ma'am, and so much of
Speaker 1: what's in this moment of democratic crisis of what's under's threat,
Speaker 1: Like if you think about the January sixth co attempt,
Speaker 1: what did they specifically try to attack? What was the
Speaker 1: boring democratic moment that they were trying to interrupt the certification,
Speaker 1: which for like one hundred and fifty years most citizens
Speaker 1: didn't even know what it was. Right, it was a certification.
Speaker 1: It was a ritual in which different states read out
Speaker 1: their ballot count and the vice president certifies the election.
Speaker 1: It was a very strategic, tactical, surgical attack on before
Speaker 1: what was actually a mundane civic ritual that had a
Speaker 1: functional and a ritualistic power, but all of a sudden
Speaker 1: that has become loaded and baggaged and so versus. Like
Speaker 1: I was so moved at the beginning of that kind
Speaker 1: of May June, April, May, June July, of the pandemic,
Speaker 1: when we finally got our first vaccine. To me, those
Speaker 1: moments standing in line watching I went in Brooklyn. The
Speaker 1: place I went was operated by the National Guard. It
Speaker 1: was safe, it was orderly, it was full of volunteers.
Speaker 1: It was this like I was weepy. It was this
Speaker 1: beautiful national civic ritual of walking in sitting side by side,
Speaker 1: six feet apart from other citizens or non citizens, but
Speaker 1: other human beings in that moment to all get the
Speaker 1: shot in our arm. And to me, like, those moments
Speaker 1: are moments to actually up the civic celebration. Right if
Speaker 1: you walk outside and everyone starts clapping, like these moments
Speaker 1: where you actually see this is what government is. Right.
Speaker 1: Government isn't just that election once a year. This is government. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: when we do it at the Apple store, you know,
Speaker 1: when they launch a new product and people line up
Speaker 1: and they clap congrats. You spend too much money on
Speaker 1: a device, you're gonna have to replace it a year.
Speaker 1: And we absolutely we could do it for first Like
Speaker 1: if you think about schools, you know, looking at schools
Speaker 1: as these educated places. The difference between schools that on
Speaker 1: the first day of school, like everyone just runs in
Speaker 1: the door, versus schools in which these are all real examples,
Speaker 1: a principle stands outside the door and greets every student
Speaker 1: by name. Yeah. Another school in Connecticut where trying to
Speaker 1: stop particularly black student attrition, black fathers would stand in
Speaker 1: their professional uniforms from where every bus opened the door
Speaker 1: to the door and would clap as their children entered
Speaker 1: the room. Yeah, that's great, and that's sparking. Where do
Speaker 1: we invest where do we add meeting, as you said,
Speaker 1: and what's worth celebrating in terms of our civic college apart,
Speaker 1: I can I just tak one thing part of like
Speaker 1: when I said earlier, gatherers are meaning makers, Like there
Speaker 1: is a lot of our civic life, in our democratic
Speaker 1: life that actually still works. And sometimes it's actually trying
Speaker 1: to figure out where to put the spotlight and saying
Speaker 1: this is something to celebrate. It was resonantly rereading their
Speaker 1: eyes were watching God by Zoraneil Hurston. And there's this
Speaker 1: moment in the book where basically the man she marries
Speaker 1: is in this new town and he becomes mayor, and
Speaker 1: one of the things he agitates for is getting electricity
Speaker 1: into the town. And the first street light arrives and
Speaker 1: the narrator basically says something like I just thought we'd
Speaker 1: like stick it in the ground. But what I didn't
Speaker 1: understand about my husband was that he was a man
Speaker 1: of ceremony. And he got the entire town cooking for
Speaker 1: three days, and we began to get everyone excited, and
Speaker 1: then we gathered around and then the first moment when
Speaker 1: there was literally light, the entire town was gathered, everyone clapped.
Speaker 1: He understood what and how to make meaning around certain
Speaker 1: moments of civic life. And the leaders we mean now
Speaker 1: and the citizens are moments to know what to celebrate
Speaker 1: and to grow. It's like parenting, like grow the good
Speaker 1: and to also I mean like the media I think
Speaker 1: is doing a slightly better job at this now than
Speaker 1: they were four years ago. It's also like what to
Speaker 1: not pay attention to? Yeah, what should remain boring? Just boring?
