We talk a lot about agility on this show, and today, we’re going to talk about how lessons of agility can come from unexpected places – like the set of Seinfeld – where – for those superfans like me – our guest played Alec Berg – which should be said in more of a Jon Houseman manner, and while guest starring there (plus other shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, Tracey Takes On…, and more), took some lessons from the value of collaboration and how great ideas can come from anyone, anywhere.
Joining me today is Mark DeCarlo, an Emmy Award-winning comedian, TV host, and speaker who brings a fresh and entertaining perspective on navigating change, AI, and work-life balance. Mark has developed five simple strategies to help people embrace chaos, overcome fear of AI, and actually be happier while working smarter.
ABOUT MARK DECARLO
Improv actor/host, screenwriter and best-selling author Mark DeCarlo, lives a dual life: as an Emmy Award-winning TV host…and a cartoon.
As host/ringleader on 1000+ episodes of hit TV; Studs, X Show, Taste of America, and current series; World’s Funniest Videos Top 10 and ABC’s Windy City LIVE, Mark’s improvisational skills – honed as a Founding member of The Second City Hollywood – have earned him three Emmy Awards for On Camera Host.
From pissing-off pal Steve Carell, to convincing a random tourist to pose as a fashion designer during a live remote, Mark’s interviews of the famous/infamous celebrate the odd and eccentric. His characters on “Curb your Enthusiasm,” “Tracey Takes On…,” “Seinfeld” and 2020’s “Ballbuster,” zig where most zag. That’s Mark, the human.
Mark, the cartoon, came within a Shrek of winning an Oscar starring as Hugh Neutron in Best Animated Picture nominee “Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius,” and has built a career playing energetic, off-beat and edgy cartoons characters on many series, including; Family Guy, Barnyard, Planet Sheen, Johnny Bravo and Handy Manny. He stars in Steve Oedekirk’s series of Thumb comedies from Thumbtanic to BatThumb, and will reprise his iconic role of Black Helmet Man in the upcoming 2022 release of ThumbWars IX.
RESOURCES
Mark DeCarlo: https://www.MarkDeCarlo.com
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom (00:10)
We talk a lot about agility on this show and mostly involved in business, of course, but today we’re going to do that. But my guest is someone that has some answers about how we can be more agile in our worlds that come from unexpected places like the set of Seinfeld, where for those super fans like myself out there, he played Alec Berg, which should be set in more of a John Houseman manner. Some of you will get that, some of you will not.
And while guest starring there, he took some lessons from the value of collaboration and how great ideas can come from anyone and anywhere. Joining me today is Mark DeCarlo, an Emmy award winning comedian, TV host and speaker who brings a fresh and entertaining perspective on navigating change, AI and work life balance. He’s developed five simple strategies to help people embrace chaos, overcome fear of AI and actually be happier while working smarter. Mark, welcome to the show.
Mark DeCarlo (02:03)
Good to be here, Greg. Thanks for having me on.
Greg Kihlstrom (02:06)
Yeah, absolutely. Looking forward to talking about this. Before we dive in though, why don’t you give us a little more about your background and what kind of led up to developing the five strategies.
Mark DeCarlo (02:17)
Well, started, up in Chicago. My best friends, older siblings were on stage at Second City. So we would sneak in at the age of, I don’t know, 14 and watch the show. And when I realized that you could get paid for going on stage and improvising for an hour and a half every night, that was pretty much it for me. So I started doing comedy. came to UCLA, did more comedy there.
I won a bunch of money on a game show, so I didn’t have to get a job right away and it allowed me to focus on show business. And I just started doing commercials, ⁓ hosted some shows for Fox and FX and Hallmark and did a real fun series on the travel channel called Taste of America, where I got to go to 500 different cities and meet mom and pops and business entrepreneurs, small business entrepreneurs. And I’ve also had a career as a cartoon voice.
