 Welcome to the show, Kelly Leonard. We are very excited to have you with us today because we have been using improv as an integral part of our exercises at the Art of Charm since, well, since we started. We've certainly recognized the power of improv and how it can help us in our interpersonal skills and skills beyond that. And we're very excited for you to be able to drop some of the science behind why this improv is so powerful. So I would love to start off by hearing about how you discovered and ventured into improv. Oh, completely by accident, which seems appropriate, right? I graduated college in 1988 and I wanted to be a playwright. And the advice that I was given was if you want to work in theater, work in a theater. Doesn't matter what you do. Tearing tickets, whatever. So I got a job. Bernie Sondlands, who was the co-founder of Second City, was starting a new theater. But it was about six, seven months away. He said, great, I'll get you a job at Second City to tide you over. And I don't, you know, we're dumb when we're young. I assumed I'd be walking in as the director of marketing, but I was ushered to the back bar at Second City and I was a dishwasher, which is not as glamorous as it sounds. That same week that I got hired as a dishwasher, so did a young guy named John Favreau, who would go on to become a director and actor of movies. We both had mullets and there is photographic evidence of this. I may have had a near cuff. That is something that might have occurred as well. And so this is 88, right? So on stage at Second City at that time, Mike Myers, Bonnie Hunt, Jane Lynch, Chris Farley and Tim Meadows had just got hired in the touring company and Farley was constantly getting in trouble for breaking shit. And I don't know if you know how Second City is set up, but we do two acts of scripted content and a third act that is improvised. And normally, you know, you're washing dishes and you're cleaning beer glasses and you're doing that during the show, but the improv set, you kind of get to sneak out and watch and it completely felt like magic. But the reality is you work there a little while and you realize it's not magic at all that essentially this improv is a practice. And what I always say is it's kind of like yoga for your social skills, you know? It's a kind of like noisy group mindfulness. It's a way for us to practice being unpracticed, which is the way that we live our lives every single day. And so this is useful, not just to create great comedy. As you know, it's great in business. It's also great as a parent. It's great as a partner. It's great that these are human being skills and it's a way for us to practice what it means to be humans who are prone to fail most of the time. Goodness at it better. And one of the things that I love about improv in our programs, how we incorporate it, is we work with a lot of highly analytical people and they often feel like they don't have a great sense of humor or they can't be funny because they've received some negative comments in the past or maybe they've tried to crack some jokes and haven't gotten anywhere. And through doing just a few improv games and letting their guard down and shutting off that analytical mind and just saying the first thing that comes to mind, they will often have belly-shattering laughs from the entire group. Like the least expected person will be the funniest because it creates this ability to just open yourself up and tap into that magic in the moment. But it's a team sport. So it's not just you giving a monologue. It's you playing off of each other and riffing. And when I think of Second City, it's like the Harlem Globetrotters of improv. So for you to be able to witness this night in and night out and this ensemble come together, that's just insane to think about all of the stars who've come through. Absolutely. I mean, being able to watch Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert improvise a scene based on this audience's suggestion of Maya Angelou and have it come out so beautifully that the final scripted product was kind of the same scene, right? They just did this thing and they recreated it when we had our 50th anniversary and they came back and that was also a kind of magic. But you're right when you talk about being dialogues as opposed to monologues. And look, you shouldn't use comedy if you don't have a license, but the reality is in improvisation, what you learn is that if you just allow yourself to be sort of honest in the moment and respond freely, you're gonna get laughs. And that sort of marks at the point that is really true about improv, which is it reveals truth. This is the thing. When we let our guard down, we're just sort of being honest in the moment. We tend to say things that are true and often those truths are surprising. So that's great comedy, but that's also the seeds of creativity which lead to innovation. And I think people conflate creativity and innovation. I'm sure you guys have talked about this. I think I've heard you talk about this in the podcast. And the thing is like, they're different. You can have creativity with zero innovation. You cannot have any innovation without creativity and creativity is messy and it requires that failure we talked about. It required the dialogues that we're talking about. And so the idea of teaching people practices that allow them to fail and fail well and be resilient through those failures are vital if we want our people to be creative. And then the innovation part is kind of where you stop doing the yes and, right? So the yes and is so vital to get abundant amount of ideas. And you need thousands of ideas to get to a good idea. But then at a certain point, you gotta stop. So there is such a thing as a bad idea. There absolutely is, just not when you're yes anding. You let the bad ideas exist because who knows they might turn out to be good. But at a certain point then you're sort of ruthless about your editing. And that's okay because everyone's already had their first ideas vetted and it's just human nature, right? We want to be seen, we want to be heard. And if you do that, people will give you a lot of leeway. And we have a phrase in our work that you need to bring a brick, not a cathedral. So many people walk into these brainstorming sessions with their fucking cathedral already built and there's no co-creation going on. And we believe that all of us are better than one of us that you get amazing ideas through these collaborations. No one, this myth that we have in this country and it's been supported by film and books and all that, this sort of great man myth, this idea that Steve Jobs did it all alone. It's like he didn't. Thomas Edison had like hundreds of people working in that shop. And this has been, it's a great story. It's an easier story when we think it's one person but it's not, it's all of us. What I want to touch on for our audience who might not be super familiar with improv. So when we bring it up in class, a lot of people immediately think of whose line is it anyways. It's the one clear representation on TV but improv has actually woven into a lot of TV and movies that we aren't aware of. So what does improv mean to you and what are sort of the core principles that we can then dive deeper into the science and how we can use it in other areas of our life? So quite simply, you know, improvisation is making something out of nothing. And when we're talking about improvisation, we're not talking about