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Dr. Neil Bardhan: Cut through the noise. Connect to another human. Build common ground.
60 Plays1 year ago
It’s hard to hate someone whose story you know.
That’s the resounding call of Neil Bardhan, the executive director of the Broad Street Review and the director of applied storytelling at First Person Arts.
Neil holds the Ph.D. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the University Rochester.
CONTENT WARNING: death of a parent, COVID
We talk about: storytelling, the life skills people can learn from studying improv, the damage to human interaction caused by social media (and some of the silver linings), bereavement.
Check out the Broad Street Review: https://www.broadstreetreview.com
Check out First Person Arts: firstpersonarts.org
This program is produced in south west philadelphia, in the unceded neighborhood of the black bottom community and on the ancestral land of the Lenape nation, who remain here in the era of the fourth crow and fight for official recognition by the commonwealth of Pennsylvania to this day. You can find out more about the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania and how you can support the revitalization of their culture by going to https://lenape-nation.org.
Visit this episode's sponsor, BVP Coffee, roasting high quality coffee that benefits HBCU students:
https://bvp.coffee/uncommongoodpod
Visit this episode's sponsor, Poi Dog, chef Kiki Aranita creating sauces inspired by Hawaiian Cuisine: https://poidogphilly.com
we chat to ordinary people doing uncommon good in service of our common humanity.
we are creating community that builds relationships across difference by inviting dialogue about the squishy and vulnerable bits of life.
(un)common good with pauli reese is an uncommon good media production, where we make spirituality accessible to everyone and put content on the internet to help people stop hating each other.
thanks for joining us on the journey of (un)common good!
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Transcript
Desire for Human Connection and Curiosity
00:00:00
Speaker
What do you want the world to look like when you're done with it? More connected. Yeah? Yeah. I want humans to feel more connected to each other. There's seven billion other people out there who haven't been nail-barred hand, and that's very, very cool to me because I want to hear what all those people have been doing their time. What does it take to foster and cultivate curiosity rather than the overwhelm that we see so often?
00:00:27
Speaker
in like a world that is so oversaturated with content. If I asked you what are you curious about, you could probably list me a bunch of things, right? But then I think what is really necessary is what do you think you could be curious about that you don't know that you're curious
Introduction to Podcast and Guests
00:00:44
Speaker
about? Where do you have kind of a gap in your understanding of the world because of what you've decided is as important or what messaging has been provided to you about like, oh, you should be curious about
00:01:04
Speaker
This is Uncommon Good, the podcast where we chat to ordinary people doing uncommon good in service of our common humanity. My name is Paul E. Reese. Fam, we got a live one for you today. In addition to holding a PhD in brain
00:01:20
Speaker
and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Rochester. Neil Bardin is the Executive Director of the Broad Street Review and the Director of Applied Storytelling at First Person Arts, both here in Philly. A theater performer, a talented improviser to boot. Content warning here for you, we talk about the death of his father, and we talk a lot about the impact of COVID on live theater.
Storytelling and Social Media
00:01:49
Speaker
So viewer and listener discretion advised. We go on to talk about storytelling, the life skills that people can learn from studying theater and especially improv, the damage to human interaction caused by social media and some of the silver linings and a little bit about bereavement too.
00:02:11
Speaker
This was such an incredible privilege. In spite of all of the craziness that was happening during the lockdowns and COVID, please enjoy my chat to Neil.
Personal Insights and Anecdotes
00:02:25
Speaker
I love spinny chairs, number one, because you can just sort of lean right back, and I'm plugged in right now, so I can't, and I'm like, I'm on wired headphones, but I love the Wii. How can you not love the Wii? But you wish the spinny chairs could read your mind as to whether or not this was a good time to be spinable or not? Yes.
00:02:42
Speaker
Yes, there's a part of my body. I'm a fidgeter. I'm recently working on ADHD treatments, but I don't think there's ever a time where my body doesn't want to fidget or at least be moving something.
00:02:57
Speaker
Yeah, it's very challenging for many people. There's something unnatural about sitting rock still in a desk chair. I don't think we were meant for that. I don't know. I wasn't. My body was built for nachos. What is the ideal flavor and topping combination for nachos?
