Episode 86 - On being funny and ethically persuasive with Dan French

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Dan French, a multi-talented fast-brained human who has successfully combined careers in comedy, academia, and public speaking. 

Dan is not your typical comedian. He has a brain that allows him to juggle multiple careers simultaneously. When boredom strikes, he turns to various creative and intellectual pursuits, effectively splitting his brain into two halves. This unique approach has enabled him to excel as a marketeer, comedy writer, stand-up entertainer, and rhetorician.

We talk networking, ethical persuasion, and travelling the world as a stand-up comedian on cruise ships.

Dan is also a professor in rhetoric,  a powerful tool for effective messaging and communication. Despite its often negative association with sales and politics, rhetoric can be used for good - and Dan shows you how on the podcast.

He also shares his technique of using a meta-level approach to abstract issues, enabling you to remove emotions from conversations and emphasizing the importance of validating the other person's perspective.

Other topics we cover include:

• Embracing vulnerability and authenticity 
• The impact of humour on mental health
• The value of continuous learning and personal growth
• The role of creativity in problem-solving
• The significance of community and support networks
• The impact of storytelling 
• The potential for comedy as a catalyst for social change

Should comedians be given more power or at least a more prominent role in society?

Do we need to reinstate the court jesters? I'd love to know what your thoughts are after listening to this Episode!

Show Notes

Rhetoric Warriors: https://rhetoricwarriors.com/

500 Rockets: https://500rockets.io/

21 Coliseums of Persuasion: https://www.amazon.com/21-Coliseums-Persuasion-Winning-Knowing/dp/0983361649

Dan on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-french-ph-d-6ba9059/

Ready to learn how to Manage your Smart Mind? Then download my free 'Mapping Your Unique Brain' Workbook. Go to:
https://www.coachkramer.org/brainmap to get access.

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Come say hi on LinkedIn |Insta | Twitter | FB

Transcript

Else Kramer (00:00:02) - All right, Smart humans, I am delighted to introduce to you Dan French. Dan, welcome to the podcast. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. We're good. Yeah, I love that you're saying that because we have people from 102 countries tuning in. Oh, wow. It's super fun. And we're going to dive straight in with a topic I think a lot of people think about, which is boredom.

Dan French (00:00:28) - Boredom.

Else Kramer (00:00:28) - Yeah. Do you ever get bored?

Dan French (00:00:31) - Uh, I have zero boredom. Tolerance, like, zero.

Else Kramer (00:00:36) - So what happens when you get bored?

Dan French (00:00:38) - Oh, I do something. I. I have my pockets of things that I do in the world, and I do them.

Else Kramer (00:00:48) - Okay, so tell us a little bit more about that. What do you do in the world?

Dan French (00:00:53) - So the most interesting part of I think my brain is that it's. Diametrically split into intellectual and creative. So I'm right brained and left brained. And basically, like I work as a comedian, comedy writer, stand up entertainer.

Dan French (00:01:12) - I write all sorts of things. And then I'm also, you know, PhD in rhetoric and intellectual, and I love to dissect things. So basically, the two sides of my brain just talk to each other all day long. This side will think of something. This will heckle it and turn it into comedy. And it just oscillates.

Else Kramer (00:01:32) - Beautiful. And do you do you still work as a what is what is the word rhetorician? Is that. Yeah.

Dan French (00:01:42) - Rhetorician. Everybody wants to add a T, They always say rhetoric, rhetoric. Titian.

Else Kramer (00:01:46) - Ah, see, I have like, this classical background that's like super helpful. Oh, cool.

Dan French (00:01:52) - Yeah. So yes, I combine careers. I've always had multiple careers that are going at the same time.

Else Kramer (00:02:00) - How do you do that? I mean, I think a lot of people listening are wondering, how does how does someone do that? Like if want to be in academia, how the hell do I find time to do other things because I have to publish or perish and so on and so forth.

Dan French (00:02:14) - What it said. Did each of them. Well, you know.

Else Kramer (00:02:17) - See, this is great. Like, you know. Yeah, but kill the perfectionism, basically.