I’m Hugh Neutron on Jimmy Neutron. I’ve been on Family Guy and Rugrats, a bunch of different cartoons. And I enjoy comedy and I like your podcast because agility is basically a business term for improvisation. Right, everyone in business is trying to get an advantage or move their product forward or move their ideas forward. And sometimes
You can’t go in the door. You got to go in through the window or you got to dig a hole and come up through the basement. And the philosophy of improvisation is a win win for everybody involved. So I think that’s really my only skill. I don’t know. Well, it does generalize to a lot of other things outside of show business business specifically. But like if.
If I was one of the seven people on Gilligan’s Island, I would not be as utilitarian as the professor or as stupid as Gilligan. I’d be in the middle somewhere. Yeah, right.
Greg Kihlstrom (04:18)
That’s a good place to be, right?
Well, to me, sorry to typecast you. You will always be Alec Berg from Seinfeld. it’s a huge fan of that show. But yeah, definitely. You you’ve done you’ve done a lot of great work and and it’s interesting to see how you have parlayed that into the business world as well.
Mark DeCarlo (04:38)
Let me tell you something about that week on Seinfeld. mean, I’ve been on a lot of different sitcoms, television shows. And when you’re a guest star, typically you kind of go in, you keep your head down, you learn your lines, you do them. You know, maybe the regular cast sidles up to you and says, hi, blah, blah, blah. But you’re definitely lower on the totem pole than the stars of the show. Not so on Seinfeld. They welcomed me immediately.
And instead of going back to my trailer between my scenes, I was only in, I don’t know, three or four scenes. I sat on set and I watched their process for the entire week. And unlike any other show I’ve ever been on, except for maybe Curb, when the stars weren’t in a scene, they were sitting off stage during rehearsal and coaching, saying, wait, well, know what? Why don’t you shouldn’t have that line? Give that line to Julia, give the ball to him. And they were all very…
focused on the group endeavor that they were engaged in as opposed to a lot of shows like if I’m not in the scene I’m in my trailer on my phone doing stuff and I think the the proof is in the pudding, know the show was Spectacular for its entire run. It was smart. It was clever. The acting was great The writing was great Jerry and Larry were the first guys there every day the last guys to leave every night they worked really hard, which is why the show is still good, you know, 30 years after it premiered. When I was in school at UCLA, I got the chance to meet Carl Reiner, one of my comedy, clearly one of the comedy gods of the 20th century and a personal hero of mine. A friend of mine had written a Dick Van Dyke show book and I was at the launch party and the entire cast was there. And as the party was winding down, Carl was still there. So I screwed up the nerve to go talk to him.
And I said, you know, I’m an aspiring writer. How did you come up with this Dick Van Dyke show idea? And he said, sat, because he had written on my show of shows, The Sid Caesar Show for years, which was a live, Saturday night live-ish type of show, sketch, comedy, music. And it was the top show at the time. When that show ended, he said he went, at home and said, all right, what do I know that nobody else knows about?
And he was like, I have writing on a comedy show. So he wrote what he knew and he wrote 13 complete episodes before he showed it to CBS, which is unheard of. And maintain the quality of that show for six seasons. There’s no slang in it. There’s no numbers, like $5 for nothing like that. So the show in my opinion is still hilariously funny 60 years later. And that kind of attention to detail
I think is not only important in entertainment, but it’s important in business. And I think that’s where the energy that fuels agility comes from. Just paying attention and knowing what’s important and what isn’t important in whatever your endeavor is, you know?
Greg Kihlstrom (07:52)
Yeah, I love that. And yeah, I’ve no I had not heard that about the the Seinfeld process. But again, to your point makes a lot of sense when you when you see it. And, know, I certainly think it’s it’s it’s timeless ⁓ as well. So let’s let’s talk about, you know, let’s parlay this a little bit into into business and stuff. So, you know, you’ve been able to take comedy and just that that agility from improv and things and you know, apply it to business settings. And, you know, one of the things I want to touch on at least is, you know, developing the five strategies that you’ve developed. Do you want to talk a little bit about that process?