00:03:19
Speaker
Oh, I didn't think this question was going in that direction, but I'm glad it did. Some, some carnitas, some sour cream, a good blend of cheese. That's like the consistency is so tricky because you don't want it to be a gooey, gooey, gooey yellow bowling alley nacho cheese, but you don't want it to be totally like a block of cheddar straight from the fridge. So something melty that has a little stretch, a little pull to it, some diced jalapenos. Uh, we were doing, we were doing sheet pan nachos like once a, once a week is dinner a couple of months ago.
00:03:48
Speaker
By the way, this is going to be 90 minutes about nacho content. It might be internet, which I would personally be delighted because this is important. So here's a sidebar about that. Okay. So I lived in the Netherlands for three years in my late 20s. Cool. And at various bars, you could order nachos, but you never received nachos in the way that you and I are talking about them. You received flavored tortilla chips
00:04:14
Speaker
effectively knock off Doritos with a sweet chili sauce, like a little dish on the side. That's what Dutch nachos were. And I would forget occasionally and then be like, Oh, I'm so disappointed that all I've received again is Doritos and dip.
00:04:27
Speaker
I know that you're not in your usual recording spot, but I need to call out something that's in your background. And I see what looks to me like a couple of Emmy Awards. Am I wrong? My sister-in-law is a documentary filmmaker, and she's worked on a number of things that have gone to TV and have been awarded for their presence there.
Digital Storytelling in COVID Era
00:04:47
Speaker
I've had the privilege of doing a story with first-person arts, and it was done during the pandemic. I recorded from home, from your point in doing a lot of that sort of administration and community-building work with first-person arts, what was the pivot to digital?
00:05:10
Speaker
I can start on the abstract level, which is that it seemed important to do that as quickly as we could and learn as much as we could as soon as things were shifting in March 2020. One of the things that we do is we capture the stories of our time and we thought,
00:05:30
Speaker
Now seems like a major moment in history. What are people experiencing? What have they already experienced that they're figuring out? What are they right in the middle of and see how long this takes, which I think we still don't have a great answer for.
00:05:45
Speaker
But we said, OK, we're used to doing in-person activities where people connect over telling their true stories. If we do that virtually now, what is gained? What is a new challenge? And what's just like in-person? There's some things that are going to be the same because it's people wherever you go. And one of the most lovely things we saw was the really now obvious, to many of us, notion that
00:06:09
Speaker
people could watch from wherever they were. It didn't matter if they were in California or Vermont or Florida. They could watch a show that was theoretically based in Philly because everything was on the internet. And that's a game changer for people who want to participate but might not be able to go somewhere because who's going to fly up from Florida for Tuesday night?
00:06:31
Speaker
drop their name in the bucket show in Philly and see what happens. But on the internet, nobody minds exactly where you are and it makes the experience all the richer. So that was really just a great thing to see was connecting with storytellers all over.
00:06:45
Speaker
the country and the world. And that was true from our production side, but also as a audience member, I was getting to see shows that I wouldn't necessarily have gotten to go to because they were in Boston or New York or the internet, but hesitant folks who said, this doesn't feel like what I want. This isn't what I come for. I want to be in a room with people. And they, you know, they know,
00:07:05
Speaker
They knew at the time we weren't doing that, and we've still barely done it since everything shifted. People said, this isn't what I'm used to. This isn't what I like out of it. I'm going to skip for now. And I think we saw some of that with audience members. And that's fine, right? Not everybody's going to be comfortable in every setting. And so we were doing the best we could. Right.
00:07:28
Speaker
You've talked so much in previous interviews about the work that storytelling does in building community and helping us know each other and helping us build human connection. I wonder if you can articulate what differences you saw as that was happening. The biggest one that I would say the biggest difference between virtual and in-person is it's a lot harder virtually to go up to somebody afterwards and say, I really liked your story. You can do it in a chat room, but that's not the same as
00:07:55
Speaker
you know it's a one-on-one conversation that probably other people aren't paying attention to. That was a big thing of when I first started going to Story Slams with first-person artists. It was very cool that they weren't talent that was hid behind the curtain during the show. We're like in the green room.