Dan French (00:02:23) - Well, I was a professor for off and on for 20 years, and I like teaching, but I'm not really an academic. Like talk about boredom. Like I find academic work too tedious, too detailed, too long term, too boring. The same way like creative. I don't do I don't really like to write screenplays or really even television or television scripts because they're long form and I'm not a long form person. It is torture for me, not completely torture, but I have to really force myself to stay on one project. In a mono way. Over time, I can bounce back and forth between big projects, but just doing the same one every day just drives me nuts. So I wasn't a good academic. A decent intellectual, but not a good academic.

Else Kramer (00:03:11) - Right? Fair enough. And what about the comedy? How did how did that start?

Dan French (00:03:16) - A boredom like think.

Else Kramer (00:03:18) - Again, right?

Dan French (00:03:18) - Like I tend to drive towards things that have energy in them even if don't really quite fit just so I can see what's there and with stand up. I was I my first professor job was an instructor job after I got my master's degree was right next to right near a comedy club that was just opening up. Wow. So I went down there to check it out and ended up going up on stage the next night.

Else Kramer (00:03:47) - Seriously, just one. You checked it out in the next day. You got on stage. You're just like, let's let's give this a whirl and see what happens.

Dan French (00:03:54) - I wanted to see what it felt like and.

Else Kramer (00:03:56) - What did it feel like?

Dan French (00:03:58) - Amazing. I mean, the performance energy inside of that sort of glowing orb of a spotlight and a stand up club. It's very small. It's intimate. There's probably 200 people that night. The first night I went up and you're raised up above them. You're the only illuminated being you're really the only one talking.

Dan French (00:04:19) - And you've got a super technology audio that you're talking into. So you feel like a supernatural being.

Else Kramer (00:04:26) - It's a little power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And back then on that first day, were you like, okay, this is my thing I have found, right? Did you see the light or was it just like, Oh, this is this could be fun, you know?

Dan French (00:04:42) - No, I knew instantly, like, I'll be doing this the rest of my life. And I have. Oh, wow.

Else Kramer (00:04:46) - Really?

Dan French (00:04:46) - 20, 23 And I just turned 60. So I've been doing stand up for 37 years.

Else Kramer (00:04:52) - That is amazing. Oh, my God. And did you ever have a feeling of like, Oh my God, the audience, they really don't like this. I want to die in puke now. Or is it do you feel very comfortable on the stage?

Dan French (00:05:04) - Um, you know, there are bad audiences or there audiences you don't fit with and that kind of stuff. But I've always been very comfortable.

Dan French (00:05:11) - Public speaking is what I like teaching and doing talks and I've done tons of training and things like that. Um, there's something about, about having a conversation with a crowd of human beings that doesn't let you get bored because somebody in that crowd will have something interesting to say. So like, teaching 200 students is awesome. It's much more interesting than finding one person. You're lucky if you have a bunch of nodes that connect and it's a fun conversation. But talking to 200 people, you'll always have a good conversation 100%.

Else Kramer (00:05:46) - And listen, I love to teach. I still I mean, I wish I did still did it more often because I learned so much through teaching. Right? The questions people ask are like, huh, I love that you're asking that. That is that is so good.

Dan French (00:05:59) - And so it's just so dynamic. Know my brain works really well in that situation. That's why a lot of times in standup I do crowd work instead of routine. So I have jokes I could do. But it's much more fun to talk to people and let my brain, my comedy brain react in the moment.

Else Kramer (00:06:16) - So what does that look like? Is that kind of improv with the audience? Like I'm I know nothing about standup, so educate me.

Dan French (00:06:23) - Yeah, stand up. Standup is you kind of mentioned it, but it's a control freak performance form. Yeah. You're in charge of what you're going to talk about. What's going to happen if you let somebody talk, that's your choice. Or you can shut them down. But there's there's negative crowd work where you have to, you know, insult somebody into submission. And but I do positive crowd work. I just want to find out things about people. Right. And they're always people are always just weird. They just say weird stuff and it's very entertaining.

Else Kramer (00:06:56) - And then you just ride with that and you sort of improvise on that.

Dan French (00:07:00) - Well, I'll give you an example. This last cruise that I just did through Alaska, it was a ten day cruise in Alaska.