Speaker 1: Don't don't grow agitation, don't grow hate speech, don't grow.
Speaker 1: Don't retweet whatever you know so and so might say.
Speaker 1: After the break, Preya Parker on how we can reimagine
Speaker 1: the ways we gather for democracy. I want to bring
Speaker 1: us back to kind of neighborhood's, families, workplaces, these places
Speaker 1: where we gather the most. And we got this question
Speaker 1: in advance from a listener, Sarah Takehara, who row, some
Speaker 1: of us are eager to gather and build community, but
Speaker 1: we've been hurt in past community offerings. How do those
Speaker 1: of us who are worried about feeling safe and at
Speaker 1: home in community move forward? How do we honor our
Speaker 1: need to self protect while still actively looking to participate
Speaker 1: in the richness of a community gathering? Welcome to being alive?
Speaker 1: Do I love again? Do I decide to open my
Speaker 1: heart to a friend again? Do I decide to try
Speaker 1: something new. What I would say to dear listener is like,
Speaker 1: what is your deepest need? Like which community? Whose community?
Speaker 1: What are you trying to build a community, trying to
Speaker 1: join a community? Are you trying to be in community
Speaker 1: with people who have hurt you and you're trying to
Speaker 1: create some repair? Are you trying to new people and
Speaker 1: you're just feeling a little tender from the where you
Speaker 1: were before. And I know I sound like a broken record,
Speaker 1: but it's coming back to basics, which is really asking
Speaker 1: and pausing, what is the need here? What is my need?
Speaker 1: And what do I see the need in this community?
Speaker 1: Who might share that need? And then are there boundaries
Speaker 1: that you set up well ahead of time time to
Speaker 1: create the gatherings you wish existed. I mean, one of
Speaker 1: the things I thought was so interesting when I did
Speaker 1: research for the Art of Gathering, So the Art of
Speaker 1: Gathering as a book is yes, it's me as a
Speaker 1: facilitator kind of giving you my lens, But I also
Speaker 1: interviewed over one hundred different people, including you, Bartende, including
Speaker 1: me and Elizabeth and Elizabeth Stuarts and my wife. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you're both great gatherers and one of the things
Speaker 1: I found and I learned from so many people was many, many,
Speaker 1: many of these gatherers. And I found these people in
Speaker 1: part because these were people who other people consistently credit
Speaker 1: with being great gatherers or creating meaningful experiences. One of
Speaker 1: the things I found was, again and again and again,
Speaker 1: many of these gatherers self identified as introverts, as often
Speaker 1: suffering from social anxiety, as people often on the outside
Speaker 1: of things. And I it wasn't my frame of what
Speaker 1: who we think of as like the magnetic host or
Speaker 1: you know, like the person in the middle of the
Speaker 1: room who can handle it staying. I hand me the
Speaker 1: mic and I asked one person, I said, why do
Speaker 1: you think this is? And this person said to me,
Speaker 1: I create the gatherings I wish existed in the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I don't rely on the uniqueness of my personality.
Speaker 1: I create just enough structure and just enough context to
Speaker 1: allow people to really know if they want to enter.
Speaker 1: And I make sure that there's someone kind of at
Speaker 1: the steer of the ship so called, so that there's
Speaker 1: a light hand pushing people through. They know what they're
Speaker 1: signing up for. And I'm kind of creating just enough
Speaker 1: guardrails that I wish I had when I walk into
Speaker 1: a room and it's vague and diluted, or I'm getting
Speaker 1: cornered by someone forever, but I don't know how to
Speaker 1: politely sidestep, and so so often to go to even
Speaker 1: to the how do you re engage in community? To
Speaker 1: first pause and just ask what kind of community do
Speaker 1: you want to create? Like it's not a ad water,
Speaker 1: This is an organic and somewhat synthetic designed experience that
Speaker 1: takes courage and is risk taking. But also to get
Speaker 1: really clear on your intent, I think allows for some
Speaker 1: of the courage to be built brave spaces, beautiful courage.
Speaker 1: Thank you. This idea of planning gatherings for good controversy,
Speaker 1: which is something you've also talked and written about, can
Speaker 1: feel a little stressful, well nerve racking, like inviting controversy
Speaker 1: maybe conflict, but especially if you're not a trained facilitator.
