How Improv Can Level Up Our Creativity, Connection and Leadership | Kelly Leonard, VP of The Second City

I don't want your success story. I want your fiasco and the fact that you made it through. So when I think about comedy and improvisation, I think about mess and struggle and hard stuff and the ability to navigate through it and laugh our asses off. Welcome back or welcome to The Finding Mastery Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Jervé, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. And I am thrilled to welcome Kelly Leonard to the podcast for this week's conversation. If you've ever appreciated the comedic stylings of talents like Tina Fey or Stephen Cobair or Amy Poler or Seth Meyers, you may want to give today's guests some credit. As the executive director of Learning and Applied Improvisation at Second City, the world's premier comedy theater in school, Kelly Leonard has spent over 20 years shepherding the kind of creativity and collaboration that not only catapults comedy legends but has the power to transform people's lives. Turns out improv isn't just good for laughs. Looking at behavioral science through the lens of improvisation, Kelly helps not just build performers but leaders, innovators and everyday professionals develop transformational skills in business using the yes and principle, mastering the art of co-creation, leading by listening and innovating by making something out of nothing. Like improv, life is not scripted. The more tools we have to navigate it, the better. So whether you're ready to laugh, or learn, or cry, or a bit of all three, you're going to love hearing the insights in this remarkable conversation. So with that, let's jump right in today's conversation with Kelly Leonard. Kelly, I am stoked to learn from you today and just sincere thank you for coming on the podcast with us. But before we dive into your insights, can you just set the scene for our audience and explain what Second City is? Your role is there. And then please feel free to name drop all of the amazing people that you've been able to work with. But like, so can you just give us a flyover? Yeah, yeah. So and I maybe we can do this. I can sort of tell you my story at Second City and we'll explain what Second City is through that because my first gig at Second City was in 1988. I had just graduated college and I got a job here as a dishwasher. And the other guy who got hired that week to be a dishwasher was a guy named John Fabro who would go on to direct some pretty famous films. We also both had mallets and my wife has photographic evidence of such. So Second City is a sketch and hold on, hold on. Yeah, I can see where we're starting already. You're starting the mallets. You and John in the kitchen washing the dishes. This is perfect. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. All right. With a bunch of like Yale sociopaths and alcoholics. I mean, you know, Second City is a renowned sketch and improv theater. It started in 1959. And so when I showed up, it was legendary in Chicago and nationally. And we have had a theater and still do in Toronto when we produced a television show called SCTV. And people mostly know us as a place that sort of is home to the first jobs of all these famous comedians. So when I was washing dishes, Mike Myers and Bonnie Hunt and Joel Murray were all on the main stage. Jane Lynch was in our ETC stage, our second stage. And then a couple guys named Tim Meadows and Chris Farley had just been hired into the touring company here. And in the way Second City is set up, I don't know if people know this, but we do two exoscriptive content to the review. And a third act almost every night, that's fully improvised. And that's where the cast is just taking suggestions from the audience and making what appears to be magic happen on stage. And lots of celebrities will join up. It was not uncommon for Rob Williams to stop by almost every month and perform with the cast in the improv set. And the improv sets free. So, you know, broke college students are coming to this and getting to see world-class talent. And the thing is it appears to be magic and then you work here for a while and you realize there's a sort of improvisational pedagogy that is going on that all our performers are steeped in that they learn. And what I sort of figured out is that improvisation is not magic, it's like yoga for your social skills. I often say it's like loud, noisy group mindfulness, right? It's a practice in being unpracticed, which is the way all of us walk through the world. So, you know, the very first company was spitting out people like Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Alan Arkin, Barbara Harris. Then you've got people like Peter Boyle and Joan Rivers and Robert Klein and Fred Willard. And then the group in 1969, which called itself the Next Generation, included John Belushi and Harold Ramus. And then you've got John Candy, Gilda Radner, Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, George Went, Jim Belushi, Bill Murray, Betty Thomas. And I actually was lucky enough to graduate from Washington's. I hosted the room, I worked in the box office, and I actually became the producer of Second City. So, I got to hire a bunch of great talent. And I started out in 1992 doing that. And my first cast included Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, and Amy Cideras. I hired Tina Fey, Amy Poler, worked with Mike Myers, worked with Seth Meyers, Jason Cedacus, Cessli Strong, just a Keegan Michael Key, a host of incredible people. Jordan Peel, who I tried to hire, kept getting other gigs. And he actually worked on the bar staff here. So, it's just always been this place where budding talent is playing and learning and growing. And we have a school, and we work with corporate groups and do all kinds of stuff. But at its heart, it is an improv-based comedy theater. Okay, so that you've been around. And yeah, well, I would wonder where you're going to take that. But I was going to finish it with you've been around great. Yeah. Like all time greats in the comedy world. You might call them masters. The map like deep. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, let's start with just like unscientific approach to your subjective experience, which is if you just, you know, let's imagine that, you know, you're just we're at the, I don't know, dining room table. And you've had a couple cocktails, and you just kind of push the seat back a little bit and go, you know, between Tina, Steven, Robin Williams, Sudeikus, John Favreau, like, you know what, you know what the common theme is? What would you say? And I don't think there is a common theme. Oh, there is. No, there is. Okay. Absolutely. Let's go. 100%. All of these people are trained in the art of improvisation. So it is a embodied study, essentially, of human behavior. That might surprise some people, and it might not if they actually knew the origin story before 1959. So indulge me just a little bit. But there was a woman by the name of Viola Spolen, and she was a social worker in the 20s and 30s, working at Jane Adams Hallhouse in the South Side of Chicago. And her job was to better assimilate young people and immigrants into her care. And so she had worked with a woman called Neva Void, and they'd been playing around with theater games. And so what Viola did was kind of create this whole new suite of games, improv exercises, many of which were in silence or gibberish because the kids didn't always share language. But what they did was they came together and played, and it taught them to listen, to empathize, to cooperate, to collaborate. Her son Paul Sills was studying at the University of Chicago, and he loved these games, and he taught them to his friends, people like Mike Nichols and Elaine May, among others. They formed the first improvisational theater in America called the Compass Players in 1954, and that turns into the second city in 1959. So the origin of this stuff was a way to get kids from disparate backgrounds who are scared and everything's new, and they're navigating complexity. And it was like, oh, I know how we can get them better, or quite frankly, I think turn them into superstars, is by having them practice these elements in a gamified situation with embodied skill building. And that stuff also makes great comedy. It produces truth, which is really at its heart what most great comedy is. And it has this other aspect to it, which is very prosocial. And I think if you look, no one got into comedy because they're well-adjusted, that is not a reason people enter these doors. But what these skills do teach these individuals, these sometimes broken individuals, is how to work well with others. And when they share that language, they don't want to like ever do it differently. So when I sort of listed off that huge name of second city alums, if you trace where their careers went, second city people went with them, whether it's cheers, Mary Tyler Moore, 30 Rock, Parks and Rec, writers, actors, everyone's bringing the second city people with them because they know that they have a shared language and a shared set of values. So one of the things in improvisation is your job is to save the person across from you, and you know their job is to save you. So if you, if you are going into these very high-pressure situations and you know that this person has got your back and you've got theirs, why wouldn't you want to be working with that person? Okay, quick pause here to share some of the sponsors of this conversation. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Duo. Duo is changing the game when it comes to toothpaste, and I've been loving their stuff. 