304 | CIA, Stage Dive and Helicopters | Tim Gard | Eksteen de Waal

When he went to go clean it out, his boss had borrowed the car to go pick up one of the undersecretaries of agriculture at the airport, not knowing what was in the trunk, and opened up the trunk and if it smelled bad before, it smelled terrible now. And he looked at me and he had told me this story because I had made a mistake. But he looked at me and he said, tim, it's only stupid if you do it twice. And it stuck with me all this time. I mean, he could have yelled at me for whatever the mistake was that I did, but he gave me that example of humor and leadership and it stayed with me for many, many decades. It sticks with you headless chickens running around and finally getting to the vault. That's what's been happening to us. And now we can bring you Tim Gard's video a conversation around humor and humor in the workplace and humor in different contexts, from rubber chickens all the way through to do you drop a CIA helicopter into an ocean. Well, hope that's wet your appetite as much as it did mine for recording this. Enjoy. Tim Gard. I have been a huge admirer for years and I show your Ted Talk to just about all my friends because I absolutely hose myself every time I watch it. So thank you so much for coming on the Exponential Leadership podcast and talk to us a little bit about humor and crises and leadership. So welcome, Tim. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me. I've been looking forward to this for a long time and it's good to just be able to spend some time and chat with you. Yeah, I feel like I'm honored because I get to spend time with. Way. Just for the listeners that didn't watch our drama for the last hour, trying to get everything up and running. I'd show Tim a little chicken in the break because Tim's known for these itty bitty chickens that he talks about and is part of his speech. So if you get around to watching do watch Tim on his Ted Talk. But talking about technology and humor, tim, I'm sure technology goes wrong a lot when you're out on the road and speaking gigs and so on. How have you used humor to sort of take the sting out of it? Well, it's interesting now that whether it's the technology or if I've been on stage somewhere and had something happen, a lot of times it's luck is preparation meeting know, I fell off a stage several years ago and had a very large stage in North Dakota and fallen off and hit the floor. And the audience is actually laughing about it, and all of a sudden they stop laughing as if on cue. And in that silence I said, and now I'll take questions from the floor and they all burst out laughing again as if I'd done it on purpose. And what had happened was just several months before that event, we'd been at a training, a national speakers association training, and the speaker that was on stage, a really great speaker, lou Heckler, had been walking backwards on stage. There was a hole in the stage, and he fell right through it, and he just kept talking. And, I mean, it was just nothing threw him off. And I looked at my friend Scott Friedman sitting next to me and I said, what would you say if that happened to you? And we came up with our best line, and his was, it's just a stage I'm going through, and very good. Mine was now all these questions from the floor. And so when it did happen, I was prepared. It's that luck is preparation, meaning opportunity. I was in Las Vegas, and there was a fire in the room next to us. Somebody had sparked off, some magician had sparked something and started to fire, and firemen ran into the coliseum, into the humor, and there's about a thousand people stood in front of the stage, throws his arms up like this, full fire regalia, and then runs off the other way to the other room. And I said to the audience, did you see him too? It's knowing that things are going to go wrong and preparing for it is the best way with technology. Now, we could have small clips ready to go. That if something happened where, say, you're having one of your guest mic fails or something. You could actually put on a 22nd clip of a comedy piece or the best of your shows from prior audiences. But we could prepare those things and have them ready just in case we need them. And if it's funny, I think the audiences are a little bit more forgiving than anything else, but it's finding funny pieces that are good standalone, regardless of what the topic is that you want to be ready for. So I would say technology. I've watched speakers get up and their PowerPoint will fail, and they don't know what to do. And I've told them, if you wrote this program, you should know what happened. You shouldn't be dependent on it as a crutch. And so if PowerPoint goes out, you should be able to keep talking. If your mic goes out, you should be able to project for a while. I just believe that we don't use it as an excuse to stop and that we prepare. We have alternative ways that we can respond and be ready for just almost anything. I think I think for me, the most difficult one was I was doing my first Ted talk, and within the first few seconds, the clicker failed, so it didn't move the right amount of slides. And by the time when I looked up, I was trailing about four slides, and I kept on clicking, and then it jumped ahead to two or three, and I went like, okay, so now I'm ahead of my slides. And then the mic started giving feedback on the speakers in the room. So all of a sudden we have this huge feedback session. So they rush up to me with another mic, shove me another mic in my hand, but it's ted. You can't restart, you roll. But when it gets edited, they edit the bad bits out, except that that bad bit out. But it now looks a bit weird because all of a sudden I'm standing there with like a head mic, and the next moment I have one in my hand and my slides are not matching up with where I am in my story. But speaker, if you spend so much time on stage, you roll with it. If you're talking about change, you can't be angry because there's change experienced during your program. And it's that you realize that nothing's going to be perfect and that audiences are really pretty forgiving. I think I think that it's being as prepared as we can. I watched one guy one time where the clicker was broken and his laptop is right on the stage on the podium and he's got the clicker right in front of it. Instead of just reaching down and pushing the advance on the laptop, he's sitting there clicking it. The audience is hysterics, and he couldn't understand why, but we have to laugh at ourselves. And as CW. Metcalf said, laugh not with ridicule, but with objectivity and acceptance of self. I think it's really important talk about quotes. You seem to riddle off quite a few when I normally talk to you as well. My grandfather had one which I liked, and he said, statistics are to be used like a lamppost for illumination, not like a drunk man uses it as a crutch. Oh, that's really good. And this industrialist in the US. That said, I can't remember the name. I'll have to look it up, but it's one of my favorite quotes. Because it's just a case of there are so many things we can use as other props or things to prop our arguments up, but we should aim for illumination, we should aim for insights. And so when we're in a leadership role as well, we tend to, I think, sometimes not realize the impact we have on people's lives. What kind of situations have you been in? Because, I mean, you also had leadership role in the military, but have you been roles in situations where humor helped you? Humor has helped a lot, I believe. And I'm trying to remember who said it, that leadership isn't about getting people to do their job, it's about getting people to do their best. Harvey McKay said that, and to me, it's always been a way of learning to let people find their own way know, necessarily ordering them and making them. When I was in the Navy, I was on the USS Midway, which, if you or any of your watchers ever in the San Diego, out in the harbor. It's sitting out there. The ships out there, I spent two years on it was there when we evacuated Vietnam several years ago. And I discovered, as probably so many others have, that leadership and authority are two very different things. You can tell