 It is. So I put the recording on and we'll start. I think others may well join us. In fact, they're doing so even as we speak, which is great. So welcome to the AI in Big Topic Monthly Sessions. I'm Paul Z. Jackson, and this is the first brain tank session, which we're hoping will run through the year. Not every month will intersperse it with book club meetings and maybe other things as well. And the idea of the brain tank is to explore what's the future of applied improvisation. What is applied improvisation. Who are the people who are doing it. Where might it sit in academic departments if we had to place it somewhere academically, does it belong to theater or psychology or business studies or something else again. What research would we like to see done into applied improvisation if we were able to inspire researchers in the way that for example positive psychology has done so successfully. What's the ambition of practitioners of applied improvisation for applied improvisation in the world. What I hope we can do today is some scoping and some framework setting, get some of the ideas onto the table. We have a panel, a very distinguished guest panel who I'll introduce in a moment. In the meantime, we're also inviting everyone who's participating to join in with discussions in breakout rooms which will do from time to time and in cleanery. And we're also going to aim to document the discussions that we have. So we're recording this which is one form of document, but also written documentation. There's a Google Doc, which I will share with you if you didn't see it before. And as you have seen, Jeannie has already started supplementing the documentation with notes in chat. So we'll be able to save those and keep them too. You're all invited to participate in both of those documents as well if you want to. So in the chat just write anything you want as we go along questions comments, wise observations. And in the Google Doc, which is aiming to be a little bit more substantial perhaps than a chat, then you can put comments on the pieces that people write. We've written the first piece to get things started. And there's three or four people have commented on that, including both of the panelists. And there's an invitation for you not just to comment on what other people write but to write the piece yourself if you're inspired to do so. And I'll very briefly introduce the two panelists. Jeannie's already mentioned that there's something she might like to write. So one panelist is Jeannie Lamin. Hello, Jeannie. We'll say hello. Good morning every good afternoon morning evening wherever you are in the world. Hello. Hello. And other panelists is Kat Coppett. Hello everyone. You did faster than I could introduce you. I'm a New Yorker at heart. It's splendid. So contributions welcome throughout both written and spoken. And today we're going to look at what I'm calling the three waves which will describe and discuss soon. And you can see a preview of that in the Google Doc if you open that up. It's the topic of that first piece. Let's start with a chat question for everybody, which is this what is applied improvisation in your view. For example, how would you describe it to yourself, or to a potential client or an academic researcher, or somebody who was wondering what is applied organization. Well done. Very astute. Put that in the chat. Some of them have to say, what am I dog practical experiential application of social science research. Wow, there's a good hefty definition straight in there from Nancy. Applying improvisational meta skills to work life. Philosophical implications of meta skills. People having fun practicing skills and learning the attitudes. Yeah, taking the skills and mindsets of on stage improv and applying them to off stage environments that's quite similar to the definition that the applied improvisation network has been using for around 20 years. Certainly not the last word in it. Spontaneous action guided by intuition. I'm not livious. An upvote. Okay, so keep putting those ideas in there. And I'm going to invite genie and cat to say what their definitions are, they may have written them there but maybe to expand on a little bit or how you would describe it to yourself or to clients or to academic researchers does it change. If you describe it to different people. Okay, let's go first. I'm sure I will go first. So I would. I think in private applied improvisation is taking the improvisational mindset which is a beautiful quirk of human evolution. And then taking that mindset and putting it out into the world intentionally in a range of applications and those can be academic contest those can or contest absolutely academia is often a contest. So academic context, you know, social justice in training and facilitation. So, and with that, I think that there's a degree of intentionality. So one of the things for me that makes improv applied is the direct intention to, or have the ability to respond in that way to a situation. And that's not a super succinct definition. It doesn't need to be at this point. I don't think there's any specific particular merit in a definition that we're going to have a range of them and different descriptions perhaps for different contexts. Katz what's your definition or description. Yeah, improvisation. Yeah, I mean I think we're sort of we've sort of I said what Libya said I think that's a good succinct definition that we are, at least the way it grew up is that we are taking the tools and exercises and mindsets of improvisational theater and applying them to context other than creating shows and performances on stage for an audience. What I love about sort of what we're doing now is I remember you and I Paul having a conversation once where we realized well, maybe it's the other way around maybe performance improv is just another application, maybe it's just a subset of applied improvisation, where we're taking those tools and mindsets and applying it to performance, instead of applying it to