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Let's jump right back into the conversation. So the golden thread that you're talking about is that they have had this embodied skill building study. Yes. And they're practicing. And so I want to break that apart embodied meaning it's visceral, it's cognitive, it is physical, and so, right? Is that okay? So we're talking about the same thing. So there's an embodied skill building. And that skill, I'm going to leave it blank for right now, but you're talking about practicing an embodied approach, which is essentially what sport practices. But this practice that you're talking about, like skill building, right, in sport. But what you're talking about here is that the skills are designed to work well with others. Yeah. And what's interesting is if you think the sort of the stew of University of Chicago, basically from that 20s, 30s period through that late 50s period, so much thought that we take for granted now in terms of human behavior, psychology, neuroscience, sociology, that stuff was bubbling up there. And it's so interesting that while the founders of Second City weren't necessarily tying together their classes with Martin Boober with the work they were doing on a stage. Because again, University of Chicago had no theater department. These folks were making theater at a place that had no theater department. But it is, the lineage is there. And we work, as you know, we work a lot with the behavioral science community now because they're recognizing that it isn't like, it's not role playing when we're talking about practicing. What we're down is we're breaking down in these exercises point of focus, listening, status, all the sort of elements unconscious bias, all these elements that make up how we communicate, how we behave, how we make decisions. And we know, I mean, the yes and concept is actually perfect for understanding this. So most people know about that, right? They've heard it. It's almost a bumper sticker now, this idea and improv that you shouldn't say no, you say yes and. But if you look at through the lens of say behavioral economics, where we know that people's default position is to say no or do nothing, then you could look at yes and and say, oh, that's a nudge. That's simply a nudge to get someone off their couch, not watching Netflix and do something or in the case of a business meeting, not shut down a conversation too early. And yes and isn't about like, oh, we have to follow every single thread every single time. It's about, yeah, you want to do that for the first 20 minutes or you might want to do that for the first few weeks of a process to kind of make sure you've got all the ideas on the table. The idea and creativity, of course, is you cannot be creative if you're a judgment of self or judgment of others. You also can't be creative if you're in fear. And all of that is affected by people saying no to us. So when you create a space, and this is what we do when we when we're putting together a second city show over like a 12 week process, first three weeks, four weeks, all yes and every idea, I don't care how dumb it is, because you don't know, you don't know what innovation looks like when you're being creative and creative creativity and innovation are two different things. When you're being creative, you are just playing and you're failing and it's all good. When you get to innovation, right, you're you're turning it into something, but by virtue of it being innovative, it means we haven't seen it before. So if you're saying no to these things, because they seem like they might not work, you're kind of being both anti-creative and anti-innovation. And so all of that is at play. And in a variety, I mean, there are thousands of these exercises that address all these different kind of phenomenon. It's really kind of remarkable. And I think we're very lucky that we're turning 65 next year. And we're very lucky that in many ways, we didn't know how powerful this stuff would be off the stage. We just thought it was powerful on the stage. So we had so much time to sort of stew and get our expertise and figure out what we really think, what works and what doesn't. And so that now we're sort of able to work with all these major university partners and give like, you know, MBA students an opportunity to use these exercises themselves to get better at telling the story of themselves and the thing they're trying to sell, for example. And there's so much golden here. And I want to pause on the skill building because in some of the practices, so we're going to let's come back around to that. But maybe let's just segue into the thought that you're just leading on or leading with is that, you know, when people think about leadership and collaboration and teamwork, I doubt that many of us go to comedy to think about best practices. Right. And so how does improv and the yes and framework help us in these three areas? And those are leadership, collaboration, and teamwork. Okay. I have a funny story that we'll talk about leadership. So I had a truly terrible idea for a show, and it was called Juusical the Musical, who was trying to nail down a certain segment. And so I reached out to the Spurtist Institute of Jewish Learning in Chicago, got introduced to the CEO there, Hal Lewis, and said, hey, could we test out some material and from your audience? I've got this idea. He thought also it was a good idea. So we were both wrong. This thing was a disaster. However, he said, okay, great. I'll give you a stage, try some stuff out. Could you also lead some workshops? Big comedy fan. Love Second City. And so we're at his venue and we're observing a workshop and one of our instructors is doing a classic improv exercise called Follow the Follower. And the idea there is we gather people in a space and we're like, okay, right now you're not going to use words. We all want you to walk around the space. We're going to choose one of you to be the leader. We're not going to tell the others that that person is leader. That person's job is to use their own body, not words, to hand off leadership to someone else. So whether it's like a nod or whatever. And they have to make sure the person receives it. And then that person does it as well. And Hal Lewis is sitting next to me and he goes, you're doing Peter Drucker. And I said to him, who's Peter Drucker? And so I didn't have a computer handy. But he's quite famous Austrian management theorist who came up with a bunch of brilliant ideas that no one paid attention to. One of which was, and this is the 50s or 60s, right, that command and control leadership doesn't work. And that really this idea of knowledge workers and support and coaching. And basically what we were doing in this exercise, which is in improv, what we know is that leadership will change hands continually based on who has the ball and who's the expert in that moment. We've all heard the phrase, your team is only as good as its weakest member. At our place, we say your team is only as good as the ability to compensate for its weakest member. Because each of us will be the weakest member at some point. If you have a tech problem or a math problem, please do not come to me. But if you would like to discuss the Grateful Dead or have me order a good wine, I can do that. And I have other things I can do. But that's true of all of us. So our differences as an ensemble, and that's what we call our teams, at Second City, ensembles, is that we're all bringing this weird mix of talents and we are allowing each other's talents to shine and then receive and shine and receive and there's flow that exists inside of this. So the leadership thing, and this sort of came late because collaboration teamwork, that's the easy thing to see at Second City, right? It is how do you think six people with zero script 12 weeks later can end up with award-winning comedy reviews? We are the only theater that I know in the world that is commercially successful only doing original work. Right? Think about this. There's not a theater that is like, oh yeah, no, we're going to do more new plays. The new plays are going to sell everything. It's no, they got to do cats. They've got to do. It's a wonderful life for Christmas Carol. Even the cutting-edge theaters end up doing the whose time year, whatever. Not us. Every show is original, and that is 65 years of sold outhouses. So, and there's something magical about watching, and that new. And so when you're in the audience, you're experiencing the spontaneity and the clumsiness and the having each other's back in an interesting way. I think people are craving that. In my line of work, you know, obviously we talk about team a lot, but when you double click on team, it really is the mechanics of being a great teammate. Yes. And what does it take to be a great teammate? And everything that I hear you talking about is just that so much so that that's one of the reasons that one Tina Fey leaves. She brings people with her because she's like, listen, I know they've got my back. And I've got their back. And we've practiced that being a great teammate for a long time. And again, I'll kind of round this out. We've practiced it in an embodied way. So we haven't just done the intellectual exercise of like, hey, if I go sideways on this meeting, will you have my back? It's like, no, they're actually practicing it on a regular basis. And so, all right. Now, with that in mind, the yes and, you know, the yes and peace here, the framework of yes and maybe I can't imagine, but there's maybe a