people what to do or you have people that would want to do their best for you to accomplish the goal. I think that when you finally realize that fact about the leadership and authority being different, that you're even more open to being able to laugh at yourself and to be able to help people learn without chewing them out or being angry with them. One of the best examples I have of that is I worked for a gentleman that had been with USDA, our Food and Nutrition Service, so Department of Agriculture, and there was a TV show in Chicago that was called the Howdy Duty Show, and it's a black and white kids show. And they were having a special for Thanksgiving in the US. And they called him up and they wanted a turkey to show on the display on the show. And I don't know why they called him, but he was tasked to go out to this turkey farm or turkey ranch or whatever and get a turkey. And he didn't have a cage, he didn't have anything put it on. He didn't know really what he was in for. So he put this giant tom turkey in the trunk and then drove about, I don't know, 90 km back to the city. And in between the farm and where he was going, the turkey died. And it did not die well. And when he opened the trunk up, there was this dead turkey and there was feathers and bile and everything from the inside of the turkeys on the outside. And it smelt horribly. And he closed it and took it back to the garage and parked it and was going to clean it out the next day. And he said that when he went to go clean it out, his boss had borrowed the car to go pick up one of the undersecretaries of agriculture at the airport, not knowing what was in the trunk, and opened up the trunk. And if it smelled bad before, it smelled terrible now. And he looked at me and he had told me this story because I had made a mistake. But he looked at me and he said, tim, it's only stupid if you do it twice. And it stuck with me all this time. I mean, he could have yelled at me for whatever the mistake was that I did, but he gave me that example of humor and it stayed with me for many decades. It sticks with you. I think what you're saying there is very interesting to me because I'm of the firm opinion. Actually, I'm writing a whole chapter in my new book about it. It's about leadership is a perspective. And humor is that it is finding a different perspective that nobody else is looking at because it's funny or because it's just so completely off kilter. Yes, I mean, I think that's so spot on. Humor is just combining ideas that aren't normally associated together with a positive or happy outcome. And the more extreme the surprise, I think the bigger the laugh. It's really all it is. And I think sometimes people maybe work at it or try so hard. But I think it's like even with problem solving, as a leader, we often look at it's like somebody says, solve this problem. Well, we have this much money and this many people, when they should be going to the extremes, they should not look at just these simple limitations, but look at an extreme, the most bizarre solution and the most conservative. Somewhere in the middle is the answer. And I think that's an example of using humor problem solving in resolving situations. I mean, you've seen me speak. I was having trouble with my suitcase where I put my suitcase in the overhead, my carry on bag wheels out and sometimes it didn't fit so I'd have to put it on its side and then people would come behind me and move my bag around so the wheels are out and then it wouldn't close. They tried to make more room. So you saw the solution. I took a rubber chicken and I put the chicken feet stick out of my bag so that when somebody sees it in the overhead, there's two rubber chicken feet sticking out about so far and they usually would grab the bag and bring it out so far and see the chicken feet and just put it back. That solved the problem. Instead of yelling at people or getting angry. It's an example of using humor in problem solving. I think that's also a very good thing. For instance, if you're in a crisis, can you think of a situation where emotions were running high and humor helped you so sure. When we evacuated Vietnam, I was enlisted rank and one of the things that had happened was everybody wanted to leave Vietnam but nobody wanted to go back. And the sky was literally full of helicopters and as they started landing on our aircraft, mean people were scared and we didn't know what to do. And we took people off the helicopter and they had weapons on them and we were worried about I mean it was just a very high, intense situation. And as the flight deck got full, we started moving them down to the hangar bay. And when the hangar deck got full, we realized there's a finite amount of helicopters that we could bring on the ship. It's like they're standing there, it's like we don't know what to do. And I don't know who got credit for saying it, but they said, you know, we could push them over the side as a joke. And then he goes, well, we'll take the people off first, and that's what we did. But what happened was we would land, take the people out, emptied of all the other things, and then we'd push the helicopter over the side and it saved hundreds of additional lives. It was start out as a joke, it ended up saving a lot of lives. And it's that extreme that brought clarity to a situation where there was a really positive situation, and it happened. We weren't the only ship that did that. There were a lot of ships that did it. The only ones we weren't allowed to push over the side, interestingly enough, were these new Cobra gunships that looked everywhere the pilots looked, and then the Air America or the CIA, the CIA planes, we weren't allowed to push those over either. But it was extreme, an extreme situation. And humor helped. Humor helped. I think growing up in South Africa, you know what the situation used to be like there, the apartheid, and I went through my own traumas with that, with friends of mine that died and were basically discounted as being less than human. And it was really horrible. But one of the things that South Africans do is they have a vile sense of humor. Doesn't matter how horrible it is, they'll make a joke out of it. I remember you remember the Challenger, right? Yes, I do. Within 48 hours, there were jokes about that. There was a bus full of school kids when I was in my final year in high school that drove into a dam and all the kids drowned within a day. There were jokes about that. You see that in times of extremes. People will find, even if it's inappropriate, they'll make jokes about stuff to try and find a coping mechanism. You're not a stand up comedian. You're a humorist, as you tend to say. So what would be your no go areas? Well, we used to call it whistle. They call it whistling in the dark or people deal with terrible, terrible things in each their own ways. And some people, there's so many sayings out there that there's something so serious, we must laugh at them. There are so many things like that out there. But it's funny, the minute there's a disaster, the jokes appear within seconds. The extremes on that, a lot of the comedians, they don't really pull any punches, but the jokes pop out on that. I mean, there were COVID jokes almost immediately when COVID hit. I mean, I think the first one I heard was after COVID, we were going to have to get rid of a lot of sayings. We're used to like, avoid it like the plague. A lot of jokes came about, and I guess everybody has their, I don't know, thresholds about where they won't go after 911. There was jokes. I don't think any of them had any bad. I mean, I'm just saying people dealt with that and it was a terrible, terrible thing. And I would see those jokes and those actually made me pretty upset. They almost made me mad. And I realized that it's the same for everybody that depending on I talk about people, it's who's involved, if you're involved or not. You hear a lot of the medical in the medical practice, people tell jokes of survival because things are so intense they have to deal with it. And if you're involved in medicine, then that's acceptable. Law enforcement same way they see terrible, terrible things, they tell jokes to deal with it. And if you're part of that team or part of that