Nervous speakers give nervous talks. A speaker who has shared bread with the host, heard the other talks over dessert and walked the stage the next morning gives a different performance entirely. So the night before every major event, we lay one table.
The rules of the table
Twelve seats maximum. No slides, no shop talk for the first course, and the host sits in the middle, not at the head. Between mains and dessert, each speaker gets three minutes on tomorrow's talk — and one honest question from the table.
What it buys you
Overlaps get spotted ("you're both opening with that statistic"), intros get written by people who now like each other, and the morning's tech check feels like returning somewhere rather than arriving. It costs one dinner and saves three rehearsals.