Else Kramer (00:07:07) - I'm going to pause you there. Right. Because that's another like such a fun thing.

Else Kramer (00:07:11) - Like, yes, you keep it interesting by doing lots of different things. But then within one of the different things that you do, you go on cruises all over the world. How how fun is that? Okay, So you were on a cruise.

Dan French (00:07:22) - I was on a cruise, which if you don't like, Cruise, is higher entertainment. And some of it's like on ship Entertainment, which will stay there for 3 or 4 months, like a Broadway show. And they just do the same show every week. But then they bring in new entertainers every week as well. And that's usually a lot of times stand up comics or vocalists or singers or whatever musicians. But I get flown in basically for a week at a time. Sometimes they'll keep me for 2 or 3 weeks because they keep changing out people. And I do maybe two nights, two shows each week, a 45 minutes of straight standup with about 800 to 1000 people is a really big theaters. And yeah, it's crazy. It's people all over the world, all over the US.

Dan French (00:08:07) - I've been to Sri Lanka, I've done the coast of Brazil, I've done Hawaii multiple times. I'm doing Tahiti coming up.

Else Kramer (00:08:17) - I think there are many people listening right now taking notes like how they think, how the hell do I get on a cruise ship?

Dan French (00:08:23) - But you need to two 45 minute completely different shows of playing material.

Else Kramer (00:08:29) - Amazing. Okay. But you were going to tell us the story about what happened when you interacted with the audience. And so this last.

Dan French (00:08:35) - Week, there are lots of ways of doing crowd work. Like I also do trainings and like the comedy trainings are really interesting, especially for like business people. Essentially, it's a extracting the secrets and techniques that professional standups have used, but moving them over to let professionals use them not to be funny, but to like dominate an audience or rivet an audience and crowd works. One of the great ones of doing that. So there's sub techniques within it that you can use to make it work. And one of them is I need personal information from people in order to turn it into comedy.

Dan French (00:09:12) - And so I'll ask questions. And the most common way of doing crowd work, the most common topic is where are you from? And as soon as they say where they're from, you have all this imported, you know, caricature of of that area. Like where are you from originally?

Else Kramer (00:09:29) - I'm from Haarlem in the Netherlands.

Dan French (00:09:33) - Yeah. See, you just said Haarlem from the Netherlands. That's a weird concept here in the US.

Else Kramer (00:09:41) - Yes, it's Harlem with an extra.

Dan French (00:09:45) - That's funny.

Else Kramer (00:09:46) - And think Harlem was actually named after it.

Dan French (00:09:50) - Really?

Else Kramer (00:09:50) - Yeah. Because remember, we used to own New York, but then we sold it for. For one guilder. It is that we were.

Dan French (00:09:58) - You could have just had better defences against British ships and cannonballs.

Else Kramer (00:10:03) - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan French (00:10:05) - Um, so I would take that. That would be perfect. Like if I found you in the audience, I'd be like, What's your name? And that's where it would start. And then I'm where are you from? And you say Haarlem, the Netherlands.

Dan French (00:10:18) - I'm like, Really? That's the whitest place ever. And like the most African American place in America. Like, you just that's some weird collision. Yeah, It would be off and running.

Else Kramer (00:10:30) - Oh, love that. Yeah, you just riff on that.

Dan French (00:10:33) - Right? But the guy that I was talking to on the cruise this last time I asked, I asked people, Do you like where you're from? Who loves where they're from? And a bunch of people applauded. I'm like, okay, everybody just yell out where you're from. And I listen for funny places. And this guy was from Arkansas and he had a big accent and I'm like, okay, Arkansas, what's your name? And he said, My name is Country.

Else Kramer (00:10:55) - What's really honest? Like such a gift?

Dan French (00:11:01) - Here we are.

Else Kramer (00:11:02) - You can't make this shit up. Seriously? No.

Dan French (00:11:05) - And and so there's a whole series of pro questions that you can use to get more. And he's got a woman sitting next to him like, Well, who's next to you? Is like he said, Well, that's my wife, but I call her sister.

Else Kramer (00:11:17) - Watts.

Dan French (00:11:18) - And I'm like.

Else Kramer (00:11:19) - Country with a sister from Arkansas.