00:08:13
Speaker
They were just literally coming up from the audience, taking stage for a minute, sitting back down. That was one major difference. The flip side of it is for performers, and I think you and I have experienced this in like comedy spaces. As a performer, it's a lot harder to read the room. If you're sitting in your living room, standing in your basement, whatever it is, it's not the same as having, you know, a couple dozen human beings breathing the same air as you and
00:08:39
Speaker
making eye contact with you or looking down at their phones or walking out of the room entirely. You just don't know what that's like in a virtual setting. You don't know what the attention level is of your audience members. You have to trust that they're there and that's all you got because I think it raises interesting technological questions as well as
00:08:57
Speaker
societal ones about like, what does it mean to be performing with an audience? And what are people looking for literally looking for, but also listening for and also feeling for because something coming in over the internet is only going to do so much for a couple of your senses. And if the sound is attenuated or mixed differently, it's just, it's not going to
Building Community Online
00:09:16
Speaker
feel the same as a room.
00:09:16
Speaker
So I'm thinking about this project of building community and connection a bit. The thing that I'm wondering is, so we have this one particular
00:09:31
Speaker
format that we're used to in the context of live theater to build community. An audience of people gather around a performing cast or maybe two. There's the experience of walking into the theater, buying the ticket, waiting in line.
00:09:49
Speaker
sitting in the pre-show and the seats, letting the anticipation build, now maybe less because of phones. But there's a certain way, a certain set of mores that we've come to expect this being the way we've always done it. The way that it's worked, the way that we know how to build community. I wonder if we are missing out
00:10:18
Speaker
on the possibility of whatever community could be being built on the internet by trying to approximate as closely as possible the feel of an in-person theater, but for virtual, you know? I know exactly what you mean. I think the simple answer is yes, because the internet
00:10:43
Speaker
just has different possibilities. And so if you create the work and the experience for what the platform is capable of, then you're designing it right. If you're starting from the viewpoint of, oh, we're replicating a live experience, an in-person experience on the internet. No, you're not replicating it.
00:11:01
Speaker
you know that you're creating a feature reduced version of it. So why not kind of like build up rather than like, okay, we're aiming for hitting all these points, but we're just gonna miss out on a couple. We both work in entrepreneurial spaces, in entrepreneurial energies. One of the things that we always talk about in those spaces is that
00:11:24
Speaker
data and pivoting is not a thing to be afraid of, but it's a natural progression of energy in following where our clients, where our customers, where the people that we serve, what they need, what they want.
Storyteller's Responsibility and Trust
00:11:43
Speaker
I hold that intention with the Steve Jobs model of that his whole thing was to just tell people what they should want.
00:11:50
Speaker
I wonder when we think of like the work of storytelling as perhaps like the the overture for a relationship the the service on offer if the intended outcome is human connection what's the right balance between the the storyteller and the organization behind it
00:12:16
Speaker
creating the stage and setting the expectation for the audience and being present to what the audience needs in order to connect. Yeah. Yeah. This is a great question that I haven't thought about this way. So I'm just going to start riffing and see where I end up. And I think it's start with the audience. You were saying something about
00:12:39
Speaker
kind of following the data and not being afraid of it. And I think that was a big lesson for a lot of folks in 2020, 2021 was the audience's expectations changed every couple weeks to months. And so if you'd been producing something in kind of early 2020, the same thing might not work six months later for all sorts of reasons.
00:13:00
Speaker
Right? New technologies develop, people get tired, people are looking for other things. The whole nature of the health situation is different. You know, the weather is a factor in a way that it wasn't before. I think you just have to say like, okay, what is the audience looking for? Like, how do they want to consume this? And there's, I think, easy ways to carve that up and then more challenging ones. What, how do they want to consume it? And what are they actually looking for? Are they looking to interact with storytellers or are they just looking to hear those stories and they don't actually mind if there's no interaction?
00:13:26
Speaker
um and or if I hear hang on okay it's but then it's not also just not just the audience to the story connection it's not just the audience to the storyteller connection it's also audience to audience connection yes yes this is an interesting it feel it almost feels like a puzzle to me
00:13:44
Speaker
you know? And I don't know if that's the right language to use to talk about a human relationship and human connection, but I hear you identifying at least that piece about the audience. What I think I hear is that there's still this sense of being committed
00:14:09
Speaker
to hearing the audience and being mindful of what they need while using different tools to accomplish that end. Is that maybe fair to say? Yeah, that's a great way of thinking about it, that there's the different tools that are possible and that it's not just that there's one platform equals one tool, that a given platform has a particular set of tools with some tweaks on them.
00:14:36
Speaker
And then another platform has another one and it's what's the best combination for what the audience is looking for and what the, in a way, what the organization and storytellers can support and play along with easily. So what do you think the work, what is the responsibility, the, perhaps you might use the word obligation, of the storyteller in this context?
