Improvisation as a life skill with Andrea Jones-Rooy and Justin Gregg

**Andrea Jones-Rooy** (0:00)
Improv really helps you be a better listener, a better team member, a better person who thinks bigger ideas. Bless you. She's allergic to team membership. I can't believe it. It helps you get out of your own head.

**Adam Grant** (0:14)
Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking, my podcast with TED on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people who explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.
Today, I'm bringing you something a little different. The topics include bouncing back from failure, being more creative and collaborative, and honing your sense of humor. The occasion is a live event recorded in Authors at Wharton. But this time, I came with no interview plan, because my two fascinating guests made me do improv.

**Justin Gregg** (0:51)
Technically, on paper, you should be the worst person at improv because you are a very intellectual person. And part of what we are going to learn here is to not think. No prefrontal cortex, sir. Turn it right off.

**Adam Grant** (1:03)
Andrea Jones-Roy is a data scientist, and Justin Gregg is an animal cognition researcher. They are both past ReThinking guests, and I wanted to bring them together this time and do it live. Because outside their impressive day jobs, Andrea and Justin both moonlight as improv comedy performers.
I realized it when we were at a conference together. When I started grilling them about the science of improv, they convinced me to try it myself. I guess that's my version of yes and.

**Andrea Jones-Rooy** (1:32)
Do you want to sit on this chair? No, I like it. All right, great. You stand behind me and then we'll do it.

**Justin Gregg** (1:37)
I don't want to sit on this though.

**Adam Grant** (1:38)
Welcome to Wharton. Andrea Jones-Roy and Justin Gregg, my two favorite science communicators.

**Andrea Jones-Rooy** (1:43)
Oh, well, thanks.

**Justin Gregg** (1:43)
I'll take that.

**Adam Grant** (1:44)
I'm a little disappointed in myself though.
Because you both been on my podcast, and I failed to ask you about improv comedy. You failed to do improv comedy. I feel like that was an epic disaster on my part.

**Andrea Jones-Rooy** (1:57)
I think the big headline from both of our appearances on your podcast is epic disaster.

**Justin Gregg** (2:02)
That's true. To be fair, it's a dirty secret in a way.
As a science communicator, I use improv all the time, but it's not necessarily how I advertise myself to the world as an improviser first. Scientist sounds a little more, they have a little more clout.

**Andrea Jones-Rooy** (2:15)
Well, and even with the way, I don't know about you, but the way that I learned improv was I was in graduate school being a very stressed graduate student, and I was absolutely losing my mind, and I took an improv class because I was curious about it, and I went in and it was just so much fun to just be in a room with other human beings, not a screen, and not have a plan and not have a right answer I was seeking. And so it was always my guilty pleasure during science. And so, of course, it wouldn't come up when I'm speaking with Adam Grant, you know, and I really didn't expect it to ever come up.

**Adam Grant** (2:43)
Yeah, I'm a little nervous.

**Andrea Jones-Rooy** (2:44)
I tried to keep it a secret from you, in fact.

**Adam Grant** (2:46)
Same.

**Andrea Jones-Rooy** (2:46)
Yeah.

**Adam Grant** (2:47)
You failed.

**Andrea Jones-Rooy** (2:48)
We did. Another failure.

**Adam Grant** (2:49)
And now we're here.

**Andrea Jones-Rooy** (2:50)
Yeah.

**Adam Grant** (2:50)
Yes, well, I'm excited that you're here. I normally would have a plan for a conversation.

**Andrea Jones-Rooy** (2:55)
We have no plan.

**Adam Grant** (2:55)
I think that would go against the spirit of improv. That's right.

**Andrea Jones-Rooy** (2:58)
What should we do? That's right. So I want to know how many of you were talking about improvisational comedy. So I think one of the things people don't realize about improv is that it's, first of all, truly made up on the spot. And there's basically two versions of improv. There's one version where you go up and people tell you funny things and you sort of say them and act them out, like whose line is it anyway. And then long-form improvisational comedy is you go on stage with a bunch of other people, you have zero plan, you've discussed nothing ahead of time, and you go out and someone gives you a word or a place or an idea, and you might do an entire half-hour show with multiple scenes and characters, and some of it's funny, some of it might be actually heartwarming, some of it you don't know where it's going to go, and it's a really long-form acting. And for a long time, it was only considered this, like, lesser art form that would be used to generate ideas for sketches for things like SNL.