Kelly Leonard: Second City and the Power of "Yes, And"

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I am Charlie Melcher, founder of The Future of Storytelling. I’m so glad to have you with me for today’s episode of the FoST Podcast. Before we get started, I want to share some exciting news. Our episode with legendary film director Alejandro G. Iñarritu has been nominated for a Webby Award for best individual episode of an Arts and Culture podcast. It was such a privilege to have a conversation with Alejandro and doubly an honor to have the episode nominated for this prestigious award. The Webby People’s Voice Awards are given to nominees who receive the most public votes. So if you’re a fan of the FoST Podcast, please, please take the time to cast your vote for us. This podcast has been a labor of love and receiving this award would mean the world to us. We’ll include a link in the episode’s description for where you can vote, and thank you for your support.

 

Recently, the FoST Explorers Club took a trip to Chicago where we had the opportunity to spend an evening at legendary Comedy Theater, the Second City. Since opening in 1959, the second city has become one of comedy’s most influential institutions with alumni, including John Belushi, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, Tim Meadows, and Steve Carrell, to name just a few. It not only puts on live comedy improv shows in Chicago, Toronto, and New York, but also offers a variety of training programs for adults, kids, and even businesses, because as it turns out, many of the skills and insights that make for great improvisation are the same ones that can enable us to succeed in our personal and professional lives. No one understands this better than today’s guest. Kelly Leonard, who’s the Executive Director of Learning and Applied Improvisation at Second City works for over 20 years. Kelly oversaw second city’s live theatrical divisions where he worked with such talent as Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert, Amy Pohler, Keegan Michael Key, and others. Now he uses his improv expertise to help people become more confident, resilient, and successful. He’s the co-author of the critically acclaimed book “Yes, And” as well as the host of the podcast “Getting to Yes.” And Kelly is a wise, generous, and empathetic human being who has a lot to share, not just about improv and storytelling, but about life. Please join me in welcoming Kelly Leonard.

 

So Kelly, welcome to the Future of Storytelling podcast. It’s a delight to have you here.

Kelly Leonard:

Thank you for having me. I’m really happy to be here.

Charlie Melcher:

I have to just start with the thing that comes to mind for me, which is when I think about doing improv, it has got to be the most terrifying thing I can imagine. I mean, isn’t it just like out there naked?

Kelly Leonard:

Yes, that totally checks out. That is a hundred percent in many ways should be and is a terrifying prospect. However you do it every single day. Unless, and Charlie, correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t think you carry a script with you in every interpersonal interaction you have.

Charlie Melcher:

I wish I did, but I don’t. No,

Kelly Leonard:

Sometimes you wish you might, and we do have our scripts. Let’s also say that there are scripts that we’re walking around with, even if they are not in our hand on a piece of paper. But most of our interactions end up being these sort of spontaneous conversations, drawing on things that we might’ve thought of before or that we’re thinking about or that are in the culture, in the zeitgeist and in a beginning improvisation class, we are recognizing that people are walking in with their fear and shame brain, and we need them to get outside of their fear and shame brain because you cannot improvise well when you’re in fear, when you’re in judgment of self or judgment of others, when you’re feeling shame. Those are all things that are impediments to improvisation, and I think you’d probably agree with me that they’re impediments to creative collaborations, to ideation, to successful relationships, to marriages, to parenting, which is why the bulk of the people who take classes at Second City since certainly the two thousands, if not before, and we’ve been around for 65 years, but in the more modern era, the bulk of the people who take classes are not doing this to get on stage at the second city and not doing this to get onto Silent Live. They are broken in some manner and they’re using this to repair.

Charlie Melcher:

So much for the light slapstick comedy thing.

Kelly Leonard:

We’re going to start, we’re going to get real, and we can be funny as well.

Charlie Melcher:

Let’s get real right away. How does improv help you to become less broken?

Kelly Leonard:

Because it’s yoga for your social skills. It is a practice in being unpracticed. So that’s how we all walk through the world. We don’t have places to sort of rehearse our humanness, our ability to listen, our ability to empathize, our ability to co-create. These are not things that we practice. However, if you are looking to be a peak performer across whatever domain this is across all domains, if you are looking to be a peak performer, you have to do those things. Just imagine, if I was to say that by taking this program, you would become a listener by 5%. You’ll become a better collaborator by 5%. You’ll become more creative by 5%. Would you not pay almost any amount to do that?