Mark DeCarlo (08:30)
Yeah, I think wellness is a big buzzword now in business because businesses are finally understanding that if employees are miserable or not feeling taken care of, the production suffers, the output suffers, the quality of the work suffers, whereas people that feel valued and feel included in whatever process is going on produce better work.
I don’t know where you live. live in California and I go to Costco all the time. I’ll give you a million dollars if you can find me a Costco employee who doesn’t love their job. Everybody that works at Costco loves their job. People at Trader Joe’s love their job. Why? What is it about the work? I would propose it has less to do with the work.
Greg Kihlstrom (09:11)
Good point.
Mark DeCarlo (09:27)
than how the employees are made to feel that they’re an integral part of the machine that serves the customer and they’re listened to. And when they have an idea, they can talk to the boss. They don’t have to drop it in a box where it dies. And that kind of investment from the C-suite on down empowers people. And what I learned at Second City, we would do a show like a half scripted, half improv show. And then the third act would be okay.
We’re going to take a 10 minute break. Before we do, we’re going to take a bunch of suggestions. Then we’re going to come out in 10 minutes and we’re going to do another 30 minutes of comedy based on your suggestions. So we would get those, those suggestions. We’d go backstage and there’d be six or seven of us sitting around a table and we would have to take all that information and figure out ways to turn it into scenes. And that process requires a lot of communal thinking and working and not trapping on other people. Can I say shitting on this podcast or is this a-
Greg Kihlstrom (10:32)
So yeah, yeah, okay. think you can yeah
Mark DeCarlo (10:35)
You know, if you know anything about improv, the rule one is yes and. If someone says something stupid, you don’t say no, you say, well, we could do part of that. And what if we added this to it? And what that does is first of all, opens a corridor of information flow from the lowest person on the totem pole to the top. You know, sometimes the guys in the loading dock will have an idea that the C-suite would never conceive of because they’re not doing the work.
You know, they’re not, yeah, we’re wasting all these packing peanuts when we could do this instead and we’d save X amount of money. And oftentimes people lower on the totem pole are frightened to speak up because they’re going to be laughed at or marginalized or made fun of or just ignored. And when, you know, when you raise your hand four or five times with what you think is a great idea and people basically say, you know what, sit down, the grownups are talking. All right, I’m going to stop volunteering my information and
At some point you may lose out on a great idea I had because I was afraid. So these five simple strategies, I’ve kind of pieced together from my time in entertainment, but they generalize to business, right? The first thing is empower people and encourage creativity and communication is the key to everything.
Right? You need to have ⁓ a system where information can flow both ways and make people feel… I mean, it’s so simple. You make people feel important. Right. And you know what? If they’re not important, they shouldn’t be working for you.
Greg Kihlstrom (12:15)
Right, right. Why? Yeah. Why are you hiring people and asking them for things, but yet not listening to them? I mean, to your point, it’s it’s maybe once or twice you can get away with that as a leader. But yeah, people start shutting up. And I think to some leaders, maybe that at first that feels good of like, oh, OK, now I can just like get my way or whatever. But like, that’s not a sustainable.
way of doing like pretty soon, like a leader only knows what they know. Right. So like pretty soon, the ideas run out and then who you’re to turn to. You turn to a bunch of people that have been told to be quiet. Right.
Mark DeCarlo (12:53)
Right. this, and going back to the Seinfeld analogy, had Larry and Jerry were absolutely the unquestioned top of the food chain there. They did all the writing, they did all the conceptualizing, but they empowered their cast, the craft service people. Literally everybody on that set in the week that I was there felt free to speak up with an idea about what was happening on the set. And they were listened to.