group, you can it's when the outsiders do it that I think it begins to cause problems. And I think that sometimes the comedians will tell jokes that are meant to get attention, if anything else. And all they do is probably create more pain. So for me, I go with this. I don't want to ever use humor to diminish anyone. I always think that we should use it to enhance and never diminish. Now I will say we can laugh at ourselves. I have a story about being the big sweaty guy in the middle seat. I do tell jokes about myself and my size. But I think that when we use it to hurt or to cause pain or diminish, then it's too much. And that's the difference between what I believe and what most comedians believe. I just think that we've got to be careful how we use it and it can cause a lot of damage. I just think it should be used to enhance, and that's just my personal belief. A comedian will tell you that nobody's off limits and no thing is off limits. But I don't really follow that philosophy. I think when we look at leadership, it's also when we demean others or diminish anyone. The impact on that is so much larger because I normally tell the guys that I coach or the teams that I work with, when you're in leadership role, if you open your mouth, just imagine you've got a megaphone in front of it and it's going to hit ten times as hard. And if you have that in your mind, you should be able to sort of navigate a little bit and apologize when you've upset someone. Because no matter how well intended things are and what our motives were, when the impact hits and it's negative, I think the best way is to just apologize, apologize. And I think what happens is the first of all is we need to assume the best. Assume the best. And that happens if you don't use humor. If you are really trying your hardest and you make mistakes, people will assume the best. And then the newspapers call it absence of malice, that there was no intent to cause pain or mean example. Years ago, I worked in an office in Kalispell, Montana, and somebody put up a cartoon that said, missing dog, missing left ear, three legs minus tail, recently castrated answers to the name of Lucky. Well, didn't know, but her dog was recently missing. And so when they posted that she thought they were making fun of her lost dog, we wouldn't know that if somebody didn't say anything. And so sometimes we make mistakes. And I do believe the if we apologize, genuinely apologize, then hopefully people will move on. I don't want people to be afraid to use humor. I think it's so necessary now to connect us. And at work, the rules are differently, though. At home, you can walk away if somebody says something you don't like, you walk away. At work if you do that, it's called quitting. And so you've got to be aware of the fact that if you're using humor inappropriately as a leader, the ramifications can be large. And in the United States especially, we live in a litigious society, people are liable to get sued and want some financial renumeration because of a mistake. So it's a level of awareness, but not fear, I think. Not fear. I think fear is also one of those. The moment people use the word fear, I'm reminded of Dune Frank Herbert. Fear is the little mind killer. It's little death. And for creativity, I think fear is the biggest killer of creativity. If we want to have in a crisis, if we need to figure out what needs to be done, we cannot introduce additional stresses. Fear is one of the things that needs to be taken off the table as soon as possible. The thing is, for me, when I was in the military, there was a situation that was in. I wasn't the officer commanding. I was the highest officer on duty at the time. And we had some of the riots in South Africa that broke out and was in Elspray, and it was really bad because people were trying to get to work or go home. Actually, it was late, but it was Saturday. They're going to want to go home, and some people want to go to work. And the buses were being boycotted. And so somebody so I don't know what was going on. The police came to me, and Sergeant Major just said, you know what? I need help. And I went like, the best I can do is I've got three military bases I can put on standby, but if those boys come in, they shoot first and ask questions later. It's not going to happen. And so I got everybody on standby and was trying to get the general officer commanding to go like, hey, you're the boss of the theater. What am I supposed to do here? How far do you want my help to go? But what I was also doing at the time, I was in intelligence services so even then I was a gadget freak. So they put me in charge of sort of the it and equipment side of things. So I was the one doing all the databases and getting all the intel to sort of look nice on a graph kind of thing and at the same time was also responsible for all the equipment. So everything from the cars all the way through to all the vehicles and all the telescopes and the TVs attached to the telescope so you can look for like 2 miles, you can zoom it in and get it basically on one screen, that kind of stuff. So I was playing with my gadgets a lot so I just told my boys, you know what guys, as the officer I'm in charge of that whole chain of command. It's fine, you can go get the stuff, go get our stuff. And so they brought the stuff, we set it up on different buildings and then we started looking. And as we looked the first thing I saw, which has really stuck, stuck with me all my life is this woman that stepped onto the bus and as she stepped onto the bus she was petrol bombed. And so that is the sort of thing that made to me. It's like if that is the kind of thing we can do as human beings to each other when we devalue each other and that doesn't mean it's because of that. There's not a racial thing. It was just an ideological difference. And so for many years I sat with the thing that I felt almost a sense of hatred towards the person that threw the petrol bomb. And then somebody told me, you know what, but have you thought of a different perspective and the guilt that person is dealing with and that they won't be able to move on? That's really interesting. I think that people believe and think things at a certain age and as you get older or as you learn more, your attitudes change, but the actions that you took will always be there. I'd never thought of it like that. I think that's very true. I think that's as leaders we have to just be aware of the responsibilities that we have and the things that we decide can have far reaching effects. I mean, even if something as simple as firing someone could result in massive retaliation, there's just so many things anymore that we need to be aware of and so many things that aren't funny. But I think what happens is that if we only focus on that then we lose the balance. I really do. I think what that story brought home for me and really sort of got me thinking about is that forgiveness has a big role to play in leadership. It's not just about forgiving others and the mistake for the mistakes they make because people will make mistakes and we need to let go of that. Because that's the way they're going to learn. But we also need to forgive ourselves for not being perfect. And I think humor helps us to have a look at those extremes and go like, what if this if what if I took this to its ultimate conclusion? Is that funny at least? Can I laugh at myself so I can get to forgiveness? No, I understand. I remember we were on board ship, and water was a very big, really a big thing. We had water condensers on the port side that were cold water. And on the starboard side, on your right side, starboard is hot water, and on the port side is cold water. And as the ship would go like this, then if it went too far, if you were in the shower, you had to step out of the shower because you'd either scal or get too cold. Well, now I look back on it and here'd be a line of like nine showers. And the ship would go like this. And it's like a dance of people coming out and going back in, and you see all this stuff and laugh about those things. But one of the funniest things happened was they're always careful about fresh water. And I remember that there's water down on the deck and they were tasting it to