handful of people that don't know what yes and means. So let's go straight into that. Sure. And just open that up and make, I don't know, this is really dangerous, but maybe we could roleplay it. As I say that out loud, I'm like, oh, Jesus, what did I just say? But like, but maybe explain what the yes and, sure. Well, let me say, I'll give you an example of of how this played out on the very first day that we started a partnership. So it was about seven years ago at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. At that time, the Center for Decision Research was run by Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize-winning economist, not then, but after. And he greenlit this program. So essentially, for about five years, the second city, sort of improv experts and scientists from the University of Chicago looked at behavioral science through the lens of improvisation and vice versa. Very first day. We are sitting around a table and we said, well, we need an open space. So we go to an open space. And the scientist said, can you just teach us an exercise like one of your most popular exercises? So we taught them the yes and exercise. So I'll explain what that is. We pair up people and we had all the scientists pair up and we said, okay, this day has been amazing. So we're plotting a reunion event for a year from now. And person A, you're going to pitch your ideas for this reunion event to person B. Person B, your job is to say no to every single idea in as many different ways as you would like to go. And they do that for about a minute. And you can imagine that that doesn't feel great for person A. It shouldn't feel good for person B. It sometimes does. And that's a problem. And then we say, okay, person B, your turn. And you're going to pitch your ideas. And person A, what you're going to respond to is yes, but. So you're going to say yes, but to every idea. And what inevitably happens after a minute or so of doing this is we pull the room and we say, who like that better half the hands go up? Who thought it was worse the other half go up? We're like, yeah, because you heard a yes, but it was a no with a bow tie. You know, it was a no with a top hat. There was there was no yes there. You got the shib afterwards. So some people figured that out and other people are like, I said, yes. And then we say, okay, now person A and person B, you're each going to pitch your ideas. And every idea you're going to yes and you're going to affirm the idea and contribute a new idea. You're not going to negate anything. And we're like, look, and the law physics doesn't apply. There is no budget. You have whatever budget. You could be having sushi on the moon. And that's what they do. And so the room fills with laughter and we come around and like, okay, what are you doing? And it's amazing what people come up with. And this is about the marketplace of ideas. And the thing is there's been research on this. I think Bob Sutton's done some at Stanford, which is to get to a good idea, you need something like 2000 ideas. And I know, I know, I know that sounds daunting. It is not. If you just let your mind go. And again, like, if you think like you're creating a second city show, it's like, it can be a premise. It can be a character. It can be an idea. It can be a line. It can be a color. It can be a place. It can be a time. So suddenly there, right there. And then you can make those categories. And you can have 50 under each of those. And something you're at the 2000. And it's fine. And so generating a lot of ideas. And the research I've looked at around when we talk about mastery in music and in different arts is volume. I mean, the amount of music that the Beatles made in like a nine year period is stunning. Very similar to Beethoven and Mozart. You know, the the greats produced a lot. And we don't talk about the stuff that maybe they produced that wasn't great because it doesn't matter because a lot of the greatness came out of the a lot. So yes and is an approach to additive creativity. It is you'll you'll never hear professional improvisers use the term yes and but is the mindset of I'm going to go in this room and I am going to allow every idea to live a little. I'm going to explore these ideas. I'm going to add to them if they take us nowhere. That's fine. We'll go down another path. And we say in our work, you have to learn to replace blame with curiosity. So this idea of like, it's so easy to come in and be like, you know, I've just been handed this terrible thing. But why not go in and go, okay, I've been handed this thing. What can I make of it? You know, we learn to see all obstacles as gifts in improvisation. We talk about that all the time. Where does yes and come from? What is the origin of it? Is it you? It's not me. You know, no, no, I mean, I luckily got to write the book. But no, I mean, I think and I don't know that it comes from Spol and either. Some people have credit to Del Close. It is just it existed when I started Second City and it existed before and it became an idea that just sort of made sense to the work and it's kind of rule number one. And I think that's probably because what we recognize with individuals is this stuff to get up and you've sort of seen the studies on fear of public speaking, being like one of the biggest fears that human beings have. So I would imagine if you don't have a script or anything or you don't you don't know what you're going to do and you can't because when you're improvising you're just working with whatever you have in the room at the moment. There may be a suggestion. There may not be a suggestion. That seems incredibly daunting. So you really have to teach people the approach to make it not so daunting. So a lot of that in very early improv classes is meditative qualities of getting that place of like get out of your fear brain. We have them sort of fail over and over and over again. And then we work a lot on listening skills. So if you wanted to play an exercise actually you and I could do a very early stage exercise which is all about that listening and it's called last word. And the idea here is that we're going to have a conversation like we're having right now and there's one rule is when I stop talking the first word of your response to me has to start with the last word I just said and vice versa. Cool. Okay. And there's no so there's no other rules. No. All right. Who goes first? I'll go first. I'm going to pause the conversation here for just a few minutes to talk about our sponsors. Finding mastery is brought to you by bio optimizers. If you've been listening to this podcast know how bullish I am on magnesium. It's hard to overstate how important is for our overall health and well-being especially when it comes to enhancing sleep. So if you're struggling with sleep in any way I want to invite you to try a solution that has been a game changer for me. I take a glass of water and two magnesium breakthrough capsules 30 minutes before hitting the pillow. It's part of my sleep routine. What I have noticed from magnesium breakthrough is that it's part of me getting better sleep both falling asleep and staying asleep. And I do feel when I'm taking it that there's an overall boost in my energy levels with a there's a noticeable zest or sense of vitality that I feel as well. Our review of magnesium research is that this is one to pay attention to. I don't think it's well known that there's seven forms of magnesium. And that's what I love about magnesium breakthrough that it contains all seven forms. And because you're listening to this podcast you'll receive a special offer when you head to magbreakthrough.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout. I think your brain and your body will thank you. Just head to magbreakthrough.com slash finding mastery and use the promo code finding mastery for 10% off your order. Finding mastery is brought to you by bond charge. Bond charge is a holistic wellness brand with an extensive range of evidence based products to optimize your life. Everything from blue light glasses to EMF management, circadian friendly lighting and more all grounded in science and designed to help you sleep, perform and recover better. My favorite product that they have is their infrared sauna blanket. I've loved adding this to my routine. It's a great way to reset and unwind and at the same time get my heart rate up. What I really enjoy about it is that it heats the body directly rather than the air around you like a traditional sauna. That means that you get the same benefits at a lower heat. And for me the best part is how I feel after. I'll revitalized relaxed and I've even noticed an improvement in my sleep, which is a game changer for me. So if you're looking for a nice way to add the benefits of high quality heat therapy to your routine, I really want to encourage you to go check out the infrared sauna blanket by bond charge. Just head over to bondcharge.com forward slash finding mastery and use the coupon code finding mastery to save 15% off your order. Plus you get free shipping, a 30 day money back guarantee and 12 month warranty on every sauna blanket. Again, that's bond charge B-O-N-C-H-A-R-G-E.com slash finding mastery and use the coupon code finding mastery to save 15%. And now back to the conversation. I was very much looking forward to this conversation because you were gracious enough to come on my podcast. And I think we instantly sort of were like, oh, there are surprising connections between what you do and what I do. Do I give you that impression that what we're doing is corollary between the two of us? Us for