having a good conversation or to generating creative ideas. Yeah, I think that's how I talk about it. And, and yeah, well stop there for now. Yeah. Okay, as I remember those conversations and I think in the end that's where it would be nice to end up where there's improvisation, whatever that is. And it's applied to all sorts of contexts and arenas including theater, comedy, jazz, coaching management and cooking, sports, wherever life in its complexity arises, and that the difficulty of getting to that is that we're so familiar with it most of us at the theater theater context which as I put in the article has become very much a thing, a product and well known for that. And so it's obscured this actually much larger area where improvisation occurs. I know there's something else in there Paul that you're talking about, which is, you know, this, this concept that we are, we say very sort of casually or at least we say it, some of us say, you know we're improvising all the time. And now we're just going to do it deliberately or do it consciously but I'm not really sure that's true. I think most of the time we're not improvising most of the time we're sort of following these habitual scripts and ways of doing things that are pretty reified and pretty, pretty scripted, you know, I drive the same way to work. I have the same conversation with my mother, every single time, you know, my, my husband annoys me in a certain way and then I respond in a certain way and he responds to me and they're like how are we having this conversation again. And we get stuck. And I, so I think there's a way that, as Jeannie says being deliberately applying these rules of improvisation can help us break open some things and get out of some patterns get unstuck. Maybe that's the end of that sense. Yes. In a sense there's no point in saying we're improvising all the time, because then there's nothing to contrast it with. Yeah, or relating everything to one particular metaphor. So you can also take a fractal view where within any circumstance we can focus in further on it and see even if it's a scripted event that there could be improvisation happening within a scripted thing so actors for example with a script performing a show, they make it fresh each time through responding newly to the specific things that happening on that occasion with that audience with how a line is offered to them. So it's not necessarily an either or. Jeannie, do you want to do? Yeah, well two thoughts come to mind is that one Gil from Frana's doll. I think I'm not sure if I'm saying his name correctly but he is at the insight meditation center and he describes meditation as an observation deck for the brain. And I love that as a description for improv, because I think it's this great way to kind of see this amazing tool that we have and play with what is possible, because of it and and that leads me to patterns because I think those same patterns we can kind of fall into like the well rutted wagon tracks of, you know, thought are the same things that make it possible to improvise and see new patterns and make connections and bring things back so it's this this duality of mindset where on the one hand it's how we behave every day and then I like the term deliberate cat as a way to kind of then turn that so that it's not so you're putting the pattern on a new context. Yeah. Thank you. So I'm going to do starter thoughts and going to invite everyone to join a breakout room with four or five people in your room and have a look at this as a question. The definitions that you came up with or the ones that you liked that you read. What do these different descriptions have in common, and what are some of the significant differences between one and another. Once you have your conversation and build on each other's ideas in a time honored improvisational way, what might be worth adding if we begin to extend those descriptions or definitions. So can we come up with a more rounded thorough interesting different exciting description of what this applied improvisation is, you'll get an invitation to a room. And if you accept the invitation you'll be beamed into the room. I'm sure you're all zoom veterans after a year of doing this. So if anyone is left behind or not sure what to do. I'll be here for a moment to guide that. And then I will join one of the rooms. And let's have 10 minute conversation see where that takes us, and we'll meet back together in 10 minutes time. Before we get sent away is there somewhere where we would like people to capture their excellent definitions. Yes, so in line with what I was saying earlier about chat. If you chat within the private room within the breakout room that remains private to you but you can cut and paste it, and then bring it back to the plenary. So that would be a really good thing to do, because that will help us with the documentation, but we'll take spontaneous additions when we return as well. So here come the invitations. See you in 10 minutes. Colin not clear how to use zoom rooms. Welcome back. We had good conversations, and we'd like to hear what you said, or what you wrote or both. I always have the impression of the change back to the main room as being the old vaudeville stage hook. There and then, you know, even though we see it coming as it's like magic. Yes. I find zooms be like magic even now after a year of sitting with it. So ask is the world ready for the definition of AI. Well, we think it might be ready to start hearing at least some descriptions, maybe rather even than definitions. So let's start with that room that had Nancy, Robert, Livia and Amy. And I'm starting because Nancy has put in some of the chat that was created in that room. Do you want to elaborate on that Nancy or anyone else who was in that room. Sure, live have my Livia have my back here as I know clear definition, but one of my favorite things in the world is talking to fellow creatives as we explore both the the creative consciousness and cognition. We talked about