Avoiding Faux-Intellectual Programming

Building a real intellectual soul into the club

A couple weeks ago we cohosted a debate watch party with Open to Debate, formerly Intelligence Squared, for the first Biden vs Trump Presidential Debate. Open to Debate’s CEO Clea Connor, their long time moderator John Donvan and Reason Magazine’s Editor at Large Nick Gillespie commented on the debate during commercial breaks and discussed the expectations and results and feelings of the room. And most importantly, everyone got a commemorative T-shirt:

This was the latest in a huge effort we’ve begun at Maxwell to make our spot the center of intellectual discussion and high culture in the city.

I’ve previously written about how much I hate the faux intellectual and cultural programming that much of our city institutions engages in when I spoke about my cringe-worthy experience with Chainmail Breakdancing at The Met’s Apollo Circle.

In summary, I think most intellectual and cultural events are full of people who think they SHOULD like this stuff instead of actually like this stuff. Most junior councils for whatever museum or arts org are full of people who mostly want to go to a swanky party and pretend they are Blair Waldorf in the city because they are clinking champagne glasses at The Whitney. The attendees at the classical music concert are really just trying to impress the girl they brought, the participants in most “salons” are really mostly interested in hearing themselves talk.

I’ve had a fear of doing anything performative at Maxwell — I took ballet when I was little, and I almost became a classical musician out of high school (practiced 5 hours a day at one point), so I almost view anyone pretending to do something cultural or artsy or intellectual without really understanding what people in that world want as bordering on cultural appropriation.

So it has been a mission of ours to build TRUE cultural and intellectual programming into the backbone of what we are doing at Maxwell, and the Open to Debate partnership was just the most recent.

One of our member’s, Johnathan Bi, recently released a lecture series that he’d filmed mostly at Maxwell with a live audience consisting of members and friends focused on all the Great Books. Johnathan left his position as Joe Lonsdale’s Chief of Staff to investigate our “intellectual heritage” and create this lecture series, which he recently announced here at GreatBooks.io.

We’re working on a fireside chat series with UATX, the startup university out of Austin that Joe Lonsdale and Niall Ferguson started, after already doing two events with them last year.

And several prominent foreign relations, cultural exchange and political think tanks are starting to throw regular events at Maxwell and making it their second home.

The Open to Debate night was an example of another tenet — engagement, not consumption.

If you wanted to listen to a lecture on philosophy you could just, well, listen to Johnathan’s lectures online. Open to Debate has a podcast with their Oxford style debates. There are plenty of opportunities for pure learning, to have someone talk AT you, instead of WITH you.

But the point of being in the room is to not just consume but engage, to be able to ask questions, to discuss whats going on with like minded people in the room with you, to meet fellow travelers who share the same passions and interests you do.

As we grow we’ll continue adding more and more intellectually engaging partnerships to our programming, please reach out if you represent one of those types of orgs and have something creative you’d like to discuss, and as always, we’re looking for our own intellectual fellow travelers so apply for membership here, and follow us on Instagram here.

David, Kyle & Joelle