Bet on People with Jeff Kramer

In this episode of the Bet on People Podcast, Keegan Evans, executive coach and AI Consultant at Euda and Limited Partner at Beyond Earth Ventures, sits down with Jeff Kramer, Founder and CEO of CSz San Jose, the longest-running show in the Silicon Valley, to explore how improvisation develops the same skills that drive effective leadership, collaboration, and organizational performance. They discuss how improv moves far beyond entertainment, becoming a practical framework for building stronger teams through listening, adaptability, trust, and creative problem-solving.

Jeff shares his journey from becoming an actor and discovering improv to building Comedy Sports San Jose into one of Silicon Valley’s longest-running improv organizations. Through stories spanning the early days of introducing improv to new audiences, helping Apple engineers improve collaboration, developing corporate training programs, and navigating the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, he demonstrates how improv principles translate directly into workplace effectiveness. The conversation also explores why great leaders know when to step forward and when to step aside, how psychological safety enables teams to take risks, why “having each other’s backs” creates stronger cultures, and what improv can teach us about leadership in an increasingly AI-driven world.

Expect to Learn:

• Why improv is a serious leadership skill built on listening, adaptability, and trust
• How Comedy Sports evolved from a comedy performance into a corporate training and team-development tool
• Why psychological safety and “having each other’s backs” are essential for high-performing teams
• How leaders can recognize when to step up, support others, or get out of the way
• What improv teaches us about decision-making, experimentation, and working alongside AI

Episode Breakdown with Timestamps:

[00:00:00] - Teaser
[00:00:45] - Introduction: How improv skills connect to leadership and organizational                       effectiveness
[00:03:31] - The power of listening: The most important skill for improvisers and leaders
[00:05:26] - Jeff’s journey into improv and founding Comedy Sports San Jose
[00:08:00] - Building improv in San Jose and educating a new audience about the art form
[00:09:56] - The unexpected Apple connection: How engineers discovered improv for   teamwork
[00:11:43] - Using play and experience to teach collaboration and design thinking
[00:14:27] - Growing a 40-year organization through uncertainty and changing markets
[00:18:13] - Leading through crisis: Navigating the pandemic and rebuilding together
[00:28:55] - advertising on TV and telling Mentor
[00:34:01] - Lightning round: Growth goals, mentors, AI, media recommendations, and closing thoughts

🔗Connect with Guest Jeff Kramer:
👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-kramer-0317734/
👉 Email:  jeff@cszsanjose.com 

🔗Connect with CSz San Jose:
👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/comedysportz-san-jose/
👉 Website:  https://www.cszsanjose.com/
👉 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CSzSanJose
👉 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cszsanjose
👉 Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@csz.san.jose.backstage

👉 The ComedySportz Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-comedysportz-podcast/id1493584575

🔗Connect with Host Keegan Evans:
👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keeganevans/

🔗 More from Euda:
👉 Website: https://www.euda.io/
👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/euda-io/

🔗 Follow the Podcast on:
👉 Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bet-on-people/id1882863281
👉 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5HgXTMbgkDsmuqzUiDGcXc
👉 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Euda-io

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What is it about improv that translates so well to organizational effectiveness?

SPEAKER_01 0:03

They just said this is just a bunch of silly games, and I don't understand how this is going to benefit me, and of course the ROI behind that as well.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Our guest today is Jeff Kramer, founder and artistic director of Comedy Sports San Jose. Jeff knows that the skills behind great improv are not so different from the skills behind great leadership. What was your process of figuring out what were the exercises to bring or not bring to these corporate environments?

SPEAKER_01 0:28

It's funny, when you say silly, the fun and the laughing and the silliness is actually the tool that we use to get the message across because it's not experiential. They don't learn it, they just hear it and forget it, and it's gone.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Welcome to the show, Jeff. You've delivered thousands of performances from theaters to corporate trainings. What is it about improv that translates so well to organizational effectiveness?