And what does the guy that makes pancakes know about comedy? Well, you know what? He’s been watching your show for four years. And he knows that, you know what? George would never say that. Kramer would say it, but George wouldn’t say it. Just my opinion, Larry, you do it with what you want. it fosters a collegial, we’re all in this together mentality, and it’s better for the people at the top. I wrote and produced a
animated reboot of Pinocchio that’s coming out later this summer. And in animation, now the current, the way people produce it is they’ll write the script and then they’ll get one person in the booth and that person will read with the director. In my opinion, that’s crazy. What we did is we had the whole cast together in the studio at the same time, reading the scenes together. So we would read it once as written that I wrote, right?
And then the next pass, was like, all right, this is a crazy pass. Do whatever you want. So I had some of the funniest people in cartoons improvising and adding material based on how they’ve developed the character in their mind. And some of it was better. I mean, we used 25 % of the movie, 20, 25 % of the movie was stuff that was improvised in the room that was hilarious, that wasn’t on the page. And there are, you know, some
writers or producers who are like, hey, I didn’t write it. I don’t want to hear it. You’re paying those people for the day. Squeeze everything you can out of them. And if you’re picking, if you’re picking the right people, people with talent, you’re an idiot if you don’t use it. Because like you said, leaders only know what they know. You can’t know everything. a room of 10 funny people is going to be funnier than a room of one funny guy.
Greg Kihlstrom (15:20)
And another thing based on the strategies that just reading through, I liked and at least resonated with me was this idea of embracing chaos instead of avoiding it. So anybody that keeps up with anything these days knows that there’s a lot of chaos and I don’t want to go there. I know in my career, I’ve started and sold a couple of companies. I’ve been through the ups and downs and the economic downturns and this and that, people coming, people going.
instead of thinking or maybe diluting yourself into thinking, OK, we’re going to hit this stage and then we’re going to everything is going to be smooth. Like, that’s not a thing. mean, anyone that’s done this long enough, they they know that. But I think we keep maybe convincing ourselves that maybe there is this point of stasis instead of, you know, talk a little bit about what does it mean to embrace chaos without being chaotic, I guess.
Mark DeCarlo (16:16)
Well, that’s a good question. mean, let’s talk physics, right? There is no stasis. You’re born, your body grows, then it starts to decay and then you die. Nothing is the same. Your body is different today than it was yesterday. You you’ve lost 4 % of your cell, whatever the number is. people seek the comfort of stasis. You know, they want to get everything straight. They want to clean the house and then don’t walk on the floor. I just clean the house. Right, right.
But that change is the essence of life. Time passing is change. So to pretend that every time something happens that you didn’t prepare for, it’s a catastrophe. First of all, you’re living your life on adrenaline and you’re you’re freaked out and stressed and you’re not doing your best work when you’re freaked out and stressed. Yeah, good point. Right. if you expect things to go to shit, then when it happens, you’re prepared and you again, you’re agile.
All right, hey, everything is great today, but if something goes sideways, I’ve already got plan A, plan B and plan C in my head on how to deal with it. So by expecting it, you take the corrosive power away from it. And because most people can’t embrace it, you’re giving yourself a leg up. Does that make sense?
Greg Kihlstrom (17:39)
Yeah, yeah, no, I like that. Yeah, I mean, it’s you know, part of it is just being realistic and accepting things as they are. But also it’s it’s the idea of once you get past the it’s scary or it’s you know, I wish it were, know, whatever you wish it were. Then you can actually start. mean, maybe this kind of goes back to the other thread, but then you can actually start getting creative with it and you can start embracing the parts that are opportunities instead of, you know, there’s there’s opportunity and chaos, right?
Mark DeCarlo (18:13)
That is the key takeaway, I think. When things break down, it’s like ⁓ an offensive line in football, right? They make a little hole and the running back can get through it. That’s chaos down there. And for a moment that chaos separates and that person gets through. Chaos is an opportunity to innovate. The whole core of business success is innovation.
and seeing something that your competitors don’t see, acting on it and then executing it and then sustaining it. And the sustaining it, what you do today is different than what you’re gonna do two years from now just because everything changes all the time. And not only do I think it’s important to embrace chaos, but I think the most important thing people need to learn is that you are responsible for your own personal happiness.