ad-living. We're, you know, we're talking about a sort of a wise approach of improvisation. And I think the best orientation is if you know how this started. So in the 20s and 30s, there was a woman by the name of Viola Spolen and she was working at Jane Adams Hall House in the South Side of Chicago. She was a social worker. Her job was to better assimilate immigrant children and neighborhood children into her care. So she created all these improv games, these exercises, many of which were silent or gibberish because the kids didn't always share language. And she got those kids to play and they basically sort of created empathetic communication and collaboration and co-creation. And her son, Paul Sills, was studying at the University of Chicago and he loved these games and he taught them to his friends, Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Alan Arkin, among others. They formed the first improvisational theater in America called the Compass Players. That's in 1957. By 1959, that morphs into the second city. So we use improvisation to train our performers and then they use that improvisation sometimes in game format, like you've seen on whose line is it anyway, but primarily as a method by which they create content in the form of sketches, like you might see on Saturday Night Live. And so many people from SNL started here. But then there's this other side to improv that still relates to Spolen's work that she did with kids, which is when we take improv into businesses and schools and for doctors and nurses and other kinds of caregivers, anyone who has to navigate ambiguity, anyone who is dealing with uncertainty and needs to be agile, improv training is kind of the recipe for success inside those worlds. And I think, you know, all you have to have done is live in the last 10 years to recognize that, man, we are living inside that now. The rate of change that has happened in the last decade is so astounding that we really need to be able to be agile and resilient in the moment if we're gonna be able to shift the entire way we communicate, which has changed, right? I mean, this is what was going on when I was growing up. I mean, when I started at second city, no cell phones, no computers, zero. You know, we took reservations on an answering machine and, you know, I mean, it was completely different. And now what's funny is that ironically though, second city has always dealt in short form interactive content. That apparently is very hot right now. So yeah, so I guess what's old is new again, you know? I mean, so the fundamentals I think are just, you know, so important and inside improvisation, it is a group activity. We don't call our groups teams. We call them ensembles. And I think we've all heard that adage, your team is only as good as its weakest member. And for us, that's not true. For us, it's your team is only as good as its ability to compensate for its weakest member. Cause at some point we're gonna be the weakest member. None of us are omniscient across all contexts. You know, if you have a math problem, please don't bring it to me. But if you need a good wine ordered, I'm your man. I'm the guy. And so inside our ensemble and our casts are generally six people. And there's some science behind this, right? That those sort of small ideal groups are generally in that sort of six number. You are gonna find a lot of people with a lot of varied skills that you wanna tap. And there's gonna be introverts and there's gonna be extroverts and you have to make space for everyone to play. What I wanna touch on in this, and this is something that Johnny and I have talked about on the show, is with this rise in asynchronous communication and conversation, there's been a rise in perfectionism. So writing the perfect email, sending the perfect text message, sending the first message on a dating app. It has to be perfect. We think about it. We think about it again. And improv is the opposite. It's removing all of that in your head, self-analysis, catechum with the cathedral and stripping it down and let's just build something together brick by brick. We'll get to a cathedral, but it's through the group play that we actually build that cathedral. And for a lot of people in our classes who try the first exercise or the couple exercises that we do, we strip the actual words out completely. We're using sounds, we're using our body to communicate just to get warmed up because so much of our communication in our professional lives and our social lives, we are overthinking right now. And it's actually hurting our ability to connect with one another. One of the scientists that we worked with at the University of Chicago is a guy named Nick Epley who has a terrific book called Mind Wise. And Nick's research really centers in on how poorly we actually understand what's going on in any given moment. He has a wonderful joke in his book where he talks about a guy walking up to a river bed and he sees a guy on the other side of the river and he yells to him, how do I get to the other side of the river? And the guy yells back, you are on the other side of the river. So I think that's very tellic. That attracts with how people communicate. Epley says we get it right about 20% of the time. If we're maybe with a spouse or someone we're close with 30% of the time. I often look at that, I'm a baseball fan. I'm a long-suffering Chicago Cubs fan. I guess not that long suffering, we won that that long ago. But if you look at a baseball player, if they're not hitting the ball 70% of the time, there are 300 hitter, that's pretty good. And so I kind of feel like this average makes sense. And so if you understand that, you are probably gonna be walking into conversations, maybe a little less with blame and more with curiosity. What am I not getting in this situation? How can I prompt the person across from me to open up and collaborate? And improv is all about that. It's sort of empathy on steroids. And it's not like soft empathy, right? It's kind of muscular and gritty empathy. It doesn't mean this thing is gonna be easy. In fact, it's not easy. It's messy. There's disagreement, all those things. However, we stick with it. And I'll give you a great example on this. When we started working with the scientists at the University of Chicago it was a program called the Second Science Project and we were blending behavioral science through the land of improvisation. First day, they're like teach us like the core second city exercise that when you go to Facebook or Nike and you're working with them, what do you teach them? And we normally teach them the yes and exercise. So real briefly, you get two people together and you break everyone up in pairs. And person A is gonna pitch to person B a reunion. Like we say, this day has gone so well. We're all gonna get together in a year. Person A, pitch your idea for the reunion to person B. Person B, you have one job. Your job is to say no to every idea, go. And we do that. So not fun for person A. Shouldn't be fun for person B. Sometimes it is. And then we say switch. Person B, you're gonna pitch your ideas. And person A, what you're gonna do is say yes, but to every idea. Now the interesting thing when we unpack this, half the room thinks that was a better experience and the other half thinks it's worse. And when you say like, you heard a yes, but what you actually got was a no with a top hat. There was no yes actually to be had. And then the third pillar is where we say, all