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Well, that's what's interesting is that when we first started proposing to do these types of workshops for skill sets, nobody thought that there was any type of crossover. They didn't see the value in it at all. They just said, this is just a bunch of silly games, and I don't understand how this is going to benefit me. And of course, the ROI behind that as well. And back when we first started, 35 years ago, people really didn't take improv seriously at all. When we first got started, this was before shows like Whose Line Is It Anyway got on TV and put improv just in the mindset of people. And so they just looked at it as frivolous and silly. And they looked at improvisers too in that same way. In fact, they would say, Oh, you're just up there winging it, right? And winging it to an improviser is an insult, really, because it's a very, very highly refined skill set that involves listening, reacting, responding, and winging it implies that you've had no training. You're just going to try something and just go, sure, hope it works. Right. But our performers will train for up to a year before they can be asked to join the professional company. And so it's these training, these skill sets and the soft skills that apply to business as well. And so we look at it as training, not as you're playing a bunch of silly games that have no crossover and no relevance to what we're doing.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

Absolutely. Not to undercut the silliness. I mean, Zip Zap Zop is objectively silly when you watch it from the inside or the outside. But I'll say by the time that I first met you, um, when in doing that level one comedy sports training, no show at the end, uh, 20 people in a room, most of them raised their hand and said, I'm a software engineer, and my wife said I had to get out of the house. You had really refined it down, and I very quickly saw, oh, wait, no, we're doing this is like design theory, customer obsession, obsessed design theory 101 played out for ourselves and for developing these skill sets that work together well as a team. And so I'm really looking forward to like diving into the journey that brought you to that point.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

Absolutely. Yeah, and it's just these skill sets that translate and cross over. All the things that make a good improviser are things that make a good leader, that make great customer service, that are great for design thinking and make great software engineers, you know, all these different skill sets that we can carry over from those skill sets that you started learning at the very first day of the level one class.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

This is gonna be picking your favorite child here. What's one particular of those skill sets that you think is the most applicable or your favorite on how it translates across?

SPEAKER_01 3:31

I was gonna make a joke and pretend I wasn't paying attention, but I was gonna say listening is at the top of that. It would have been great if I just said, I'm not sure what you're talking about, but absolutely. Well, it's you know, when we talk about listening, there's an old joke where someone says, My wife says I have two major faults, not listening to her and something else. Right. But when we're looking for someone to join our team, and people say, Well, obviously they uh talent is number one, and we say, No, talent is actually further down, it's listening. They have to be a great listener to be able to know what's going on and then use that skill to support everybody else. And then number two is do they play well with others essentially? Because it's a very tight-knit group, and you have to be able to trust everybody around you because there are nights when you're not on or something is not happening for you. And it happens to me all the time. You never have a perfect show, and there are plenty of nights where I go out there and I have no idea what it's going to be like, and I get on stage and I realize nothing's happening. I have nothing going on up here. We get a suggestion, and if they say a shoe, all I see is a picture of a shoe in my head, and that's it. But it doesn't matter because I have people around me. Somebody has an idea and they will get things started. And then my job is just to switch to a supporting role. And then if something pops into my head, I can run with it there. But it's that listening. I would say that's the number one, for me, that's the number one skill.

SPEAKER_00 5:01

Yeah, I'm right there with you. And what I love about this is listening can feel like straightforward and a lot of us can feel like really good listeners. But when put under the pressure of doing it in front of an audience with the lights on and with an expectation that you're listening to also participate and contribute, it could get really hard to listen in all the ways that you're talking about it. And then all I picture is the shoe. And how did you start this journey into this world?

SPEAKER_01 5:26

Well, I trained as an actor originally, and we did some improvisation is part of every acting program. Actors use it obviously if something goes wrong on stage in a scripted show, which it does all the time. You have to have that ability to be able to either skip ahead or figure out a way to make what just happened work in the play. You can't tell the audience that something has gone wrong. If you don't, they won't know. And so you can just find a way to keep it going. And then I was in graduate school at University of Wisconsin, and my advisor said to me, Hey, I want you to meet this guy. He started this improv show in Milwaukee, and he wants to open one in Madison. And so that's where I met Dick Chudnow, who became my mentor, told me about this show he had done. It sounded like fun, and we started another chapter of comedy sports in Madison back in 1985.

SPEAKER_00 6:25

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 6:25

That's how I'm so old, I've forgotten how long ago it was.

SPEAKER_00 6:29

Was that the was the Madison one the second ever chapter?

SPEAKER_01 6:32

Yeah. It started in Milwaukee, and then they were selling out. And 25 years earlier, Dick had gone to school in Madison.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

Oh, cool.