Speaker 1: And you've just spoken about the types of hosts who
Speaker 1: who aren't the extroverts, but they want to create something
Speaker 1: that they saw missing in the world. You've also added
Speaker 1: and said that human connection is as threatened by unhealthy
Speaker 1: peace as unhealthy conflict. Break that apart for me, and
Speaker 1: then I got to follow over me. So I come
Speaker 1: from I'm a child of divorce. When my parents announced
Speaker 1: their separation, I and everyone else was shocked because they
Speaker 1: never fought. And I understood over many years that I
Speaker 1: come on both sides, from my Indian side and from
Speaker 1: my white man coincide from my like three generation of ostriches,
Speaker 1: people who just bury their heads. Just stick your head
Speaker 1: in the sand, hope it passes. And I think, in part,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm a conflict resolution facilitator who is conflict
Speaker 1: a verse. Oh that's right. I like even now, it's
Speaker 1: like start things start to heat up. This is my job.
Speaker 1: Things start to heat up, my hands get sweaty, you know,
Speaker 1: my heart starts beating. I've trained myself physiologically to like
Speaker 1: stay in the game. But I also deep empathy for
Speaker 1: those who are conflict of verse. I actually understand their
Speaker 1: deep desire to just flee, because I'll want to do
Speaker 1: the same. And I think there's some conflicts you just
Speaker 1: exit it's actually not worth it or it's revealing. But
Speaker 1: part of what I realized as a facilitator is heat
Speaker 1: is relevance and whether it's a community trying to figure
Speaker 1: out how to allocate its budget, or whether it's a
Speaker 1: newspaper designing which six stories get on the front page.
Speaker 1: Like it. It goes back to all gathering is political.
Speaker 1: All systems kind of have to decide like what are
Speaker 1: we about? And the juiciest of those conversations usually have
Speaker 1: a lot of heat. So I'll give a simple example
Speaker 1: someone I know who was running a team. She had
Speaker 1: a weekly staff meeting and she was trying to figure
Speaker 1: out basically how she wouldn't use this language, but how
Speaker 1: to bring more heat to the room. She was like,
Speaker 1: can tell they're not really they're holding back. I can
Speaker 1: tell they're not really like saying what they think. I'm
Speaker 1: not really sure why. And so I said, you know,
Speaker 1: don't try to change everything. The way you open a
Speaker 1: gathering matters. How are you opening your meetings? And she
Speaker 1: told me, and I said, why don't you try this
Speaker 1: for six weeks. You have sixteen minutes, spend the first
Speaker 1: five to ten minutes doing a very simple technique called
Speaker 1: rose and thorn. And it's something often from parenting circles.
Speaker 1: You zip around, you say what's your best thing in
Speaker 1: your week and what's the worst thing of the week.
Speaker 1: And that's it, and people could decide if it was
Speaker 1: work or if it was from their own life. And
Speaker 1: I called her up later and I said what happened
Speaker 1: and she said, well, first, since we did it regularly,
Speaker 1: different people took different risks over time. Some people chose
Speaker 1: to just keep it at work. Some people thought work
Speaker 1: is more risky. I'm going to keep it, you know.
Speaker 1: My two year old stubbed their toe, like, I'm going
Speaker 1: to keep this low risk. But basically, over time people
Speaker 1: started expanding their geographical conversation in terms of what they said.
Speaker 1: But something else happened, which is she said, I this
Speaker 1: is her language. I didn't realize that I was. I've
Speaker 1: always been perceived as a cheerleader, somebody to like bring
Speaker 1: things to and grow. I didn't realize that they didn't
Speaker 1: want to bring me bad news. And by shifting, by
Speaker 1: starting with a rose and thorn and giving them equal weight,
Speaker 1: we culturally normalized thorns. It's okay to bring thorns into
Speaker 1: this space. It's okay, and it's not even like even
Speaker 1: more than okay. It's normal. And so part of like
Speaker 1: really thinking about creating cultures for a healthy conflict. Often
Speaker 1: it can be really sometimes you do need an external facilitator,
Speaker 1: And like some of the things I would tell you
Speaker 1: to do, I would say, don't try this at home.
