Good ideas love a long dinner.
A surprising number of the ideas that shaped the world took shape around a table. Plato's Symposium, the book that lit Western philosophy, is a record of friends drinking and arguing late into the night. The Enlightenment was half cooked up in Parisian salons. Benjamin Franklin's supper club, the Junto, gave America its first libraries and fire brigades. The Lunar Society dreamed up the Industrial Revolution between courses, by candlelight, meeting on the night of the full moon so they could find their way home. Freud and his circle remade the modern mind in a Vienna coffee house. All of it happened over food and wine and the kind of honest argument you can only have with people close enough to touch.
None of it was planned. The ideas that came out of those tables — the ones that built libraries, lit revolutions, reshaped the mind — emerged sideways, between courses, in the gaps between one person's thought and another's pushback. And while you can't force the idea, you can set the table for it.
So, here we are. One long table, one real question, and one rule: nothing leaves the room with your name on it. We've been hosting dinners like this for over a decade, and the formula is simple because it has to be. Eat together, argue honestly, stay too late. You'll leave having changed your mind about something — and not quite sure which conversation did it.
So pull up a chair.
Human friction in the age of AI
When so much can be done without us, what is still worth doing together?
Wednesday 29 July 2026, 6pm – 9pm
Fugazzi Basement, 27 Leigh Street, Adelaide
$120 a seat, includes 2-course meal & refreshments
This is the first of many.
The Table is a standing series. There'll be a new question each time, in a new room, building through the year and out beyond Adelaide toward our festival in March 2027. We'll release each edition as we go, because the next question depends on where the last one got to.