 Everybody, good morning. I had coffee. Okay, so this, you know, a lot of our talks are really all about us, and that's what this is. So, this is my opportunity to work out my trauma of being an academic. So, I live, I feel like a dual existence, a split personality where I live in happy improv land, and I'm an improviser, and I use improv, and then I work in academia as well as a professor, and it's just a little, it's a little different. So, sometimes I feel that I have two choices. I can either go in the direction of happy land where people love each other and they're collaborative, and, oh, thank you, and they're spontaneous and flexible and agile and supportive, or I can live in the world of academia where people tend to be, not always, competitive and hierarchical and scarcity-based and fear-based and silo-based, and it's a dilemma. Sometimes I feel the choices between love and justice. So, I have struggled with this, and since I can't quite quit my day job yet, I have thought about ways to integrate. Integrate the philosophy of improv, the world of improv, of course, into academic life, and, of course, those of us who live in the world of academia know that we have to publish. How many academics types are there in the room? Oh, my God, my people, awesome. Okay, so, you know, we have to publish. Where's Pablo? Is Pablo here? Pablo, Pablo. So, Pablo Suarez, if you don't know, is the lovely gentleman in the back of the room who works for the Red Cross and is taking applied improvisation into extremely important places in the world, and at the Berlin Conference, Pablo said, hey, I wanna do a special edition of games in our humanitarian journal. I'm abbreviating. Would you maybe be interested in writing an article, and, of course, yes, and on all that. So, I bet on that, and anybody wanna take a guess what that number is? No, how many words I wrote? How many chocolate bars I ate while I was writing? No, no, how much I got paid? No, that wouldn't be in the negative. No, this number is the number of days between that invitation and the day the article actually came out. Now, I will say that I had great collaborators, and I will say that none of the slog was due to Pablo because, of course, he was trying to push this rock up a hill, but the rock is a heavy rock. It's an academic rock. It's filled with bureaucracy and deadlines and standards and limits and critical minds and things that maybe make improv a little more difficult. I had amazing collaborators, two of our most wonderful applied improvisers who are not here at this conference, and I just wanna show you a couple of images of us along the way in this process. So, the first was Viv McWaters from Australia. And they would sort of say, well, we need the revisions by next Tuesday. We're like, oh my God, we don't have a life. Okay. And then the other wonderful collaborator was Raymond Vandreel from Holland. And... Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. You know, it was a challenging collaboration, but we just had so much fun. And the other thing about being an academic, so if you don't know, like one of the things about being an academic, if you write, it only counts if you're the first author. So like so much for collaboration, like let's write together, me first, you know. But since I was the only one actually sort of living in a university, they were kind and let me do that, but there are costs to being the first author, which means you get all the edits, you get all the communication, you get all the headaches, you get, you know, so this is me toward the end. Oh, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. And you know, me, we got there. We got there. So 644 days later, we have an article. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think maybe two or three people have read it. That's the other downside of academia, is like, you know, it's not the most public way to spread the word, But, you know, so we struggle with this. We struggle with, you know, is it worth all that effort to create sort of an article that may or may not actually have a life outside of our own arena? So publishing is one struggle around which many of us have written books and academia is another world where, you know, the two paths may or may not meet in all the best ways. The other ways in which I've tried to integrate and improv into academia. Paul mentioned the Delphi study and asked me yesterday if I would talk about it, Paul. I did the Delphi study, it was a research study about what is implied improvisation through the poll of experts and I just want to reiterate that the reason I agreed to do this is because I thought I would go to Greece. And, you know, and, you know, it still hasn't happened. But the Delphi study is up, where? Where is it that people can see it? It's on a website somewhere. I'm sure you'll find it. Okay, the next way that I've integrated, of course, is I've been able to teach. I've been very lucky. I've had innovative people in my departments. This is me teaching. Whereas Chris Esparza, who is great to be my wonderful partner at the University of Oregon teaching improv for dispute resolution at the law school and I teach improv for conflict resolution in my graduate program. And so there have been wonderful ways to actually bring this art into the university life. But I did think, you know, it's not really integration. I feel like I'm still patching onto the quilt, you know? Really still trying to patch on the quilt. So I was trying to think about how to make, how to make it better for me and how to ultimately do a better job. So for those of you who know me and maybe those who don't, I am a professor of conflict resolution. That's what I do. This is one of my faculty meetings. And you think I'm kidding. You know, it's an interesting approach. You know, they say those who go into, you know, whatever. So, you know, we have a few issues. You know, university life is full of hierarchy. It's full of ego. You have a hundred people in the room often who all think they're the smartest. But so I love this so that ego is I or one, I get one over knowledge. The more the knowledge, the lesser the ego, the lesser the knowledge, the more the ego. And I thought, well, that's interesting. And that wouldn't necessarily be true if you think about sort of content knowledge. But I actually began to realize that the knowledge that was fueling so much ego in these environments or the lack of knowledge was the knowledge that we have. And this is where Belina and I have kind of done a little bit of the same talk, which is that the knowledge that is really needed is the knowledge that we have around what improv and improvisation and applied improvisation can do. So, it's really about, I mean, I don't think single-handedly I'm going to change academia, but a new paradigm around not just doing improv classes but actually really beginning to think about university life and higher education and academia in a different way. I know it's a lot of heavy lifting and I don't expect to change the structure entirely. But I think about actually the concept of compassion, which is defined here as a feeling of deep sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering. And I actually think about the fact that a lot of the people in these structures and environments are suffering. They're suffering from that isolation and that competitiveness and that hierarchy. And the misfortune is that they don't have the gift that we have. So, I suddenly get swelled with gratitude that we have this thing and we're doing this thing together. And I realize I have to actually spill that gratitude over into this other world that I resist so that academia, I have to be grateful for that because it does things like give me money to come to resorts and call it work, things like that. And so trying to bring that gratitude to all of it. This is a slide I used last year if I were really in my professor mode, I'd be testing you to see if you remember, but I won't. So this is an almost dead frog and it is referencing a quote by E.B. White who said, humor is like a frog. You can dissect it, but it dies in the process. And I have been afraid of that related to improv, that if we continue to analyze it or dissect it or write about it in these kind of quantified ways that we're gonna kill it. And I realize that we actually aren't gonna analyze it. We're just gonna carry the frog with us into everything we do. That it is really about being that frog. And so I have decided I'm going to be the academic improv fairy. And I'm just going to sort of spread all the goodwill and the yes ands and the supports and the collaborations and the things that we do anywhere I can go, even with the biggest challenges and cut through those threads of hierarchy and academia. I'm gonna spread the joy. AIN has already given me an opportunity to learn something new for my faculty meeting. So if I wear this at every faculty meeting, I'm not sure anyone will notice, first of all. But it might make them laugh and make them lighten up. Overall, to make the world of academia and education a nicer place, a better place because we're there to educate and we need to educate about many things, not just content. We had a wonderful day the other day, the AIN Fringe Day. And I'm gonna call on you. And actually, those of you who were in that day, I'm gonna ask you to actually do all three of our symbols. So if you were in that day, we had a day on looking at academia and applied improv. So if you were there with us, please stand up. Okay, so we developed three symbols. The first was for what is an academic? The second was what is an improviser? And the third, and this is our dream come true, it's what we're all working for is an academic improviser. My partner in college. So if you would like to become an academic improviser, just walk around like this for the next few days and you're in. So I will say it's allowed me to be happier. Go to the beach, that also helps. And it's our job and our mission to spread this love. And thank you, have a great conference.