SPEAKER_01 6:41

And so he came there thinking, well, it's a college town, it's also the capital, there's an audience there. Surely. And so he trained us and we got going and we started selling out eventually too. And then he had this vision of this is going to be a league like the NFL or Major League Baseball only for improv.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

And I remember that first night before our first show, he said, I want you to close your eyes and I want you to envision us in 25, 30 cities, and we're gonna have playoffs, and we're gonna have a championship, and you're gonna travel from city to city and play. And we did, we just envisioned it. And fast forward 40 years, we're now in 25 cities. Next week I leave to go down to the combi sports championship where all these cities come together and compete against each other. And so that's how everything got started there. I moved out to California to take a job with a theater company, and they wanted to start to expand beyond Wisconsin. And so that's when Dick said to me, See if you can get something going out there. So it took about a year, and I was focused on the theater at first, but then we opened in uh San Jose in 1987. So next year will be our 40th anniversary. That's amazing. And yeah, I was what was I 11?

SPEAKER_00 7:55

Yeah, I was 11 years old when we first started.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

What um so you you're opening these concepts in San Jose, and we were talked either it was on mic or off mic, how this was before whose line and all these places. So the familiarity with it. What were you facing? What were you figuring out when you tried to when you started breaking into San Jose?

SPEAKER_01 8:17

Well, we had to educate the market because nobody, when they heard improv, they thought, oh, the improv, the stand-up place.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:25

Which was always confusing because there was no improv going on there, but it was called the improv. So we'd say we do improv and you go, oh, like the improv? We'd say, No, that's stand-up. How are you different from stand-up? And you try to explain an improv show to someone who's never seen an improv show. And it's like trying to explain all the rules of baseball to someone who's never seen a baseball game and saying, Now, can you envision this? And they say, Absolutely not. It sounds way too complicated.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

I coached Little League and I was reading the rules of Little League and the rules of baseball, and I got confused with the complexity of all the rules of baseball. And I and I know I can do it. Where did you start with that complexity? Where did you start? Because there's you also have to recruit people to do it as well.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

Yeah, the recruiting people was the easiest part because I was around other actors at the time, and I knew actors could do this. They had some improv training. And so our first cast was mostly actors. I could train them quickly. They knew how to do voices and characters already. But we opened, we did two shows, and half of our company got cast in a play. And they said, we're going to be gone for the next two months. And so we very quickly realized we couldn't just have actors in the company because if they're good enough to be in our show, they're good enough to be in all of these other shows too.

SPEAKER_00 9:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

And so we started just looking for people that maybe had this skill set but weren't necessarily trained actors. And then we started just teaching classes because we thought, well, we can find people in the classes that maybe have this hidden talent that they didn't know about before. And that's basically how the training started, too. We it this was not an idea that I had originally. The idea was just to do this improv comedy show. And about a year into it, we noticed there was a group of guys, three or four of them, that used to come to the show all the time. And they came up to us afterwards and they said, Hey, can we hire you to train us to do what you do? And we said, What do you mean? They said, Well, we're engineers, we work for Apple, and can you teach us this? And we said, You want us to teach you improv comedy? And they said, No, no, no, we don't want to learn how to do improv comedy. We want to learn how to work the way we're seeing you work on stage. You know, we yell out a suggestion and you just immediately take it and run with it, and it it looks scripted, even though we know it isn't. And we've just been put together with a larger engineering team, and we're worried that we're not going to hit our deadline because all we're doing is arguing. The way they phrased it is we're all engineers, so we think the same way. I'm right, everyone else is wrong. And so we're just arguing, and we just need to, we never see you argue or anything. It's so seamless. That's what we want to learn. And so we said, All right, and we went over there for about six weeks after work, over at Apple, and six weeks of training, and they finished ahead of their deadline. Wow. And they had fun doing it. And they said, Would you mind if we referred you to some other groups within Apple? We're like, sure, I guess so. You know, we didn't even realize what we had at first. Yeah. But we did think, well, if they liked it, maybe other people will see the same sort of relevance in it too. And so that's how it started. It wasn't even our idea, it was their idea.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

That's amazing. And what kind of the timeline you so you founded in 1987 in San Jose? When did the Apple engineers give you the that was probably 88, 89?

SPEAKER_01 11:44

So we had been going for uh you know a couple of years, just focused on doing the show.

SPEAKER_00 11:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:49

And we did some corporate work, but it was bringing the show as entertainment.

SPEAKER_00 11:54

Yep. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

And that's all we thought we had as a product. And like I said, we're unbelievably grateful to these guys from Apple who literally showed us this is something that's viable, that's needed.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

But it started slow because they saw the benefit of it from seeing the show and they put it together themselves. Try to convince other people of that. And again, it's like teaching them about baseball if they've never seen baseball. And imagine trying to approach somebody and saying, Yeah, here's what's going to happen. We're going to train you, and you're going to get better at listening and design thinking and adaptability and flexibility. And they say, Great, describe how you're going to train us. And you start to explain some of the exercises, and their eyes either glaze over or they just start shaking their head and they go, No, no, these guys will never do that. You know, or or my uh boss will nix it because they're not going to spend money on something that they think is just from a comedy company. It's frivolous.

