I was just at a Tyler Cowen lecture in NYC — one of my heroes and biggest intellectual influences — and watching everyone file out after the talk, I kept thinking about this really great comment someone had made on the event announcement: “Do these 92Y talks typically offer space to build community and talk with other attendees, or are they pretty stale pay > attend > leave?” 

This hits on something important. The type of person who wants to attend a Tyler Cowen lecture is quite filtered — there is a very good chance that I would enjoy being friends with most people who love Tyler enough to show up. But we all just… left without saying hi.

I’m not sure if we’re truly in a “loneliness crisis,” as the internet suggests, but it’s clear that many people today are actively seeking deeper connections and a sense of community. Niche events already gather people with shared passions—people who care enough to show up in person, which is no small thing. With such a clear alignment of interests, it feels like a huge missed opportunity not to create spaces for attendees to actually connect and get to know each other.

Since moving to NYC this fall, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I have a lot of niche interests and have been attending lots of niche events, hoping to meet like minded people and build my community here. Despite these events attracting people who are quite similar to me and many potential friends, there’s still very little opportunity to actually connect. I am taking initiative, being hyper-social, but I’m sorry, it’s just hard.

But I’ve seen what’s possible. I was recently at a Disco Biscuits concert and at the front of the floor (~1,500 people in attendance), nearly every person knew each other. Like 30+ people, all giving high fives, hugging, and catching up. This was actually quite annoying during the show, but it was really wonderful to see. The reason for this is that the Disco Biscuits have hosted many festivals and other multi-day concert runs where people travel to attend, which naturally leads to people meeting and connecting and the merging of friend groups. The end result is that, at a random concert in NYC, there are huge groups of people who are part of an integrated, shared community.

During the summer, the band King Gizzard had a large North American tour where before each show, fans organized formal meetups for everyone to attend and meet other King Gizzard fans in each city.

Reflecting on this, it seems like it would be so easy for more niche events to add meetup portions to them. Given the potential benefit this has for so many people and the relative ease of creating such meetups, I want to encourage everyone when they are hosting an event to consider if there is an easy way to supplement it with a meetup for those interested — and for anyone going to any niche event, to see if there is a community online you can post to to create your own meetup associated with the event.

Going back to that Tyler Cowen talk — at the event itself, there was no real opportunity for attendees to connect or meet each other. Sure, you could show up early and try to talk to the person cramped in the seat next to you, but there was no place to gather that would have been conducive for this, or self-selection for those interested. However, an individual named Anna Gát, who runs a company named Interintellect connected a group of her friends and some individuals who won an Emergent Ventures grant from Tyler Cowen (facilitated through the EV group chat), and Tyler suggested they all go for a drink (which is quite funny, because Tyler Cowen famously doesn’t drink) after the event ended. Despite not being part of either group (but being friends with someone who won a grant from Tyler), I tagged along—allowing me to meet my intellectual hero and many other fascinating, like-minded people. What a joy!

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The person who made the original comment about the 92Y talk, Liface, is a fascinating person named Liam Rosen. He created a website called socialfabric.nyc where he indexes all of the event spaces, hosts, groups, and aggregators that one might go to find their community in NYC. Liam/Liface goes to a community-related event every single night in an attempt to build his own. What a cool thing and a great resource he created.