00:15:03
Speaker
How do we think the storyteller needs to acknowledge or not the challenges the audience is facing
00:15:18
Speaker
in perceiving the story.
Adapting Traditional Formats to Modern Platforms
00:15:21
Speaker
We've got a couple abstract nouns to toss your way. One is trust, and I have to trust that the audience is literally still sitting there. Another is patience, and then the big one for me, which is a word I've been throwing around a lot recently, but I also don't know how I define it, is grace. Maybe you can define that for me, but it
00:15:39
Speaker
I feel like it's grace around exactly those things. Trust that the audience is there in their best versions of themselves and doing the best that they can. And that if a motorcycle goes by or somebody sneezes or
00:15:57
Speaker
yeah somebody types in zoom oh i missed that the first minute what's going on but that's what live shows are yeah so i think you're you're the theologian here what do i know i wish i knew so much about i wish i knew more about polytheism and and those sorts of traditions and cultures but admittedly i don't like i'm i'm very i can barely call myself an expert in
00:16:19
Speaker
in the Abrahamic faiths broadly, I have a reasonably firm grasp of like liturgical, Anglican liturgical theology. And since we're on Jeopardy, Amodio, are you a Jeopardy enthusiast? Was Jeopardy ever a cornerstone of like your media consumption?
00:16:38
Speaker
That's a good question. I would say there have been phases where I've watched daily for weeks or months, and then I'll just not watch for a year or so. I enjoy it. I've always enjoyed trivia, and I've taken the online screening test to see if I can do the big test, but never quite gotten that far. I like to play it long at home and see what I actually know.
00:16:59
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I noticed that Jeopardy is trying to get into the TikTok sort of sphere. I personally have not tried to get into the TikTok sphere. To use a biblical turn of phrase, this feels like old wine and new wineskins. Is there a place for like, and dinosaur is not a fair word to say because it's more revered than that. Is there a word for like a legacy program like Jeopardy?
Sponsorship and Promotions
00:17:26
Speaker
to adapt to a platform like TikTok or lest we all forget, rest in peace, Vine. Right. I think so. I think particularly something like Jeopardy where it is fast paced and bite sized already in a lot of ways. And I think there's something to tie in there of using video content that
00:17:49
Speaker
Presumably, they're filming more than a few minutes a year out in the field. How do they bring that to TikTok? Or how do they encourage people to play along at home? Or just think about how would you play on Jeopardy? I don't know. I've only dabbled in exploring TikTok. I see what gets reposted elsewhere. I see what my friends send me. But I do think it matters, again, what you're starting with on Jeopardy.
00:18:18
Speaker
How long does it answer in question last, like seven seconds? It's perfect. Yeah. I didn't even think about it that way, but it's, it's very bite-sized, quick-paced, easily consumable content.
00:18:36
Speaker
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Speaker
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Speaker
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Speaker
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Adapting Improv to Virtual Spaces
00:19:55
Speaker
Now back to the program.
00:19:57
Speaker
I want to pivot a little bit. One of the things as we were sort of like working through the lag and working through our technical challenges that you remind me of was that you perform regularly with an improv company here in Philadelphia called The N Crowd.
00:20:16
Speaker
from both running their shows, the end crowd has probably found a format that seems to work. What do you think about the experience of another art form that we are transitioning digitally? I think the short form games that the end crowd does have a nice spectrum of how well they work virtually.
00:20:41
Speaker
Some are clear, this isn't going to fly because we need our arms to be touching each other or something like that, right? Some things are, Hey, this is going to work with some modifications, which are great because, you know, there's like, like nachos, there's no right way to do a lot of short form improv games. It's another one to write down folks. Right.
00:21:03
Speaker
They're already adapted. They're already a bit like folklore in that. Like, yeah, there's probably a core to it, but people do it slightly different ways for all sorts of different reasons. And, you know, how much of a difference does it make to what makes the game fun and or funny if I'm ducking off screen as opposed to running off stage, right?
00:21:24
Speaker
It changes the physical version for me because I don't have to, you know, at a great time for my brain, apparently. And then there's the stuff that's basically designed for internet interactions already, either because we've created them once we started playing with this, or they feel so clearly like, oh,
00:21:41
Speaker
you don't need to be in the same physical space. It's all word-based already or physically just can be pretty agnostic as to where you are. So yeah, I think that's the thrust of why the end crowd has adapted so well to virtual shows and a lot of other specifically improv forms have not as well.