SPEAKER_00 12:55

We talked a little bit about play some of the sillier exercises, but even they're grounded in when training someone for to be an improv performer, they're all grounded in principles and concepts, and they're all important. What was your process on figuring out what the right balance or even what were the what were the exercises to bring or not bring to these corporate environments?

SPEAKER_01 13:14

Well, it's funny, when you say silly, the fun and the laughing and the silliness is actually the tool that we use to get the message across.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

Awesome.

SPEAKER_01 13:22

Because you could take the same skill sets and again just say, I'm going to do it as a lecture and explain to you how these skill sets work and why they're important. And again, eyes glaze over. Or they might actually be writing it down and go, This is really interesting. Yeah, this is terrific. And then as soon as I leave the room, all of that is gone. Yeah. Because it's not experiential. They don't learn it, they just kind of hear it and forget it, and it's gone. Think of how much you remember from college, right?

SPEAKER_00 13:50

There's other factors that influence that.

SPEAKER_01 13:52

Right. But if it's something where you just had to memorize things, you memorize it for the test and then it's gone. So this sort of thing, we use it. It's almost like a Trojan horse kind of thing. It's like the the fun and the laughing is what gets them into the exercise, and then things tend to stick because now you remember what you did as opposed to what I said to you.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

And you'll do that, and I'll say, All right, what did you notice? Well, we were laughing a lot. And what else? Oh, I noticed this particular skill set that I was using in the midst of this particular exercise.

SPEAKER_00 14:26

Yeah. Yeah, there's a good lesson in just getting to the experience. One of your uh one of your instructors always references the Simpsons line, just get to the uh oh, I'm gonna blanket Marcella's gonna kill me. Just get to the fireworks factory. Uh I think is is that one in pushing to start and that and that can be in the content of the show or it could be in the experience, as you're saying. So talk to me a little bit about continuing to grow, grow company sports in San Jose. 30 or almost 39 years, almost 40 years is a huge legacy. And I and that didn't might that likely didn't feel inevitable in the 90s. What were you facing in terms of uh uh the challenges and how did you navigate through those as the leader and founder?

SPEAKER_01 15:06

Well, that was interesting because my blueprint was watching it grow in Madison and Milwaukee, and learned over the years that every city works differently, the population is different, the culture is different, the regional aspects of everything are different. So in Milwaukee, I saw these sold-out shows, but there was also no competition, especially during the winter time.

SPEAKER_00 15:31

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 15:32

It's zero degrees, and you're you can't go outside. There's nothing else except indoor activities. So you see this, right? But in San Jose in California, where it's sunny 300 days out of the year, and there's so many different things that you could do, indoors or outdoors. And so it just took longer to build that, and there's still ups and downs, and obviously, we're still navigating the effects of the pandemic. There were there was an article I read a few weeks ago saying that since the year 2020, 50% of all the theaters in the Bay Area have closed. Yeah, that's a sobering statistic. And a lot of them, most of them, had budgets far bigger than ours.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

We're small compared to some of these ones that have gone out of business. So it was word of mouth, though, for us that built the show. Because again, how do you explain what we do? Well, it's two teams and they compete to see which team is funnier. It's called comedy sports. Oh, so it's comedy about sports? No, actually, it's not comedy about sports. The sports is just a metaphor for the thing, right? And just come and see it.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 16:36

And when people come and see it, they go, Oh, I get it. And they'll go to tell somebody else and say, I just saw this show, you have to go see it. What is it? Well, it's comedy sports, but it's not about sports. You know what? I'm gonna bring you with me. You just have to see it to understand it. But yeah, Who's Line getting on TV really helped us because now when you hear improv, oh, I've seen Whose Line Is It Anyway? And now more and more people from the improv world have become famous and gotten on TV. And shows like The Office and Parks and Wreck, Curb Your Enthusiasm, which have a framework for a script, but most of the dialogue is improvised. And then all of these people came out of an improv background. People discovered later. Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Amy Polar, Tina Faye, Will Ferrell, they all came out of improv companies. In fact, the entire cast of Saturday Night Live came from Second City, other improv groups. And so it's easier now to explain what improv is to people. But you still have to get them to come out to see your product and sell your product to them.