Speaker 1: But one of the things we can all do is
Speaker 1: really think about what are in the first five minutes
Speaker 1: of how you open something, What is the civic ritual,
Speaker 1: even if it's on a zoom chat, of getting people
Speaker 1: to practice that muscle in low risk ways. I also
Speaker 1: just really appreciate you, the expert, the author, the ted speaker,
Speaker 1: the conflict resolution specialist saying my hands field with clammy,
Speaker 1: and that we've prized comfort so much in life. In
Speaker 1: our economy, we create products to ease all kinds of discomfort,
Speaker 1: and in our political and civic life too. So if
Speaker 1: something makes us feel icky, we want to crush it
Speaker 1: or avoid it, or know or flee from it. And
Speaker 1: to see you practicing living with it and sharing stories
Speaker 1: of people inviting it, normalizing like discomfort is also part
Speaker 1: of the process. I think that's a really essential takeaway
Speaker 1: from this. So much of gathering and the way we've
Speaker 1: talked about it and the way I've i hear folks
Speaker 1: talk about is focused on the hosting. How to host
Speaker 1: any tips for guesting? How do we better attend and
Speaker 1: guest so that our gatherings it takes, it takes both
Speaker 1: those functions. This work is called the art of gathering,
Speaker 1: not the art of hosting, in part because I think
Speaker 1: guests have a lot of power. Guests absolutely shape a gathering.
Speaker 1: If someone is in the room and they are checked out,
Speaker 1: everyone can feel it, right, If someone's like texting under
Speaker 1: the table, everyone can feel it. And most of us
Speaker 1: are guests much more often than we're hosts. That's true
Speaker 1: for me, certainly, and so often. To think about, first
Speaker 1: of all, sort of stepping all the way back. If
Speaker 1: a gathering starts before anyone enters the room, it starts
Speaker 1: at the moment of the discovery. First of all, all
Speaker 1: these invitations come in invitations. Are these like little vessels,
Speaker 1: one gathering at a time to think about, to consider
Speaker 1: how do you want to spend your time and with whom?
Speaker 1: And to pause and to ask first to build what
Speaker 1: I call discernment muscles, which is to pause like, how
Speaker 1: is this invitation making me feel? Which ones are you
Speaker 1: rolling your eyes at? Which ones make you a gree
Speaker 1: Which ones are you like you know what? I'm going
Speaker 1: to leave this company? This is so disrespectful, right, like
Speaker 1: we react even if you're not paying attention. Which ones
Speaker 1: are you so excited that you start clapping when you're
Speaker 1: so excited you got invited to something? Just notice? Then
Speaker 1: the second as a guest, really thinking about you know,
Speaker 1: we talk about nutritional diets, right of a culture or
Speaker 1: a community? What does a group of people eat? We
Speaker 1: talk about informational diets, what do we read? What do
Speaker 1: we doomscroll? When do we limit our doomscrolling? And I
Speaker 1: want to introduce the sort of the idea of a
Speaker 1: gathering diet, how many what type with home over? What
Speaker 1: gatherings do you want to host or guest to maintain
Speaker 1: relational health but also boundaried a boundaried life and what's
Speaker 1: the right balance for you? And then the final thing
Speaker 1: I'll say is in terms of an intentional guest. And
Speaker 1: this is like, if you remember nothing else from from
Speaker 1: our conversation, an invitation is like someone throwing you a ball,
Speaker 1: And so often we think the only way to throw
Speaker 1: a ball back is if you can go, is to
Speaker 1: say yes. And when it comes to invitations, don't be
Speaker 1: a maybe it's a delusion of everybody's energy. Well I go, Well,
Speaker 1: I not go keeps this question open your head keeps
Speaker 1: their question unless they're literally like, come on by, if
Speaker 1: you want open house, no big deal, don't rus would
Speaker 1: be great, go do that. But basically to practice either
Speaker 1: an enthusiastic yes, yes I choose to go to this,
Speaker 1: Yes I want to be there, or a connected no.
Speaker 1: We often think saying no is actually not throwing the
Speaker 1: ball back. Not responding is not throwing the ball back,
Speaker 1: and actually by saying I thank you so much for
Speaker 1: thinking of me, I won't be able to make it,
Speaker 1: it's actually yeah, it's citizening. It's throwing this ball back.
