20 years ago, I was invited to the big meeting.

Every week on Mondays at J.P. Morgan Chase, there was a meeting of the team that was responsible for

one-third of the bank's profits. This meeting consisted of 42 people sitting around a long table, 20 on a side, one at the head and one at the foot,

surrounded by 30 other people sitting in the second row.

That meeting costs the bank more than $50,000 an hour. And as far as I know, they're still having it.

Konichua. It's Nick in Fukuoka, Japan, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

I got this question from a reader and decided to do an entire episode of Akimbo about it.

It explains why I don't go to meetings and how I avoid going to meetings. Here we go.

Hey, Seth. This is Thomas from Maryland, a proud golden ice. And I have a question about meetings.

You said previously that you save a ton of time

daily by not attending meetings. And I was wondering, could you tell us how you work without meetings?

For example, what do you do when you need multiple people to discuss something at the same time?

Also, do you have any tips for how to stop attending meetings in the meeting-centric culture?

Meetings are a culture, a specific culture, a specific act that industrialized organizations

engage in on a regular basis.

Meetings are expensive, meetings are debilitating, and most people who go to meetings for a

living will tell you it's one of the worst parts of their job.

Why would something like this persist for so long?

One of the most famous paintings in the world, something that's been painted over and over again by many artists,

is a painting of a meeting, The Last Supper. Meetings are central to many spiritual and

religious observances. But we're talking about a very specific sort of meeting right now. The meeting

that you might have gone to just before you listened to this, or the one that you have scheduled later in the day.

...