SPEAKER_00 17:39

And I mean, I found you all through word of mouth. A friend of mine had gone with his wife after having had a very disappointing stand-up experience, thinking they were gonna hit a high-profile venue and performer. They wanted to feel good about comedy, and they found you all, and then we started talking, and he's like, I want to take this class. And I was like, I'll do it if you do it. And we went back and forth on that. And then it ended up also being a creative to our uh our Dungeons and Dragons campaign, too, because improv in in a D around a DD table is uh makes it much more fun.

SPEAKER_01 18:08

Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 18:09

You brought up though, you brought up the pandemic, and it's something I actually wanted specifically to talk about. So let's see if I can do math in public. A little over 30 years into your run in San Jose. You're already you're established, you've got your own place. Live comedy is that inherently in-person experience, and then the pandemic hits. What were some of the lifelong leadership lessons, both earlier failings or successes in leadership, that helped you navigate and you and Coffee Sports navigate the pandemic?

SPEAKER_01 18:36

Well, I was very lucky that I was part of a group of colleagues from 25 other cities that were all going through the same thing. And so we met. Uh people asked me, you know, do you remember a time, you know, what's one of your worst days in your business history? And I'll say, I can tell you the date. Most of the time you can't, right? I can say March 10th, 2020, because on that day is when they announced that all theaters were now closed. Yeah. You know, it started with 10,000, then 5,000, then 1,000. March 10th, they said everything's closed now. And then on that same day, I had phone calls or emails from five different companies that we had booked events for telling me they had to cancel.

SPEAKER_00 19:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:16

Half of them had put deposits down. So not only had I lost all that, but I had to give money back. Wow. Yeah. We had three classes that were sold out that we had to give money back to as well. And then on top of that, I'm looking at no way to bring in any income.

SPEAKER_00 19:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:33

And I remember at the time, this was March 10th. We went, yeah, wow, you know, they're telling us we might be close till May. What are we going to do? Right?

SPEAKER_00 19:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:41

And but you sit there for a while just in the horror and terror of it, circling the drain. And then you have to just go, Well, what am I going to do? Am I going to give up or are we going to try and fight our way through this? And so I, as I said, I was lucky that I had a group of colleagues that we all got together and someone said, Hey, we should meet. There's this thing called Zoom. And uh, let's get together on Zoom, first of all, and talk about it. And then between us, we came up with a way of creating a virtual version of our show, as other artists were doing too. For us, of course, the challenge was even bigger because how do you do improv when you can't make eye contact with the person you're playing with? And what you say might take a few seconds, depending on their connection.

SPEAKER_00 20:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:29

And how do you do that? So we just had to start practicing. But I went to our team and just said, here's the challenge. Here's what everyone knows what's going on. Here's what we're going to try and do. And for me, that was actually one of the best moments I've ever had as a leader. Was we're in this unbelievable crisis. And I had my team of people just say, Great, we're in. What do we need to do? We're in. And I do that when I'm training people as well, when I'm leading trainings, just saying, you don't know what kind of team you have when things are going great.

SPEAKER_00 21:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:07

Right? I look back to the time in the late 90s when all I was doing was team buildings and trainings for startups. And every startup was the same. They were all excited. They were gonna make millions. Everything was going great. They had seed money. Their CEO was the most brilliant person that ever lived. And it was weird because they were all 10 years younger than me. You know, they were all these, and I'd never experienced that before. Every single one was at least they were 25 to 30 years old and they were being talked about as they're brilliant, they're brilliant, everything's great. Then when the downturn happened, you could tell which companies were going to survive because the ones that didn't were the ones that turned on their leader, immediately fired them and said, Well, they didn't know what they were doing. We knew that all along, that sort of thing. And just pointing fingers and taking blame. And the ones that didn't do that were the ones that had the chance to survive. So for me, that was a pivotal moment for us. Was when everybody just kind of came together and said, okay, if this is the plan, great, tell us what we need to do.

SPEAKER_00 22:06

I've watched you as an instructor, I've watched you as a performer, and we're talking about acting as a leader in this time of true existential crisis for the craft and for and for people's lives. One of the things that I've enjoyed watching you on stage is there's some you are often a grounded, straightforward player that is supporting other people, it felt so there's two cases in particular that I remembered, I don't even remember the premise of it, but you just stood up there and kind of waved your hands and were basically okay, I'm a ghost. And there was interaction playoff. And it was just this delightful, simple, and straightforward, and it created the space for all the other insanity to happen. Another time you did a very sim, another similar straightforward caveman thing, and then ended up writing an entire contract on the wall, the cave wall of things. Does that kind of helping do you find that as a part of your leadership personality in terms of simplifying and grounding for folks, or should I just catch two nights that resonated with me?

