GP Dinner #200 | Transcendent Horizons

GP Dinner #200 | Transcendent Horizons
About this Event

WHAT: GP Dinner #200 | Transcendent Horizons

WHERE: TinkerTendo 1025 Tennessee Street, San Francisco, CA 94107

WHEN: 6:00 to 10:00pm on November 21st, 2026

PLEASE NOTE: ATTENDANCE LIMITED TO FIRST 60 PEOPLE WHO SECURE A TICKET HERE. YOU'RE WELCOME TO GIFT OR TRANSFER YOUR SPOT TO A FRIEND IF YOUR PLANS CHANGE. JUST LET US KNOW IN ADVANCE.

Please join us for our landmark 200th dinner on November 21st in San Francisco.

Expect cocktails at 5:00 and three speakers starting around 6:15 with a family style feast introduced around 7:15, prepared by our professional chef. Wines will be thoughtfully paired with the menu.

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After more than fourteen years we have arrived at our 200th community dinner, a time for giving thanks to the thousands of people who have made this journey so life-enriching and memorable. We think of this as a kind of Friendsgiving
Tonight we will hear from three prominent members of our community, each sharing stories that paint a vivid picture of who we can become with sufficient trust, imagination and courage.

Our conversations will revolve around protopian futures, humanity and life's greatest blossoming.

Ten, twenty or fifty years from now, how will we have built systems that support a flourishing planet?

How will humanity have evolved to become responsible stewards of all life on earth?

How did we solve the challenges of making decisions as a planetary culture?

How have we ended poverty and established norms more fully capable of delivering sustainable prosperity to everyone?

What will our cultural norms, narratives and aspirations become?

ATTIRE: Attire is relaxed and informal.

About Good People Dinners: GP Dinners is a community built around meaningful ​conversations and delicious feasts, a moveable social club for those who value authenticity, a better way to connect with each other. We are also an event production business and regularly create tailored dinner series for a wide range of companies and organizations.

Our dinners are hosted at a variety of venues in the Bay Area, at Camp Earnest near Yosemite NP and around the country and the world. Every dinner includes a speaker on a topic of wide ranging interest and a chef prepared feast.

Please email us at least 72 hours in advance if you have any dietary restrictions and we'll do our best to accommodate them.

OUR SPEAKERS:

Tonight we will hear from three prominent members of our community, each sharing stories that paint a vivid picture of who we can become with sufficient trust, imagination and courage.

Our friend Nate Halverson is an Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist. His feature-length documentary The Grab—nominated for four Emmys in 2025—followed him as he uncovered the governments and mercenaries vying to control the world’s food and water supplies. The film premiered in theaters and is now streaming on Hulu.

Nate has reported from around the world as a staff reporter for the Center for Investigative Reporting, with his work appearing regularly on PBS, NPR, and Mother Jones. His investigations have ranged from financial fraud and organized crime to exposing business practices that led to a $155-million settlement for those harmed, and most recently how record amounts of glyphosate are being sprayed in California’s forests.

In September, Nate launched himself into his latest investigation, enrolling at the Harvard Divinity School to research what some are calling the meaning crisis — a pervasive sense of disconnection, alienation, inaction, and loss of contact with substantive purpose.

Nate’s research was prompted by a surprising cadre of sources—from the Pentagon and the State Dept to the NSA. The U.S. Intelligence community for the first time in its history even added a metaphysical threat to its 20-year forecast, warning that emerging trends “raise fundamental questions about what it means to be human.”

Nate is exploring the historical ways people have created meaning by connecting to something beyond themselves. At Harvard, he is taking part in the Transcendentalism Initiative, looking back at how Americans in the 19th century such as Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau tapped into spirituality to affect meaning and push social change, and how that might inform a world now facing unprecedented existential challenges.

Tonight, Nate will share a collection of interweaving stories from his years reporting, all which spurred his curiosity in the meaning crisis.

Our friend Sofi Bergkvist is president and CEO at Center for Care Innovations, based in the Bay Area. Her career has focused on delivering healthcare to vulnerable populations all over the world and for two years now she has attended the UC Berkeley School of Public Health’s Collab unconference at Camp Earnest.

Tonight Sofi would like us to ask ourselves what does it take to build systems worthy of our trust?

Mental, physical and emotional health are agreed upon requirements if we are to approach other challenges and opportunities, many of which are now global in scale.

In 2008 in India, Sofi experienced how digital technologies could radically expand access to care. A woman in a rural community who could not read could use a fingerprint to retrieve her health record and blood pressure history through a community health worker, creating a digital thread that could ultimately connect primary care in a village to sophisticated specialty care. It was an early glimpse of what becomes possible when we design systems around people rather than asking people to navigate complex systems. In short, this technology earned people’s trust.

Today we have the emerging possibility of highly personalized, technology-enabled health: sensors that help us understand our own bodies, AI that can connect those signals to the world’s medical knowledge, and care that increasingly moves from institutions into our daily lives.