00:22:02
Speaker
I would love to know a little bit more about the journey that it takes to becoming the Neil Varden of 2022. What? Gosh, we're recording in early August. Tell me about the journey that brought you to where you are in this multi-hyphenate of speaking and entrepreneurship and storytelling and improv.
00:22:29
Speaker
Yeah, I'm glad that you have four hours of tape available to us because that's what it's going to take me to get through it all. Listener, buckle up. Now, I love how you put this together. A lot of times what I point to is a time in my life about 10 years ago.
00:22:44
Speaker
I'm academically trained as a linguist doing science experiments on language and how adult humans use it, uh, specifically spoken words. And I'd known for years and years that I found words very interesting. I liked science generally, and it wasn't until, you know, I was kind of headed off to college that I realized, Oh, you could do, you could.
00:23:05
Speaker
study words through a scientific lens. Fantastic. So that kind of propelled me through college and grad school. And then I had a research focused postdoc and found some of the environment interesting, but it wasn't quite what I needed to thrive. And I started to wonder, well, what else am I going to do with my life? If this isn't it, things feel wrong here. But I was far from home. I was eating nachos in the Netherlands. It's actually a very good book title actually, now that I think about it.
00:23:35
Speaker
I just was trying to figure out like how do i square up what excites me intellectually what feels right to me kind of like in my heart and where i want myself to kind of make money but also have an impact on the world and i started thinking that i like being around.
00:23:50
Speaker
really clever people who are doing interesting things, talking about what they're up to. But I didn't want to be a researcher myself, I realized. And I didn't necessarily want to be a teacher in the way that a lot of people think about teaching, honestly, at any level. And so I kind of first step was, how do I apply what I know from linguistics and psychology to the challenges of technical communication kind of within a field at this very, very high level. So that was like a first pass at
00:24:16
Speaker
it was how do we design PowerPoint slides? How do we think about talks? You know, I was working around linguists and memory experts and I didn't understand what they were saying and I couldn't remember what they said and it just seemed all horribly ironic that this was the situation that we were in. And to be clear, right, some of this was my own bias and my own
00:24:34
Speaker
emotional state of being frustrated with myself and kind of the situations I placed myself in. But at the core, there was still the challenge that within the field, you know, communication wasn't what it could be. And then the next kind of component to it was I'd started listening to a lot of storytelling podcasts and thinking about these performances and how much I was getting out of them emotionally and factually sometimes and just hearing about another person's life.
00:25:00
Speaker
I thought these are so cool. This is like a mini theater show. I had done theater in high school and college and never planned to make a career of it really. But this was the first time that I thought maybe there's something about bringing the performing arts to
00:25:16
Speaker
these scientific settings. And so I started to be curious about how do I train in storytelling? What stories do I need to listen to? Who's thinking about this? Who else is bringing stories to science and vice versa? And that introduced me to a whole set of fascinating individuals and organizations. And then the last part was my brother, who's the trained scientist himself,
00:25:38
Speaker
He took a class on improv for scientists, and he fell in love with improv. We'd both seen it before, you know, college shows and, you know, a bar here and there. And we liked, I mean, we'd always liked comedy and we realized like, oh, this is an art form that we're both really curious about.
00:25:54
Speaker
for our artistic growth, personal growth, professional growth, and spreading this as a concept of like, how do you create something brand new with people in a different setting, whether you know them already or you've been playing or working with them for years? And so that led me to doing improv, learning it, and kind of getting involved in a number of ways. And so I left academia, I started doing some consulting, started doing some, taking some classes in all sorts of things.
00:26:19
Speaker
and folks at First Person Arts, people around Philly, met people kind of across the country who are involved in the arts and the application of the arts to group communication and individual science communication. And I just started putting together kind of a little stew of my interests and building
00:26:38
Speaker
I call it kind of like a 90 degree turn of a career because I wasn't trying to leave science behind completely. I was just trying a new approach to being in technical settings. So fast forward to now, and I'm the director of applied storytelling at First Person Arts, performer, a writer. And yeah, I don't...
00:26:56
Speaker
practice science anymore, but I like being around smart people of all sorts of different fields and how they are passionate about what they're working on.
Storytelling as a Bridge for Connection
00:27:05
Speaker
It's a lot closer to where I think I want to be than where I was 10 years ago.