Dan French (00:11:22) - Right? So that's crowd work. And I talked to him probably ten times. I kept coming back to him at the show would lull or I would get bored and be like, Hey, country, how are you doing?

Else Kramer (00:11:35) - How's your sister? Listen.

Dan French (00:11:39) - Technique. You can learn how to do that. Everybody's like, It's fast and it looks magical because you're doing it in the moment, but it's really technique.

Else Kramer (00:11:47) - I love this, and one of the reasons I also love it is a lot of my clients hate networking events. And this is actually super useful for networking as well. Right.

Dan French (00:11:58) - Just that works really interesting too. So people don't understand what rhetoric is in my background. Like rhetoric is a communication studies degree. So it typically focuses on persuasion or like messaging or communications directed towards getting specific effects like rhetoric. Is the study of effective messaging? Yeah, like over here, people just express they're human. They communicate in rhetoric.

Dan French (00:12:22) - You work.

Else Kramer (00:12:25) - Oh, I've lost sound. I've just lost you, Dan. And you're back.

Dan French (00:12:41) - Okay.

Else Kramer (00:12:43) - You were saying rhetoric is basically effective messaging.

Dan French (00:12:49) - Rhetoric, rhetorical studies is the study of effective messaging. So expressive. Most people speak expressively. Whatever their brain comes up with, they say it. Rhetoricians stop you before the message gets out? Do work on it to optimize it for whoever you're talking to so it has a better chance of being successful. Yeah. So it's very organized, very edited, very controlled messaging.

Else Kramer (00:13:14) - I think, by the way, has a very bad name. We're going to talk about that later on. But it can also be used as a force for good.

Dan French (00:13:20) - Yeah. So, I mean, the reason why people think it's bad rhetoric is just the old Greek word for persuasion. But the only time it gets used anymore is in political rhetoric like empty rhetoric. You know, say for.

Else Kramer (00:13:34) - Selling you stuff you don't want or need. Right, in marketing.

Dan French (00:13:38) - Yeah.

Dan French (00:13:38) - So that's what everybody thinks about persuasion. It goes up instantly into sales and bad politics, but that's like 20% of persuasion. The other 80% is ethical. Good techniques for getting human beings to do what you want them to do or need them to do. Yeah.

Else Kramer (00:13:54) - Okay. So going back to networking, sorry for the. So we'll just take. Yeah.

Dan French (00:13:59) - Like a communication studies degree. Thing I like about rhetoric is they'll dive into anything and it's studies like what are people doing here, what are the best techniques and then goes back and takes teaches those techniques to people. So like I used to do these events, um, I'll do them again here again in California did these a lot when I lived in Texas, but had a big house. Uh, I would take everybody. I met new people I met for the last six months. And comedians, business people, intellectuals, professors, whatever. And do parties that are called super social parties. And I would do bios for everybody before the party would write up a bio and put it and send it out to everybody.

Dan French (00:14:44) - So you knew exactly who everybody was, even though they were all strangers. And there are rules for the party. There were networking rules like you had to talk to everybody.

Else Kramer (00:14:54) - Are you you kind of gamified it?

Dan French (00:14:57) - Yeah, a gamified it and gave it new social rules because the worst part of networking is you don't know who you're about to talk to.

Else Kramer (00:15:03) - Yes.

Dan French (00:15:05) - Fix that way to optimize it.

Else Kramer (00:15:07) - Yeah. Love it. So it needs specific tips for people who find themselves like maybe for work. They have to go to conference and they find themselves in a room full of people and they're like, Oh my God, I hate this. Like, what would you how could they make it fun? It'll be a fun game to play.

Dan French (00:15:23) - Well, again, I think it's a communication challenge more than a introversion challenge, Like a lot of people are like, I'm an introvert, don't like to talk to new people. Like, that's not true. You don't like to talk to new people that you don't enjoy talking to.

Else Kramer (00:15:36) - Exactly.