right, pitch your ideas and everyone yes and. You affirm and contribute that allows you to explore and heighten. And so suddenly, we're having sushi on the moon and Led Zeppelin is playing with the original lineup. Great, yeah, that can't happen, but you never know. And so the yes and part, which we talked about earlier, beginning of the creative process, start of a brainstorm could be five minutes at the beginning of meaning that's it, but it allows you to get to an abundant amount of ideas. Now, the scientists had said, there's tons of research that already backs this up. Chiefly, Richard Thaler, who led the initiative, Green led the initiative that we were working under. His work in behavioral economics shows that people's default position is to say no or do nothing, primarily in behavioral economics, right? So yes and is a nudge towards doing the opposite. And they said, well, what happens when I don't agree? What happens when you can't yes and? And we didn't know. And so they went back and looked at the literature. We went back into our lab and started playing around with improv concepts. So they have a paper coming out next year based on what we discovered. And the thing we discovered is if you wanna stay in conversation with someone that you disagree with, you need to say thank you because you need to say thank you for what they offer because it sets off the gratitude part of their brain. There's no feder flight. And the because is you find anything, no matter how small that you actually agree with that will allow you to stay inside the conversation. So the example I give is when my daughter was sick, one of her best friends, parents were anti-vax and this is well before that became fashionable. And we wanted the kids to be able to stay in communication. So I had to actually employ this. And I said, thank you because you care for your kids so much. You don't want her hurt by vaccines. I care for my kids so much. I don't want her hurt by someone who's unvaccinated. The thing we care about is the same. We just have different ways of getting there. And the kids ended up texting and FaceTiming and doing all the stuff they needed to do. That relationship stayed. And I think this is particularly relevant in the moment we live in right now where we are so eager to block, we're so eager to cancel and we're not allowing space for our diverse, divergent, ignorant points of view to be kind of okay in this sort of human endeavor that's already fraught with a lot of the problems. Like, can we just give each other a break and try to kind of make it through to a next step? Because I think what we're... There is a great scientist who has this idea, if an alien came down to the United States or any country and met one human being, they'd understand 99% of humanity at Stan Gilbert stumbling upon happiness because we share that much. But right now, we're not looking at what we share, we're looking at what we don't, we're looking at our differences. And I think that that blinds us to the opportunities in front of us. And a big part of that no shuts down the sharing. Totally. And I think that's what's so important, whether it's yes and or thank you, because you allow space for the other person to continue sharing to get to that point of agreement. But so much of our communication right now, especially online and asynchronously, is that criticism, that rejection, that shutting down to win brownie points, likes to get more followers. And that has poisoned our ability to actually get to the place of agreement that creates connection. It's highly funny to think of someone worrying that they're not gonna get their no in. I mean, this is like what really is that your concern that you're not gonna be able to say no? I mean, just think how warped that is. I mean, this idea of like, all right, let's just sort of see what happens. And look, we talked about creativity and innovation. You can't name me an innovation that didn't face a sea of no's. That's what an innovation is. It is something that no one thought of before. So, you know, you've got to make space for something unusual, something odd. And again, it doesn't need, the space doesn't need to take up the whole room. It just needs to exist, especially at the start. So there's this idea inside improvisation. And I think it's what's kept me going here for so many, I've worked at Second City for 34 years. And the idea is that the people who do this work, they approach it with grace and with gratitude. And here's the thing that's so unusual, which is we are known as a star factory for good reason. Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert, Keegan-Michael Key, Jason Sudeikis, Cecily Strong, Eddie Bryant, you name it, they all came out of here. These people are all practiced in an art form that they're taught to make their partner look good. That's what they did. Your star will shine and it will shine because you're putting a spotlight on others. And that is the way they behaved here. And I'm telling you that is the way they behave when they got out of here. And that's how you get Ted Lasso. That's how you get that series is all these people grounded in this improv work, deciding to do something that collectively will be bigger than anything they could have done alone. Letting that star shine is accepting and building off of mistakes. So one of the key unlocks for a lot of our students is how the mistakes can actually create more of a scene and be even funnier than the perfect scripted set imaginable. And I know there's a principle that you shared in the book around how we build off of mistakes. And if we can't get to the point of mistakes, we're not gonna get to the point of actually having a meaningful sketch, a meaningful moment on stage. Yeah, Rick Thomas, who's an alum of Second City and a director and teacher talks about the need to fall into the crack in the game. So what is it? When you see that mistake, can you seize upon it? And we know from the history of various innovations like post-its, like slinkies, these things were all mistakes. They didn't start out being the thing that the person was trying to make. And you just discover at a certain point that you pivot. I guess Slack, right, is one of the most amazing things. So it's like, that is a, you know what Slack is? Is a failed product. It was a failed product. And now, it's an amazing product. But that took a reframe. And this is the thing, I don't know about you guys, but I certainly wish that when I was a younger person working, you know, but both in sort of my creative brain and my business brain that I understood this idea of reframing that it is a, what a superpower that is. The ability to take something that is like, oh, this is the worst thing possible. What can I do with it? How do I have agency? My friend, Scott Berry Kaufman, introduced me to this concept of post-traumatic growth. So the idea that, look, we all go through incredible trauma and grief and problems, divorces, deaths, all those things, it's inevitable. But what if you take it in those moments and you look at like post-traumatic growth, you're like, how can I grow out of this thing? How can I take this seemingly net negative and make it inform something positive in my life? When COVID hit, this was this moment for Second City and this was a very turbulent time here. We went through a sale. So our longtime owners sold the place. We were getting just terrible press because any institution that had been around for 60 years