The Celebrity Poster
Starting Meaningful Meetup Groups: May 2019 Report on Origins and the First Year of the Sacramento Group
Of course much has changed in the meantime; the Estuary concept has now been further developed and embodied, but this video is packed with important takeaways!
To give some history, explanation and orientation about doing meetups, I've asked a number of my friends to join me in this.
~
I have been doing meetups long before I even knew about Jordan Peterson or [Paul] for that matter, because I was doing a meetup for my Storytelling Time - basically attempting to create an audience for a storytelling event that we patterned after The Moth radio story hour.
When you and I started talking about Jordan Peterson and the way that it was actually creating a conversation online about what it means to sort yourself out - that whole conversation took on a life of its own.
I thought it was just fascinating that all these people were really sharing a lot of deep stuff with one another online, but the one thing that was perhaps missing was the opportunity to do that face to face. To actually sit in front of another person - and have that person hear what you say and get some immediate feedback - if for no other reason than the facial expressions that are generated when you're pontificating about this or that. So I thought it was kind of a cool opportunity to gather people.
~ John
I'm about to make a celebrity out of someone else because a little poster here is famous. A lot of people ask me where I got this poster - and I'll tell them the story about a guy who comes to church the Sunday after I started making videos and he comes and gives me this as a gift. That guy is actually with us today and his name is Rick.
~ Paul
I live down the street from Paul. So late one night watching Peterson videos - Paul's video came up, and I went Oh boy, we have to meet. So I got the car one Sunday, went into the church and made a new friend, so then we started doing Peterson meetups and it's been a real rollercoaster ride…
It was a real mystery to me who these people were. Were they like me? Should we all get together and have conversations? I’m a little bit burned out on social media…
~ Rick
To me that's the biggest contribution that Jordan Peterson has made is giving a language for people to have conversation, not just the material for the conversation.
~ Tyler
I didn't know what to expect - I'm the type of person I have never been to a church outside of weddings and funerals…
I joined the meetup, had a great time the first time, I've kind of been addicted ever since. It's one of the highlights of the things that I get to do now. I started my own smaller meetup…
~ Joey
I have a sense that meetup.com captured a trend or a need in society, where so many of the institutions that ordinarily brought people together in one room face-to-face in physical proximity to one another - many of these structures have fallen by the wayside. All these kinds of membership groups seem to be diminishing and finding it difficult to keep the show on the road and churches are losing members. And a lot of people seem to be going through life in a kind of a form of social isolation. There are still all kinds of people who would like to be able to do things with other people without necessarily making the commitment of membership and dues and whatever else is associated with that.
~ John
One of the things we almost never talk about is politics; we'll talk about second layer politics, we'll talk about cultural trends within politics, but we don't talk about politics directly.
The other thing that we don't do is run it like a spiritual group specifically, and I use spiritual as a rough sense because there's a lot of groups out there that are looking to gain members who want to talk about similar things to what we want to talk about, but they are run more like a group therapy group, or a 12-step meeting, or something like that. Not necessarily that there's something specific they're trying to get rid of, but they are a I'm dissatisfied group and I'm gonna go to this group to try and become satisfied with something. We have stuff within our group available to people who need that kind of help, but we're not specifically about helping people that need that kind of help. We are there and we are a healthy outlet for people who are in need of something new without saying come here and we'll cure you of what's wrong with you.
It's a meetup, not a meeting - we're coming together to come together and we all want to be there.
~ Joey
Probably our first three or four meetups we were just trying to understand who these people were and how to cater to them.
We tried to split up the groups into somewhat rigid categories, and we abandoned that after the first time we tried that, we said Oh, that's not going to work.
~ Rick
If people know I'm a minister the presumption is often that I'm going to proselytize, and I think that tends to inhibit the conversation. So my goal was quite strictly speaking just conversation about whatever people would find to be meaningful and that's really been what we've sought out.
I wanted us to at least begin with a circle so everyone could see everyone and I also knew that another strong motivation was the breakout from a social media screen culture: just who are these other people? I feel alone … and does this mean something?