SPEAKER_01 23:09

Those were the only two nights anything ever happened for me. Well, so that's what's interesting is that you know I'm a leader of this group of 30 performers, but when I'm on stage with them, I can't be the leader.

SPEAKER_00 23:23

Right.

SPEAKER_01 23:25

Sometimes I'm leading a scene, but I can't lead everything. And I have to be able to, on a dime, follow and help set other people up. And sometimes I'm on stage for just 10 seconds. That's my contribution to the scene.

SPEAKER_00 23:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:40

Because I'm not needed or I don't have the idea. And so at the beginning, though, people looked at me to do that because when we started in San Jose, I was the only person that had ever done the show before. So when we first started, everybody said, Well, you've got to be out there leading everything because we don't know how to do this. And it actually created some bad habits in me because I did this thing, but I wasn't training the other people to come along and be leaders as well in the scene. And I just I was a one-trick pony. I was doing the same thing every time. Like you said, I had to be the one that makes something happen. And eventually, though, I just started to think it about it differently. And it was just, well, what do they need from me now? In this moment. And it works great for improv, but I teach that now for leadership as well. Is it leadership is really a moment-to-moment thing. Yeah. And it's what do they need from me right now? What's the best thing I can do for them right now? And that's what I do. That's my North Star, right? If for improv, it's do they need me to lead? Because I look at the other three players on my team and they look at me and their eyes are really big and they go, I don't have an idea. I go, Well, I don't have one either, but I'm running out there. Yeah. Because somebody has to. Yeah. So I'll do it. Because I don't care if I fail, because I've done 5,000 shows and I've got a thick skin. And if I fail, I fail. And the audience won't remember that I failed 30 minutes from now. They only remember the good things that happened in the show. So no one's ever come up to me and said, you know that one scene that I saw an hour ago? Boy, you really failed at that one point because they don't even remember it. It's just gone. And so it's the same kind of thing. It's do they need me to lead, or am I in a scene and I realize I'm not contributing anything to this scene right now? They need me to leave and get out of their way.

SPEAKER_00 25:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:27

And again, that's another thing with leadership is know when to get out of the way and just let people start to run with it. For me, that was a skill, though, that took a long time just for me personally to develop that ability to trust people and go, they've got it. And they might fail or make mistakes, but I've got to let them.

SPEAKER_00 25:45

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 25:46

And I was very hesitant to let them because I was so guarded about this show and this business that I was building.

SPEAKER_00 25:52

Well, I can say that by the time that you and I met a few years back, you had not only uh figured that part out, but figured out how to teach it. And two of the things that stick with me from that first class that I carry through into coaching or leadership or business or anything one, don't try to come up with the best idea, come up with the first idea and make it the best. And that's to get over that hesitation impulse. The second, and you mentioned it here, if no one else has an idea, I got to get out there and do something. And uh it may fail or not, but the way that you taught us was if it's dead air on stage, just get out and start doing something. And that something can be making a weird noise or just doing a silly dance or just doing some sort of motion and not having to have the idea of what that's gonna lead to, but trusting the team to jump out and have your back. And if you're floundering, the other team's gonna have your back or the other post next team are gonna have your back. And it's so broadly applicable.

SPEAKER_01 26:46

Yeah, it's that whole got have your back. In fact, that's just before we go out on stage, we do this got your back thing where we all go up to each other, pat each other on the back, and look each other in the eye and say, got your back. And it's the only thing that we don't do as a bit. We're about to go on stage and do all kinds of bits, but we take that seriously, not so seriously that's you know, we're taking it out of context or anything, or but it's just this is how we're trained. Just a reminder: do whatever you need to do, I will be there for you. I won't let you fail. Yes, yeah, and if I know that from you, then all I'm doing then is just making sure you don't fail. I don't have to worry about myself. You're gonna take care of me. Yeah, you know, when we're out there. So Dick Chudnow, the guy who started Comedy Sports, my mentor, that's one of the things that he said is make a decision and then make that the right decision.

SPEAKER_00 27:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:32

Right? And it's true on stage, that's a so it's true in life, too. Just you know, you've got to make a decision. Don't just be paralyzed with what do I do? What do I do? It's just you make a decision and then make that the right decision. Yeah, love it.

