I'm playing my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work.

Okay, so occasionally in my podcast, I do this thing where I talk about some life experience that I have,

and I talk about the lessons I learned from that life experience that make me a better designer.

So today, I'm going to talk about my time doing stand-up comedy. So the idea here,

I believe holistically that everything is connected and that what makes you good in one field

helps you in another field. And so I'm going to talk about my time doing stand-up and then I'm

going to explain the lessons I learned from stand-up and how it applies to how I do magic design,

in game design in general. Okay, so a little bit of history. So I went to college at Boston University,

in Boston, obviously, and my sophomore year, I started an improvisational comedy troupe called

Uncontrolled Substance. My junior year, every year we had auditions and we'd get new people in to the troop.

And my junior year, we got someone in the troop named Stuart Winter.

And Stuart was a comedian.

Stewart actually did stand-up comedy.

And so he really encouraged the group to try our hand at stand-up comedy.

We were doing improvisational comedy.

And he felt like it was just a real good tool to sort of work on presentation and some writing,

even though we were improvisational.

So anyway, a bunch of us went with Stewart one night to a local comedy club.

There actually was a comedy club on the edge of the college.

And so we went there, and we all did stand-up.

So the way stand-up works is when you're first starting out, you do open mic night.

So usually open mic nights are like on Mondays or something.

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