see if it was fresh water or salt water because they come from different pipes. And this chief petty officer was there, was watching these guys that were fairly new tasting the watered salt. No, it's fresh. And he said, Come with me. And we go up on the deck up above, and one of the toilets had overflowed. And I said, we should go tell him. He goes, no, they got to find those things out for themselves. The lessons that we teach as leaders like that, I'm sure that it made a bigger impact on him than it did if he would have told him. But you're right. Everything from the little prank like that all the way to the other side would affect us. I agree with you. It would affect us differently as we got older and about whether or not we can forgive ourselves. I think it's a really valid point. We talked about leaders, but leaders lead people. So, I mean, leaders without followers are I don't know what a voice in the desert, they're alone. But how do you find the funny as a team together? I mean, let's throw crisis at someone, but what can we do? Is any practical tips you can give us to get humor in a team to be used to diffuse situations or to help us just to get the endorphins flowing so we can do more creative stuff? I think a lot of times what happens is when there's a shared problem that they're solving and it brings the team together against a problem, not against a person, but against a problem is where maybe we. Can see the absurdities in it. I know I was, years ago, was consulting with a group where everybody had had to have these new electronic organizers, and they'd been told they could no longer have their date minders, where they actually wrote on them, and they were taken away from the they had to have these electronic things, and everybody was angry about it. And somebody posted a cartoon that had Jurassic calendars where it had this Tyrannosaurus Rex with a calendar, and it every day said, kill something and eat it. And then he would exit off like that. And it was their way of protesting together about these electronic calendars in a funny manner instead of saying something they might regret. And everybody they laughed about it. They still had to have their calendar changes. But I think it can unite people in dealing with situational stress. I don't have one sitting here. But when I was a case worker, when I was a welfare case worker, they had new policies all the time, and we had to take the old policies and get rid of them and put in new policies and have this mental floss that looks like put this little thing over your head. It looks like you're pulling a string, like you're flossing your brain out. We all had mental floss. When the new regulations came out, we flossed out the old regulations. So altogether, we laughed at the situational stressor together. And I think it was really positive. It's just you have to be careful not to use it against someone else who's enacting you're not doing it against a person. It's more of a concept or an idea. We just got to be really careful that when we use humor to diminish anybody is usually when we start getting in trouble at work. I think the first time I saw a leader being made fun of was my dad. Because growing up, as I said before, in South Africa, we had a lot of farm workers that worked on the farm, that worked for my dad. And in the evenings, it's tradition for people to sit around a fire and talk about the day. And so when you talk about the day, you tend to talk about all the difficult things in the day. And my dad had a temper, and he was quick to jump to conclusions, so you can imagine what problems that would cause. And so this quick temper, quick to jump to conclusions, which meant he was always in a hurry somewhere and trying to get something done and get something fixed. So they called him Nsietse, which is basically like a little fly or like a fly. All right. And then when I sort of got into secondary school or high school, and I started exhibiting certain similar behaviors, they called me insetsignani, which means the little fly. And so you would hear these stories in the evenings. I used to sneak out to the campfires and just sit and talk to people. Because I grew up with Setswana being sort of my first language. I spoke it a lot more outside of the normal school group. It's called

It's of the Tswana people. And Setswana is the language and it's mostly spoken in Botswana, which is the country. And I grew up very close to that, about 60 km away from Gabarone, which is capital city of Botswana. And so you would sit around the fires and people would tell these stories and the always thought that there's a funny sounding one and that is the name for a scooter because it's called a setu two, because that's the noise it makes in languages where you have certain words that are just funny sounding. What would you say except for itty bitty chickens? Because we already know that word is funny. What other words do you find funny? Well, the thing is, a lot of times people mix up words. There's malaprops, there's words like I was saying, my mom used to say, my mom always mixed up words like we're driving down the road and my dad almost hit another car and my mom yells at him, you are such an erotic driver. She would get words that sounded alike. And I'll never forget mom had gotten really sick in the hospital and she's laying there and the doctor was doing intake and says to my mom, are you allergic to anything? And my mom goes, I'm allergic to hallucinogens. It's like, where do you get hallucinogens? And she goes, well, when you want them, you can find them. And the doctor goes, I think you mean analgesics, Mrs. Gart. She mixed the words up. But some words are just funnier than other words. It's like when I'm telling a story, if I'm building a funny story, you take what really happened and then you add a little bit to make it funnier. So if something happened in Idaho, Boise, Idaho isn't a funny word, but Walla Walla, Idaho is a funnier word. We might do something like that to aid in the story. Some words are just naturally funnier than others. Onomatopoeia is when a word sounds like the action that it describes. I talk about having ponskum, putting a pond scum in and it came out of my mouth. Well, it exploded. That's a better word for the story. Well, I think that we find the funnier words or sometimes we hear funny words like that, sometimes we make them up. I'll never forget driving with my friend in high school and I hear this and I go, what was that? And police lights went on behind us. So he saw the police car behind us when we were out driving around and he goes and then the lights came on. And anytime after that, whenever I saw a police car. It sticks in your mind sometimes the funny words, we make funny words for funny things like that. But I just think some words are funnier and based on where you're mean, if you're in Australia, they have a lot of really amazing sounding words for their cities and towns. Walla Walla is probably pretty passive. It just depends upon, I guess, the language and things like that. I love the German language that when they don't have a word for something that's something new, they make it up. They have a new made up word. I love that. But anyway, I just think some words are funnier than others, and I guess that's up to each person. I think the Dutch also do that to the Belgians, in a way. The Dutch will take whatever the word is and just anglicize it all right. So basically take an English word. Oh, it's already an existing word. Oh, we'll just modify it a little bit so it sounds Dutchish, and then we'll use it the same thing with French words. I mean, when the French invaded and came over here with Napoleon, and Napoleon's brother ruled for a while, it was just a case of, okay, we adopt some of the words, and when the Germans came, the same thing happened. But the Belgians, they make up their own words, and the Dutch sometimes find it very funny. So they will make jokes, things like, so what do you call a helicopter in Belgium? And the answer is a flying windmill. So they make these kind of funny jokes, and I think it's also become a thing. I don't know if you have rivalries in the US. But we have rivalries here, for instance, between Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and