00:27:11
Speaker
Do you have a sense of where you want to be? Like what the goal is? In many ways, no, not as much anymore. The blend that I was trying to bring and accomplish. I don't think I have a particular goal of a title or position at this moment. I keep getting to do a lot of it and that's really great. Perfect.
00:27:29
Speaker
And we were talking about some of the format of what we talk through and talking about the sort of ideas and people and places and experiences in the past that make us who we are. There are a lot of people, and I mentioned this to you, who talk about
00:27:46
Speaker
like core principles and beliefs, values that help them sort of help define who they are. For many people, myself included, we like to talk a lot about, for others, the work of finding that sort of drive, mission, vision, the language of religion is helpful.
00:28:05
Speaker
The response that you gave me that I found to just be beautiful and fascinating that I would love to hear a little bit more about is that storytelling is my religion. Could you say more? Yeah, I'm glad you remembered what I said because I did not. You started down that path and I thought, oh goodness, what
00:28:24
Speaker
What did I spout at you? But what it is now is hearing other people's stories is understanding what other humans are doing on this planet and why they are the way they are and what they're trying to do. What do you think we gave us? Go ahead.
00:28:41
Speaker
for ourselves. When I listen to a story, when you, Neil Barton, listen to a story, what is there to gain in the action of the hearing? Perspective and appreciation, I hear you. Yeah, yeah. What do you think broadening it out a little bit?
00:28:59
Speaker
when we hear each other's stories, that we gain as a people, as a society, when we receive a gift like that. One phrasing that we use a lot at First Person Arts and I think is true more broadly is that you don't know somebody's story until they share it with you and that they choose to share it with you.
00:29:24
Speaker
Right. So as a people, we understand, Oh, right. This Dave has this experience fell off a bike. Somebody walked by and helped him up. Right. Yeah. You learn something about Dave and like one. Okay. Dave rides a bike. Sometimes Dave can maybe appreciate what strangers can do for you. Uh, maybe this explains why Dave is afraid of bikes now, but really it's that then the last part that I was getting at earlier is like.
00:29:50
Speaker
of all the stories that Dave has, this is the one that he chose to share today with you. What does that mean for us? Yeah. Yeah. One of the things, the more that I listen to what stories are being told, and I'm thinking specifically about current events at the moment, we're recording on the week of August the 8th on Friday the 12th, and there's a lot of
00:30:16
Speaker
conversation in the media right now about the FBI and the search of the former president's home in Florida. And one of the things that I'm very aware of is that a lot of the stories that we hear are not even the stories that we hear, the bits of story that we hear are not being told by the people whose stories they are.
00:30:42
Speaker
Like a news media tells the story of the FBI. The former president tells the story of what he sees the experience being. And that story changes from day to day, depending on any number of factors that I couldn't possibly begin to guess at. Thank heavens I am a theologian and not a psychic. That to me feels,
00:31:07
Speaker
because stories are not necessarily stories. Stories are not being told with integrity for the people and with care for the people who are part of them, I suspect.
00:31:24
Speaker
by the media, people like you and I, like what our responsibility in safeguarding the story is. Yeah. That's interesting because I feel, I don't want to say not a big responsibility, a very like local decentralized one. And what I'm thinking is, you know, encouraging other people with stories to share them however and wherever they can, because most people that I meet aren't going to get to have an editorial in
00:31:51
Speaker
The New York Times, right? They're not going to be an answer on Jeopardy, but they can tweet about their experience and use the platforms that exist that way. Yeah. There's a lot of different stages right now. And I mean stage and like the performance sense, not like the time sense.
00:32:08
Speaker
And some stages are very big and celebrated and others are very small and also celebrated. And then there's a lot of stuff in between and people are kind of paying attention to all of it for better and for worse. And I think that's, you know, what I'm safeguarding is that the people who want to share their stories, I want to help them know what platforms they can get to and that are beneficial for them and are the right fit for their audience, whatever that may be.
00:32:33
Speaker
Yeah. In this work... This feels... Go ahead. No, go ahead. I was going to say, this feels like the headiest conversation I've had in a while about the meaning of some of this stuff. So I really appreciate the opportunity to honestly process a lot of it out loud. It taps into a lot of things that I've been mulling over in much briefer conversations and that also I want to process in things like writing or just deeper explorations with myself.