it being. We talked about an intuition being a part of our knowing that rarely sees the light of day, and that has a wonderful way of showing up on in improv. We talked about Paul added that, you know, we all have it as humans, indeed adaptation is what humans do. And play and creativity. It's about, but however, AI is about creating those aha moments that allow one to have a conscious appreciation for what just happened, you know, and experiencing their delight and it being a revelatory experience. We talked about how it increases our agency and, and we appreciated. How did genie say at the beginning, well rusted wagon tracks of thought and action, you know that, you know, we, we appreciated cats comment about, you know, maybe we don't improvise all the time we get into, you know, we are deeply piloted and habitual in our, in our actions so improv takes us out of that out of the ruts or at least, at least allows us to see them. What else Olivia what did I. I think you did a lover. When we love by Venn diagrams to your where we're trying to put diagrams on the way to turn this into a proper white paper or think piece that can go out to the to the journals. So Cimo and has put something in chat as well. So let's go to Cimo's group, which was Cimo Matt cats and Colin. Have you more things to put in the chat or things to talk to us about. It's cat group. It's Collins group. Okay, I so I think it's just that the general kind of conversation came around of are we are we all are we all talking about the same thing. Are we putting labels on things that are actually now creating barriers. And so therefore just by using one word are we creating a barrier, particularly when people know it from a certain perspective. And so it becomes this thing, but actually, and it's maybe it's just a set of ingredients. And so that the question of them put in the chat was well, are we being just recipe followers, or are we being chefs. And so it's, it's an interesting one thing well, I know we're trying to label things, but is it serving us, rather than thinking well what can we can we kind of get some granularity to this, rather than going, oh it's this, this is what it is rather than so just break it down. Again, you probably that the way I think about it and talk to other people is talking about co creation collaboration communication and trust. That's just the way I fan by encountering it the way to communicate the layers. So it's just an interesting one of what, what are we, what are we describing. I don't even have a joined up view. How do we expect it to communicate to other people. What was one of the questions that prompted this gathering is how do we use the words are these the words to use. Simo will now answer the question, definitively. Like based on what I'm doing with my clients. It seems like improv improvisation is one of the tools or improvisational mindset or improve meta skills or whatever you like to call them. They are one area of tools that I use, but they are also other areas that like, you know, there are lots of other tool kits that I use so I'm kind of not calling myself an applied improviser. You know, towards the clients. I'm, I'm a trainer facilitator or like I like to call myself interaction designer. So I'm kind of designing a different communication situations for my clients, like helping them to design them to work well. So, and I use improvisation as a mindset as a trainer, and also as one of the tool kits. I can say that all I'm, that is all I'm doing I'm not. You know, if I face my clients I'm not saying that I'm an applied improviser. I'm doing applied improvisation with you. That's one of the tools I use. I'm sure within the network there's a real range of what we say we're doing particularly in relation to mentioning the improvisation word or the improv word, which was the start of the article in the Google Doc is the associations people already have with some of these words. And I use the word improvisation with the client with clients. But only as a one tool. So this is it's on the plate that the improvisation is a very important offering also but it's only one of one of them. Thanks Seema. And the other group right to Elena, Jeannie and Nick, things to add in chat or in plenary discussion. I, you know, I think that we, I think these conversations loop and sometimes I'm interested in. I think we have a lot of conversations within the applied improv network and my guess is outside of it as well that are false dichotomies. It's interesting to me how often we as improvisers get hooked by either or conversations and you know, failure conversations or yes and conversations or this one about is, you know, is it should we call ourselves applied improvisers or not. And I think sometimes we should talk explicitly about improv and the value of applied improv of improvisation. And sometimes we should not. And I think the question as I as we often say to our clients is it's the right question to ask. I don't think there's always the right one right answer to that question, but it's a really good important question to ask. When is it valuable to explicitly reference improvisation or improvisational theater. As a tool or that that's where the tool is coming from or as a, I'm avoiding the word metaphor but as a sort of example or image or touchstone or touch point explicitly. What's the value of that and when is it not when is that a distraction or a barrier and I think they're really clear situations where both want one or the other is true. We might not all agree on exactly each situation but I think that's a question we should always be asking ourselves as consultants and trainers and coaches. Thank you cat. Robert, and then right so invited share screen. I go back to to my very basic my first applied improvisation workshop that I set out to get calling on all the businesses in Atlanta, two responses that sat there one person now this goes way back and and one of the responses was I'm Robert well I got a team building program called