sure. Because, I mean, I've raised your work and I've listened to your podcast. And I am a giant fan of sport. And I've always felt that this world, this sort of improv world is for the people who didn't have team experience like I did playing soccer, which is my sport. But they needed a team experience. Experience like really when you get down into it, it's reference points and experience that really provides the context for mastery. And I'd listen to your stories and I listen to your insights. And not only are you studying it, but you're actually living it through second city, through dishwashing all the way into managing the play. Like, you're definitely in it. Yeah, it's important. I mean, what I discovered, and it was through writing the book, right? So we got this, we got this book contract. And what I, and I would write in the morning, I closed my door in my office, I never used to close my door, closed my door in my office, and I would write in the morning, because I get here earlier, still the first person here every day. And I'd be done around 10. And what I noticed was my staff, the people who immediately worked for me just filled my calendar at 10 o'clock for conversations to have with me. And I later found out what they realized was when I, because I'm not an improviser myself, I didn't come into this as an actor, I was a writer, but I've really worked at the applied ideas. So thinking about this work and then how it applies places. But my staff figured out that because I was writing about the work and the exercises, I was in such a good improvisational headspace that they knew I'd be a really good listener at 10.01 when my door was back open. I became kind of the mediocre boss I was normally later in the day, but it was that sort of fresh, fresh off, the good ideas of how to listen, how to collaborate, how to co-create, that made me kind of a better human. Human. We can stop there. I was going to leave you with two things just for fun for that. I was like, oh, I got I got to really dial up the listening. It was a point well made. And then so as soon as as like I listened to the last word, then I figured out the first sentence. And then I could go kind of just about anywhere. And then at the same time, I was thinking about the handoff. Yes. And like, what's the word I wanted to leave with to give you an assist? And I was going to leave you with on this last one, Nanya. And it's just because my son keeps like, I'll say, hey, Grayson is his name. Like, hey, Grayson, you know, how's practice? And he said, Nanya, dad. Nanya. What does that mean? Yeah, Nanya business. And he just laughs. It's a good time where you go with that. Well, I think so. Anyways, there's a few things going on there, right? Which is, yes, you have to listen to the end of my sentence, which most human beings don't do. We think we get the gist. And so we're kind of like, and we don't want to look, we want to look at our smartest cells, right? So we're sort of preparing what's the clever thing I can add in. When you're on stage, improvising with someone else, the last few words they say might contain crucial information. Of course, that's the same in real life. But we have shortcuts. And we have shortcuts for a reason, right? These biases are built in to keep us safe. And also because the world is complex. And if we really, if we pay attention to everything, we're going to go out of our minds. But many conversations that we have throughout the day, we're not giving our full weight to. And so when you practice listening to the end of a sentence, and when you are patient, and not worried about the pause at the end, that's the other thing, right? A lot of people feel like, well, if I pause, that's going to be upsetting. It's like, it's the opposite. When I finished talking and I saw you sort of trying to calculate what you were doing, I knew you had been paying attention to me. I knew you saw me. And that felt good. So it's kind of the opposite of the way a lot of people enter these rooms. Yeah, that's really fun. That's really fun. I would like to go you've written about the core principles of improv. So I do want to go there with you because I think there's a nice segue. However, before we hit that, Robin Williams, Tina Fey, John Favreau, you had mentioned public speaking being so terrifying. And it is one of the things that we're tackling, you know, we're squaring up with in the book that we just wrote called, that's about FOPO. And we call it the book title. I don't know if I show this with you on your podcast, is the first role of mastery. And essentially, it's squaring up with this deep fear that we have of being critiqued and judged in this chronic desire to see if we're okay based on what you or others might be thinking about us. And it's this constant chronic scanning to see if we're okay that it's just exhausting. But public speaking is like culprit number one for FOPO. FOPO keeps us from going for it because we're overly trying to manage approval and rejection. And so with Tina and John and the folks you've been talking about, did they have any FOPO? How did they work with FOPO? How did you see FOPO in these folks? Well, yeah. I think a lot of people come to improvisation because they're experiencing some sort of break. It can be a break up. It could be, they don't know what they want to do with their life. It could be, you know, I mean, a lot of pain, a lot of tragedy, a lot of trauma. Stephen Colbert lost his dad and brothers to a horrible plane accident. Tina Fey, when she was a little girl, doorbell rang. She opened the door and someone slashed her face and she has a scar. And she sees herself or saw herself as a deformed human being, that's what she has said in the past. So and that story goes on and on and on. And so they enter this world of improvisation in part because what they discover is these spaces that they occupy when they're when they're taking classes and then when they do it professionally are they have to they have to be deeply fiercely present in the moment. They can't linger in the past and they can't linger in an imaginary future. They have to stay present. One of the things we say is you need to learn to play the senior and not the scene you want to be in. So was the senior and play that and it is incredibly free. There are no phones. You are just have you have your other humans and they're working with you. And in the classes, we are putting people up to fail in volume over and over and over again. There's a classic game called a thousand and one and it's basically you throw out an object, give me an object like plunger. And then there's a format for a joke. A thousand one plumber's plunger is walking to a bar. A bar just says we don't serve your kind. The plungers say, you know, stick it or whatever. So stupid joke like I just made was terrible. And you just have to keep getting it. You have to keep getting it. And the what happens is the rule for the rest of the group is no matter how bad your joke is, they have to applaud like it's the funniest thing they've ever heard. And so you're building up like a callus for your bad failure work. And this is just there's so many of these exercises. But they're about like, no, this is this is the batting average. I think we might have talked about this if we didn't. I use this when I talk in my speeches all the time, which is, you know, Nick Eppley is one of the scientists that we work with at the University of Chicago. And he has research that shows us that human beings get it right in typical conversations, probably 20 to 30% of the time. So 30% being kind of generous, right? And then you're missing. You're just missing stuff. You just are. And if you think about that in the context, if it surprises you, and you think about that in the context of a major league baseball player at the, you know, at home plate batting, if he's missing the ball 70% of the time, he's a 300 here. It's pretty good. So this site of being, and that's, you know, what he what they've done is they've taken a lot of swings and missed. So that, you know, wait a minute. So go back to go back to Nicholas's insight is that we're getting conversations about 20% right? 20 to 30% right that we're understanding what's going on inside the conversation, understanding the full intent of what the person is trying to convey to us at any given moment. I had no ideas. I'm Nicholas Eppley Chicago. I know his work. So I didn't know, but I didn't know this. This is, I'm gonna go dig in. That's really terrible. Yeah, that's disheartening. It is, it's, but it's also funny. So Eppley has this, he has this joke in the, in his book mind wise, which I highly recommend. He's got this great joke, which is a man walks up to a riverbed and he sees another man on the other side and he yells to him, how do I get to the other side of the river and the man yells back, you are on the other side of the river. That's, that's the word we live in. And, and, and again, not surprising if you take a beat and, and just, you know, if you, if you go online or read a newspaper, you know, it's like the framing is terrible all the time and there's always framing and context is so hugely important yet, we don't necessarily always consider context. So when you understand that we're getting it wrong, more than we're getting it right considerably, what an awesome, awesome opportunity for you to listen a little bit more deeply, ask a couple more questions, do all those things that might give you an edge in notch line up to 35 or 40 percent. And I would say the great improvisers are, are, understanding what's going on in a conversation or a room