Started by someone who watched the rooms empty out.

Jon has spent years in the music industry, which is a good vantage point for a slow change nobody announces. The shows didn't get worse. The players didn't get worse. The rooms just got emptier — a little each year, until a full house became a story people told about the past.

What made it click was noticing the same shape everywhere else. The choir with more robes than singers. The club that folded because nobody would take the chair. The weeknight anything that used to be a fixture and now isn't. Live music wasn't a special case; it was the version he happened to have a front-row seat for.

None of it was a decision. There was no meeting where we agreed to stay home. Attendance is just easy to skip once, and easier the second time, and eventually the room stops being booked at all.

The through-line in Jon's work is people in a room doing something together on purpose. A song played live for the people in front of you. A yoga class where thirty strangers breathe in the same rhythm for an hour. A classroom where the interesting part is the argument. A philosophical question that goes nowhere useful and is worth an evening anyway.

None of those survive the translation to a screen. You can film them, stream them, and post them, and what comes out the other end is a record of the thing rather than the thing.

So this is the part he can actually do something about: put on the events, hold the dates, keep the rooms small enough that you end up talking to people, and do it often enough that showing up becomes a habit rather than an occasion. That's the whole plan. It isn't complicated. It just has to be someone's job.

You don't need to know anyone, be good at small talk, or commit to anything beyond the one evening. Come once. If it's worth your time, come again. That's how every community that has ever worked got started.

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