Speaker 1: And so so often, how we actually model these moments
Speaker 1: of transaction affects so much about how we spend our time,
Speaker 1: in part because then you are choosing what you want
Speaker 1: to go to, and to be in a place you
Speaker 1: want to be is a beautiful experience, and also you
Speaker 1: show up differently, and then not being someplace is also like.
Speaker 1: Our gatherings are affected by who's there and who's not there,
Speaker 1: and people saying not to stuff is also data interesting,
Speaker 1: why did they say no to this? Maybe we should
Speaker 1: shift it? Interesting, No one's coming to our conferences here,
Speaker 1: Maybe we need to figure out why are they saying no? Right.
Speaker 1: It's an ongoing practice and conversation in communities, which is
Speaker 1: like trying to figure out what is the need, how
Speaker 1: should we gather and who decides? As you know, citizen
Speaker 1: is a verb in the title of this show, right,
Speaker 1: how to citizen? And so I'm going to ask you
Speaker 1: what would be your definition of the word citizen if
Speaker 1: you choose to interpret it as we do, as a
Speaker 1: verb to pay attention to the needs around you, to
Speaker 1: choose with discernment which ones you choose to address, to
Speaker 1: galvanize the people with a shared need, and to do
Speaker 1: it in a way where you don't all have to
Speaker 1: be the same beautiful we are entering the community, ask questions.
Speaker 1: This is a q anda. We like to do these
Speaker 1: things live, and so if we have Cassandra or Cassandra,
Speaker 1: you will tell us which it is and your question. Hi,
Speaker 1: thank you so much Cassandra's staff. As what I say,
Speaker 1: I respond to both. And I'm in San Jose, California.
Speaker 1: This has been very interesting and inspiring. I am starting
Speaker 1: a new job soon and I'm wondering if you have
Speaker 1: any advice for gatherings to establish meaningful connections with about
Speaker 1: one hundred people in my first ninety days on a
Speaker 1: nonprofit budget, and you know, something like an alternative to
Speaker 1: surveys and one on ones. So two questions, is it
Speaker 1: online or in person or a mix mostly in person?
Speaker 1: And do you have institutional authority? I will, you will. So,
Speaker 1: first of all, the reason I ask about the institutional
Speaker 1: authority is in a work context, like who is calling
Speaker 1: the meeting? And your ability to call a meeting or
Speaker 1: gathering really depends on what type of power and role
Speaker 1: you have in an organization. And I mean I will
Speaker 1: just I'll give a few examples of different forms that
Speaker 1: I think have been effective for people. The first is
Speaker 1: think about what are the types of gatherings that are
Speaker 1: low pressure but high interest. So what I mean by
Speaker 1: that is something like a brown bag lunch, right starting
Speaker 1: a series speaker series that's a you know, local activists
Speaker 1: in the San Jose area. I'm making this up right
Speaker 1: where you come in and it's voluntary, but they're every
Speaker 1: Tuesday at noon, there's a brown bag lunch. Right. It's
Speaker 1: broadly informal, but you're also seeing kind of who's coming,
Speaker 1: particularly if it's in person, like the before chat, the
Speaker 1: after chat, like it's low stakes, but it's relevant to
Speaker 1: the organization. One of my favorite books of the last
Speaker 1: year is Oliver Berkman's four Thousand Weeks? Do you Know?
Speaker 1: Do you know what four thousand weeks is? So? Four
Speaker 1: thousand weeks is the number of weeks one has in
Speaker 1: their life should they be lucky enough to live till eighty.
Speaker 1: So the subtitle of the book is time management for Mortals.
Speaker 1: And the second half of the book is really interesting
Speaker 1: for me and the people who are interested in kind
Speaker 1: of gathering in collective life, because he talks about this
Speaker 1: concept called the social regulation of time. And this idea
Speaker 1: is basically that when we choose to come together at
Speaker 1: the same time at the same place, by definition, we're
Speaker 1: giving up some amount of individual freedom. Right can I
Speaker 1: listen to the meeting whenever I want? Or do I
Speaker 1: need to be there in person at the same time
Speaker 1: at the same place. And he talks about this Swedish
Speaker 1: tradition called the fika, and he says, in Sweden, in
Speaker 1: many workplaces at around three o'clock, everybody gets up and
Speaker 1: goes and has a coffee in the office. And this
Speaker 1: is different than having like a cappuccino machine or coffee
Speaker 1: machine you kind of go to whenever you want. This
Speaker 1: is a social regulation of time. And one of the
Speaker 1: managers in the book said, if I want to know
Speaker 1: what's happening in my workplace, I attend the FIKA. And
Speaker 1: he says it's not required, but you'd get a side eye,
Speaker 1: you know, a Swedish side eye if you don't go.