much more than a regular human being. And, and it's in the, in the same way that great athletes know to move to space, the such a soccer thing, but I think it's true with the, with the other support, it's certainly basketball, but that idea of like, no, no, no, like you just got, like, how is Messi passing it there? Like, he just knows your, your should go to that space. And I grew up with the, with the championship bulls teams, thank God, here in Chicago. And just watching the flow of those folks, they got the triangle and they just started figuring out how this works. It was, it was beautiful to watch. It was like ballet, like some form of dance. And, and there's synchrony that happens, right? And that's, you know, you want to avoid group think so you can get to group mind. You know, how do we all sort of think the, the same in a, in a, in a way that will guide us in our individual work and our individual skill? And that is a hard thing to achieve, but I would imagine is the thing that ties together championship teams across all the different sports. Well, when you say group mind, no one makes sure I'm hearing that correctly, because I hear group mind, and I go to group flow. Yeah. And I think I mean group flow. I, and I'm the distinction I want to say is it's not group think. It is not, that's right. Yeah. It is not that because, because that's a danger. But it is about, like, group mind is a cool, yeah, that is cool. I think that group flow is, it's probably happening on stage. Yeah. Think about the same thing, like, whether it's two people or three people. And I, I'm nodding my head, I'm fusedly thinking that group flow is one of the unlocks for great teams. Yeah. And there's a bit of science around flow. And there's less science around group flow. Yes. And I would imagine that fear and risk are part of those triggers for, and I know it's one of your principles for improv, but fear and risk are, they're forcing function to be all in to this moment. Yeah. And if you can't embrace the fear with deep focus and listening and take the risk of staying in the next moment too, then the whole thing does unfold because, or not unfold, unravels because you've ejected out of what's required to stay on time. Maybe I can say that better. You've ejected out when what is required is to stay on time. Yeah. And so I'd love to hear your text. Sure. So there's a phrase in our work of the need to follow the fear. And there's a teacher. He was an actor here first and a teacher, Rick Thomas, who used to say, you need to learn to fall into the crack of the game. I'll say it again. You need to learn to fall into the crack of the game. And the idea there is like these mistakes and these fears are all opportunities. And I, not to get to, you know, area-dite, but it's not unconnected to Kierkegaard's existential leap of faith, which was also not unconnected to the term beat generation, which was coined by John Cullen Holmes, not Kierouac, but Kierouac built off it. And all of that is about when you're in this beaten space, but it's also beatific and this idea of I'm leaping into the unknown. That's where all the good stuff is. And it's hard. But it's easier if you got a group. It's easier if you're not alone. And you're right. It hasn't been studied because when you're doing legit scientific studies, you need to have volume. And the way to really understand this kind of group flow, it is following six people who are putting up a second city show for a year and a half. And that hasn't happened yet. I keep trying. Because I do think that that's where they're going to discover this idea, because we're ruthlessly experimenting in front of audiences. We're doing rapid prototyping of creativity in front of audiences, this third act of improvisation. And when we're in a process for creating a show, and this is very risky, right, is that we are just, that third act is just all made up, but understanding if you're going to have your people have that element of risk, you need to protect them. So you've heard the term psychological safety, the environment that is set for this third act is all about setting that sort of psychological safety. It's free. So anyone coming off the street can come to the improv set. When we end the 2X show, we take our bows and the castes, you know, they're in their nice clothes and they're taking their bows. And they go, well, we're thinking about doing a little bit more, would you want to stay? So it's almost an apology that they're saying. And then when they come back, they're usually dressed down. They might be in jeans, they might be other stuff. And it's late at night. And there's drinking. So you have all these cues that are set up to like, let's all just kind of lose them back and play and see what happens. And it's people's favorite part of the evening. But it is by far the riskiest and the least successful if you use the metric of laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, because there's going to be grown, grown, grown, and stuff doesn't work. But it was set up right. The founders of Second City instinctively understood this idea that we need a safe space to play and to risk. And this is the thing that businesses need. If they're in the business of making something out of nothing, creating new things, all of that, where is their laboratory for people to play? And especially what we understand now in almost all businesses is you can't do it in the silo and that you want to use your audience. So how do you engage them in such a way that's not going to put it at risk your product or the thing that might not work? And that's not always easy. 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Again, that's Apollo, A-P-O-L-L-O-N-E-U-R-O.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery for 15% off your purchase. And with that, let's jump right back into this conversation. Do you think that's why teams in business don't operate as teams? It's because they haven't built that play on unstructured way that they are taking care of each other. There's a great quote. I came across the other day and it was from Francis Fry and Anne Morris, who have a terrific new book. And they- We had them on the pod. They were awesome, right? But the line that I really respond to is that a bad system beats a great person any day of the week. And I think that you can teach your people to all these great skills. But if you don't have a system in which they can then do this work, then it ain't going to work. So I think it's less about the necessarily the individual team as what's the system they're operating in? Are they given a level of autonomy and freedom and opportunity? Are they given a lot of instruction and knowledge ahead of time? This is the thing about improvisation. It may seem like we're talking about just making it up. There are so many rules and so many conditions and so many walls, very specific one. That stage is a specific size. And we're doing this work at a specific time. And then we stop doing the work at a specific time. And then there's note sessions and there's other- there's all these things surrounding it. Because you want to have all that information to the- this like, you know, Charlie Parker, the great saxophonist, wouldn't be able to do the incredible improvisation that he became known for if he couldn't have played by by Blackbird, note for note beautifully. So it's that tension. That's right. Yes. So from form to break form is something that I picked up from the arts that really has stuck with me. Like, you have a rock solid on form to be able to break form. Yeah. Yeah. And same with structure. No structure to break structure. And there's a plan where it's no structure to no structure. But KNOW. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Okay. So do you think that the switch that would need to take place in business is more suited for an entrepreneur startup where it's like, we're going to create a whole new way of operating? Or do you think that it's small little incremental changes that would take place at the multinationals that would allow those enterprises to be able to get a bit more psychological safety, a bit more structure to play, a bit more practice on taking care, a bit more awareness on how to actually fail and fail fast and fail well and fail forward and all those things. Yes. I think it's easy to see the analogy to startups because having worked in theater my whole life, not just improvisational theater but theater at large, the best training and most startups, people working startups will tell you this. The best training would be putting on a play, putting on a show because you have to do everything. What is the play? What are you calling it? Where are you doing it? How are you doing it? How are you selling tickets? How are you promoting it? Then it's got to go on. There's got to be lights. There's got to be a stage. There's got to be sound. All this stuff. The multinationals are the people who hire Second City to come in and work with them because they recognize that they want their teams to be more effective. There are places like IDO and other businesses at Zappos. Zappos has a yes and library. They've embraced this idea within their team. There are many organizations anyone who's doing agile, that whole idea around scrum masters and sprints and all that very improvisational, like design thinking, very improvisational. It's out there under other names. It's out there under improv. I think it's becoming increasingly when I started here, so again late 80s, but then in the 90s when I was running things and working with leadership team, we had to do so much convincing