team building was improvisation I'd like you to send a couple people. I'm not here click. And another who was Dr Ed Metcalf who was the senior trainer for IBM Corporation. I'm Robert low team building with improvisation. I'd like you to send out send two people. What. Yeah, well yes so here's in the details he says you want to know why I said, yes. So quickly well yes sir. What's the meaning of the term enthusiasm well no sir I don't know where it comes from it's etymology and within theos God expression of the God within he says I don't know who you are. I don't know what you've got, but you've got enthusiasm and I want my people to get it. So that's my bottom line and has been my bottom line forever. And my other bottom line is that we don't know who we're dealing with until the day that we get there. Whatever we think we do not know who we're dealing with until the gathering has been made. And our first job is to understand that as much as we can. Can they handle the language are they a no thanks are they a, hey wonderful world. And then we can begin as people say there's so many different ways we can describe this, what we're planning on doing what we're going to do is what happens when we arrive. And that's the baseline for all this. So, as far as the title general overall wonderful. I tell people hey you know you know improv comedy right yeah still people have you know if you heard about applied improvisation. What's that. So that's always the conversation. Thank, thank you Robert. I would like to make point for the, this brain tank that it's not just the question of when and what we say to clients or conversely clients there's there is this thing called applied improvisation that it's of interest to us as a, as a community. And there's all sorts of things that we might say about it or might choose not to say about it at different times. So bright Sue and Eleanor we're both interested to come in right to first and Eleanor. And I just share a document and that's a picture I just draw a moment ago. And I can give a overload of my understanding input, then down or in fiction something like that, and then I draw a comparison between input and then and current and past 30 years, a situation. Like my understanding are very personal like improv is equal to then down or in fiction, or spontaneous spontaneity. So improv and people has a misunderstanding is only comedy because in the past 30 years and it has a movement, who's like she has the boss comments boss. It's a very narrow kind of understanding and but he has very deep cultural impact in a lot of people. So this comedy approach. Of course now we know also we have the legitimate see it or improv and doing long form or like improv LA doing a wonderful wonderful different genres out there and improv. John Stonnier has a important product in that and of course we know this is all about theater and we know AI has much more application in other areas. And from here I draw a comparison to then and a lot of people learn then through mindfulness through two major movements and BS are co buzzing moment and or UK version and BCT started in 1990s and and this kind of approach also has is limitation and one interesting word is Mac mindfulness. A little bit like big Mac and McDonald's something like that. So like, you know, a lot of companies now using mindfulness to enhance their productivity, but they don't value that diversity or their respect. You just want people walk walk walk more. Using a tool of mindfulness, which is not good, or people talking about killing a cow my for it without pain and that's totally wrong. And of course we know that it's much more and compassion sealer and etc like that and. And I will stop right here. Thank you very much. We'll return to some of the, these perceptions in a moment when we talk about the three waves before we do that and I was there something that you did to add. Thank you yeah I was just wanting to add to what cat said about that how much context matters and when we use certain words and terms and both I would say for talking to clients but also what we do to ourselves and to the community. I feel that that it sometimes does really help and sometimes doesn't help to use the wording that are very familiar to us but not very familiar to people who have never experienced it and then have all sorts of assumptions and create their own idea of what we will do with what's happening and what kind of prerequisites people should bring, which we always try to emphasis like all you need to do is show up and everything else we do together. And you don't need to be a certain personality to you make use of the principles of improvisation, but that sometimes is, once people start to have their own assumptions about what improvisation is about it's really hard to bring them back to like play zero or like corner one or whatever you call it, and then just be open minded with it and my other experience is that it's sometimes a lot easier to do something than to talk about it and explain what improv is and like, you know it's like this knows not like that and then people are getting confused and so often what we do is in particularly when either we're talking to friends or with people or even in a call with the client before like in a first setting up something call is just like let's do something and then you experience like a show don't tell and that to me is much more helpful than then talking about it and trying to get on the same plate and not being sure whether you ever get there. There are certainly things that can only be experienced and not not known by reading about them, you can read about riding bicycles doesn't give you the experience of riding a bicycle and improvisation is in that category somehow. So a few things about the three waves to give a sense of a possible. Possible ways of thinking about what it is we're doing as the applied improvisation network or as applied improvisers, and certainly it seems to have some resonance with what right to was