Why the format is the format.
If a conference about the future of learning costs two thousand dollars and a flight, the future of learning is going to belong to the people who can afford two thousand dollars and a flight. We have seen this film before and we know how it ends. The cleverest insights pool in the rooms where the cleverest people already are.
The same is now happening with AI. The good models cost money. The good prompts are being shared in private groups. None of this is anybody’s fault, and most of the people doing it have decent intentions, but the shape of it is starting to look exactly like the last hundred years of who got to read and who did not.
We are trying to build a different shape. The shape requires that you can take part in this conference without paying anything more than the price of three hours of your time and the bus fare for the people you invite over. If you cannot, the project has already failed and we should stop pretending.
So this is the format. We did not invent it. We borrowed it from book clubs and study circles and the kitchen tables of every immigrant family that has ever sat down to figure out what was happening to their children. It is older than the internet and it still works.
“Three hours is the longest amount of time most people can be properly present without checking their phone, and the shortest amount of time it takes for a real conversation to stop performing and start being honest.” POST AI, on the format
How to actually do it.
Pick a date. We will publish the main October session date and a small number of suggested dates around it for circles. You can use one of those, or pick your own. The point of the suggested dates is that on those days, circles all over the world are happening at the same time, and there is something quietly enormous about knowing that.
Invite the people. Three is enough. Ten is the upper bound. More than ten and somebody will not speak, and if somebody is not speaking the conversation is missing what they came with.
Pick a topic. You can use one of the four themes from the main conference, or you can choose your own. The best topic is usually the one that has been bothering at least one person in the room for a while. If two people show up with the same thing on their mind, that is the topic.
Sit down. Make tea or whatever you make. Have one person agree to take notes. The notes are not a transcript. They are what the conversation actually arrived at, written down in plain language by somebody who was paying attention.
Talk for three hours. Do not rush. Do not try to reach a conclusion. The point of the room is not the conclusion. The point of the room is the seeing.
Upload the notes to the library. Your circle has its own entry. Over time, somebody reading the library can see a hundred kitchens around the world all working on the same question, and the answers do not always agree, and that is the point too.
What gets uploaded, what stays in the room
You decide. The library is for the part of the conversation that belongs to the world. The part that was about somebody’s specific marriage, somebody’s specific child, somebody’s particular grief, stays in the room. Nobody should ever leave a circle feeling that something they said in confidence will be on a website.
The notes are written by a person, edited by the group, and uploaded only when everyone in the room is happy with them. That is not a feature. It is the only way this is going to work.
The pass.
One hundred US dollars covers your circle. It is paid by the person hosting and it covers everyone in the room. You do not need to charge your guests. You do not need to do any accounting. The pass gives the circle its entry in the library and its place in the global record of what was discussed that season.
If a hundred dollars is the thing standing between you and hosting a circle, write to us. We have set aside a number of circles every season for exactly this. We mean this. You should not be priced out of a project whose entire premise is that you should not be priced out.
If you have never hosted anything before, that is fine. The bar for hosting is not charisma. It is the willingness to send a message that says I would like to sit down with you for three hours and talk about this thing. Five out of ten people you ask will say yes. That is your circle.