Speaker 1: And again I'm not saying like you should institute a FICA.
Speaker 1: You have to figure out what is your cultural appropriate
Speaker 1: way to have low stakes but high relevant scatherings. And
Speaker 1: some of this is also running a bunch of experiments.
Speaker 1: Who are these people? Are these people who are really
Speaker 1: interested for novelty and saying, Wow, it's so amazing having
Speaker 1: all these outside speakers or is this a culture? It's like,
Speaker 1: why are they bringing in all these outsiders? Right, experiment?
Speaker 1: But I would have specific and focused ways in the
Speaker 1: first ninety days in which you are sharing your agenda,
Speaker 1: you're letting them get to know you. And then I
Speaker 1: would have ways in which it feels more low stakes
Speaker 1: but still relevant to the organization. It's not gratuitous connection
Speaker 1: for connection's sake, it's connection to the purpose of your organization.
Speaker 1: Thank you, We're going to call on Katie Riley. Hello,
Speaker 1: and oh what a treat. So I'm Katie. I'm an organizer.
Speaker 1: I live in Queens, New York, and um, you know,
Speaker 1: big fan of democracy and citizenship. So this is super cool. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, as somebody who is very fond of the
Speaker 1: harder gathering, of thinking about different ways to gather. Like,
Speaker 1: where do you see the most untapped potential right now
Speaker 1: in creating gatherings, particularly for organizers and people who really
Speaker 1: care about protecting democracy? Beautiful question. The most untapped opportunity
Speaker 1: right now is to create pockets and moments of deep joy.
Speaker 1: We have models like during the pandemic, Saint James Joy,
Speaker 1: this couple, as I understand it, who basically DJed off
Speaker 1: their Brooklyn stoop and you know, and people would come
Speaker 1: and dance and kind of get it out once particularly
Speaker 1: we knew that it was safe to be outside together.
Speaker 1: But I think so much of what's happening in this country,
Speaker 1: there's so many underlying structural reasons as to why we
Speaker 1: are a hot mess. To put it, sociologically scientific inequality,
Speaker 1: the loss and confusion around roles in so many different ways.
Speaker 1: And like when I look at kind of I talked
Speaker 1: earlier about almost like metaphorically reading of bodies. I would
Speaker 1: go back to that parking lot example, which is like many, many,
Speaker 1: many people are lonely. Many many, many people aren't doing
Speaker 1: this the basic steps of like getting outside and doing
Speaker 1: something that's fun. We've been kind of like physiologically crouched
Speaker 1: for two and a half years for a lot of
Speaker 1: different reasons and having pockets of joy. And there's so
Speaker 1: many examples, even during the BLM protests, of like the
Speaker 1: Cupid shuffle in the middle of the street, right that
Speaker 1: we don't not know how to do this. But I
Speaker 1: think so often we think like we need to have
Speaker 1: these intellectual discussions, and so often like we need the
Speaker 1: medicine of joy, of relief, of laughter, of humor, and
Speaker 1: ideally of experiencing some of that with strangers, and part
Speaker 1: of creating spaces that you literally feel safe in public spaces.
Speaker 1: It's not a lack of danger, it's a presence of beauty,
Speaker 1: of joy, of laughter, of release. And the second thing
Speaker 1: I would say is we've been through a traumatic period
Speaker 1: with the pandemic, and it's it's continued. We're still living
Speaker 1: a different phase of the pandemic. But for multiple years
Speaker 1: we were as a nation like in like deep fear.