to the Fortune 500s to hire us to do work. That's done. That's not the problem anymore. The problem might be budget. The problem might be time or what to focus on or how to focus on all those things. But it's like people get it now. Now that more and more studies are being done and coming out about this particular form of improvisation and how it's been used in these different domains, that path is just going to become easier and easier and easier. The work itself is hard because it does demand both these individual human practice that happens and then the greater system by which these teams are allowed to operate in ways that they can be successful. That's not the model Jack Welch was talking about a G. How would you suggest a startup or a multinational start in like practicing this? The easiest thing that I think of is the problem, which is people that are no buts or yes buts. That's an easy one that I think you can knock the calcium off that. The other one is when people know the yes and idea but it comes off as dismissive anyway. It's like yes and and then it's orthogonal to the original idea. It's not actually a build. It's like an assertion of their first idea that they are just trying to ram ride through. How would you help create? I want to push back on the safe space but I want to stay there for a minute. How would you help create that safe space to practice yes and or to practice being a great teammate to have each other's back? I want to acknowledge the thing that you just said which I think is very true which is near IL is a guest I had on the podcast and he has a phrase that it's not a superpower unless it can also be used for evil. So yes he can absolutely be used for evil in just the way you're saying it by just saying it but not doing it at all and discounting it. There are people who do that. If you have an experienced improvisational educator such that come out a second city and they come out out of the places as well working with one team at a time because this is the thing man. I want us to change the world. It's not going to happen one person at a time and it's not going to happen and mass. The only place it can happen is team by team by team by team and we all work in some level of team at some point. So I would say to any business it's like start with the team. Start with one team and see what happens when these people are trained and then get let loose inside your company. Measure it. It's going to be better. So we talked about psychological safety. Do you know that origin story of Amy Edmondson when she was the postdoc and worked at the hospital where this whole idea came from? No. It's amazing. So if people know the term psychological safety probably because Google did a thing called project Aristotle looking for the top quality of good teams and psychological safety came out number one. This idea of creating a space in which you feel safe to make mistakes. So Amy Edmondson was actually studying as a postdoc at Harvard and Richard Hackman was her advisor and a hospital was having some difficulty with the study they were working on. Hackman was too busy recommended Amy follow up on it and the data she was getting was pretty troubling. So they were studying these nursing pods, these groups of nurses and it was kind of clear that the nurses who were kind of the meanest and toughest to each other they had the least mistakes in the data and the nurses who were kind and empathetic with each other they had the most mistakes and this was like backwards from what everyone's thinking was at the time of like well no you know like if you're mean to each other that's going to cause more problems and then the opposite and you know Amy was really worried because like this is my first big study and I'm blowing it and it's going to be a failure and so she had sort of an insight when she got taken to this dark space that maybe something else was happening that the data wasn't telling them and she convinced the hospital to hire a third party to observe what was going on and this person didn't know what the study was about they were just there to observe these nursing pods and were part back what was happening and after two weeks the report was kind of stunning because what they discovered was it wasn't that the sort of mean non collaborative nursing pods were making the least mistakes they were reporting the least mistakes and the opposite was true of the collaborative cooperative people who because they were reporting the most mistakes they wouldn't make those same mistakes in the future that's psychological safety that's great because I the thing that I would say after reading some of that research not knowing the origin story is psychological safety is great yes yes and you know for what aim is that the thing that I always make sure that we are agreeing on that's right this is not therapy at work right this is to create enough space that you can raise your hand and say made a mistake or I fundamentally disagree or this is actually there's some danger in this you know like it's to create that space that you can get in the messy middle and be honest with it yeah and so because you don't want the mistake on opening night and you don't want the mistake in the Super Bowl but we are going to make mistakes so if you are in your training in the times when the stakes are low allow people to sort of you know practice those mistakes I just interviewed Sally Jenkins the terrific Washington Post Sports columnist who wrote that great Martina Navratilova Chris Everett article it came out a couple weeks ago and I hadn't realized the kind of the first while Michael Phelps she talks about him and his coaching and I didn't realize really I don't think I paid attention to all his level of social anxiety but also what the coach would do with him which is he was real scared of getting water in his goggles so they practice him getting water in his goggles like oh that's and you talk about this you know in your work too yeah well but it's brilliant Bob Bowman is his coach yeah and so they talked about the practice of imagery about that and we even got Bob was on the podcast as well we talked about the relationship between seeing success and seeing mistakes yes and so we were oddly enough like we didn't know each other for a long time and he was doing the 80-20 and I was doing a 85-15 so 85% of the time seeing success exactly how you hope it will go laying that neurological pathway and then 15% of the time seeing it go sideways and then figuring out spontaneously how to fix it that's right you know in while you're in it and so so so so back to your point though yeah I you know simply that this isn't easy that like being a human being is not easy and I'm 50 I just turned 57 had birthday last week uh I am sorry to say this it does not get easier it really doesn't your body starts to break down you lose people you lose more people you lose pets work gets harder in some in all these ways however if you if you have a practice and I do we're talking about it and hopefully some wisdom and you continue to allow yourself to be curious you are going to have so much incredible an incredible toolbox from which to deal with all this you've had trauma in your life and we've been talking about you know the yes and framework for teamwork collaboration and building trust can you maybe share how this framework how you used it or how it presented being useful when with your mom and your daughter and maybe you can open up for the audience that doesn't yeah yeah um know that part of your life so it actually the the stories are started before and Adam Greenett give me a call and uh he's the Wharton professor and and I've been interviewed for like three or four of his books and I ended up in none of them so uh but he's a friend and he had a friend moving to Chicago her name was ijen who uh and he said would you meet with her and I'm like of course with me with her and ijen uh was the executive director of a group called caring cross generations as well as the national domestic workers alliance she was a macArthur genius grantee and like the best human being in the world we hit it off and we ended up co-creating my wife and and I with ijen and her team co-creating an improvisation for caregivers program we collaborate with the Cleveland Clinic and was basically we're going to take the behavioral science that we're doing and the improvisation and we're going to center it in this care experience whether it's you caring for your mom with Alzheimer's or whether it's you in a hospital setting and and one of the things you know my mom got Alzheimer's and I didn't know how to deal with it and I noted and I blocked it and I didn't recognize that you could use this power of yes and to navigate really successfully you know mostly successfully uh that that relationship and then where this really hit home is when our daughter Nora got diagnosed with cancer when she was 16 um and this was five years ago and um it was you know um in her liver and lungs and you know suddenly we're at the Laurie Children's Hospital here in Chicago and we we used everything so so here's an exercise that that so there's an exercise based on Nick Eppley's work that we talked about um and uh we talked about the fact that you know Eppley says people get it wrong a lot and one of the reasons that they get it wrong a lot is because we as individuals are oddly reluctant to share personal details about ourselves and this is even sort of low stakes stuff so and my wife created this exercise called universally unique and we pair two people up we give them a banal uh topic like grocery shopping