You are your brand, right? And if you’re miserable, it’s your fault. the way I start people off is let’s sit down and talk about when was the last time you were really happy? When was that? What were you doing? What about the time before that? And if you realize, geez, I’m only happy when I’m painting or when I’m mowing the lawn or when I’m doing this, but my work life is something completely different, you’re
you’re making yourself miserable every day. you know, everybody dies. I don’t see any reason to purposefully spend a day in misery when you have other options. Now, you know, as you get older, it’s harder because you have wife and kids and you can’t just quit your job and, you know, go sit on a mountain top. But in my opinion, there’s nothing more important than being happy every day, because when you’re happy,
Everything else is fine. You know, in show business, I audition 20 times before I get a voiceover job or an acting job. And if I let the other 19 times bug me or depress me, I’d be miserable. You know, my goal is every time I audition, I do the best I can. And I know if that was, you know, if I do 95 % or better, I’m happy. And then whatever happens, happens. And maintaining that happiness is…a lifelong, I don’t want to say fight, but it’s a lifelong process that most people don’t even think to engage in. And that’s what I try and teach people.
Greg Kihlstrom (20:50)
I think it’s some of that can be tied to, you know, so they’re like intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. So, you know, everybody works because they need money to live and all that stuff. So that’s the extrinsic stuff. And I think the intrinsic stuff is harder and less talked about for what it’s worth. So in other words, like there’s lots of things that I like to do, but I know in work, I like to learn stuff like if I’m not learning new things, then I’m not happy. So.
That could be applied to literally anything. You know, it doesn’t mean I need to be a teacher. It just means I need to have a job that makes me learn things all the time.
Mark DeCarlo (21:28)
or carve out time in your week where you read a book or you read the news or you investigate what’s happening with the James Webb Space Telescope, just because it feeds your creativity and it feeds your mind and it keeps your mind agile. But you have to instigate that, you know, it’s easier to lay on the couch and watch hockey than it is maybe to go read a book by Michio Kaku, who, you know, is a genius, but some of his stuff is incomprehensible to me.
Right, right. But it’s you have to provide that energy. And I think if you understand that that gets rewarded with an increase in happiness, it’s easier to continue. And as you as you out put the energy and it comes back to you and happiness, it builds on itself and it becomes a lifestyle as opposed to some people who just wake up every day, hate their job and go to work and get a paycheck. And then they wake up and they’re 65 and they’ve got money in the bank and they’d been miserable for 40 years.
Greg Kihlstrom (22:33)
Last topic I want to talk about here is about dissolving fear. You know, that’s a that’s another one of the the strategies here. And, know, just I’ll just kind of take it back to to me. Improv is a scary thing, you know, to me, like 15 years ago, I never would have gotten up and talked in front of people. Now I give speeches and keynotes and stuff like that. And not I’m not like terrified and whatever on the floor crying. But still, you know, ⁓
Improv, maybe it’s because I’m not funny, but like improv would be a little intimidating to me. But yet that’s something where maybe this also goes back to the I think Seinfeld has a joke about this, too, about, you know, more people wanting to be in the coffin than giving the eulogy or something. So talk a little bit about I mean, you know, it sounds like you had an interest early on in like Second City and that was you had a natural curiosity about it. But again, most people you throw them on a stage and ask them to be funny.
They’re going to be terrified, right? Like, how do you how do you kind of embrace kind of like embracing chaos? But how do you embrace some of that fear and make it work for you?
Mark DeCarlo (23:40)
First of all, we’ve been improvising for the past 20 minutes. Yeah. You improvise every day, all day long. And people still, they hear that word and they’re terrified by it. Improvising to do comedy on a stage is an extreme version of that, but we do it every day. And the key component to improvising is listening.