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah, sign me up.

Kelly Leonard:

Look, it’s not a pan for everything in the universe. However, when you do practice this work, those things do improve by percentage points. Just the idea of yes. And if you want to truly understand why this yes and idea is so important, use it at the beginning. Use it at the beginning of your day, using it at the beginning of your conversation. Use it at the beginning of your brainstorm. So

Charlie Melcher:

Just in case anybody doesn’t know, explain what yes and is as part of improv.

Kelly Leonard:

So when we got the book deal at Harper Collins to write a book about how Second City takes its improv philosophy into organizations across the world, we titled the book The Revolution will be Improvised. I dug that title. I like the idea of a revolution. I’m a big Gil Scott Heron fan. So it was kind of a subtle move on that as part of the process, they said, could you lead an improv workshop? Have one of your people lead an improv workshop with the sales team at Harper Collins? And the first exercise we did in that session was the yes and exercise. So when we do that with a group, we have people split into pairs and we say, look, today was such an amazing experience. We’re going to throw a reunion party in a year, and all of us are going to get together and do this reunion. So person A, you’re going to pitch to person B, your ideas for the reunion, person B, you’re going to say no to every idea in as many different ways as you want to

Charlie Melcher:

Say it. Which by the way, they’re very familiar doing it publishing companies. Exactly.

Kelly Leonard:

And all companies. So we have them do that, and we all know what happens. We’ve all lived that. And then we switch places and we say, person B, you’re going to pitch your ideas and person A, you’re going to say to every idea. Yes. But after we sort of debrief that part, we say, raise your hand if you thought that felt better about half the hands go up, we say, raise your hand if that went worse. Half the hands go up and we go, yeah, you heard a yes, but it wasn’t a real Yes, it was a no with a bow tie, it was a no with a top hat, you were actually getting the shiv. So then in the third round, we say, okay, now you’re going to pitch your idea, person A, person B. You’re going to yes, and the idea you’re going to say yes to it and build on it.

 

And inevitably what always happens is it’s louder in the room, there’s more laughter, and by the end of it, we’re having sushi on the moon with Bon Jovi. And that’s just fine. That’s the idea. If you look at behavioral economics, it tells us that people’s default position is to say no or do nothing. This is Richard Taylor’s work who won the Nobel Prize. The idea around yes, and is as Richard called it, he goes, this is a nudge. This is a nudge to not say no. And what we know through Second City and building shows this way is we create a show in 12 weeks, the first four weeks, all yes. And you are trying out every single idea. You’re getting a big old list of ideas. Then after that, there’s all kinds of other things that are in play, but at least what we’d have is a giant sea of ideas that we can draw on to build out the rest of the show. So you cannot have innovation without a messy space with a lot of different ideas and a lot of failure. And our process recognizes that, and that process is transferable to anyone who’s in the business of making something out of nothing.

Charlie Melcher:

I’m so interested though, in this practice of co-creation, what are some of the insights from improv that fuel people who want to work well with each other creatively?

Kelly Leonard:

So we create our work in conversation with our audience? It makes sense, especially in the comedy field. Anyone knows anything about comedy, which is you don’t know if it’s funny, if they’re not laughing. For people who don’t know a second city setup, we do these sketch comedy reviews. It’s two act review, primarily scripted. There’s probably some improv in there. And then we have a third act almost every evening, which is our improv set that is our playground. That is where we’re testing out stuff. And when we’re in process for a new show, particularly an improv that goes particularly well might end up in the scripted part of the show the next night. That’s the iterative process. Here’s the thing about getting a laugh. What is the laugh? The laugh is kind of a collective truth because all these people in the audience are laughing at the same time for a reason, and it’s that they’ve all had the insight at the same time for a reason. And if I’m married to a comedy professor, so you can imagine what our dinner table is like, which I mean exceedingly boring because breaking down all

Charlie Melcher:

These concepts, how to take funny things and make them so not funny

Kelly Leonard:

Dissecting the frog, as we all know. But comedy is often surprise and comedy is often a kind of truth. Oh, my dad does that. Oh, I’ve always wanted to say that and think that, and I would never say that. All those things. So it is this sort of like aha to haha. Yeah, kind of moment. So I would suggest gets you closer to truth quicker.

