Much less secret, but no less interesting than my last lunch experience, we met August 18 at the Sea Star restaurant in Seattle, which I didn’t even know existed- it’s near South Lake Union just off Terry, connected to the beautiful new Pan Pacific Hotel.

The agenda-less lunch was generously hosted by the Pan Pacific’s General Manager David Sullivan and also included Adam Roston, who is in charge of Pan Pacific sales. It was a very interesting group of people, mostly rounded up by the always interesting Warren Etheredge of The Warren Report.  The new CEO of EMP, the Experience Music Project , Christina Orr-Cahall was there, as was the founder and CEO of Imperium Renewables, John Plaza. Charles and Rose Ann Finkel of Pike Brewing fame- who also started the Chateau Ste. Michelle winery- were also on hand, as was Michel Brotman of Simply Seattle and now The Chocolate Box. Jeff Hansen, who runs Seattle’s most listened to radio station- which I didn’t know until that day, public radio KUOW was there, as were Carilyn Platt of Magnolia PRC, and Karen Johnson of seattlemag.com. Oh, and me, I wrote a book called Rethink  and I am known as the Business Scientist at Microsoft. I have also spent some time helping to promote the new movie, We Live In Public, that won the best documentary prize at Sundance this year. It's Seattle premier is November 13, and that’s how I got to know Warren – he has spent a lot of time in the entertainment industry. So as the lunch kicked off, we all went around the table and introduced ourselves. Christina was talking about how she landed in Seattle just seven weeks ago to take the helm at EMP and how interesting it is. She noted that attendance is more than 70 percent male, which is very unusual for anything resembling a museum, which is what Christina managed in Florida before moving West. Someone said, “Then it’s an obvious place to go for anyone looking for a husband.”  Some people suggested they could start having match-making activities there and call it the Experience Dating Project, and that Pike Brewing and Chocolate Box should be part of the program.Jeff Hansen surprised all or most of us with the fact that KUOW is the #1 radio station in all of Seattle in terms of audience, across all categories, though I think we were more surprised to learn that KUOW is not a part of NPR, National Public Radio. NPR is literally just a content provider, and local public radio stations buy that programming from them, but they create a lot of their own programming as well. Rose Ann Finkel surprised us when she told us that the seemingly ubiquitous Pike Brewing trucks that you see around town – there’s actually just one of them. This is a big anniversary year for Pike Brewing and they are having several big parties in September and October- not to be missed. When John Plaza started talking about Imperium, the question came up about the initial role of Martin Tobias, the founder of Loudeye- which became encoding.com, at Imperium and the fact that he is no longer there and no longer owns the Showbox downtown. It turned out that many of the people at the table had some story about Martin, which reminded us all just how small Seattle still is. Appetizers of coconut shrimp, crab cakes and diver scallops were served. It was all good, but I thought the scallops were best. Then as lunch was served, everything looked outstanding. Two people took pictures of Karen’s fish dish, and the jambalaya looked amazing. I had a seared ahi tuna sandwich and I ended up being jealous of some of the others at the table. 

As all of this great Sea Star food was being served, Warren tapped his glass and said that even though there wasn’t an agenda for the lunch, he did have a topic suggestion. His observation was that for years, debate was taught as the best thing to teach a kid in school, and in many places still is, but that there’s nothing really after high school for people to continue to build on their debate skills, at which point someone said softly “marriage”, which got a big laugh. And to be clear, when I say “someone” it’s not that I don’t remember who said it, it’s just not important to the story, usually, and you never know when someone will get miffed about being quoted. Anyway- Warren observed that people don’t really engage in a meaningful debate where people actually listen to each other and work out a solution where each person makes some thoughtful concessions. The current healthcare debate turned out to be a great example- so many things are being positioned falsely or being presented as “either/or” decisions and getting grossly oversimplified, and there isn’t any real debate going on. Warren’s question is, “Where did debate go, why did it go, and is there any hope it will come back?” The conversation continued for over an hour, and I am not going to try to cover every point, but basic comments were that Fox News presents one heavily tilted view, and MSNBC presents the oppositely tilted view, many people have stopped reading the newspaper, CNN and the major network news stations don’t really present different sides to a story, so in some cases people don’t even realize there is anything to debate. John Plaza commented that when two people are positioned on a program as presenting two different views on the same subject, he has been in situations where one person was extreme but very well spoken, and the risk he saw was that people would assume somewhere in the midway point between reasonable and extreme was the right answer – and it was not. I think there are two issues in this issue. The first is information and that people consume a lot less of it than they used to. People look for sound bites more than entire articles, so in many cases they don’t know the intricacies of a subject well enough to engage in a debate. The second is something the author and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has written and talked about- we have all become so busy and so constantly multi-tasking that we don’t actually take time to sit back and reflect on things, something my grandfather used to do when smoking his pipe.  If people haven’t got the information and they haven’t had time to reflect on it, they aren’t likely to engage in a debate about it.

At that point, John Plaza referenced the quasi cult movie Idiocracy about the ongoing degradation of American culture that many of us at the table have been seeing. That raised the question of whether this is an irreversible trend in politics, reporting and social interaction. There were lots of opinions, many not so optimistic. One person suggested that people don’t debate anymore because these 15 person, two hour lunches are such a rarity these days, and that is a sad truth, but it may be a silver lining of the current recession that we all were able to spend two hours at this great lunch. But it was a lively debate, ironically enough. And then the desserts came- Crème Brulee to the rescue. It was a great lunch with some really great Seattle people.  And as yet another reminder of how small Seattle is, after I connected with Carilyn on Facebook, I noticed that she’s connected to Jon Croy of Point Inside- it turns out they are next-door neighbors.