Greg Kihlstrom (23:45)
Fair enough.
Mark DeCarlo (24:09)
I’ve had several talk shows on television where I mostly, know, some of them, one of the, extra I was interviewing celebrities, but on the travel channel and on the dating show back in the 90s studs, I was interviewing civilians, regular people who are nervous to be on television at first. So what I have to do, a is connect with them, look at them in the eye, make them comfortable. And then once they’re comfortable that it’s just me and them talking.
then they’ll reveal things and they’ll be funny and they’ll be genuine and all of that will proceed. But the magic and the power of improvisation is being in the moment, being present. Because if you are, you you hear, I say something, it made you think of something and you responded something back. That’s improvisation and that’s business. If you’re a salesman and your sales team is not performing,
maybe it’s because they’re not listening. It could be because you have a crappy product, but if you have a good product and your team is not performing well, it’s because they’re not listening to what the client is telling them and reacting to it and modifying their message to answer what their concerns are. And that is something that is eminently teachable. The hardest thing about teaching it is what you referred to, is this fear. People hear the word improv and they’re like, I can’t do that.
Right. So step one is I’m like, you guys have been improvising all week here at, you know, the Gaylord in Orlando. You’ve been, that’s what you do. You do it all day long. So don’t be afraid of it. You’re doing it already. We’re just going to fine tune your tools and make you aware that’s what you’re doing so you can get better at it. Again, to serve your own personal happiness. every time you make a decision, the question in your mind is, will
Greg Kihlstrom (25:37)
Right.
Mark DeCarlo (26:07)
Will eating this candy bar or doing this sit up or going on this walk or kissing this person, is it going to make me happier or less happy? And if you only do the things that you think will make you happier, you’ll end up happier. You sometimes you’ll make judgment mistakes, but in general, if you make happiness your number one priority, everything else falls into place.
Greg Kihlstrom (26:34)
Yeah. And I mean, I also think if you if you add on to that of, you know, I think there’s a lot of fear of failure, you know, part of part of part of the fear thing is is that you’re going to fail. And I think when leaders are able to teach that, first of all, it’s not really failure if you learn and in which case, like, yes, you can you can really screw something up and maybe nobody learns from it, I guess. But most of the time,
even mistakes like every yourself and everybody can learn from then you know what what’s to fear you’re you’re you’re being afraid of learning something whether it’s what to do or what not to do right
Mark DeCarlo (27:16)
Right, think about this. I guarantee you, you personally, Greg, have learned more from your mistakes and failures than from your successes. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So being afraid of that process is basically being afraid of looking stupid. Right. And I think years on stand-up stages and improv stages, looking incredibly stupid. know, telling a joke you think is brilliant and it’s crickets.
You realize that you could go out and bomb at the improv and your life is going to stay the same. Nothing bad. You know, you’re not killing anybody. You’re not blowing a brain surgery. It’s not as important as you think it is. And again, going back to one of our first points, if you create a corporate culture that makes it imperative to give everybody a seat at the table and make sure everyone is heard.
You know, some people are going to be better at throwing out ideas than other people. There’s a, you know, it’s a bell curve of talent in that realm. But every once in a while, you know, the low person on the totem pole might lob in something that’s brilliant. So if you make them afraid to say the stupid stuff, you’ll never get the gems. And listen, if you’re coming, if you’re, if you’re trying to create a new ad campaign or you’re, you’re pushing out a new marketing program,
You’re have 10 people spitting ideas for three weeks. Eventually one idea is gonna be chosen. There’s tons of bad ideas, tons of unchosen ideas that built the stairway to get you to that idea. And the more input you have, the better the output is going to be. you have to, fear is a wasted emotion. It cripples people. It makes them miserable and unhappy. You don’t step in front of a bus.