00:33:01
Speaker
Well, I'm so grateful that this is a place where we can be working on it. Technical challenge is not withstanding. I mean, that of course means that we'll have to have you back for another taping at some point in addition to this one. I got more things to say, don't worry. Yeah.
00:33:20
Speaker
No, no, no, but so I want to one of the things that I think is really important is figuring out like how to just like take the next step, like it's it's hard to we're in a time of life of society where regardless of what you believe there are very few people that are happy with
00:33:39
Speaker
the direction that the world is going, at least in the US. I can't speak for communities that are culturally, economically, politically, deeply removed from a lot of Anglo-Western cultures. So I want to ask, what do you look to for hope?
00:34:06
Speaker
inspiration uplifting in moments like these. Oh, for so long and will continue to keep me in it, which is that I just get to meet people and hear their stories and everybody's very interesting. Yeah.
00:34:17
Speaker
As we were preparing for the podcast, there was a story that you told me, and you told me about the passing of your dad. And the phrase that you used to describe this experience was, it made you think about what it meant to tell stories, not only for the living, but the dead audience, the deceased audience. Can you unpack that for me a little?
00:34:44
Speaker
Yeah, a little bit. One of the things that I experienced right around the time that my father passed was those of us around him, physically, largely, sharing stories about him, memories, basically. And I was thinking about how, unless you're in very particular settings, by settings, I mean also community structures and families, that's not always
00:35:07
Speaker
done for the living. And looking back, and this is my, wearing my work hat now, but also my family member hat, like, oh, I wish I would have collected some of those because it was so lovely to hear those told that way at that time. And I like experienced the stories all together new, but like some, I mean, some of them were new stories, right? I heard from people he was friends with in the seventies and people that he worked with.
00:35:32
Speaker
who I didn't have a relationship with because they're his colleagues, not my friends. And just the packaging of it, right? It was a crash course in my dad's life, how honored I was and how special it felt to be able to have that with the time that we were in. That word of holy, that word choice, not just because I'm a theologian,
00:35:57
Speaker
But thinking about the word, the etiology of the word, meaning set apart. And I think, at least in my experience, religious traditions are really good at setting apart time. Time to focus on the divine, to focus on the holy, what is considered to be sacred. I wonder, dream with me for a second. What do you think our city would look like if more people took
00:36:27
Speaker
the time to set aside time for those beautiful, profound things. I think there would be, in a non-quantifiable way probably, a whole lot more empathy and some more connections across lines of all sorts, geographic, economic, racial, you name it.
00:36:45
Speaker
if people were able to hear each other's stories straight from the source and in a very kind of like nurtured environment, right? And a great question is what could those settings look like, right? I've met people through my professional life of various chapters of it from all across the city and all sorts of different experiences that they've had. But many people live in a bubble and are comfortable in that bubble. And that shifts what they understand
00:37:15
Speaker
what Philadelphia is. I was talking with a friend the other day who she's used to certain accesses and privileges and took a tour of Philadelphia that really challenged her notions of what it means to be a Philadelphian and love this city and be a part of it. And it was like,
00:37:33
Speaker
what I said to her was, and I say this all the time, is there are so many Philadelphias. People love to say, oh, that's Philly. And I'm like, well, that's maybe a common thread for your Philly, but there's a lot of other Philadelphias out there. And I know that this also isn't unique to Philly, right? This is true of Chicago. This is true of the small town that I grew up in, but there's various aspects to it. And it's when you get to
00:37:54
Speaker
meet somebody brand new who seems to have very little in common with you, you get a different perspective for what you may think about that individual or their neighborhood or where they work, whatever it is.
Cultivating Curiosity in a Connected World
00:38:07
Speaker
And that's why I'm in this work. Because like I said, everybody's interesting to me. I know who I am. I've done a lot of diving on that.
00:38:16
Speaker
tackled my own foibles and celebrated some things I can celebrate, but I've only lived my life. There's seven billion other people out there who haven't been nail-barred hand, and that's very, very cool to me because I want to hear what all those people have been doing their time.
00:38:30
Speaker
Neil, there's just so much beautiful curiosity in that, right? I wonder what does it take to foster and cultivate curiosity rather than the overwhelm that we see so often in a world that is so oversaturated with content?
00:38:58
Speaker
Yeah, I think one of the things, a starting place for this is, and this is like at an individual level, right? If I asked you, what are you curious about?