was facing the fact that they're largely white owners and operators maybe didn't behave the best. We all got that. And I remember my friend who ran exec ed at an Ivy League school was now at a major soft drink company. I'll figure out, you can figure out which one it was. But she was like, hey, do you have any stuff that you could deliver on Zoom around resilience? Because my people are hurting. And my wife, Ann, who has worked at Second City two years longer than I have and she's a longtime educator and director here, I yelled downstairs, I'm like, what do you got? Resilience, exercise, what will work on Zoom? And she gave me one. This one is really good. I think your folks could use this very easily. It's not complicated. It's called wish. And what you do is you have everyone get a piece of paper and make three columns. In the first column, you write down a wish that you have that you're not gonna get granted anytime soon. So at that point, it was like, I wanna swim in salt water. I live in Chicago, that ain't happening. And in the second column, you write down the emotion you think you'd feel if you got that wish. And I wrote like, refreshed. And in the final column, you write down something you could do right now to experience that emotion. So if I wanted to be refreshed, I could put some water in my face. I could go for a run. I could work out. And the idea is like, we don't control what's happening to us, all the elements of a situation in the room, what we do control is our emotional response to it. That's a reframe. That is a crucial way that you can manage through the inevitable ups and downs that are gonna take you through your day, through your career, through your life. You have the ability to see this thing in the way that you want to see it. It's not gonna change it. It's not gonna improve. It's not gonna make things better. But it will give you the opportunity to have some measure of control in the world that you'd live in. Well, we might as well go ahead and connect the dots here for our audience because we understand how improv works nicely with acceptance commitment therapy. And how those concepts, you will find them and see them in acceptance commitments therapy. So being able to practice them in a safe environment then allows you to then recall those in a tension, stress-filled situation. And a big part of that is to be present with your emotions of what is going on and a full consciousness of thoughts and feelings that you're going through and registering them, not acting upon them, not trying to manipulate or control them but to observe those emotions, those thoughts and those feelings. The very first thought, first part of that, which is the acceptance part. And of course in improv, it is a complete acceptance for the scene that is being created and each brick that is being placed and not trying to force this scene or this activity anywhere, but to be okay with it and then to work then from within it. So we have a phrase, you wanna play the scene you're in not the scene you want to be in. So that's that acceptance idea. And then look, you might get a suggestion that you don't like, but in improv you have built up the muscles to not just reject that bit like, okay, let's sort of see what's going to happen with my scene partner. And often you will surprise yourself. I mean, the stuff isn't easy. Part of the mythology, I think with a lot of creative people is that somehow they just got it. My experience with improv came from another angle. For me, it was music. As a guitar player getting into improv jams when you first get together with guys you're just fooling around and you're noodling around and you're trying to figure out your... And when you're new at it, you're trying to figure out your instrument and you're trying to figure out what the capabilities are. And then of course you're also figuring out what the strengths and weaknesses are of the people that you're in that room jamming with. And so of course it's the acceptance of where you are and who you're with and just letting things build and going from there. But the thing is when everyone anyone who watches a jam session, they're marveled, right? They're like, I can't believe what came out of that. That was beautiful. Do you guys did plan that? Oh my God. Well, there was simple frameworks and rules that we've accepted that we all agreed upon in going into that jam that when you work within those rules, basically if I'm going to get on this soccer field and I've agreed to the terms of how we're going to play this game, then that game will play out. So yes, and the answers are always in the other person to be active listening to what your partner is saying. All of these simple on a face value rules will then lay out a structure that you can work with it. And the more you practice these simple rules in your everyday life or as we implemented it in our workshops so that our clients have an opportunity to practice all of these rules in a very safe environment so they can actually see what they're truly capable of when there isn't consequences for doing anything wrong. Yeah, all right. So we share this, right? So I come to this work also as a musician and a soccer player. So I was... I brought up soccer because... Yeah, thanks, Johnny. So starting center forward went to the state finals didn't win, but God bless. So, and I play guitar and I was a deadhead and a jazz fan and Miles Davis has wonderful stuff around. There are no wrong notes. So I did not know that Second City created through improvisation. I came here as a fan of the comedy. And so when I... Look, I wrote my college thesis on Jack Kerouac and spontaneous beat prosody jazz writing. So I was steeped in improv, but not necessarily this work. But all this stuff. And so we look at a sports context or from a Kerouacian context or a music context. It's not just scrimmaging. Every one of these disciplines requires you to narrow. You do these very specific exercises, especially at the elite level. Yo-Yo Ma does scales. The idea of thinking he doesn't need to is ridiculous. Yet how many people who are improvising in their jobs every day feel that they need to practice listening? Guess what? You do. You are not a good listener unless you practice listening. So in improvisation, when we go into these companies and we're like, we're gonna actually work on the skills of listening and they're varied. So we have an exercise called last word where we have two people improvise and there's one rule. The only rule is that each of you has to start your sentence with the last word the other person said. It's not easy. It requires you to listen to the end of people's sentences which we don't do. So that's number one. And number two, because you're maybe gonna say orange at the end and that's not really an easy way to start a sentence, you have to sort of like, okay, how am I gonna sort of game this or do this? So we have a productive conversation. We realize, oh, I can just pause for a moment and figure out how orange could lead me towards a build on what the person said. And that might make me pause for five, 10 seconds before you talk, which seems excruciating for the person who's supposed to say the word. But in reality, as a listener, you know what it makes me think? That person is considering what I said. So we get this wrong. We get these fundamentals of communication wrong because we're so in our heads, judgment of self, judgment of others, you can't be creative when you're doing either of those things. And then practicing these skills allows us then to adapt in the variety of contexts that we're gonna face at any given day and any kind of meeting. Because I mean, I listen to your podcast and I know you interview a lot of authors just like I do on my podcast. And so many people have to follow this format of like, I'm giving you the seven elements you'll need to be successful in your entire life. It's not that that's bullshit. Some of those things are important, but no one philosophy, no one operating system, no one kind of behavior is gonna work in a variety of different ways. And what I love about improvisation is it's never tried to be design thinking. We've never been like, we're the model, we're Six Sigma. You just gotta follow this. It's like, no, we all improvise. Everyone improvises. And we're doing it now. We're gonna do it tomorrow. We're gonna do it the next day. Everyone does it. And there's a variety of things inside this field that you can take and be useful. Here's another one, which is the importance of storytelling. How do we tell our stories, especially when they are essentially unscripted? And because people want, I always say this, which is when people, people hire us for storytelling all the time. And then you have to start, I know you get this. They're like, we want you to do a storytelling workshop. And you're like, what do you mean? Do you mean a sales workshop? Sales, right. Yeah, do you mean presentation skills? Do you have to give a speech somewhere? What are you talking about? And what we say is all those things are important. And by the way, all of us are storytellers to a certain degree, whether just in the same way that culture is happening in your organization, whether you want it to or not, by the absence of you doing anything about it doesn't matter. Culture's still there. Kind of probably a shitty culture, but it's there. Same deal with storytelling. We're always telling stories. So for us, because we work in dialogues and not monologues, ours is like, how do we co-create stories? But then also, individually, what we know is that people do not want to hear your successes. They want your fiascos. Give me your fiasco. I will relate to it. And the fact that you're still standing here in front of me and you're able to talk about your fiasco is meaningful. So, and that also has the benefit of often of being funny, right? So that's also a terrific byproduct. For the most part, those fiascos lead to success ultimately. Right? So if you are ending up on that stage, if you are ending up in that skit, it's the fiasco that created that opportunity, that led to that other thing happening, the synchronicity. So if you hide and hold back your fiascos, you're removing any engagement with the audience. No one wants your resume. No one wants to hear the list of accomplishments and all the books you read. They want to hear how you grew up dyslexic and it took you years to read at a high level. What's that term? Happy accidents? Yeah, sure. I was in a meeting the other day and my boss asked me, what's the worst thing you've ever produced? And I'm like, well, I got a couple. I created a show called Jusical the Musical that didn't do well. I had this hunch that like, this is an underserved market in theater and it's just like, no, no, no one cared. And then I also got the rights, the stage rights for the hockey movie Slap Shot. And I produced a version of it in Toronto, assuming like, look, Canadians love hockey. Slap Shot is a seminal movie. What I didn't consider is that mostly women buy the tickets to go to theater and the last thing they wanted is more hockey in their lives. Not a thing that they were desiring in Toronto. And so for both of those shows, what I didn't do was factor in the audience. I had an idea, it seemed like a good idea. The people around me all thought it was a good idea because I had a good track record and I was known for giving good ideas. What I never did was beta test this with the people who actually had to buy the tickets because they would have told me not interested. And then we wouldn't have lost the hundreds of thousands of dollars on both those projects that we lost. But also, you don't know, you don't know until you do it. And I've had other times that this looked like, we produced a show here on the second city main stage called Pignata Full Abies. And Adam McKay was in the cast who your audience will know as the producer of Succession, the director of the Big Short, and then of course all the Will Ferrell hilarious movies. So Adam, who was also the head writer, Sarah Live, he's a good friend and we're like, we want to do something wild. We want to create a show that is completely improvised which ended up being idiotic because there was no way eight nights a week we're going to be able to sustain the improvisation. But what it did turn to, but what it did turn into is we recognized, we pivoted. So we're like, no, we can't do that but what can we do? We can make the show have the spirit of improvisation. We can tear down the set. There's going to be no set. We're going to use punk rock music. And then we had these recurring themes in the show, one of which is that Noam Chomsky was substitute teaching a third grade class about what the real America is. And he was terrifying and traumatizing the students. And it became this- The ones that didn't fall asleep. Exactly. We thought of Chomsky differently in those days. God bless. But it ended up being this huge hit. And it was a huge hit artistically and the press loved it. Guess what? It was probably the worst selling show in the history of Second City. But what it did was blow the doors off the place and it allowed us to shed an old audience and find a new audience. So sometimes these things that in the short term are failures by a cost-benefit ratio are actually the right thing for the business if you're looking 10, 20, 30 years down the line. And that's the way we have to look. We turned 65 next year. I want this place going to 100, which means we can't always play business as usual. No one can. You brought up a point there about engaging the audience, testing the audience. And one thing I've loved all the improv shows I've gone to in the games we play in class is it naturally does by getting suggestions from the audience. It's not you coming in prescripted with this idea of the scene you've been dreaming about on the subway ride over and now you're getting all your castmates together and you're painting this big picture. It's the audience challenging you, throwing a suggestion that you got to go with. You have to commit to in order to set the scene. And those are the moments, the most outlandish suggestions that stretch everyone on stage in a way that creates real comedy. A great source of pride I have is when there was a Simpsons episode where Homer came to Chicago and comes to Second City and gives a suggestion that they improvise on and then he demands to be paid because he wrote the show. I think this idea that we talk about with co-creating with your audience is vital. It's rapid prototyping of creativity and it's the high wire act that people come here for. They want to see what's going to happen. My wife, Anne, who I've mentioned is a tenured professor of comedy. She runs the first ever BA in comedy writing and performance at Columbia College. Every parent's nightmare, comedy school. But one of the things she teaches about the difference between sketch comedy