Speaker 1: And I think that the second civic need is finding
Speaker 1: appropriate ways to grieve, beautiful answers. The thing that bridges
Speaker 1: this for me with Katie's question, your answer prea is
Speaker 1: the Lincoln Memorial. I recently was in Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: For a big civic event, popped over to the Lincoln
Speaker 1: Memorial with friends and at the foot of the Lincoln
Speaker 1: Memorial was a group of teenagers dancing. They had loudspeakers,
Speaker 1: they were choreographed. We thought, is this a music video?
Speaker 1: Is this a TikTok challenge? And I so I went
Speaker 1: up to two of these kids, Let's say, what is
Speaker 1: this beautiful thing? And they're like, oh, they had a
Speaker 1: name for it. They just know each other through Instagram,
Speaker 1: but they don't know each other like they know that
Speaker 1: they're connected to this thing. And it was a flash
Speaker 1: dance mob and they were so happy. The physical metaphor
Speaker 1: of one of them being in their body and expressing
Speaker 1: joy of being around strangers, of being in a public
Speaker 1: space between the Lincoln Memorial and the reflecting pool that
Speaker 1: was America, Like that was the best of citizening and
Speaker 1: gathering and joy and it's everything that Katie asked, and
Speaker 1: it's everything you answered. In an instance, they're breaking our
Speaker 1: idea of the form of what is supposed to look
Speaker 1: like honoring. Right. It was like silent, hollowed tones of
Speaker 1: going and that may be honoring in some places, right,
Speaker 1: but to reclaim we can do this right And it's
Speaker 1: and it's kind of controversial, like in certain cases, is
Speaker 1: what does it look like to honor? And so I
Speaker 1: love this example in part because it's actually bringing relevance
Speaker 1: to the most one of the most important physical symbols
Speaker 1: that we have in the country. I appreciate you Prea Parker,
Speaker 1: thank you for having me a total joy, it really is.
Speaker 1: And I think there's something elemental in your interpretation of
Speaker 1: the of how to and the power of gathering that
Speaker 1: what we see reflected that feels ugly and unapproachable and
Speaker 1: even dangerous, and some elements of our politics and civic
Speaker 1: life could be addressed if we gather differently, and if
Speaker 1: we practiced differently, and even if we said no differently
Speaker 1: but said something and leaned into discomfort in someplace. But
Speaker 1: most essentially, if we acknowledge the need, if we discover
Speaker 1: that need and then with that clear discovery, find creative
Speaker 1: ways to meet them, and are always honest about needing
Speaker 1: to refresh that because some old ways we have may
Speaker 1: not be discovering or meeting our needs. And that's okay,
Speaker 1: let's do something different. So you've provoked and inspired. I
Speaker 1: appreciate you so much, Thank you so much, beautifully summarized.
Speaker 1: You are a beautiful host and you listen so deeply
Speaker 1: and I couldn't put it myself, so thank you for
Speaker 1: having me, and thank you for letting me part of
Speaker 1: your community. Thank you for being a part of ours,
Speaker 1: so so much, Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1: Love love, love thy 'all. Priya's instruction to stop and
Speaker 1: assess the purpose and need of these moments is a powerful,
Speaker 1: clear takeaway to help us make the time we spend
Speaker 1: together more meaningful and more relevant. Before this conversation, I'd
Speaker 1: never thought of the act of gathering as a technology,
Speaker 1: specifically in the context of morality. When Priya described Trump
Speaker 1: rallies those gatherings as morally neutral, that was kind of
Speaker 1: like a record scratch moment. But as someone with so
Speaker 1: many thoughts and feelings about what technology is and means,
Speaker 1: it made sense. Gatherings to me, are a real low
Speaker 1: tech technology. And we often think of technology as a
Speaker 1: hardware as software, and it can be represented in those modes.
Speaker 1: But technology is a reproducible practice. It's a way of
Speaker 1: coordinating our knowledge, and I think gatherings qualify in the
Speaker 1: same way that Ruha Benjamin, one of our earlier guests,
Speaker 1: talked about social technology. Gatherings are a social technology, and
Speaker 1: it's a technology that can help us get things done.