Charlie Melcher:

Right. I was just thinking that the difference in gratification, timely gratification between the novelist God who’s working God for five years before the book gets out, and the improv person who literally is coming up with it in the second and getting instant feedback. It couldn’t be farther on the opposite ends of the spectrum creatively.

Kelly Leonard:

I remember we did a project with the lyric opera that Renee Fleming and I headed up and the thing that always made her laugh, she’s like, Kelly, we plot these seasons like six years in advance and we’re working with composers who are 800 years

Charlie Melcher:

Old.

Kelly Leonard:

In no way does it do those things. And when we combine those worlds though, that was what was so exciting for them and for us was, well, what if we take this institution, this hierarchy, this lore and put it in our crosshairs? What do we discover? And it turns out we discover a lot and that we can have sort of instantaneous fun and insight and play. Now we’ll say we worked on that show even before we got to scripting. There was easily 10 months of discovery together. Well,

Charlie Melcher:

Obviously you’ve collaborated with all sorts of interesting people over the years. What are some other favorite collaborations?

Kelly Leonard:

So after I wrote yes, and so this is in 20 15, 20 16, I was on the speaker circuit and I was like, well, I’ve been producing for so long, 20 some odd years, second City, maybe it’s time to do something different. And so I stepped down from producing and thank heaven. Our owners at the time knew I was essentially unhirable. So they offered that I could stay on for a year to kind of figure out whether I was going to stay or go. That’s when I started collaborating with the University of Chicago in the Booth School of Business to build this thing called the Second Science Project that looked at behavioral science through the lens of improvisation and vice versa. And this was a five-year program, a lab every week we met and sometimes the scientists were bringing us evidence to play with. Sometimes we were bringing them improv exercises or concepts that we wanted to know more about.

 

So we created executive education programs and all this. And I am very proud of that program. But it was also during that time that I got a call from Adam Grant, the Wharton professor and author, who has interviewed me for a number of books and never used me, which is fine, but he said his friend iGen Poo was moving to Chicago. Would I meet with her because she didn’t know anyone in town? And I’m like, sure. I didn’t know who this person was. I showed up to a lunch with iGen. I said, I don’t know. You don’t want me. Let me tell you about my day. And my day had been spending three hours with a bunch of brilliant scientists, a bunch of brilliant improvisers, playing with ideas around how we see or don’t see human beings. It was very juicy, interesting stuff. And iGen, oh my God, this woman just so brilliant and so warm and got it.

 

And she’s like, Kelly, the caregiving space needs this. Cut to seven months later. And iGen, my wife Anne Libra and myself are on stage at Aspen, and this is Bat Me back at Aspen at the Ideas Festival. And we are presenting the ideas and practices around a program called Improvisation for Caregivers. And that program was so meaningful to me. I’m a dad, I’ve been a son. I thought I understood the caregiving space. I know I didn’t. And truly what’s going on? We have a lot of unpaid caregiving. The amount of money that is not going to the caregiving space and the burden on these caregivers is intense. And guess what folks, it’s just going to get worse as we have generations now who are not just caring for children, they’re caring for their aging parents. They call this the gray tsunami. We’re in it. It’s getting worse and there’s no safety net. So I’m very proud of the work we’ve done in that space. And there’s a lot more to do.

Charlie Melcher:

Kelly, I mean, caregivers, opera singers, economists, academics. Do you ever work with anyone funny?

Kelly Leonard:

I do. I get to work with funny people all the time. I mean the roots of all of this. So Stephen Colbert was my wife’s roommate at Northwestern, and when I started working at Second City and I was a dishwasher, John Favreau got hired the same week I got hired. We both had mullets. There’s photographic evidence as such,

Charlie Melcher:

Can’t wait to see that.

Kelly Leonard:

And then Chris Farley had just got hired in the touring company, and Bonnie Hunt and Mike Myers were on the main stage. And Jane Lynch is in the second city ETC company. And I’m a wash in these funny, inspirational people just doing the work and loving it. And then when I became a producer at Second City in 1992, Colbert, Steven Corll and Amy Sedaris were all my first cast. And you’re so spoiled when you see that level of talent. We were all the benefit from those people working together. And one of the joys of working here for so long is that I’m seeing it right now. I am looking at actors on our stages right now who are doing inventive, interesting work, and especially coming out of Covid, especially with how hard it is right now. And I think I want to acknowledge this because everyone I know is talking about how hard it is right now.

