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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, and we are going to wrap things up today with another episode of our short series with Priya Parker, best known for her book, The Art of Gathering. She also has an Art of Gathering newsletter, which people are a little uncertain about these days. As many people are coming out of COVID isolation, but not sure exactly how to gather, what the new rules are, or rituals different. So many things.

We're going to talk a little bit now about the role of a host, not the kind of host that I am on the radio, but an in-person host at this point in time. Priya was here the other day talking about The Art of Guesting, as she calls it, being a guest. Now we're going to spend a few minutes talking about being a host. Hi Priya. Thanks for doing this again.

Priya Parker: Hi Brian. Thanks for having me. Someone recently described this as a residency with you, which I thought was quite lovely.

[laughter]

Brian Lehrer: That's very nice. Is there a short answer to the question? What is the role of a host?

Priya Parker: The role of a host at its deepest level is one of meaning maker. You are a wonderful host because you help us orient, you make meaning of the day's news. A host is somebody at this very simplest level, somebody in work or in a community, or in a family that says, I think we should all meet at the same time, at the same place for this purpose. What do you think? Often the biggest mistake we make when we gather is we assume that the purpose for gathering is obvious and shared. At the simplest level a host to somebody who helps make meaning and orient people to how we should spend our time at a specific moment.

Brian Lehrer: One of the maybe counterintuitive things in your book about hosting is your chapter called Don't Be a Chill Host. You write that chill can be selfishness in disguise. We usually think of chill I think as being easygoing, which typically has positive connotation. How are you using that word?

Priya Parker: You are probably raised how I was, which is to have a spirit of generosity. There's always one more seat at our table. I'm not saying don't do that. What I'm saying is often because we don't actually think about why we're bringing people together force and how to orient them, we tend to under-host. When I went to research years ago for The Art of Gathering, I interviewed hundreds of people, over a hundred people who other people credited with consistently creating meaningful transformative experiences.

One of the things they most had in common was that they didn't under-host, they didn't let people be to themselves. They helped us understand how particularly in diverse environments how to be. This can be super simple. It doesn't have to be serious at all. I'll give an example. I have a friend who told me about a senior boss at his ad agency got as a thank-you gift from a client, got a fancy bottle of champagne.

The boss doesn't drink alcohol, and he handed it off to somebody on his team, and they had this 2004 Champagne and Magnum and didn't know what to do with it. They decided to invite eight friends to come and taste the champagne. The only rule was that you had to come with a story from your life from the year 2004 to share with your friends. This host, what they did was very simple, again, totally unserious reason, purpose. They helped to orient the guest.

Brian Lehrer: Random.

Priya Parker: Yes. It's random. Not rocket science. They helped to make meaning for their people. Rather than all hanging out in the living room, which can be fine, if you enjoy hanging out in the living room and everyone talking about this and that, do that. Many people, particularly after COVID but the Surgeon General two years before the pandemic declared an epidemic of loneliness. So much of what we're yearning for right now is to come back together in meaningful ways and fun ways, in ways that don't feel like a drag. Part of the art of doing that well is to help people understand why are we coming together and how can I be successful here.

Brian Lehrer: One concept in your book around this is that once the party has started, we should practice what you call generous authority. Explain generous authority.

Priya Parker: Generous authority is the idea that a host has a role to connect their guests to each other, to protect their guests from each other. The drunk cornering someone at Thanksgiving or Christmas or Hanukkah. How do you protect your guests from each other, and to temporarily equalize? One of my favorite examples of a host that does this well, by the way, institutions are hosts is the Alamo Draft House. There's one in Brooklyn, it was started in Austin. This is a movie theater that like many movie theaters has a jingle at the beginning of the film that says, "No talking, no texting."

Most movie theaters, Lowes, AMC, if someone's talking in a movie theater, it's up to the guests to turn around, give them a side eye, security doesn't come in unless literally, a fight breaks out. The Alamo Draft house practices generous authority because they say what the rule is or what the norms are, but if somebody talks or if somebody is being loud on their phone, you can write down on the same order card that you might order an IPA or a pilsner that there's someone behind me that's like distracting from the film and the staff goes and gives them a warning. If they do it twice, they get kicked out.

They understand that their purpose as a theater is to bring the magic of going to the movies back to people. That you can sit at home and watch Netflix. Actually, to have this incredible experience, you need to not just connect your guests to the purpose and give them--

Brian Lehrer: In our last minute, I imagine this generous authority expression of generosity but authority is probably hardest at the holidays, at the family gatherings. If you're just having a party with people you voluntarily decide to invite, you're probably going to do a pretty good job of putting together a group of people who are going to get along with each other. There's so much obligation around, you were mentioning Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, everything, where there are people maybe don't really think, are going to enhance the occasion, but we have to invite. Is that the hardest, the holidays?

Priya Parker: I think family dynamics are the hardest to shift. Friends, even colleagues, there's all agency we have, you can invite in and out, and often in systems a family as a system where our roles feel preassigned, it's harder to shift through one act at a time. The biggest advice I have to folks thinking about perhaps reimagining their family ritual is to begin well before anyone enters into the door. To think well ahead of time. This goes back to our last conversation about The Power of Guesting.

How do I actually want, when should we meet? How should we meet? How do I need to talk as their cousins to try a slightly different ritual this year? Should we send an email in advance to start thinking about how you actually want to shift the dynamic through the invitation and through thinking about with your cousins, with the other folks who want to shift plans?

Brian Lehrer: Will be back one more time in this series tomorrow. Priya, thanks a lot.

Priya Parker: Thanks so much for having me, Brian.

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