~Paul
I find it fascinating that you should mention that the exposure or the involvement with Jordan Peterson is both an asset and a liability… [There are those] who perhaps are there also for another reason, and that this being together and being heard, and having a chance to articulate your views, and have them be listened to and respected has its own value regardless of the content.
~ John
Or maybe let [new people] introduce themselves first, because by the time we all go and do our introductions we've sort of conditioned the responses based on what we’re saying that we're liking out of the group and so then they're going to sort of naturally conform towards that, whereas if they were looking for something else then we don't hear about that and so we're missing out on that information, so that's maybe an idea for next time.
~ Tyler
Talk about something that's kind of out there, talk about something that you do not have an answer for. The best conversations are not the ones where you are What do we do about XYZ problem? A better question is XY & Z are all changing - what kind of problems do you think this will cause, and how can we solve them? Those are those conversations that go on for hours and hours and hours and you actually end up learning way more than when you're actually looking for a solution with something, because again this is not a business, this is a conversation, that's fun part.
… I can imagine many of them would be very enthusiastic to say I want to talk about religious and cultural and other topics and I want peoples opinions who are involved in the church - and I don't have a church. Can I talk to your pastor and start a meetup group with them about this guy Jordan Peterson who talks about these topics a lot? Hopefully we would have a good mixture of people who are involved with the church and who aren't involved with the church and we could go forward from there. I don't know but I think that's a specific market of people that exist.
~ Joey
You just broke my heart Joey. Because I have so little confidence that many pastors would do this and that breaks my heart. It especially because I know how ironic it is that you are saying to people they should go and engage a church, because that's not who you … Wow, Wow!
~ Paul
I think that people who approach it as if it's something that's worth doing will find the meaning in it.
~ Joey
We met for coffee in the park on Saturday mornings a number of times and there was between four and eight of us at any given time…
~ Tyler
When this meetup started both James and I said to each other this is exactly what I always wanted church to be like, but never saw and here it is happening.
~ Paul
People don’t really know what they're looking for, but they know they're looking for something, and so that there was this desire for I wish I could talk to somebody about this, and then now we have people who are saying I wish there was someone I could talk to about this - I wish there was a meetup to facilitate being able to talk to people about this and that then they're thinking okay I need to be the one to start this meetup.
In trying to bring in new people, you really have to make an effort to to include them. One of the things we do is that if you're new you get to propose topics first and that I think is an effective way of just getting those people to feel like they have the opportunity to be heard… The infusion of the new that keeps the group from getting stale.
~ Tyler
I would say that very often we have a lot of people who are very information overloaded; they've read a lot of books, they've seen a lot of videos and they will try and hyperlink to those videos and books and tell people that that's what they need to read to understand the conversation. A great tool that I've found both in my personal life for having better conversations myself and inside this group is telling people No, I'm not going to go read that book you just told me to read. You have to describe it to me - that's the conversation that we're having.
We have a professor in the group who keeps trying to give me homework and I won't take it.
You are focusing on the discussion, and not consensus.
~ Joey
Meaningful conversations themselves are meaningful and sufficient…Somewhere along the way you have to buy into the value of meaningful conversations in and of themselves.
There is going to be an element of different opinions floating around out there that you're not going to solve, and you're not going to be able to to ameliorate or settle or harmonize or reconcile, so there has to be a great deal of openness to different things being in tension with each other. Then to be able to value all the people that bring these tensions to the table and then to say hey, this is in and of itself meaningful and a good place where really cool things can happen when there is an openness to different ideas, and the last word does not have to be said in the meeting.
~ John
I think the lack of meaningful conversation usually results in propagandizing people and I think that is not Christian - and I'm using the word propaganda in its technical sense.
I think you have to have meaningful conversation or people aren't actually working on their own stuff, and then looking for what real-life transformation happens. It has to be meaningful, I think in that Jordan Peterson is right.
~ Paul
There's a tremendous depth to sorting yourself out. If you do it seriously there's all kinds of dimensions to it and eventually you may or may not bump into some kind of a spiritual dimension.
~ John
Some time later…
John Van Donk describes a new protocol:
On the ground Estuary leader Nate Hile leads a demonstration meeting: