 So the title is Improvisation or the history of improv is a tool for social change and as I started thinking about that time and This time here. I realized that there was a very good possibility of Leaving a lot of things out and I also thought it might be important to step back So what are the things that unite us? What are the things that bring us together as humans and my background is in anthropology? And so I thought it might be interesting to go back to the pre-history of Improvisation as a tool for social change And this is the scroll telling that history little prehistory history joke and Think about what are the conditions of being human that make it possible to improvise? And how can we harness that intentionally to bring about powerful positive and lasting change? So we're going to start that history of change with the Big Bang Which is when everything that's anything ever began and when our universe was created about 3.8 billion years ago So everything that ever did happen could happen might happen or maybe never will happen happened in that moment good and What's fascinating fact about the Big Bang is that we can still hear the cosmic echo of that So if you're bored someday Google Big Bang listen highly recommended and when the universe started Organizing or when it was created it had to start organizing It started creating rules for itself so that it could create more and so immediately Upon that moment when the universe began began this iterative process of taking things looking at them Organizing them making rules for them to do it and so amazingly enough the universe was kind enough to create the earth for us So then we had a place eventually to be on and do improv so about 4.5 billion years old for the earth beautiful globe in A world of a lot of globes Circling and one thing that's amazing that we'll get to is that all the people on the planet wouldn't be able to see it Actually for a really long time So now we go to 3.7 million years ago On an ash field in late July Tanzania, Africa There are three sets of footprints of our early hominid ancestors walking side-by-side After a volcano Quiet ash on the earth They walk across that Their footprints are there Another ash field falls and they're preserved for millions of years and were discovered in 1976 And in the great moments of improv I see that as the first moment of agreement Where as humans we decided to walk together to be together and in that quiet moment Just walking across and looking at the world in front of them So then we walked forward and we kept walking because as humans were really good at walking bipedalism very exciting and we walked to a bunch of caves and what's amazing about cave paintings is that they Started appearing in different places all over the world and so lots of different ideas about the dates But about 65,000 years ago the first cave paintings that were known to appear started appearing And so all of a sudden we had the ability to talk about something that wasn't there So that germ of improv where we're making something up where we're talking about something that doesn't exist immediately in front of us That beautiful eventual figurative language that we had is in those cave paintings And what's amazing about that too is those those were social spaces There were places where people get together and share stories and tell stories So being present being social listening there we are in the caves together Co-creating a world another beautiful fact about the cave paintings is that one reason that they're so hard to date is because they are layered on top of one another that One person started a beautiful buffalo and then another person was like you know what I want to do something else with that And they did so it's yes and accept and build and so then we kept doing that and we got agriculture And we kept walking and then we had cities about 7,000 years before present the first city started to emerge And what was required when we were living in cities was better ways to communicate because suddenly we didn't know Everybody we had complex systems to manage and to navigate And so we had to figure out ways to be together to say yes and to be in agreement to accept and build And so we got all these tools and we also started noticing patterns The next time you walk out of this building You will understand how the streets are organized how the buildings are organized and no one needs to tell you that that's a building That's a sidewalk. That's a shrub. If you don't know what a shrub is. It's a very low bush So so we have this beautiful ability to recognize patterns which builds on that thing of here's a thing It's not here. I understand other things and it's this beautiful generation of metaphor. Does this make sense so far? Excellent, okay And that gets us to our final moment in the prehistory of improv as a tool for social change Where we come to our time now The first time anyone saw earth in its entirety from afar was in 1972 when aboard the Apollo 17 spacecraft on December 7th, 1972 an image was taken of the earth and This was the very first time We had been able to see the planet that we live on and I think that is one of the most beautiful metaphors For one of the most important conditions that makes it possible to improvise and that is our ability to empathize so here we were to have the distance to see the earth that we were on and that space and that time and that moment to Reflect to pause and ponder and what happened because of that space created by us being in literal space Was a transformation of the world that all of a sudden there was a tension to the fact that the planet was in jeopardy And it was in danger and that we could see it as a whole so then we were responsible and charged with doing something about it and This is our blue marble moment in improvisation We have emerged from the cosmos a universe was created We have walked we have spread improv to all parts of the globe and now we have that moment to pause and look at the world We have created and think about the world We want to create to bring in with our imagination our socials Skills our patterns our empathy and build a better world for all of us. Thank you