Charlie Melcher:

What is it about improv that helps you to deal with a dangerous, unknown unsettled universe?

Kelly Leonard:

Because you’re improvising, you are navigating complexity. You are needing to be agile. You are of course needing to be resilient because anything could happen. Rick Thomas is a Second City alum who is Colbert’s teacher among many. But he has a phrase that Colbert loves and I love it too, which is you need to fall into the crack in the game. And the idea there is a game is happening and there’s going to be an error, a mistake, a problem. And that is also an opportunity fall into it, that ability to not get thrown when things are not going the way they’re supposed to go, because really they’re never supposed to go away.

Charlie Melcher:

Change is the constant. Yeah, the only

Kelly Leonard:

Constant. It is the only constant. So becoming change Ready is a wonderful, it’s not just a wonderful ability for you to have. It’s a great skill to pass on to your kids. It also creates comedy. It’s what’s fun about this. It’s that mistake that happens on stage and we all know it happens. And we’re going to see that actor deftly use that mistake as a way to not make fun of the person who might’ve made the error, but make them a hero inside the mistake. And it’s like, oh my God, these are the moments where it’s walking a tightrope and you made it to the other end. And I know that, look, I’m a parent and I have, believe me, if you’re the guy who wrote yes, and your kids are going to be on your ass about every time you say no to them.

 

And the story I love to tell is my daughter Nora, she wanted a raise in her allowance, and she did not deserve a raise in her allowance. She was probably getting too much of the time anyway. And instead of saying no, I said yes. And if you can give us a really good reason why you deserve this allowance, we’ll consider it. And kind of left it at that. And this was like in the morning. And then in the evening, as Ann and I were getting ready to go to bed, suddenly in walks, it’s like seven, 8-year-old Nora, and she’s wearing one of my suit jackets and a tie, not just slung over

Charlie Melcher:

Her. Directly tied, yeah,

Kelly Leonard:

It’s not directly tied at all. And she has a PowerPoint as I’m putting my fingers in quotation marks, which was construction paper with a point by point reason of why she deserves a

Charlie Melcher:

Rate.

Kelly Leonard:

It was so creative, it was so funny. She got the raise. I was like, no, you did this and you should be rewarded for it because you put that effort in and wow, that is going to serve you. Well. That was my thought. This is going to serve you well in life, being able to ask for what you want. And then when someone says, you got to tell me why. You tell them why, come on.

Charlie Melcher:

It’s perfect. What enlightened parenting. I mean, I wish I had been able to

Kelly Leonard:

Out. I was forced into it.

Charlie Melcher:

You had to walk your talk,

Kelly Leonard:

Had to. I would not have done that without having written that book. I’ll tell you that.

Charlie Melcher:

You told me a story that I thought was a great one about a trip in Ireland. Was it?

Kelly Leonard:

So this is 1996. It’s a very different time. And there was a comedy festival in Ireland in Kilkenny, and I found myself in a 10 person van and we’re lost. And this van is filled with Second City alumni. So inside this van includes Bill Murray.

 

George went, Tim Kazinski, if you don’t know Tim, he was in the Police Academy movies. He was a silent live alum. He wrote the films about last night and My Bodyguard and then Dan Castaneta. And if you don’t know the name Dan Casta, you do know who he is because he is the voice of Homer Simpson. And we’re lost. And we pull up, we see a guy, an older gentleman with a cane on the side of the road, and Bill Murray leans out and he says, we’re trying to find the Cat Laughs Comedy Festival Club in kil Kenny. Can you direct us there? And the gentleman, older gentleman goes, ah, the Catless Festival Club looks down and then looks up and says, well, I wouldn’t start from here. And that didn’t help us. We didn’t know where to go. So we find a petrol station and we get to the club, and as we’re exiting the van, someone sees George went, a few people did.