sharing about how improvisation has been perceived. This is what I've written about in the Google Doc so some of you I know have read that and started commenting on it very grateful for that. And I know genie might write about wave zero which precedes the wave one that I'm describing. I'm not going to say everything that's in the article because you can read that a couple of additional comments, but wave one, which is the practice of improv comedy or improv theater. And the possibility that some people get more from that than things that are useful for the theater so they notice that it's good for their life in some way or other prompts their confidence or their creativity, or gives them some ideas that they may take outside, but the primary purpose within wave one is, you do improvisation theater you go on the stage with it or you choose not to go on the stage with it. And my additional comment is that I think is still the dominant and main wave that is out there in the world so it's what all the improvisation theaters do and they're training people to be improvisers. That's probably what happens more than anything else and is often many people's roots into improvisation. And wave two happens when the people who've noticed that there's all these other benefits or byproducts or other good things that happen when people improvise theatrically start to make that the topic of what they are then teaching usually still in the form of workshops and courses, but the courses are now called confidence or creativity or teamwork. And we see all these words appearing as typical of wave to where the focus is not on doing improvisation on stage or even necessarily using the stage activities and range of concepts. There's two branches of that there's a branch where you're still doing theatrical things, but saying as well as that you could see these applying elsewhere. And I think that's where some of the big corporate improvisation performing companies have gone. In city, you know of them because of their comedic and theatrical and televisual expressions but you'll go there to learn these other things because they've got the credibility, but they'll still teach you within the fairly traditional theatrical based format, or there's the other branch within that which I think is more what I do where I'm not necessarily telling people that it's improvisation I might be to go back to the discussion we had before. There's no theater in what I'm teaching at all sort of detached from that and I'm no longer working with theater even though that was where I first worked with improvisation. And both of those branches of wave to I think around with us now both healthy and both have lots more possibilities in them. And then there's wave three, which is less formulated, certainly my conception of it but is maybe the most exciting and has the most potential, which is improvisation is this thing in and of itself, that we can experience, apply, talk about characterise conceptualize and experience in all sorts of forms, and make that conscious and coherent to. And my favorite example of that as a product or service is genie's quest, where there's some workshopping does happen but that's not really the essence of it. So the quest is where you go out on your own, usually or maybe with somebody else if you choose to, and you have a deliberately improvisational experience in the world. And that is the thing. And then you might reflect and share and talk about that too, in order to get a coherent view of it. Those I think are three distinctive enough waves, and that we're all operating somewhere in a tradition of one or more of those waves. And I'm going to question in the chat and invite you into some rooms to see what you make of that. So the questions are, where did you come in. In your entrance to improvisation was it theatrical entrance or organizational entrance or research or, or something else. What's the potential for applied improvisation. If each of those waves continues to develop and express itself. So see yourself being in the mix, ideally, perhaps in relation to where you are now, not expecting you to answer all those questions. They're prompt questions that might be interesting for your discussion. If there's something else that's more striking to you or more important to talk about then by all means do that. And then we'll share some findings before we wrap up shortly after the hour maybe between the hour and 15 past for today's session. So let's have another 10 minutes in groups. I've refreshed the groups so you can meet some different people. Here come your invitations. Welcome back. So what did you talk about, particularly interested if it was about the potential, or where you see yourself with this thing called applied improvisation. What documents in what what have you put in this email. Oh, I found the schema. Giovanni skill my sister score who has researched our base methods. And they use in organizations and this nine grade version. It's not what I use I've done my own version in finish that's more about applied improvisation but but the basic idea of the nine grade is that we are working at second or third wave. There's also the application areas that are more common or more rare. And one of the most usable applications are like entertainment like in the end of seminar day we are doing the values improvisation we are displaying the values in scenes and we are displaying things we are kind of using to display information like in an entertainment kind of purpose. And also there are like trainings like who are trained like you can train in pro skills communication skills. And you can do team building customer service and that's that's that's the next level of like that's very common. And then if you think of like leadership skills and and blah blah blah they are skill sets and blah blah blah. But I think that if you think of the right top that that's transferred like cultural transformation. That's that's totally, you know, that's more ambitious more