But being afraid every day that you wake up, you’re gonna get hit by a bus is stupid. You’re probably not gonna be hit by a bus. So why let it cripple your entire life? Fear is, you know, it’s, in my opinion, it’s the most stupid, wasteful human emotion that everybody has to deal with. So I think by defanging it to a certain degree and understanding that, yeah, you could stand up in a meeting and say something really stupid today, but next Tuesday,
If you think you have another stupid idea, maybe it’s good. Because if your group is having problems figuring out an idea, it means you gotta move further outside the box to find the answer. And the farther outside the box you get, the dumber or weirder the ideas might seem, and you don’t want to inhibit people from throwing it in. The worst thing they say is, you know what, no, but that gave me an idea about this other thing. And that’s how.
That’s how we constructed our sets at Second City. That’s how good teams function, good sales teams, good creative teams, good C-level teams. They take the input and then through the expertise of all the people involved, win them out the bad stuff and construct the prime idea that then they can go ahead and activate as best they can. You know, some people are afraid of doing podcasts.
Greg Kihlstrom (30:34)
I know, I know there are there are there are those people that like write out the answers to their questions and stuff instead of like engaging and in a conversation like this.
Mark DeCarlo (30:46)
Because they’re afraid to listen. I mean, you and I didn’t discuss anything before we started today. I’m sitting here listening to what you’re saying and responding, and you’re doing the same thing. And I think that makes a more interesting conversation. This is my last note here. Johnny Carson was on the air for 30 years. And for my money, he was the best late night show host ever.
because he didn’t have to be the funniest guy. He listened. And when someone went sideways and said something that wasn’t on his card, he followed that story. And you never said, hey, did you see blah, blah, blah on the tonight show last night? You said, did you see Johnny last night talking to Don Rickles or Frank Sinatra or whoever it may be? He had great ears and understood that.
when people say something or when they avert their eyes and, don’t want to say something, that’s where you dig to get the information. And you have to, you, as a leader, I think it behooves your enterprise to construct a system where everyone feels that they can throw in their ideas as smart or stupid as it may seem without fear of mocking or getting fired or feeling stupid. And eventually you’ll get better you’ll get better output from everybody. And the flip side of that is all of your employees will be happier and they will love coming to work and they will be more valued employees and they will add more to your bottom line simply by making them happier. It’s almost anti-capitalist, but in the truest sense, it is capitalism because you are empowering people to make good decisions and contribute as best they can to the endeavor.
Greg Kihlstrom (32:44)
Love it. Well, Mark, thanks so much for joining. I’ve got one last question for you that I ask everybody here. What do do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Mark DeCarlo (32:55)
I talk to strangers. I listen to people. When I was traveling with the Travel Channel, I would always go out at night. My crew would stay in the hotel or do whatever, and I would just go out on my own and talk to strangers. One night we got snowed in in Fargo and it was brutally cold. don’t know what we were. my God. And there’s like one downtown street. Wow. No, it was. Grand Forks, was even further north. And the only two places that were open was the VFW Hall and the American Legion Hall. So I went into the American Legion Hall, walked into the basement, classic old Midwest Plains bar, and there was this Asian guy, older Asian guy sitting at the bar, nobody else in there. So I sit down next to him, we start talking, and turns out he was a United States Air Force pilot during the Korean War. And he told me,
stories about that. He told me stories about how he faced discrimination because he was an Asian guy and we were fighting Asian people. And it was one of the most interesting conversations of my life. We went to the Trappist Monastery in Kentucky and I met an 82 year old monk who had been a professional baseball player, a fighter pilot, a bunch of other jobs before he became a monk. he was what brother Ray, he was one of the most
interesting people I’ve ever met. So I stay agile by constantly feeding my head with interesting people and interesting perspectives that aren’t my own. you know, it’s empathy, putting your being, learning how to put yourself in the shoes of other people and then put that in the back of your head so that when the situation needs where you have to zig instead of zag, you sort of have a paradigm for that.
Hey, Greg, was great talking to you, man. Thanks for having me on the show and continued success on this great podcast and your agility.