But the technology is increasingly not the hardest part. The deeper challenge is whether we can build institutions, rules and norms that make trust rational: where people can safely share data, benefit from collective knowledge, and have confidence that powerful technologies are being used in their best interests.

How can new technologies helps us take better care of ourselves and one another? How can they free us to become more human, rather than fragmented into filter bubbles?
Examining the intersection of health and technology suggests a larger question: Can our institutions and strategies for cultivating trust evolve quickly enough to use our extraordinary new capabilities in service of human and planetary flourishing? If so, how might this happen?

Our friend Rahmin Sarabi is Co-Founder / Co-Executive Director of the and , which gives Americans a seat at the table to find common ground and create breakthroughs on complex challenges. BLOOM works at the intersections of deliberative democracy, civic tech, and broad-based organizing.

With local civic leaders across the country, BLOOM is building a new federated institution for public judgment — focused initially on questions related to AI and the future of our communities — along with the coalitions to give it teeth. Current pilots are in Previously he's served at.

Today's consensus suggests that democracy's responsiveness to ordinary people is in serious doubt, with too many issues captured by well-funded interests. But there are green shoots — places where the government is delivering for everyday people, and where the impossible turns out to be workable.

Rahmin will offer the story of Finbar O'Brien and Chris Lyons, two Irish citizens who came from opposite sides of a polarized and seemingly intractable issue, and met in a national citizens' assembly. What they found was an unlikely reconciliation that helped move the country — and a friendship that changed the course of their lives.

What does that green shoot teach us? And what would it take to evolve our norms, institutions, and tools so we can share power and decide together in ways that serve the greatest good — and grow us as humans in the process?

OUR CHEF:

Our friend Sam Lippman is a Bay Area chef with over twenty years experience working within innovative companies and kitchens. He has cooked at Google, Cafe Soulstice, and he created and lead the food program at Airbnb from 2011 through 2016. He has fed our Good People community more than any other chef, both at dinners and retreats.

Chef Sam pioneered new approaches to vegan meat alternatives as part of the R&D and Marketing teams at Hooray Foods, where he was the company’s first hire. He currently chefs at A Fork Full of Earth Organic Catering and Foxtail Catering and Events.

Sam’s food leans paleo, mostly plants, and rich with puns. Most importantly, he hopes everyone has a great time and learns something new through each of his innovative and ecclectic menus.

OUR MENU:

OPENING ACT:

BadLambs

I’ve got this Za’tar and I’ve learned how to make it talk, The Tatzik-E Street Band, Lime on Fire, and a Little of that Cumin Touch

(mini lamb kofta balls, tzatziki [yogurt, lemon, dill cucumber, sumac], charred lime, cumin, za’atar) - contains lamb, dairy, chili

Corn in the US Egg

(deviled egg with jalapeno, cotija, corn and chipotle) - Contains egg, dairy, chili

Every Butterbean’s a Hungry Chard, Pink Radillac

(white bean, roasted garlic, and chard dip with crudites and gluten free crackers)

HEADLINERS:

Tenth Cantaloupe Frisée Out

You’re not a blueberry, but hey- you’re alright. Fennel of Love, Atlantic Seedy, The Boss-almic Vinaigrette

(frisée salad with melon, blueberry, fennel, toasted sunflower seeds, and balsamic vinaigrette)

The Highway’s Yammed with Broken Cheerios on a Last Clam Chowder Chive

(plant-based palm chowder with sweet potato, chive, and cheerio crumble topping) - dairy-free, clam-free, gluten-free, soy-free, nut-free

The Ribber - With Roasted Nabrassicas and Glory Glaze

(bison short ribs with a cherry red wine gastrique, served over colorful cauliflower)

The Beets of Chilidephia

(steamed beets with chili crunch vinaigrette) - contains chili

Bruce Stringbeans

ENCORE:

Dancing in the Dark Chocolate (Rocky Thunder Road)

Is that Cashew, Baby, or a Brazil Nut Disguise? Lonesome Date, Born to Rum Reduction

(cashew + brazil nut ice cream with vegan marshmallow, walnut, date, cocoa, maple, dark rum) - contains nuts

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Please email us at least 72 hours in advance if you have any dietary restrictions and we'll do our best to accommodate them.

Drinks at 5:00, speaker at 6:00 and dinner at 7:00. Though a cocktail and some wine will be provided, guests are welcome to bring a bottle of wine to share.

Menu update will come soon to help you choose your bottles. We always make sure vegetarian friends will have plenty to eat. Please contact Raman or Karin in advance if you have any other dietary restrictions.

If you are wondering how you were included in this invitation, or would like to be removed, please contact [email protected]

To sign up for future events, please register at

www.gpdinners.com

To learn more about the former summer camp we've purchased and refurbished near Yosemite, please visit us here. Camp Earnest is available for a campus buyout for groups from 15 to 75 guests at a time.

www.campearnest.com

Agenda

🕑: 05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Happy Hour and Mingling
🕑: 06:00 PM - 07:00 PM
Speakers' stories
🕑: 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Family style dinner is served
🕑: 08:30 PM - 09:00 PM
Dessert is served, reflections and Q&A with our three speakers