they say okay person A describe how human beings grocery shop just everyday human beings and they do that for a minute and it's boring and it's okay take a beat and I want you to think about how you personally grocery shop now do that completely different and when you break it down people like I learned about them I like I relate to them I understand something about their values and this is from grocery shopping so when we're in the hospital with Nora um and you get these new nurses and new doctors continually eat throughout even a day and then new people the next day and we wanted them to see her and see us and not just the disease and so I used this in a new person from a come of the room and I'd say hey I'm Kelly this is Anne we've both worked at second city for over 30 years this is Eleanor she also goes by Nora and we have a hundred pound Bernice mountain dog named Benchley who's an asshole who are you and they would tell us and suddenly it wasn't cancer it was Nora and suddenly it was like oh Kelly and Anne and and I remember one doctor we you know we were home sometimes at the hospital at home that's just so complex and you know like the temperature was up so we we called and I remember when we he said come in we'll check you in and he said when it was you who was calling I kind of knew well Kelly and Anne are calling it's probably right that they come in because he knew us and the thing is I'm on we're on this floor sub floor 17 at Lori with all these kids with cancer and there are so many kids who either don't have a parent who's advocating for them or can be there or a parent who's just so scared they don't know what to say or they want to be completely deferential and I understand that but everyone's going to make mistakes and we all are in this together we're in the soup together and so we utilize this to create you know a team of caregivers is an incredible team we lost Nora four years ago was about a year and that's a whole other thing man that's that's that's this this idea of okay and and I will tell you the thing that if there's if there's one aspect of this work that's through the sort of grief period that that helped me it was the the idea of relationship right that that you know in improvisation you have your ensemble but your ensemble isn't just the people on stage with you includes that audience and it includes the people who are cleaning up the room and the box office and that's the way it's always been at second city we make heroes of the audience and in turn they make heroes of us and that's what I needed so I think we've been very easy to just like go hide in a hutch somewhere and instead you know we we rallied the team and to hold us up when we couldn't hold up ourselves and they did it it's still hard you know it's it's it's it's not the scene I want to be in you know but I we had to play the scene we're in hmm how much of you now after what I would consider being one of the hardest things of human yeah goes through it's losing their child how much of you is honestly like revealing all of who you are and how much now post post this grief and loss are holding back who you are yeah and I feel like the that type of well all trauma we go we swing one way or the other you know it's either like fuck it yeah here I am yeah or it's like uh-uh you're not getting me because that shit's too pain that's right so what where how did you swim so I've always lived out loud my wife Lasso much more of an introvert I've always been an extrovert um I'm that on steroids now I have no room for small talk um and the other thing is you know I kept a caring bridge journal through the entire experience and and for a year after she passed and so what is that what's what's a caring bridge so one of the wonderful things that exists out there in in in in the world uh is this website called caring bridge and if you're ill or you have a loved one who's ill you can update uh what's going on and sort of a blog form and people can then communicate with you and if you've got to go fund me you can have a link there and and there's it's wonderful like millions of people who signed on to our caring bridge um who who strangers uh who would reach out and either ask how she was doing or or after she passed and she's checking in and I wrote about everything and then what I discovered because I had done this as a way to help me this was a selfish this was a uh the way to make me survive through this thing um is that then people come up all kinds of people and share their trauma and lo and behold what I didn't understand and didn't realize is the vast majority of us are holding on to some really dark stuff um that was a surprise to me um and and so now that I know this um it has changed to be a measurably I mean I like who I am in what word in what way because because it's it's it's it makes when someone does something that seems weird bad um whatever my first instinct is not to yell at them it's to wonder what pain they have that is making them do that um I find that to be a healthier and more true and human response and it's not true always uh whether it's an illness or something else that someone's lashing out I'm I'm not polyannic about this I don't think the whole world is out to you know help everyone but I think more people are probably good than bad um and and we're all both right we have moments I mean meaning has made in moments life's made in moments and you know I don't want to be defined by my worst moments and if you know there there are some there aren't so great um but I really strive for trying to understand and be curious um and then also to show some grace you know and and that's this idea can I take a beat can I just take a beat try to reassess the situation try to give some opportunity for whatever bad moment might have just happened to maybe get a little bit better and inevitably like a good portion of the time it does um and that's just I didn't have that patience before all this um I didn't have any I didn't have the wisdom before this um and I didn't know what I didn't know and I continue now to know I don't know a lot of things which is um a great burden to take off my shoulders uh to not realize to realize I don't need to have it right um all the time because I because I don't um we have a mutual friend Scott Berry Kaufman and he taught yes we do he taught me the term post-traumatic growth in this idea that potentially you could take the worst thing that happened to you and have it affect you in a way that can be positive for yourself and for others um it doesn't make it the bad thing not happen it doesn't mean you're not gonna be sad or angry or all those things but it does give you a frame for moving forward broken bruise battered but move forward and try to find you know joy and flourishing and all the things that we're trying to find you know in our lives and we have a son who's 25 and wants to be an actor and is about to go down to Atlanta to start an apprenticeship with the Shakespeare theater there and I want to see him attack that stage you know and we have friends and and Scott students and I have colleagues and we you know there all these people who are counting on on us to to bring what we can bring to to our various ensembles and we need them to to do the same for us so I don't know it's it's uh I don't have the answers uh but but I got a playbook you know and it's and and luckily it's my life's work hmm I mean Kelly like thank you for sharing that part of it uh your your insights and through the pain that you've had and um thank you for like clarity on the playbook yeah and like we don't have like play one two three four you know lined out here but that's really what your book is about and that's why people hopefully can be interested in bringing you out to their organization and um through you know we've got a first principle here at Bonnie Mastery is that um through relationships we've become yeah and it's the relationships that is at the center of this whole thing and you know it's evident here that improv is more about connection yeah that's right it's more about seeing and listening and having someone's back and trusting that they're going to have your back far more than it is about comedy that's right and you're teaching the skills of relationships you're teaching the skills of connection in an embodied way so people know how to trust it there's real evidence that um they can get on the edge and then there's somebody else out there with them that's going to be in it and take care of them and do their very best and like I'm I'm I'm stoked to have this conversation with you and I'm like my heart swells a bit for folks that are feeling um that they want to they want to grow and they know that it's about taking some risks and this might be a really safe fun and meaningful way for folks that yeah so encourage folks to get your book and give you a jingle um to come out you know and and give it a go with the team that they're on and so where do just before we wrap up I just want to get your your hint at the future here where do you think comedy and AI and where do you think tech and connection are taking us so here's what I know there's the that's a multi multi no yeah I mean the the thing that the robots are not um particularly good at is improv or comedy they they can tell some bad jokes uh but jokes are one thing in comedy and they're not necessarily what most of us consume right I mean if you think about the comedy consume it is the sitcoms and movies and stand-ups and they tell a lot of stories and they're talking about their own experiences um my so so my wife is a um tenured professor