out there but it's but I've done projects with organizations using improvisation as a tool for organizational change. So, so it's I think many of you have done it but I think this is a lovely nine grade because it shows us that they are also lots of ways to apply whatever our definition of apply apply improvisation is, or some people say art based methods. Yeah, I don't. I do include the humanitarian work some of that that I am and members have done. Belina's idea of using improvisation to change the world. And Robert was talking about being a walk up comedian he does improvisation improvises with people in the community as he walks around with them. I definitely want to bring in cat and genie because cat wrote that she came from theater and then studied management and organizations and genie said she left from that one wave one to wave three. Maybe you could say a little bit each about that and then see what other people would like to comment on cat. Sure. Yeah, so I went from traditional theater conservatory acting conservatory to improvisation, because to become a better actor, actually, and there was a real split in New York City between traditional theater and improv. So improv was not respected at all, but I was in a theater company and someone came to do an improv workshop because they had some connection, and the, the improv teacher said you you're good at this, because I was following her directions I was a good student right I wasn't funny or anything. And she was able to say to me, she was able to make sense to me to give me a positive path towards saying what my acting teachers were unable to say in a positive way. They would say don't think, or you're too smart to be an actor, all of these ways of trying to get me to not censor myself, right or not hyper intellectual eyes. And she was able to say things like yes and or be spontaneous or give me exercises rather than just talk to me about what I shouldn't be doing. So that's how I found improv, and then cut to three or four years later, my students started to say. I wish my boss knew about this yes and thing, or I wish my team could collaborate and support ourselves, the way my classmates do, and they brought me into organizations to start teaching, I guess, wave to right in their organizations and I was like, I'm a starving actor. You have money. Very attractive prospect, right, but I really felt that some level uncomfortable about it I was like, I don't want to be selling snake oil what do I know about organizational development. I don't know that this is useful. So I went back and got a masters in organizational psychology. And that's a longer story but very quickly I was like, Oh, there are things that I take for granted, coming from a world of theater, coming from a world of globalization that people are starving for right there's something that people just don't get. So of course we're a value. I'll go one more step and then I'll hand it to Jeannie that it then took me a whole other couple of years out in the world of my clients saying it to me over and over again for me really to get the ways in which what we're doing I guess this is the wave three revelation that it wasn't a metaphor. That when we said, you know, like improvisation that we weren't it wasn't a metaphor we were saying like what you need to do the things you need to do in life to collaborate better to communicate better to listen more to be more present to make your partner look good are exactly the things you have to do offstage. And what we were talking about in our group was there are many, many different paths to that. Meditation and mindfulness. You know, there are all sorts of ways to get to that what it makes improvisational theater, unique, or special, or especially good, I think, is that it's like this giant gym full of exercise equipment. We have collectively built just a lot, a lot and a lot a lot a lot of exercises to help build those muscles in different ways. We have a very rich activity basket. Very rich. Right. So people talk about all of those muscles or mindsets that they want to develop. We've got something for that. Yeah, we'll come in future sessions maybe to how some of those are better or not so well used. But I think it's really nice set of points and how I've just written in the chat that theater is often a metaphor. It's like we're on stage even though we're not the improvisation is the actual thing. That's a really good distinction. Jeannie, you're muted. I love hearing everybody's origin stories. So I was in high school I had an audition like Olivia. I don't know if yours but we have a similar kind of impetus in that I auditioned for a play and didn't get cast and I was kind of crushed in the way that you can only be crushed when you're 16. I was at the yellow pages and started calling, you know, different improv schools, because I was going to show them. And second city told me I would have to take teen classes which I thought I'd rather kind of eat glass than do that. And I called IO and I actually talked to Sharna and she said well come in and try it and you can see how it works. And so I went in and when I was at IO. I was like it was before improv became a commodity in the way that it became in Chicago and it was, it was just a much different thing and so now I look back and I don't know how I was courageous enough to be like 16 years old with a bunch of, you know, adults doing improv but there you have it and then I decided that if I wanted to represent human experience it was a much better thing to do to get more experience and so I studied anthropology and archaeology and then went into historic preservation I kind of left. You know I went into improv because I thought it would teach me to be funny. But what I discovered there was that it taught me how to live. And when I went into my work. I would kind of, you know, I was presenting at a conference I'm like well let's do a play instead of a panel discussion. Of course you're all going to wear giant photo murals on