we have rivalries between people living north of the rivers and south of the rivers. And, I mean, I'm sure in the US. You have the Midwest and you have the Deep South and all those kind of things. Do you think there are places or associations we shouldn't. You know, this is the really funny part about it, is that people often make fun of things they don't understand or peoples that they don't understand. And often when we tell jokes that are put down, someone like there was people used to tell stories about blonde hair, people with blonde hair, you can substitute almost anybody, any negative, racial, ethnic, whatever it is, into those places. And what you're doing is basically you're putting people down, and the humor is diminishing them. And I think that you're always going to have people like, I grew up in Montana, we tell North Dakota jokes, they tell Montana jokes. They're just two different states. In the just there's always rivalries, there's sports rivalries. There's all those things like, you know, the thing is that at work, when we get into any sort of an extreme type of a situation where you have some extreme rivalries, I think that's something that we maybe want to stay away from a little bit at work, because people can have such extreme beliefs or extreme feelings on that. But again, it's that rule of thumb is that if it's used to diminish somebody, it could be used to diminish anyone. And I just think we've got to really be careful and aware of that. And that's just my personal belief. I know that when I was in the Navy, we told marine jokes. We told stories about the Marines, but if we were in a fight and we wanted help, there was nobody. We wanted more on our side than we would the. So there's good nature there's. I was in Hong Kong one time when I was in the Navy, and we were actually in a bar fight, like you'd see on some know or somebody's throwing a chair through the window. It was one of those big bar fights, and we were in uniform, and there was two or three guys there that were Marines, and I was in the Navy, and one of the guys went to hit me. And one of the other marines goes, what are you doing? And he goes, well, he's a squid, which is a derogatory term for a sailor. And he goes, yeah, but he's one of our squids, so they let me know. I just think that you've got to be really careful with that as leaders and fostering that it just can cause negative situations, I think, in the workplace, and I just think we've got to really be aware of it. I think one of the things for me is when I see things like that, especially when it becomes really derogatory, is usually there is a misunderstanding or a fear or a know. I'm married to my husband for a few years already, and we're very happily married, but when you say that at work, depending which country you're in, it can be quite problematic. I mean, it wouldn't be something I would say in Russia, for instance, or I'll be careful in the Middle East because I also need to respect the environment that I'm in. Sure. That does make me more sensitive to people making jokes about homosexuality, for instance, or about transsexuals and stuff like that. So anybody that's different, so it doesn't matter if it's the color of your skin or where you're from or your sexual orientation, anything like that. The moment we make jokes about those, I feel that as leaders, we need to understand that. We need to figure out what's behind it. It is not about the joke per se. That's the problem. It's about helping to foster understanding. There's a thing going on right now I've been watching is different comedians are fighting with different comedians over trans humor. And humor comedians are making fun of trans comedians, and trans comedians are making fun of heterosexual straight. And somebody asked me in another podcast about it, and I said to me, if these are comedians and they're making fun of each other, each has the opportunity to do that. It's when we do it at work or when we do it to cause pain or stress outside of it. I mean I think some comedians really can change a level of awareness. Others really suppress it. But I think at work we've got to be really aware of the fact that most of those jokes come from lack of knowledge or lack of understanding. And I just don't think there's no positive outcome. I can't think of any positive outcome that can come from it. But I do think talking about it is important and understanding is important. But we often make fun of those things we don't understand and I don't know, I just think it's something to really be careful about as leaders because people watch us, they watch the leaders to know what they should or shouldn't do and they explain their behaviors often by watching leaders. That's my rule of thumb. Don't use humor to diminish anyone. It's just not worth it. It's not worthwhile I think one of the things that has worked for me is when I use not humor but the impact it has I wouldn't want to say it as a weapon, but basically it becomes that. We basically say, well that was really painful and say, well I'm sure that's not what you intended. I'm sure it's supposed to be funny but let's figure out how can we make it really funny? So it's more like give you a hand. But it gets the point across as well that sometimes things are not okay to use. It's just some completely different tack. I was wondering what is the book that you recommend or buy most for other people. For understanding? What is your favorite book as a. Gift as a know? It's funny you should say Dune. That Dune was one of my all time favorite books by Frank Herbert. That was one of them. I think that one of the comedy books. I love the Steve Martin book Born Standing Up. That is really one of my favorites. I'm a very voracious reader. I find that the more that I can read, the better a leader I become. I think the more well read we read, the more well read and learn to speak. But the more we read and share I think that is really important. I can't stress that enough. I'm always looking for new books. I used to just read science fiction and trade books about the comedy. But I really do try to expand that out. I do kind of like some of the I think that science fiction has always been my favorite that's out there. I do like a lot of that. But it's funny. I don't think I have any one author that I just read anymore. I'm just always looking for something different. What about you? What do you like to read? Well there's this book by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen from Harvard and the actually have a consultancy company called Triad Consulting and so when I was at Harvard for a summer program, they were my lecturers on negotiation, specifically Negotiation, about the emotional side of negotiation. And they had a book then called Difficult Conversations, but they brought out another one called thanks for the Feedback, because it's always difficult to accept other people's point of view of you. So I thought, Well, I have to read a little bit about this. And so Douglas and Sheila took me under the wing and they took me on a writer's workshop with them in Newport. And it's been an amazing sort of discovery journey of my own writing. Wow. And so although their book itself is not about writing the structure and the way that they've composed it and the way that the use storytelling to illustrate points, I just think it's a fascinating way in which they wrote a business book. And so for me, on the one hand, it's great as a read and content, but on the other side, it's also great as an example of structure. There's a book I'm reading, a book called The Gift of Fear by Gavin, and it talks about how people seem to think that some folks are intuitive or that police are psychic. What it is more than anything is the body. We give off meta messages. The words we say are the messages. How we say the and how we enforce them is the meta messages. And that you're able to read or police especially can read when somebody may be a potential crook just by seeing how they act and react. But it's been fascinating reading. It's called The Gift of Fear by Gavin. But I would tell you Dean Coons is probably my all time favorite author. One of the books he had I was trying to learn I've written several