of comedy she runs the first ever BA and comedy writing and performance at Columbia College and she talks about one thing I think that that I love that she talks about the realm of comedy is that in improvisation we're doing a lot of perspective taking um we are getting suggestions from the audience and and and taking those suggestions and then spitting back what we think they mean uh to the audience stand-up comedians do and they have to do a very different thing they and especially in the first five minutes of their act they have to do perspective giving they have to teach the audience how to watch them and if you think about your favorite stand-up comedians that's usually talking about their flaws patent Oswald is a schlub Amy Schumer is a slut John Mulaney is a drunk so keep going and then and then from there and it's and and this is a leadership thing I think which is like I I don't want your success story I want your fiasco and the fact that you made it through so when I think about comedy and improvisation I think about mess and struggle and hard stuff and the ability to navigate through it and laugh our asses off um because we're all kind of just figuring this crazy thing out together so I the the future is the blend the future is not that AI takes the place of it's that AI is additive too because you're gonna need the storytellers and the problem solvers and and the creators um and that is just not going to be that particular kind of technology um and we are going to need deep places of human connection and the shortest distance between two people as a laugh so comedians who are already our truth tellers you know I mean Colbert John Stewart Seth Meyer I mean you know we the the late night which used to be news I know it's still there but not in the same way it's it's now these comedians who are trying to show us um maybe a better way to live um I think all of that sort of coalesces and and I think it's a very powerful um concoction uh when done well and I think you can see it on the opposite side too you know I think you can see how people can use comedy to otherwise individuals um I have been asked to come on many a program to talk about whether Trump is funny or not um and and indeed he is using comedy he is I think he is using it to make people separate and others and and that sort of thing um but it's definitely using wait how how is he using how is he using comedy oh well I mean it is it is uh he's he because he is getting us to all the names he calls people he is an insult comic he is Don Rickles insulting people to have that tribe feel connected by making that other person an out person they're out of our group and we're gonna laugh at them as opposed to what we do which is how do we bring you in how do we celebrate the thing that that's different about you when we bring you in so comedy can be used in in in both ways it's a very powerful tool and he has the cadence of a comedian if you just it's why you know when uh patty Cooper um who is a standup who does the sort of lip syncing of of Trump it's the reason that is effective is she is using her frame as a comedy standup to simply use his words and facially delivering such a way it's like oh this is funny that that's what's funny i see both of those yes i see both of those ones yeah and you know i guess a light segway here is that it's i don't know the psychology here and i'm imagining you might have at least a hint at it is why we laugh you know in dark situations and like the gift that is and it's like right at the edge of irreverence and like disrespect that's right and but when you're in it and like special operators have like this you know that type of connection and if anybody were to hear we just had to uh seals on special operators on and they're like yeah if anyone would have heard you know what we joked about and laughed about like we'd be instantly careful but so so can you can you open up a little bit of that like the dark situation you know yeah well there's a fmri study that was done fairly recently in china which exposed to that the same part of region of the brain that processes an insight is the same part that processes a joke so it is discovery um it is also a mechanism by which we diffuse our apprehension in our fear so it's in the same way that you're looking at this what looks like a really sweet behind of a fine lady that you're welcome by and you realize it's a guy and if you're a cis man like myself you laugh but had it because you're like uh oh what did I do there uh and and and so there's many of those oopsie moments that we all all have that then we laugh afterwards which is really just sort of like okay I I didn't want to go there in my mind I went there in my mind I can acknowledge it now move past it or or we use it as a way which happens in traditional comedy all the time which is a truth is revealed that you didn't expect inside comedy so the the processing you the understanding of humor is certainly there's philosophers and and sociologists and other kinds of scientists who who've studied this stuff my wife has a book coming out uh next year called funnier it's her theory of comedy and the title is based on dads and moms coming up to her and saying hey you're gonna make my kid funny and she goes I can't make him funny I can make him funnier I can take the thing that they have and then push it to the extent that they'll allow me to push it or or discover it and a lot of that is just these these skills that we're we're talking about but and you know she has every one of these students have they all have a writing practice they need to observe things in the world they need to write them down you wish y'all would be doing this for for whatever our our jobs are but but you know like especially the young people who you know enter her program are are what many people define as e2 right they're they're terrible on testing and they're all brilliant um and so she has to push them to do this work and and and and really focus and be disciplined so that they can then let their incredibly facile rebellious minds work in the most positive way possible and entertain us while also giving themselves you know a career that they can you know uh bi groceries and and pay for rent and insulin and things like that so it's it's all the things that we need so yeah so I think that's that's that's you know this this stuff is it that it appears to be magic and and it ends up not being and that's okay give us one takeaway something we can do at the dinner room table besides the universal unique which is a fun one you know give us one more that we could do at the dinner table or um this this is based on uh so our son Nick was always a natural improviser very good could completely yes and through through everything uh our dear departed Nora was not uh in which she had a thing that that Nick I think coined as nor logs uh which were her own personal monologues where she just wouldn't stop talking he created a thing called the story bucket when she has story that turned into a nor log she had to drop it in the imaginary story bucket so that would never be found again so we created we didn't create this there is an improv exercise that we used at the dinner table you can also use it in the car with the kids and it's called one word story very simple you tell a story one word at a time so everyone just has to say the the story but they can only say one word of the story and when we get to Nora and she would say hippopotamus when really all that should have been there was a thought or an and um it would cause her essentially to lose the game and she did not want to lose so she learned how choose those ends of could be very useful at different times and every once in a while she got to say hippopotamus uh and that was a game that allowed her to build the ability to share a conversation so you don't know where the story's gonna go and you just like if you were to say the word today and then the next person says I the next person says went and so we're just building a story and you see where it goes and it's amazing when it actually kind of all ties together and you just know there's a natural end it's beautiful but you can only do that if everyone's listening to the person before the person after and and is is making a worse way how does that work with a cell phone in your hand it does not work with the cell phone in your hand no it doesn't there's no cell phone to be seen all right listen Kelli thank you for teaching us about connection and comedy and improv and creativity and innovation and leadership and teammates being a great teammate and teamwork like thank you and I'm stoked that people in our community that might not have known you or second city now definitely do and um where do we drive people for your book and where do you want to just kind of suggest people go check out your work yeah so you know the book is available everywhere but you know Amazon's probably the easiest right now and then if you come to the second city website the second city works section is where my podcast is we're also in WGN radio but if you come to the second city website you'll you'll see the podcast and I'm easily found on social and I'd love to interact with folks so feel free to reach out and thank you so much for having me this has been a blast appreciate you Kelli all right thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you we really appreciate you being part of this community and if you're enjoying the show the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening also if you haven't already please 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