your head where you're going to represent different works of modern architecture and compete in a bachelor competition and I just kind of left into these things and then when I discovered kind of the applied improv network I was like oh right this is what I've been doing. Now I have a name for it and and then when I encountered the quest. I became fascinated by it as a way to, you know what is this improvisational mindset, and then how do you break apart the components of the improvisational mindset. And what does it mean to take that out into the world not just for like a few hours, but for a few days a few months and entire life. And kind of digging more into the roots of improv and latching on to its roots as what I see in, you know, Chicago and North America as a tool for social change, and really wanting to like, what would it look like if we all had this resilient spontaneous wonderful self to access and what magic and good could we bring into our own lives on the lives of others on a small scale but then also on a global scale. Thank you, Jeannie. And there are roots before it became improvers of commodity and they are in social change and it's in some ways come back full circle through the AIM and other other activists. Just a few minutes to go. What else would anyone like to say either in chat or in verbal communication with the whole group. Amy, and hello Suzanne. I was really delighted with what I heard at the beginning of the conversation when I don't know it was the kind of going back and forth between what Kat and Jeannie said about, we say, oh we're improvising all the time and that phrase never sat well with me I didn't understand why until now. No we're not. We're just, we're in automatic mode most of the time because it's just easier. And that what Jeannie said about that we had to do this with deliberately consciously at times I think you had a different word Jeannie. And that just was really satisfying to me I mean yeah and that's why it can sometimes feel scary or hard or effortful for people at times because they've got to get out of the automatic brain and just make different choices. So that just I'm just thank you for that insight that connection. Thank you Amy. Right to talk a lot about comedy but also I wanted to get the credit to the comedy as well and about exposure about improv. And like who's right is anyway and you give exposure to millions people and I meet a lot of people who actually got to know improv through who's right anyway. And the theater can reach hundreds, hundreds of people, but more shop can reach only dozens of people and really limited in terms of scale. So I still have just value and out there, the more people we can get them interested in in improv and the better chance we can get them deep more into the improv. Okay. Yeah. Many of our roots are from there. And I love theater improvisational comedy, long form improvisation. And at the same time I think it can be distinguished conceptually and usefully from improvisation in some other applications. So both and not an either or to go back earlier to our conversation with people waving there. Gene and Robert, Robert then genie. Very quickly on the idea of we always are improvising. I grew up in a ghetto wise gang run neighborhood in the 1950s in Southern California, and didn't know until maybe two years ago that I was improvising in order to get there I had to be aware of everything around me, not knowing what to expect from a given moment. And so I think that improv has brought that back. And I also respect what people are saying, because it's so easy to get into the ruts into the wagon wheel ruts I love that term. Something about consciousness be more alive responsive to circumstance in different ways, adapting to change these are these are certainly things we'll be talking about, genie. This was just something that occurred in reading some of the comments and talking about rules and kind of learning and one thing is is that I like building blocks as a term rather than rules because it also speaks to the assembly like nature of what the different ways we express improvisation but then also it makes me think about artificial intelligence and machine learning in that, you know, there's there's this information that comes in and then. It creates rules and then those rules then learn and then it goes on and you know I am by as anyone listening to it would know not an expert in machine learning but play can be a very deliberate tool for helping machines learn. And I think we're at this fascinating thing where we're, we're both. I don't know I think that these these two fascinating ways of externalizing our thought and putting it out into the world are kind of coming together at this really interesting intersection. Thank you for raising the other AI. That's right. We'll continue in some parallel. So we'll finish in a moment, but there's an invitation that we also continue with more meetings of the brain tank. That's the BR AI and tank, which will be, thank you very much, which will be here in a month's time. It's the first, that's the second something of the month second Tuesday of the month is when the big topics are happening. We'll be notified in the AI and newsletters on the Facebook page and in the LinkedIn page so you'll you'll see them there. Thank you so much for coming. And there's also an invitation to keep writing. We've got one Google Doc so far but we can obviously extend that to sections and chapters if the writing explodes in a way that it might. It's a great way to think about how to incorporate the chat from the session itself into the documentation to so that we get a sort of rich depth to the discussion and we can read back on what we've already created and then take it on further month by month and see what we make of applied improvisation in the world. So thank you all very much indeed for being here this time. We'll see you again, no doubt, soon. What a wonderful gathering. Thank you so much. I'll stop the recording. Yeah.