Speaker 1: Gatherings can help us see each other, hear new ideas,
Speaker 1: reach consensus, can help us citizen or they can help
Speaker 1: destroy the fabric of democracy. It all depends on how
Speaker 1: we use them, and like with all tech, gatherings need
Speaker 1: to be honestly assessed and reimagined when they no longer
Speaker 1: serve us. So follow me on this little journey. If
Speaker 1: we can get more creative, playful and purposeful and the
Speaker 1: ways we bring people together and show up, I think
Speaker 1: that can have a bubbling up effect where with time
Speaker 1: we can start to embody a different way of being
Speaker 1: together in our every day and I think that could
Speaker 1: change how we come together on very special days like
Speaker 1: election days. Gathering better can help us citizen better. Now
Speaker 1: it's time for some actions like we always do. Here
Speaker 1: are things you can do to practice what we've been hearing.
Speaker 1: We've organized these into three categories. The first category internal reflection,
Speaker 1: something you can do inside your own head. I want
Speaker 1: you to think about gatherings in your life. Try to
Speaker 1: think of a great one where you felt connected, fulfilled,
Speaker 1: and a sense of purpose. Now, try to think of
Speaker 1: a bad one where you felt the opposite of those things.
Speaker 1: Think about it. There's any gatherings that really surprised you
Speaker 1: versus what you expected of them. And as you reflect
Speaker 1: on these, can you identify what about the gathering made
Speaker 1: you feel the way you do about it now. The
Speaker 1: second recommendation is in the category of getting more informed.
Speaker 1: Check out Preya's conversation with Brene Brown on her Dare
Speaker 1: to Lead podcast. Will have it linked in the show notes.
Speaker 1: They go through an example of prey as gathering Makeover,
Speaker 1: which is focused on improving a weekly leadership. That may
Speaker 1: not sound like it has anything to do with practicing democracy,
Speaker 1: but it's got everything to do with literally practicing democracy.
Speaker 1: And our final recommendation is an action in the form
Speaker 1: of public participation. I want you to check out pre
Speaker 1: as brand new digital course on the art of gathering.
Speaker 1: It's specifically designed to help you plan an upcoming gathering,
Speaker 1: whether it's a wedding, a weekly meeting, or something in between.
Speaker 1: With purpose and with meaning. Head to course dot preaparker
Speaker 1: dot com and use the code baratun Day for fifteen
Speaker 1: percent off. I know right, I got a code. It's
Speaker 1: my name, so cool. If you take any of these actions,
Speaker 1: please brag about it online and use the hashtag how
Speaker 1: to Citizen. Also tag our Instagram how to Citizen, or
Speaker 1: you can email us comments at how to citizen dot com.
Speaker 1: I am always online and I really do see your messages,
Speaker 1: so send them. You can also visit our website, howard
Speaker 1: to citizen dot com, which has all of our shows,
Speaker 1: full transcripts, actions and more. Finally, see this episode show
Speaker 1: notes for resources, actions and more ways to connect. How
Speaker 1: to Citizen with barrettun Day is a production of iHeartRadio
Speaker 1: Podcasts and row Home Productions. Our executive producers are me
Speaker 1: barrettun Day, Thurston, and Elizabeth Stewart. Our lead producer is
Speaker 1: Ali Graham. Our associate producer is Donia Abdelhamide. Alex Lewis
Speaker 1: is our managing producer, and John Myers is our executive
Speaker 1: editor and mixed engineer. Original music by Andrew Eapen with
Speaker 1: additional music by Blue Dot Sessions. Special thanks to Joel
Speaker 1: Smith from iHeartRadio and lay Labina. Next, on how to Citizen,
Speaker 1: I think it's important if you're going to be involved
Speaker 1: in the community and involved in some kind of social
Speaker 1: change that you're looking for, find a passion, find something
Speaker 1: that you're particularly interested in, and focus on it and
Speaker 1: read about it and get to know your subject. For me,
Speaker 1: that topic is gun violence. I lost my dad to
Speaker 1: gun violence when I was eighteen years old, and so
Speaker 1: that issue is my passion. NBA Championship winning coach Steve
Speaker 1: Kerr talks teamwork and flexing our civic muscles on and
Speaker 1: off the court with leaders from the world of college athletics.
Speaker 1: We all belong to a team, so what can we
Speaker 1: learn from people who practice teamwork as their job. Yes,
Speaker 1: we're running hard with the sports metaphor, but it works.
Speaker 1: Find out how on the next episode, Row Home Productions