books on humor, and I was trying to learn how to write funny. And I was reading he wrote a book that really made an eye opener for me. And the line in it was the water was as clear as a baby's conscience. And I thought to myself, that's an example of a sentence that you would read in a book that's very profound, but it's creepy to say in written humor or in written form. It's better than it is in spoken form, if you get my meaning. And that was a real eye opener for me. But Dean Coons is one of my favorite authors. If I had an opportunity to ever meet an author, it would be Dean Coons. Without a doubt. I think if I can recommend something to you it's actually a TV series. It's not a read. And that is the Time Traveler's wife. It's a new series. It's out now. And I have just enjoyed it so much because it has humor, because you can imagine what kind of situations you can end up in if you sort of wink out of existence one place and arrive in another naked so you can imagine situations that causes I'll check it out. And the on the other hand, is time travel, which is Sci-Fi, which is something I love, too, and then the human aspect, which is about their relationship. And I just thought they're weaving it together so well. I've never sort of fallen in love with a TV series more than this, I think, and it's really weird for me. We've been watching on Netflix, we've been watching Emily in Paris, and again, I'd recommend it. It's an American woman that is working in Paris that doesn't speak French. And seeing the humor and how they all interact has just been so much fun watching. But it's something what we do is my wife will have some shows she wants me to watch, and I'll have some shows that I want her to watch, and we kind of learn about each other like that. So I'm watching Emily in Paris for her, and I hate to say it, but I've really enjoyed I've really enjoyed is it's Strange. I never watched period dramas till I met my husband, and that's something that he enjoys. And so I've become a fan of Downton Abbey, which I never thought would happen. And that's another of Sophia's favorites. It sounds like we have a lot in common, my friend. That is one of my wife's favorites, too. If I were to ask you who do you admire and why, what would you say? Who do I admire? Boy, that is know, I was really a big fan of Kennedy until I started finding out john F. Kennedy until I started finding out a lot about the things that we really did not know that much about him. But it's funny. That is a really tough question anymore, I got to be honest with you. But let's take Kennedy. I mean, okay, his extracurricular activities in the Netherlands, people would just go know, so it's a different society, but what is your mind about him? I felt that he was truly committed towards the country that towards America. He said, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. That he was truly committed to being creating an America that was united together. And it's been a long time since we've had somebody like that. And so he's somebody that I really always admired. Desmond Tutu is another one that I really admired. I thought he had a fantastic sense of humor. I think that it's funny. There are different reasons, I guess. I admire people, too, that Winston Churchill, to me, was one of the greatest know, I go back and listen to speeches from the great speakers to find out what it is about their ability to speak and what they spoke about. I mean, there's different things, I guess I admire about different had. John Wayne was a famous American actor, and when he was dying of cancer, they could have extended his life a little bit, or he could have gone through these trials that helped him understand about cancer drugs, and he accepted the trials and it shortened his life, but it helped other people. When I was reading about that, I greatly admired that. And so I guess it would be different things like that for different reasons, but a lot of different people. I think for me, one person that stood out was my grandfather. And he had some flaws which very few people knew about. But by that contrast of what I admired in him and his flaws, what I admired in him became even more special. And so I don't mind if people admire flawed people, because I think flawed people have some of the most interesting stories and have the most wonderful things they've discovered in their lives. I like that when I go back and look at different people all through again, I just read an awful lot. I think you're right. I think that people with flaws really do are some of the most interesting people. And I would say my dad had probably about an 8th degree education, and yet he became almost as high up in the Air Force as you can know. When he retired and was able to do so much, he quit school to work on the farm and then joined the Air Force. I guess people like that, that he just always went to work. I talk to people now where they're saying things that are missing in the country today and in leadership. And it's that my father used to say that either had a job or you were looking for a job, and he was like that either got up and went to work or he was looking for a job. And I think that this work ethic and this about coming to work and spending a full day, and if your work day is nine to five, that you get there at 830 and you leave when everything else is closed at five and then go home about whenever. And I just think that we're beginning to lose that. And I mean, that's worldwide. I don't see that people have the work ethics that my parent, my dad, did. When I turned 21, I was working part time in Montana. My dad worked at a Camper manufacturing place in Kalispell, and I turned 21, went out and got drunk, and the next day I was a mess at work and I went home early. And on Saturday my dad woke me up and took me to work. And we didn't punch in, though we worked all day long. I didn't complain. He told me to do it. I went and worked. And when we got done on the way home, I asked him what we were doing and he said, you did not put in a full day work on Wednesday. You cheated your employer, and you don't ever do that again. And so we'd gone in on Saturday and worked to pay that back, and I've never forgotten it. That's work ethic. I appreciate you asking that question. I hadn't thought about that for a long time. I do admire that about him, and I'm glad that he taught me my work ethic. I tell my clients I'll do anything short of committing a felony to get there on time to do a speech. That's from my dad. That's work ethic for you, I guess. I think I got the same in perseverance. I went through my whole primary and high school career without ever being one day off from school. So when I had chickenpox, I did my homework in the library, things like that. It was just ridiculous, but I just felt I had to do it, and that's something that stayed with me, and it was something as well, I think, that my grandfather taught me. And that is when the chips are down and you don't know what the next step is, just pitch up. First thing is pitch up the figure out what's the next step, and you might not see the whole road. Okay? But if you pitch up, you're going to learn something. If you pitch up, you're going to find something new. And that's what school became for me. It became a journey of discovery. I had amazing teachers that always challenged me to take a different perspective and look at something slightly different, and I think that's helped me. I totally get it when you talk about it. Aren't you amazed, though, when you run into people that don't get it? I had an employee that worked for me. I had three employees at one tim, and everybody came in

00 in the morning, and he came in about 915 every day. And

00. And so the next day came, and again about 915. And I said, well, you have daycare problems. Is there something going on? He said no. I said, if you come into work late tomorrow, you're

00, and the day after that, he came in at 915. And so I said, I'm going to start you at 930. And he said, okay. So the next day came in at 945. And I said to him, I said, how far away do you live from where our office is? And he said, It's about 15 minutes. And he said, what time do you leave? And he said, when am I supposed to be to work?