and standup is that sketch comedians do perspective taking. So we're like a Nielsen rating system of like, okay, what's on your mind? Great, we're gonna give it back to you. Are you laughing or are you not laughing? What did you find funny? What did you not? Interestingly, standup comics, what they are required to do at the beginning of their act, especially is perspective giving. They have to teach you how to watch them in the first five minutes. So I want you to take a moment and think about your favorite standup because you know what they do and this relates to a thing we already talked about. They talk about what's wrong with them. Pat Niles-Weld is a shlub. Amy Schumer is a slut. John Mulaney is a drunk. And it goes on and they can change later once they're known, but that is the way they start because again, what's that point of relation? And this is a thing when I love playing around with status which is a huge thing inside our work, both comedy and improvisation because I think a lot of people think that people who have high status are constantly taking it. And I'm like, man, I'm telling you right now the savviest people I know who have high status learn how to give it. Absolutely. Tina Fey, look at 30 Rock. How are you taking status from Alec Baldwin? It's impossible or any of them. She is constantly, but there is no question she's in charge both as a character and as, so as Liz Lemon and as Tina Fey. Here's another person who does it all the time is Oprah Winfrey. Like when she's interviewing and she gets sort of lower to like physically lowering her status, softening her voice. And so that is, and look, the other side of that is very Trumpian in terms of I'm gonna take that and that is effective I guess for him in some ways. I don't enjoy it. But I think really a great improviser and a great comedian learns how to both give and take focus and give and take status. My friend near I.L. says that it's not a superpower unless it can be used for evil. So everything I've talked to about can be the province of con men. So look out. Yes. Yes, and people use yes and to try to get their own way all the time, especially tech bros. Yeah, well, let's dissect some of these rules and talk about their effectiveness to leave our audience with something that they can work on from listening to this. We've brought up yes and a bunch. And again, it's an incredibly simple rule. And basically that rule is whatever the other person says your first answer is yes and then you go on to complete that sentence and or your point or whatever you add something. Now, let's talk about why this is effective. So number one, it gives value to the other person because you have acknowledged what they have said. So with an emphatic yes, they're like, oh my God, I've won this person over. That's right. So this is why the con man is going to definitely use this because it's all about allowing the other person to feel amazing. That's right. I remember AJ and I were in London and he brought this up the other day and there was a con man who was working for a club who was trying to do whatever he could to get the crowds into a club in Piccadilly Circus. And their first words to us are, check, you guys dress smart. And we're like, oh, yeah, of course. You immediately believe them. Yeah, it's pro-social, right? It's a pro-social act. Absolutely. So then you're adding to it. And so you're building upon what they said. So the subject and its matter comes from the other person. So they feel validated, they're elated, their emotional state gets pumped and now we're creating, co-creating and building upon that. And then of course you're going to add your piece and they're going to add their piece as well. This simple concept will save and practicing this and this is why AJ and I go to great lengths in our implementation sessions to give our clients an opportunity to practice this because let's talk about a situation, a first date. Yeah, a very tension-stress-filled situation. Everyone has preconceived notions going in. Everyone's minds are losing it. And again, acceptance of what is happening and what is going on is going to save you a lot. But also to be able to focus on what the other person just is going to say, you give them a yes and then you add to it. You don't need to say the amazing, witty thing. You don't need to be completely hilarious. You are already making the other person who's nervous, who's stressed out, feel comfortable, feel good. If they leave that date, maybe it's an hour, maybe it's 90 minutes, feeling good and comfortable, well, that's a second date. Yep, yep. So there's one other thing going on there that I think is also worth noting, which is we talk about convergent and divergent thinking. So the convergent thinking is very easy for humans because we are pattern-making creatures, right? We see A and B and we then CC. Original thinking comes out of divergent thinking, which is how do I break up the pattern? And yes and requires you not to operate by rote because you have now, you've got to yes this thing and then you got to add to it and it can't just be like, oh, well, I'm just gonna top it with the other idea of it. No, no, no, I need to stay on where they are at and that requires you to practice this level of divergent thinking. One of the exercises that we utilize to teach people this is called point and until. And what we do is we hold up a bunch of images of different things like the earth, a red wheelbarrow, a chair, and we have one job for everyone to do, which is you need to point at that object and say what it isn't. It's not easy. It's not easy. It's really hard because we desperately want to say red ball. We see the red ball and we want to say, and it's very hard to say yellow car, you know? And so, but you practice that enough and you start to loosen up that idea of pattern-making that we normally set in on and allows you to sort of be in this discovery mindset. In Zen, they call that sort of a beginner's mind, the idea of like this could be anything. How do we get to place where this could be anything? And that relies the sort of like emptying of all those preconceived notions of all those things I'm walking in this room with. And by the way, that idea of being fiercely present with someone in the moment, it feels really, really good. We know that with someone we love. We know that in a great session of therapy, you know? But it doesn't need to be restricted to those moments of intimacy. It can be in your day-to-day conversations with colleagues and you know, it's unusual and I get that, but it's unusual for bad reasons. It's unusual because we fear that kind of intimacy and we want to look smart and we think we need to be prepared in that kind of certain way for that. It's like, no, you got it. You have it all. You have the stories. You have the ideas. Do not worry about it. Be fiercely present in the moment with this person and see what happens. That next piece is the listening, right? So in order to yes and something, you have to be fully engaged in listening and there's multiple levels to the listening that we're talking about here. So you bring up pattern recognition and many of us are just listening at that first level of the voice in our head. Like I got to say this next thing because Kelly just brought up Chicago and I've been to Chicago, so I have to talk about Chicago. Then there's, okay, what are the facts and information being shared? Okay, Chicago, second city, comedy. Then there's the