00:39:07
Speaker
could probably list me a bunch of things. We've known each other for what, five years now or so. I have an idea of some of the things that you're intellectually curious about and so forth. But then I think what is really necessary is a step beyond that to be like, what do you think you could be curious about that you don't know that you're curious about? Where do you have kind of a gap in your understanding of the world?
00:39:29
Speaker
because of what you've decided is important or what messaging has been provided to you about, oh, you should be curious about the stock market. What about investments that aren't the stock market or just don't fit your Western ideals of what finance is? How do you encourage that for people without the overwhelm? And I think it's out there. I think
00:39:51
Speaker
some people start to go down this path. And I think this is one thing that the internet actually has been pretty good for, EA internet, which is expanding people's horizons about things that they just wouldn't otherwise know where to start accessing them. And this, to make it concrete, I'm thinking of, you know, a listicle of foreign words for concepts that you didn't know how to name, because there's not like, you know, a single word in English that means that it's, you know, it's translated as this whole complicated phrase.
00:40:17
Speaker
right? Something like that. Or like Wikipedia articles, right? You find yourself, I find myself looking at Wikipedia lists of defunct Swedish musical groups. Would I have said I'm curious about it? No. However, have I gotten myself to a place where I'm like, dude, let me see how many I can find. There are just so many possibilities and go back to my seven billion thing, seven billion people on this planet who I
00:40:42
Speaker
haven't been. What do they know that I don't? I'm trying to get it where I can. And I think the more that people do that, the better. And last soapbox point for for now, I think that shows up in very exciting spaces for some people who then can be very quick to forget it, right? Because it's, it's a cute Instagram account. It's a fun human interest story somewhere. But then they're like, Oh, okay, that's it.
00:41:09
Speaker
But if they don't allow themselves the time to process, okay, what does it mean that I just heard the story? Or how else can I access stories of people who've had similar experiences that I don't have a frame of reference for because of my upbringing or whatever? I think there's that spark, but there's not always enough fuel for it.
00:41:26
Speaker
What are the things that sort of give you that fuel? I'm breathing. Okay. Besides Swedish nachos. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It shows up in so many different ways. And I'll give you a concrete example of something that came up recently for me, right? So my wife and I went to Alaska. We had some time on our own exploring, reading up with some friends, one of whom grew up in Alaska and has had a fantastic resume of jobs that didn't exist in Alaska.
00:41:55
Speaker
Yeah. And it opened my literal eyes, but also mind to how things function when really it was like when you're in the United States, but not on the East Coast, right? How does it work when you're, you know, of, of the same country, but with different possibilities in your geographic locale, where's their overlap, where is there such a Gulf? And yeah, and I also say this as like, going back to my thing about like people who experienced different Philadelphias, right?
00:42:25
Speaker
this works on all these different scales different philadelphia's different health care different experience of improv and stories and most importantly different iterations of nacho there it is i so appreciate the time that we've had to to linger on some of these big ideas i've got just one question remaining for you and that is
00:42:48
Speaker
What do you want the world to look like when you're done with it? More connected. Yeah. Yeah. Just I want humans to feel more connected to each other.
Conclusion and Audience Engagement
00:42:56
Speaker
My guest has been Neil Barton. He is one of the most phenomenal storytellers, improvisers that I know he performs regularly with the in crowd and with first person arts. And thank you so much for being with us on Uncommon Good today.
00:43:19
Speaker
My thanks to my guest, Neil Bardin. You can sign up for his e-newsletter, check out the Broad Street Review, and check out First Person Arts, and get involved with all three at the links in the episode notes.
00:43:33
Speaker
Thank you so much for tuning in to Uncommon Good with Paulie Rees. This program is produced in southwest Philadelphia in the unceded neighborhood of the Black Bottom community and on the ancestral land of the Lenape nation who remain here in the era of the Fourth Crow and fight for official recognition by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to this day.
00:43:50
Speaker
You can find out more about the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania and how you can support the revitalization of their culture by going to Lenape-Nation.org. Our associate producers are Willa Jaffe and Kia Watkins. If you enjoyed listening to the show, please support us by leaving us a five-star review and a comment and subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts. It really does help people find us.
00:44:11
Speaker
Uncommon Good is also available on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram at UncommonGoodPod. Follow us there for closed caption video content and more goodies. We love questions and feedback. You can send us a DM on social media or an email at uncommongoodpod at gmail.com. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, wishing you every Uncommon Good to do your Uncommon Good to be the Uncommon Good.