00. I said, well, it's not possible to get here on time. He said, well, that's travel time. Travel time is a part of work. In his mind, he thought that travel time was a part of work, and I ended up firing him. But he did not have he had zero work ethic. And I think that I worked really hard to try to teach it to him. And I think that's something that as leaders and supervisors, if you're able to teach that, more power to you. I think that this work ethic, people will follow it for a while, but I think they default back to what they really believe. It's until you convince them about what a job really is, that maybe then they'll make some differences. I'm not sure. I think it's interesting because my dad was a big time and motions person, sort of like time and motion studies were big in the was sort of his thing. And everything on the farm was timed so from how long it took to plant something and then water it and then move on to the next one, trying to calculate what the optimal amount of things that somebody could do in a day and so on. And then he would put into practice, he would do it himself to see if he could actually do it in the time. And when he couldn't, he sort of like, adjusted the time and then gave a little bit more leeway and so on, and then he set the task for the day. So everybody had a full day's work, and he had determined what a full day's work was. But it wasn't tied to Tim, it was tied to the work. So for me, being on time has never been something that I value highly. Getting the job done has. So at the end of the day, if the job is not done, then I have

00 in the morning and they leave at three in the afternoon, and I know the job is done and is done well, I never bat an eyelid. And it's interesting how I recently read an article about that. The time perception is something that has a genetic component, and that not all of us perceive time and the flow of time in the same way. So for some of us, like me, when I start talking to someone, or when I have a lovely conversation, or I'm reading a nice book, or just I'm busy with anything, all right, time just sort of disappears. It's one of the first things that just disappear for me. And I might go like, okay, it's five minutes to go. Yeah, I can just quickly type this last paragraph and then I look up and it's 20 minutes later. What happened to the time? And I appreciate that. I mean, my nephew Morgan works for Amazon, and they really don't care when you come to work and when you leave, as long as your work is I actually I get the concept. I just wonder how many employees are self motivated to a degree to be able to do that. Steel, sharpens steel, having people around each other, working together. I think it's a real positive thing. But what you're saying is I think there has to be a leeway for people like you. What you're saying that I think that it is counterproductive to hold them to a time rather than a production. It's very interesting. I'm glad you told me that. Yes. For me, I would sometimes work 1214 16 hours straight. And I'll enjoy it. I'll take a break, I'll even take a nap in between. But I'll keep going because there's a goal that I want to achieve. There's something I want to reach. I need to get that bit done. Otherwise for me, it's just not done until it's done. But I can't expect people that work for me to work 16 hours, days. No, I understand. And for me, my other two employees, I couldn't explain to them why they had to be there when the other person didn't. So I mean, it's an interesting paradox. But the world of work has changed. And as leaders, if you're just holding to old patterns, I believe that you are destined to die of dinosaur failure. You've got to learn to grow. I'm with you on that one. I think change is the meteor that's coming at all of us and we need to make sure that we survive that. I think what's something you say about all this almost like discipline. It's something that I remember from the military was something that was really difficult for me to fit into. I did, but it was gard because it wasn't natural for me to do that. But what would you say is the difference in for me it was time. But what is the difference in humor between military personnel and civilians? Well, with the military, if you didn't follow the rules, eventually it would catch up to you. I don't care if you didn't keep your room clean. There are just certain things that weren't allowed. It was an automatic thing. But what's funny, I don't know if there is a major difference between the humor. I do think that in the military it was much more respectful that right now in private industry, anything goes. I have my own barriers. But in private industry, if you have the right of free speech, then you only have the responsibility of free speech. You say what you want, but you have to be responsible. People might get up and say something. I think the Dixie Chicks at one time had talked about the then president negatively and it affected their sales. That's the right of free speech. With the responsibility in the military, you wouldn't have gotten away with it. You don't have that freedom. I was telling my wife, now, see, I'm admitting this to the world. When I was I kept track of I kept the muster list on the base that we were on and I had to sign them. So there was like 8000 people floor were AWOL something else. And I turned those in every day. And after about a week or two. I wondered if anybody read them. So I started signing them. Like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and Peter Pan. And so for a year I signed them with made up names like that. And it didn't catch up to me until like years and years later I'd gotten out of the Navy, and they were actually pardoning people that had deserted during the Vietnam War. And they were going back to these old muster lists to see who had deserted and the found documents signed by Peter Pan and Donald Duck. And I'm sure that they did not find that amusing at all. I'd kind of forgotten about doing it, but I was telling Sophia about it. She goes, well, what would have happened if you'd have been stayed in? I said, I think I would have gotten in a lot of trouble for that. But I think in the military you have a bunch of young kids like me who stay in for a period of time and then leave, and we do certain things like that. And I think that we just have to be in the military. You have to be aware. You did not make fun of commanding officer, not at least in writing. There were certain things I guess you didn't do, but you just didn't have all the freedom, you didn't have all the freedoms you do now. I remember when I was in training, the humor was very much us and them. It's sort of the civilians versus the military. And the military was always batter in a way, but I think it also create that sense of us and them, also creates a sense of family. So when you leave the military, the are certain boundaries that fall away, and now you have to rediscover those for yourself. But you always have a sense of belonging. And I think that's one of the things that I'm missing at the moment in work, to get that organizational sort of citizenship behavior from employees, you need that sense of belonging. Yesterday I told somebody, you know what? Belonging is not a KPI, it's a feeling. No, I think you're very true. I think I missed being in the military. I mean, you missed the comrade that it is us. I think that a lot of places it's funny police department, they have a comradeship, the military. You can have different businesses where people really have a sense of identity as a result of that business. I do believe that that's important, and I really believe that if you can as a leader inspire that, then I think you've got something bigger than without it. If people have a sense of belonging to something, I don't see it a lot in different industries. But I do see it though, several of the companies that I've worked for over the years have just had they just have an incredible sense of belonging. Anytime fitness is a group in the US. That I've worked for several times, that the owners and the franchisees are just an incredible sense of belonging. And I think that that's something that leaders should strive for. I think it's important. Well, there's an organization I recently interviewed where the sense of belonging is quite severe. And I interviewed the guy that was charged of the Paul SMUR prison in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was for the last few years before he was released. But he was not in charge of the prison itself. He was in charge of the most notorious gang in South Africa in prison called the Numbers Gang. And they've been around for 200 years. And so what kind of governance do you put into place? Absence of law. And so it was very fascinating to talk to him and see how they've actually created stricter governance and more investigative procedures before they sanction someone, because their sanction is the ultimate sanction. You don't wake up the following day. And so they have three sections, the one which they call the HR, but I would sort of say it's corporate governance and HR. They do the investigations, but you also have the sales and operations, which is another one, which 26 is sales and operations. 