emotion and really good improvisers can pick up on the emotion that's being communicated and mirror it back or react in an outlandish way to that emotion and play with the emotion that's being shared. Then there's the unsaid. And when you actually dig that level deep of like, okay, you're painting the whole story for the audience and you're bringing them into a new dynamic that they haven't seen yet because all they have to go on is what you and the ensemble are doing on stage. And when you get to that unsaid level as a listener and get to that level of communication, you allow for so much more creativity. So for many of our analytical clients, that's an unlock. It's like not only getting outside of your head and the fear and getting beyond the facts, it's once you get to the emotion and the unsaid levels of listening, we're really this creativity and magic that we're talking about, the humor, the fun, that's where it lives. When I'm not lingering in the past, ruin the past, when I'm not imagining the future, when I am purely with the person who's in front of me, my job is to save them as an improviser. That is, I have one job. And guess what? Their job is to save me. And so when that is the norms, and one of the things we talked about earlier that I know I wanted to sort of mention this, which is a lot of what we're talking about are covenants that we make to each other that we should be more explicit about at the beginning of our meetings, at the beginning of our days, at the beginning of our work lives, which is, hey, these are the things we believe. We, do we all believe these? Let's make sure these are the things we believe in. And if so, we have some really good guiding principles. Some people might call them ethics. If you don't like that word, call them norms, whatever it is. But with us, it's this idea of saving the other and the other saving us. And what a awesome place to start from, that provides us with a kind of roadmap that it's gonna be hard to really like get lost with. Cause we kind of, we're in this, we're in this thing together. And Irving Yalom is a cognitive scientist and my friend Scott Berry-Coffman who I mentioned, he introduced me to him as well. And he's got a great line. He says, sooner or later, you have to give up the hope for a better past. This kicked my ass. Because, look man, bad shit happens and it is really easy to anchor ourself in that lat. I mean, look, we all carry imposter syndrome. You know, you can Google me and I look pretty cool. Do I still think about that thing that I said 25 years ago to that person? Yes, I do. And I know you do too. Well, and it's completely out of context as well. Because we have now ruminated and thought about that so much that we created- A whole story from it. This new, a full story, a new context that makes it usually 20 times worse than it. Totally. Even the worst that it could have been. Totally, you gotta give yourself a break, man. You've got to show yourself some grace. That's hugely important. One of these covenants that I heard you mention on another show that I thought was really fascinating. And I know you speak on stage, we're speaking here in a podcast, Johnny's performed on stage and of course we've heard about stage fright. But for many in our audience, that could just be presenting on Zoom or presenting in front of the room. And you made this point, this covenant that audience members share that we don't often think about which is they want you to succeed. They came to the improv show not to see you bomb. They came to the presentation, the TEDx talk, to learn and to be informed or entertained or to engage in emotion. They didn't come with tomatoes waiting to pick you apart. But when you are in that role of being on stage and I'm using air quotes because it's different for every one of us, you can often again get stuck in that head space of, okay, but if I fail or I'm going to fail this is going to be a failure and that it was a mistake and ruminate on those things missing the covenant that we all have which is we want to be fully engaged in conversation. We want to be fully engaged in the team meeting. We want to see the comedian succeed on stage. Yeah, I want to add to that as well as a musician. There are people who do come to see you fail but they're usually other musicians and they're highly critical and judgmental because of what they have in their own lives that are going on. If you're an improv, the only people that are judging you in that manner is going to be other improvisers, absolutely. Yep. Who have their own issues that they're working through. 1,000%. So that again, leans into what it is saying. So anyone there who's in bad faith has their own reasons. Yeah, no, no, no. I mean, yeah. It says more about that. Yeah, there's bad actors everywhere but it's not most folks. And yes, this is actually a recent observation I had which I sort of surprised myself with which is like, yeah, I don't go to a movie or a play hoping it sucks or like that the actor forgets their lines. Like I actually don't want that and we tend to be pretty forgiving of people. I also don't need you to be incredibly charismatic. My friend Sunil Gupta talks about like we value conviction over charisma, right? And so if you look at the video and you can look at this on YouTube of Steve Jobs doing his presentation, launching the iPhone, he's not charismatic. He's like, he's not. He's not a great speaker by any sort of like normal standards. But you know what? You can tell he believes what he's saying and we all see that. We all see that. So you don't have to be incredibly dynamic. You just have to know your stuff and believe in it, believe in the thing you're saying. And I think that's one of the things that trips people up too because they get in that position where they're trying to sell something and they don't believe them. And man. Absolutely. This goes to the same with back to the first date. No one's going on that date hoping it's horrible. People are cutting out time of their day to get ready, to get dressed up, to put themselves in a state where they can deal with the stress and tension that comes from a first date. And if you show up swinging for the fences, you're going to have a hard time. But if you settle in and you are accepted of the situation and it's about the other person and yes, and you're going to cruise through that and that person is going to leave their one, that was fun. I want to do that again. Yeah. I think this idea, and we mentioned jobs, right? And the idea of thinking different. And I was talking to Annie Duke who's got an awesome book called Quit. Yeah. And she tells a great story in that book about Ash. She's hilarious. She's the best. And she, a very salty woman, I love her. Oh yeah. She tells a story about Astro Teller at Google X. And one of the things that he has to teach his folks is this thing around the pedestal and the monkey. And the idea is that if your job is to get a monkey to juggle on top of a pedestal, don't start by building the pedestal. Because we all know how to build the pedestal. The hard part is going to be the monkey juggling. And when you build the pedestal, you get the illusion of progress. You know, the idea, I don't know, we're doing this thing. And it's like, oh wait. Like the train in California. Like the train in California, exactly. And I love that because I just feel like that's such a go-to. And especially like, no, I'm just improving. I'm just saying this thing, it's