🎈the best article ever written about me...
My dear friend Taylor who writes for Meetings Today interviewed me twice and then wrote the best piece ever written about me.
Yes. This is the best article about me ever written…
Who Is The Party Scientist? Meet the Expert on the Science of Joy and Human Connection
Jacques W. Martiquet, better known as The Party Scientist, turns to music, neurotransmitters and the science of joy to cultivate event environments that foster real human connection.
Before he became The Party Scientist, he was Jacques W. Martiquet, a student at the University of British Columbia studying public health and pharmaceutical development while volunteering as an emergency medic for events in Vancouver.
His career path may have shifted from health and medicine to meetings and events, but Martiquet’s ultimate goal in life held steady: Help people feel healthy and happy. His time as a volunteer emergency medic made him realize there was another way—maybe even a better way—he could do that.
“I was with my medical partner driving a golf cart around at this festival—a 60,000-person festival—when we got a call about an unconscious person in the campground,” he recalled. “I’m running through the campground with my partner trying to find this person—this kid, pretty much—and we enter this opening of tents and see a bunch of people playing drinking games, and then there’s just one kid facedown in the middle of them all, and I just remember thinking, ‘What the hell are all of you doing? Do you not care about each other?’
“We rushed him back to the main medical tent and he survived, and that’s what made me want to change these social norms,” Martiquet said. “I saved a bunch of young people's lives and had these experiences of reviving and supporting people who had succumbed to these toxic social norms…and I realized there was a much better way to gather and to facilitate the joy of being alive. That's when I started to throw sober parties.”
That’s when The Party Scientist was born.
The Creation of 'Sober Parties'
Martiquet set out to design gatherings that maximized a sense of community and the physical and mental health benefits of genuine connection. It didn’t take him long to figure out all he needed to accomplish this was positive energy and a giant speaker.
“I traveled Europe alone with one of these really loud speakers and I would set it up in public, and random people would start dancing wherever I was,” Martiquet said. “I would start these parades of like 300 people. No one knew who I was, but they saw me and they saw people having fun, so these big parades would form and I developed this confidence and this system for reducing people’s self-consciousness, helping them access that joy we have inside that we don’t often get permission to let out.”
Martiquet started calling these spontaneous gatherings “sober parties.” To his surprise, they went viral on social media and Martiquet found himself speaking at festivals, teaching people how to have fun without substances.
“You asked me when I became The Party Scientist? That’s when,” Martiquet said. “I became The Party Scientist—this confident, charismatic social engineer—when I traveled Europe with a speaker.”