SPEAKER_00 27:45

That's actually a great transition into our lightning-ish round. Thank you for the full dive in that. But you ready to go a little faster than we've been going? I'll try. Yeah. I think if any of my guests are ready for this, you are Jeff.

SPEAKER_01 27:59

Now, watch. Now you just set this up. So you're gonna ask me a question, the very first question. I have no idea, and I'm just gonna stare blankly at the screen.

SPEAKER_00 28:08

Well, we'll see what happens. Yeah, we'll see. All right. What's a personal goal you have for yourself this year?

SPEAKER_01 28:12

Well, I recently moved from the West Coast to the East Coast, and so the goal, one of the goals, is to try and expand comedy sports out this way. We have locations in New York and uh down at the Jersey Shore, but there's something about this area of northern New Jersey where I'd like to get things started again. And so that's my goal in the next year is to have something going out this way and also keep things going in San Jose.

SPEAKER_00 28:38

Awesome. That's fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 28:39

And I also want to ride my bike more.

SPEAKER_00 28:41

Okay, that's good too. Probably goes hand in hand until the winter out there.

SPEAKER_01 28:46

So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:48

We've talked a lot about growth opportunities and good advice. What's the worst professional advice you've ever received?

SPEAKER_01 28:53

All right. I had someone come up after a show when we were first getting going, and they said, This is so great. I can't believe more people don't know about it. You should get on TV. And so, you know, I said, Wow, I I never thought of that. You know, I didn't say this directly to them. This is what I thought inside, you know. I never thought of that. Um, what's the number for TV? Right. And then mind dialing a phone. Hello, is this TV? Yeah, listen, I've got this great show. And what you'll put me on and pay me millions of dollars? Thanks. That was easy, right? So it's just they were well meaning, but it's just funny in that they were thinking like I had never thought of that, that getting on TV would yeah would help our business or yeah, be on our show. Or you should advertise, really, advertise, huh?

SPEAKER_00 29:41

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 29:42

Yeah, that sort of thing. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:44

Excellent. Uh, you've talked about Dick a lot, and he may be the the one for this new one, but who's someone in your mentor hall of fame?

SPEAKER_01 29:49

Yeah, Dick, and then really a lot of my colleagues who were in the trenches with me for the last 35 years, starting their own comedy sports cities, staying in touch, and I never felt alone and still don't to this day. I've got three or four people that I can call or text or email and just say, Hey, I'm going through this. I know you've gone through this. How did you handle it? What advice would you give me? And then they do the same for me. We do this for each other because we've all been through every situation over the course of all these years. So it really does help knowing that not only am I not alone on stage, but I'm also not alone in terms of management and leadership that I've got these people I can reach out to. The best advice Dick ever gave me was always pay for breakfast. Because you'll look like a big shot, but it's the cheapest meal you can buy. And so, yeah. That's good. Still use that to this day. I just think APB, always pay for breakfast.

SPEAKER_00 30:48

I like that a lot. All right, straight up. What's your honest relationship with AI right now?

SPEAKER_01 30:53

Well, it's funny because what we do, we've we've been calling for years, we've been calling it applied improv or AI. And so we always say, you know, this is the original AI, it's not the scary AI. We're not Skynet. We're doing that too. Interesting thing with AI is you can use it to help you get ideas to start writing ads or sum up ideas. A lot of people, though, are looking at it going, well, eventually you you just use AI for training. It's another goal for us, is that we've been doing a lot of role-playing for companies where we supply actors that can play other employees to have them focus on difficult decisions, real-time feedback, things like that. And people are saying, Well, I could just use why hire you if I could just use AI and just program it to do that. So that's a fear, I guess, but it's also it's not the same as being in the room with somebody.

SPEAKER_00 31:47

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 31:48

I mean, you could practice with AI, but at a certain point, you can also practice being a pilot with AI and practice being a surgeon with AI. But when people ask me, Well, are you what about if I just use AI? Then a lot of times I'll just say, Okay, would you like your pilot to just be trained on AI or to actually fly a plane for practice? And I'll be like, oh God, no. I how about your surgeon? Would you like your surgeon to just go, how do I take out an appendix? Got it, and just start cutting into you? Or do you want them to practice in in a real-time scenario? So yeah, that's kind of how I'm looking at it now is it's a tool. I'm not crazy about the fact that it's being forced on people and foisted on people, as well as, well, it's inevitable. So you've got to use it. So that's really tricky because it can be really, really useful and save a lot of time, but it can also be relied on too heavily and can replace people. And yeah, hopefully it doesn't replace improv. I was on a panel once where someone said, What about AI to do a scene? And so we did AI in a live performance where uh you've played the one of the jump out games where you tell a joke really quickly.