 

And they yell, norm, norm, which is his character from Cheers. And this drove George mad. He didn’t like it. And I saw Tim Krinski pull him aside and he says, George, I think you need to reframe this experience. They love Norm. They don’t know George, but a lot of George is inside Norm. If you just are gracious about this and introduce yourself, they will get to know George. So the show’s going great. It’s an all improv show. And one of the last pieces we do is a conducted story. So for improv people who don’t know improv the cast line up on the stage and there’s a conductor, which is one of the other actors, and they’re going to lead them through the story. And audience members are going to give each actor a style to do this in usually an author style, Dan Castaneta last person. And someone yells out Homer and Dan’s face is balling. He’s like, look, I didn’t come across the pond to do my character from tv. You can throw out something else. And this guy yells from the audience, this guy yells from the audience, from the Iliad, ya get. And Dan Castaneda does Homer Simpson doing Homer of the Odyssey and the Iliad, and it brings the house down.

 

And the reason I like the story is for a variety of reasons for the things that we’ve talked about, which is to be a good improviser, you have to be a good lister, be patient and not make assumptions. And Dan made an assumption, however he made a mistake work for him. He dove into the crack. Yeah. If he had just done Homer of the I, I’m sure it would’ve been creative, but they got Homer Simpson doing it. And by the way, no one gets that. This is a guy who does not do that for other people. And this other idea of what it means to be seen, which is so crucial in the behavioral science world, but I think is also a central part of really skilled improvisers, is they have an ability to see the person across from as the person they are and audience members pick up on this. Like Tim talking to George and being like, that is a part of you. It is. They are not wrong when they’re yelling Norm, that idea, this is something I learned later in life. I didn’t understand that we have many selves. I think I subscribed to what a lot of people do, which is there’s an authentic self and everything else is that’s not true. We don’t behave the same with our spouse as we do with our boss, thank God as we do with at church, as we do in any sort of situations.

Charlie Melcher:

But they’re all real.

Kelly Leonard:

They’re all real Goffman In the fifties, I think Irving Goffman was one who talked about a backstage and onstage self and that there are different selves. So when you understand that, I think it allows you to be more gracious with regard to not just you and the way you operate, but recognizing when other people are struggling that they might like, oh, they don’t know how to be themselves in this situation.

Charlie Melcher:

One of the reasons I’m personally so excited about improv, it is part of you getting to play different roles. It is part about getting to learn different parts of yourself. It has a lot in common, say with immersive theater where the audience is being drawn into the production and has a role to play. And one of my beliefs about where we’re heading as a culture with our entertainment and our media is that we’re going from that age where everyone was a passive voyeur to an active participant. And I think the playbook for that is to be found in improv. It’s the skills and the drills and the practice of improv that enables you to step in and play these different roles to be able to interact with your content and make it therefore all the more meaningful, more powerful, obviously more embodied and multisensory and obviously more social. And I think all of this has great value and will accrue tremendous benefit to human civilization. It’s giving us human skills. It’s giving us skills to operate in a chaotic world. It’s giving us communication skills and what you didn’t say, but you’ve implied, which is, and it gives us greater self-knowledge, self-awareness,

Kelly Leonard:

A thousand percent. So one phenomenon. So in improvisation, you have to see the need to be right. So let’s explore that, right? If we could, all our politicians, all our leaders, all our bosses could occasionally see the need to be right. I imagine that better decisions would be made because a lot of us who are in positions of power feel we need to be right all the time. And what I’ve learned, actually, Mick Naper is a director at Second City who taught me this, which is it’s okay to say, I don’t know if you don’t. It’s the thing I’ve learned about leadership in general, which is most people are not interested in your success story. They want your fiasco and they want to see that you made it through. So what is your struggle? What is your pain? And you made it through, how’d you do that? Help me?

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah, even just your vulnerability, just that you’re, and what is that? Ultimately it is that you’re authentic, that you’re human, that you’re someone you can relate to. I couldn’t agree more. I think that the more that we can show up in a kind of authentic way instead of a role we think is defined a boss role or whatever the role is, you’ve seen a lot of evolution in the field of comedy and improv. How are you feeling about something like AI and the ability for people to have an improv relationship with an artificial intelligence?