great. You know, it's like, well, let's take a beat. Let's take a beat and actually step back and zoom out and zoom in, right? This is such a smart thing that people need to recognize is Ron Heifetz at Harvard talks about the need to be on the dance floor and the balcony. And great leaders go from the balcony to dance floor, dance floor to the balcony. Zoom in, zoom out. And any sort of like deep thinker is gonna do that. Cause at some time you are working on the craft and sometimes you need to be like, no, is the thing I'm working on makes sense? You know, do I have to ask some different kinds of questions? Because what you don't wanna do is just spend all your time building these things that don't matter in the long run. And the wonderful thing about our work is that we're not doing it alone. We have 300 people every night telling us whether it matters or not because they're either laughing or they're not. And I'm telling you, if they're not laughing, our thing doesn't matter. Absolutely. And part of what you're talking about with conviction that I wanna touch on here, we talked a little bit about it earlier, is body language in the communication. So much of improv is not just the words being exchanged on stage. There's movement, there's action, you're getting in different poses. Up, down, you're moving your body and using your body language to communicate. And you had, I don't know if it's a great job, a terrible job you can share with us, the honor of watching auditions at Second City. And I'm sure a lot of people going up on that stage thought they're gonna be the next Steve and Colbert and a few people thought there's no way that they belong. And you were saying that just by watching them get on stage before the audition, you could predict whether or not it's gonna go well in their body language. Yeah, so we're talking about this now because we're opening a theater in Brooklyn, the first permanent second city in New York, which is really exciting. And we're holding auditions soon and we have thousands of resumes. And I'm gonna even say, looking at the resumes, I think I have a pretty good idea of who is going to go on that stage and do okay and who isn't. So when you're in the room, man, it's rough. It is rough in the sense that there are so many people who are so afraid and you can't improvise well out of fear. You just can't. It's like a surgeon can't do a good job if they're afraid of doing surgery. And this is the same for improv comedy. And so when I'm sitting in the audience for auditions and someone's walking on stage and I can tell that they're wringing their hands or they've got flop sweat or whatever, it's just not gonna go well and we all know it and we're never wrong about that. We'll get surprised on the other end, if someone's like neutral and then they blow it out of the water, that's awesome. And so it's much easier to tell the people who are gonna struggle than the other folks. And then what great improvisers know is they have all these tools of their body at their disposal. I mean, working here when Chris Farley, you know, first came on stage, I mean, Jesus Christ. This guy, I mean, he called a fatty fall down and I get it, but he was so physical. And I don't know if you know this, like Bob Odenkirk actually joined the cast when Chris was in it and he wrote him the motivational speaker, Matt Foldy-Sketch, it started at Second City. Oh, wow. Living in a van down by the river. I saw it every night for a year. And it never got old. And people for the most part don't come to Second City to see individual performers because they don't know who they are. They knew who Chris Farley was. They came once, they came back. They wanted to see that thing again because it was like a force of nature and he just sacrificed. And also the other thing that Farley did that was amazing, like, yes, he would fall down, he was big and all that, which also meant when he went subtle, it was just a thing of beauty. And so know who you are, know what your body tell already is and then find ways, different ways of expressing that. Like we talked earlier about status can be lording over someone and it can be kind of underneath someone. There's different ways of projecting that. And I think just in general, Annie Murphy-Paul, another huge fan, she has a book called The Extended Mind and there's so much in there about the importance of gesture and the idea that our bodies are telling us things before they tell our mind and so pay attention to your body. And that's really important because we do live in such a mind-first culture. We have this bad metaphor where thinking is like a computer and it's not. It's not like that at all. No. It's really not. And when we understand that our body is hearing it first, we're gonna maybe make some different choices. And even though the audience might not have that sort of intellectual understanding or physiological understanding, what they're going to get is the truth underneath it when you improvise it. It all goes back to that. It all goes back to finding these sort of truthful moments, these surprising truthful moments which is the seed of great comedy. I mean, our work is all about playing to the top of your intelligence. That doesn't mean you're not gonna do a dick joke, but that dick joke better be fucking smart. What a pointy way to end this episode. Are we really ending on that? Oh, no. What a bad move on my part to end on the dick joke line. All right. God bless. We'll make it work. We love asking every guest what their X factor is. What do you think makes you unique and extraordinary, Kelly? When I became the producer of Second City, I was 26 years old. It was 1992. My first cast was Colbert Carell and Amy Sedaris. What a hassle. My friend Ann, who's now my wife, she was my friend then and ironically caught the bouquet at my first wedding. I went to my friend Ann. I go, what advice do you have for me? And she goes, when you make a mistake, tell people you're sorry. So if I look at a particular superpower I have is that I will own up to my mistakes. I will tell people I'm sorry, and I won't make them again. I'll make other mistakes. I'll screw up in other ways, but I won't do that same one again. And I think that's really served me well over the course of my career and has allowed me to do so many different things underneath this roof. Start as a dishwasher was producing, ended up writing and doing public speaking and posting a podcast. And now I'm back on the leadership team and we're trying to like, what does Second City look like for the next 50 years? It's really exciting. And it requires a level of humility that I think when I look at other people who've been around for a long time and aren't happy, it's usually that they lack a level of that humility and they think they're gonna ride this thing. Like they're gonna ride the wave the whole time and it's like, nope, that's not what happens. Could not agree more. Thank you so much for joining us. It was such a fun conversation about improv. Where can our audience find out more about the book and all the work that you do on the business end, Kelly? So everything's at secondcity.com and secondcityworks.com. Those are our sort of two websites. And you can find me on LinkedIn and I'm on Twitter right now, who knows? I'm waiting for my blue sky invitation. We'll see how things not holding out too much hope once Tucker's show goes live, but we'll see. Thank you for joining us, Kelly. Thanks guys, I appreciate it.