SPEAKER_00 32:59

Yeah, on the way based on a suggestion. So AI could probably be me, but not the people who are good at it.

SPEAKER_01 33:05

Well, that's funny, is because we programmed the AI to do it, and it came up with some decent jokes, but it doesn't have timing, and it can't read the audience to know when do you hit the punchline, when do you do the next line, because you have to listen for the reaction from the audience. And then when do you realize this isn't the right joke for this particular audience, right? That didn't go over well. So, you know, it's another improv skill, though, is reading the audience and and reacting and changing things up in real time, just making those real-time adjustments.

SPEAKER_00 33:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:36

So until AI is able to hear in the way that you and I hear, and hopefully that's a long way away. Because that's when Skynet happens, actually.

SPEAKER_00 33:46

Yeah. That'll be the final canary is fully AI improv. Uh we'll keep we'll keep an eye out for that. And wrapping it up, what's a recommendation for media? Uh, a book, a movie, a show, uh, a play, anything that that preferably not leadership or business related.

SPEAKER_01 34:02

No. Well, if you want to have a quick one that's leadership related, we just started re-watching The West Wing. Oh, yeah. And and I'm watching it going.

SPEAKER_00 34:09

That doesn't count. Yeah, that gets included. That doesn't count on our exclusion.

SPEAKER_01 34:12

You know, like if what's who's the greatest leader? Uh, a fictional character. Right? I think that all the time. I'm like, boy, if I could only have my lines written out for me in certain periods, if I could have a writer, boy, would I be a great leader. You know, if I could just have Aaron Sork and if I could have Aaron Sorkin lean in my ear and say, say this right now, you know, that would be great. What I'm enjoying, just as far as podcasts, there's the Smartless podcast, which is brilliantly funny, you know, and they've also turned into good interviewers too. But it's just fun just listening to them because the first 10 minutes is them just improvising and basically tearing each other to shreds at the beginning. And then I love Ted Danson's podcast where everybody knows your name, because he's approaching it from he's lived this life where he had this amazing career, and now he's kind of looking back and seeing things, and he's not afraid to talk about bad mistakes he made when he was younger and how he's learned from it. And then one of my favorite just shows is called Somebody Feed Phil.

SPEAKER_00 35:16

Oh, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 35:17

Uh, which is on Netflix. So it's Phil Rosenthal, who's the guy that created Everybody Loves Raymond.

SPEAKER_00 35:21

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 35:22

And he's this wonderful guy, he's just become a world traveler, but he experiences cultures through their food. Uh and that's his whole philosophy is if we could solve all of the fighting in the world, if we would just get together and taste each other's food and share meals with each other.

SPEAKER_00 35:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:43

And he's it's a delightful show. I you just you you like this guy immediately when you see him. And he's one of those rare people that can walk into a room and he makes everybody feel comfortable and feel listened to, and everybody just immediately likes him instantly. It's a great show as well. I love watching it. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 36:00

I will have to check a couple of those out. I haven't uh followed up those, so thank you very much. Um, all right, thank you, Jeff. Jeff, uh, for everyone, Jeff Kramer is the founder and artistic director of Comedy Sports San Jose, Silicon Valley's longest-running improv comedy show.

SPEAKER_01 36:14

Or improv show, too. Show period, really.

SPEAKER_00 36:19

Oh, is it? Yeah, I guess 40 years has to be.

SPEAKER_01 36:22

We've done over 7,000 shows. That's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 36:25

And they're all great. I've never had a bad time. I've never even had a mediocre time at a comedy sports show.

SPEAKER_01 36:30

Can I quote you on that as uh something to put on our website?

SPEAKER_00 36:33

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 36:34

I've never even had a mediocre time. Kay Evans.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

Uh Jeff, we'll have this all linked in our show notes. But where can people find you and what else do you want uh folks to check out?

SPEAKER_01 36:48

They can check our website, which is cszsanjose.com. And you can find out about the shows, but also just about the training, the team building, and then the role-playing that we're also putting together.

SPEAKER_00 36:58

Awesome. All right. Thank you for joining us. Sure. Thanks, Keegan. Follow, like, and subscribe to Bet on People on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. And if you want to learn more about how we think about leadership at Uta, visit EUDA.io slash executive coaching. Bet on People is presented by Uta. Our producer and lead researcher is Molly Van Duzer. Our host is Keegan Evans. Special thanks to our editors at GHA Marketing.