Kelly Leonard:

So I interview a lot of people about AI because of that. I want to know on my podcast I booking, I just booked another one. Most of my conversations with folks in this field has said, which is what this technology needs is the human interaction. What is the future of work, if not for storytellers, problem solvers for people who can navigate complexity, all the things that you work on and that I work on. I said this the other day at a conference in Toronto, which is because we live in a time that devalues poetry, the arts and English majors, we are losing the very skills that these people need to operate in a future that you can’t always imagine. So you need the imaginations of those to light up and come to grips with all this work. And yet we’re going the other way. I mean, you and I both lived at a time where a parent was saying to his kid, learn how to code, just learn how to code. And now no technology is doing that for you. No, don’t go into radio or whatever it is.

Charlie Melcher:

So now it’s What do you say, go into improv? Well,

Kelly Leonard:

Yeah, I mean, improv doesn’t pay well. Here’s what I would say. Here’s what I would say. One of the reasons I think Second City will always be successful is we are not trying to be the thing my co-author Tom Ton on. Yes, Ann always talked about improv being the intel inside. It’s simply a practice and a skill that can help you in whatever you’re doing, whether you’re a lawyer, whether you’re a doctor, whether you’re trying to date, and whether you’re trying to be a better husband, all those things. So improv will help you. It absolutely will give it a shot. Do that. Is it the end all? Be all? No, go find your other areas of expertise to bring to the table. But what I will say is because things are changing so fast, especially now, and it is at certain points in our history, we can look and be like, well, in a 30 or 40 year span, there wasn’t that much difference. It’s like I started at Second City and there was no such thing as a personal computer, let alone a cell phone, let alone the internet. We did our jobs just fine, by the way. The shows were no more or less funny. But we are at a time now where these technologies and other things are, the speed is. So we have to be agile and nimble and we have to draw on our historical knowledge, our personal knowledge and all those things, and be a blank slate.

Charlie Melcher:

I don’t know why I just had this flash that someone’s going to try to feed in to an ai, all improv sessions that have ever happened at Second City to create the ultimate AI improv collaborator, and then you’ll be up there with that on stage instead of another person.

Kelly Leonard:

One of my favorite things is in 1992, I think it was 92 or 93, Steven Colbert, who was in the main stage cast, wanted to get suggestions from the internet for our improv set. So we hooked up an extension cord to the TV that was hooked up to the large computer that had to then dial up a OL. And here’s the thing folks, and you might be ahead of me on this, is lengths of lag time are not good

Charlie Melcher:

For comedy. Comedy.

Kelly Leonard:

It is the opposite. You do not need to put things in between for comedy, but God bless him, he tried, and it was a noble effort and a way of trying to embrace this technology that we never did again.

Charlie Melcher:

It’s one of the things that’s so amazing about improv is that there is nothing mediating it, right? There’s no screen between us in it. There’s no other devices. It is truly just this kind of alchemy or magic that’s happening in real time before your very eyes. I mean, when it’s done well, it’s not just hysterical. It truly feels like magic. Yeah,

Kelly Leonard:

It does. And I thought it was magic, and it turns out it’s a practice.

Charlie Melcher:

I love the way you speak about the practice. I’ve been dying to take a class forever, and I am going to, unfortunately, I’m not in Chicago, so I probably won’t be doing it second City, but I’m going to make a commitment to improv this year because of you and my belief in the value of that practice. Just as I believe in the value of a walk every day or in some meditation. These are just some basic things to make one healthier, happier, and probably more creative,

Kelly Leonard:

Drink more water. It’s not like this stuff wasn’t be nicer to people,

Charlie Melcher:

Kelly. It is just a joy to spend time with you and how can we not feel enriched and blessed to end with the advice of be nice to somebody and drink more water. So

Kelly Leonard:

If we’ve solved anything

Charlie Melcher:

Today, we have some good suggestions, at least

Kelly Leonard:

I think

Charlie Melcher:

So. Thank you so much, and can’t wait to see you in person again soon.

Kelly Leonard:

Thanks, Charlie.

Charlie Melcher:

I’m Charlie Melcher and this has been the FoST podcast. Thanks for joining me. Please don’t forget to cast your Webby awards, vote for the future of storytelling podcast. To do so. See the link in the description below. And if you want to stay up on the latest news from FoST, please consider signing up for our free monthly newsletter or applying to be a member of the FoST Explorers Club. You can learn more about both on our website@fost.org. The FoST Podcast is produced by Melcher Media, in collaboration with our talented friends and production partners, Charts and Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.