27 is sort of governance and HR, and the 28 are the leaders and the enforcers. So they're the ones that make the final decision if you're going to live or die. And so I spoke to welcome Bitboy because he was in charge of the 28. So basically in charge of 2700 gang members in prison, in a prison that can take supposedly four and a half thousand people, but have 7000 inmates. So you can imagine how stretched the personnel are. They run short on personnel, and they don't have enough capacity, so the gangs run riot. And I just find it fascinating. They said that the 20 eigth take eight days to make a decision. The 26 is six days, the 27, seven days. The 28 take eight days. Said, why? Is it because we have to consider all the facts that are coming in from all the different aspects of the our personal sort of like the interests in the we have to look at all the interests across the different parts of the gang, but it's also within the different elements before we make that final decision, because it's an irrevocable decision. And I just thought if we looked at what the impact would be on employees when we fire someone, what a different world that that would know. Sophie and I were watching a movie, and I think it was called The Last Duel, and it had to do with if you're familiar with it, it's medieval times that somebody if you made a claim against one of the knights, then the two knights would duel, and whoever won, then the families would die or something. It was that it's the ultimate thing that if you were going to accuse somebody of something, then you would have a duel to the death. And if you won, then your family got to live and the others died. And, I mean, it was pretty intense. If you get intense, it's called the last duel, incredibly. But I mean, if that were the case, I think people would be a lot more hesitant to be throwing around casual aspersions of someone's character than they certainly do today. That's very true. Yeah, that is true. I think another one for me is the Tswana where I grew up. They're not a tribe or tribes that are really vicious or aggressive. I don't know if you ever saw the movie about Seretze Kama, president of Botswana. He's one of the but anyway, he married a white woman and the English didn't like that. So they got the South African government to get involved and eventually he was banished. He came back later and many years later. And his family is one of the, let's say, the big part of the ruling families that tend to run Botswana. And the Botswanas think about things slightly differently because the elders of the crises are the ones that decide on ultimate sanction, on anything. So if you do any kind of transgression, the elders will decide your punishment. And the punishment can be quite severe for Westernized sentiments. I know somebody that was accused once of theft, and when he was found guilty of theft, they rolled him over a drum and basically started hitting with a cane from his shoulders, worked their way down to his butt and then back again. And when he passed out, they put salt, poured salt water on him. That's heavy. But the elders were respected in that way and that they would say, no, this is where we draw the line. And the line was very clear. And so when you consult before you make decisions, you tend to get the wisdom that comes with it. And for me, that is translated into if you look at Botswana's economy, it's one of those fascinating economies, I think, worldwide it has no harbor, so it's dependent on its neighbors for import and export. It has a little bit of land in the north where there's lots of water that flooded it once a year, which is called Ukavango swamps. Fantastic for wildlife, amazing place to visit. So what do you sell? So the CDC, the Commonwealth Development Corporation, had been there and they developed agriculture and specifically cattle farming. So Botswana became like a really big cattle ranch. And so they would look for water, and whenever they found water, they would basically put down a borehole and then they had water. And that means you could have a certain amount of people and a certain amount of cattle around that borehole. Then they would go a few kilometers off, punch another hole, and drill, drill, drill, drill, drill, drill till they found one. The reason why I know they did it this way is because my aunt did a lot of the drilling for the and it's hard to drill in sand. So my uncle became a specialist in that. So they would drill, find the water, then it would set up a camp there and again and again. So most of the roads in Botswana followed the line of underground water. And so when the cell phone towers were put up, they followed the road. So the followed basically water. So when you look at a map from Botswana, you can see where the water is. And so water has a very basic need for humans, but also a very sort of emotive connection in Botswana. And so there was cattle and when there was something like mad cow disease or something similar, they would slaughter everything in the vicinity because they would not put their one big industry at risk. And then they started looking at tourism and they went like, but where are the real tourists? Well, we get to need to get the word of mouth out. So we'll put up camping sites. You bring your tent, you put it on a camping site. Lovely, great. We'll look after those. You have an outside toilet. We're not going to put on an electric point. We're not going to cater for caravans. It's sand. You come in with a four x four in a tent. Very basic or luxury. We'll fly you in with a jet and then a helicopter and we'll get you to where you need to be, but we're not going to cater for the middle segment. And so it became this luxury sort of location to go for watching game and things like that, especially in the north. And that helped the economy because you brought in people that would spend money and it kept a whole community going because a backpacker doesn't. No, that's very true. And so the next thing they went is, okay, but now they've got these two industries and then they discovered diamonds. So the beers came in and this is me ad libbing the story a little bit and said, you know what, we want to basically mine for the diamonds. And so the government said, sure, but instead of taxes, we want shares. And you're going to move your mining. Not your mining you're going to do here, but you're going to move your sorting and your polishing and your distribution centers here as well. And then you're going to train our people to become the people work for. You not going to just bring in foreigners. We're going to learn how to do what you need to and you're going to invest in setting up academies, in setting up places that we can learn. So Botswana's economy went from, I think it quadrupled or became five times bigger within ten years around that, because this economy now allows you for this knowledge economy that you're creating in an African country where it's really hard to do that and all these ruling families have banded together to get that done. And so I think when we together, when we forgive and let go, when we find the funny things that help us to survive and we don't diminish people, as you were saying, I think that's something that the swana sort of epitomizes for me. Wow. I had no idea that that's how it was set up. Especially about the diamonds. I didn't know that. I wasn't aware. Diamonds and gold, that seems to be the value. That's what's happening there now. Wow. So if you were to leave our listeners tonight with one clear message about leadership and humor, what would that be? You know what, I think the thought would be that humor happens on purpose, that we don't wait for things to happen funny, that we actively take some time to see the funny around us and to be aware of it. I call it a comic vision. That you use that vision to see the humor and that you learn to share it with the folks around you and that it's about them being funny. I've been funny most of my life, but when I learned I could help other people be funny, I think that's when my career really started taking off. And I think that when we make it about someone else, that we never diminish anyone and that we have fun in what we're doing. I think then we've got a pretty good goal. We build these gigantically, fantastic worded sentences and mission statements, and very few of them say, I'm going to have fun and no one's going to stop me. And that's what I would hope for them. I think that's an amazing place to stop it. I'm going to have fun and no one's going to stop me. That's a good point, I think. Thank you so much for Tim, for joining us tonight. I really appreciate your time and I love talking to you. My honor. I'll come back anytime. Let me know. What I learned from Tim ingress is that humor can help us change the world. It helps us to step away from the mundane and from our current boxes that we live in into a world that is fresh and new and give us completely different perspectives. It'll help us to basically break away from those anchors that hold us back. So I'm looking forward to exploring humor and using humor to let go of my darlings and move on to bigger, brighter, and more amazing stuff. And I think a giggle a day is what should keep the doctor away. Well, I hope you find your giggles and your future. Future?