Dan French (00:15:36) - But if you knew who you were going to enjoy talking to in that room, you'd be very excited to go into that room. Yeah, and part of it is just being able to identify you. And I came up with this partly because I was a panelist for years at the Austin Film Festival. Oh, fun. And they they literally print out a brochure or a magazine or a guide before the the event to tell you who everybody is because everybody wants to network. Yes. They're all writers trying to meet producers and, you know, more advanced writers. So I would go through the thing before the, you know, event and mark all the people I wanted to meet, I knew who they were. So I just walk up to them and start talking to them. So you can do it that way. Somebody can put together that resource or where something to let people know who you are. Like a t shirt or something.

Else Kramer (00:16:28) - So that so basically message with your outfit, you're saying.

Dan French (00:16:33) - Well or actual signage? Yeah, I had a guy who was a fight coordinator and he would go to the Austin Film Festival and same thing. He wasn't good at just walking up to people. So I'm like, Well, print up a t shirt that says I fight people for a living.

Else Kramer (00:16:50) - Oh, that is good.

Dan French (00:16:52) - And so everybody would ask him, Well, what's that mean? Yeah.

Else Kramer (00:16:56) - Yeah. So nice. Little bit of intrigue, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Dan French (00:17:00) - Advertising. You got to advertise yourself. Yeah.

Else Kramer (00:17:02) - 100%. Okay. And listen, when we talk about rhetoric and conversations when it comes to the business world, another thing a lot of people struggle with is, I think, sort of expressing frustration or disagreeing. Right. Think a lot of people will have trouble doing that, Um, because they think, oh, I can't say I don't like this. And then it sort of builds up and it becomes so much that they then explode because they there's now so much they don't like, right? So basically, first there's a lot of people pleasing and then there's the eruption.

Else Kramer (00:17:38) - Have you got any tips on like how to navigate disagreements and sort of giving feedback that is maybe not so positive like and please don't say the sandwich method.

Dan French (00:17:50) - They'll say, what?

Else Kramer (00:17:51) - The sandwich. The sandwich method stories have been good. And then.

Dan French (00:17:54) - No. Well, that's all the little tiny pieces of rhetorical advice that leak into the world. That's the thing like about rhetoric. It's people have never even heard the term used the way it's supposed to be used. It's a 2500 year treasure trove of ideas about persuasion, starts all the way back with the sofas and Aristotle and yeah, up to the current minute. So every once in a while one will leak out like that, like give people, you know, feedback with the sandwich method of positive, negative, positive. It's like, okay, that's a tiny little technique that that has some utility to it. But the bigger issue is how do you validate people or not intimidate people or not upset people? And there would be 50 techniques for that.

Dan French (00:18:42) - But the one that people remember is Sandwich, because it's a better message about how to do. It's easy to remember. Yes. Rhetoric will be like, okay, great sandwich that's sitting over here. Let's do the other 50. So that you have a lot more options because people recognize sandwich. They recognize what you're doing.

Else Kramer (00:19:00) - Exactly. They're like, Oh, God, this is where they do the sandwich and just give me the bad news. So can you give us a tip, like for, let's say, um, my CEO has decided like we're pivoting or we're taking a new direction, and I know this is going to hurt my team and I am not happy, and I'm going to have to, like, push back, Like, how what can I do to not like my brain is like, oh, my God, confrontation. Fear don't like it. From a neuroscience perspective, it's going to be very uncomfortable. Also, I want to, you know, keep a healthy relationship. I don't want to burn my bridges, but I also want to express my discontent, let's put it that way.

Dan French (00:19:40) - Of discontent. Um, so. Again, rhetoric is something that's going to answer that question by studying that, Right. It's not going to give you prebuilt tactics. Yeah. So if you look it down on this sort of, you know, sort of list of levels like here's theory, strategy, tactics, situations, and then here's actual scripts for how to do that. So if we go down that list, like what I would start with is probably a strategy which is to meta everything.

Else Kramer (00:20:16) - Yes, I love managing everything anyway because it's so useful. This was smart.

Dan French (00:20:20) - People do you know, they.

Else Kramer (00:20:22) - Turn.

Dan French (00:20:22) - Everything into an abstract issue and they go to the meta level. Yes. So what you have to be able to do is invite that person up to the meta level with you, which doesn't have emotion in it. It doesn't really it doesn't put the relationship on. You know where it could be injured. It takes relationship and emotion out of it. It's like we're just going to abstract this.

Dan French (00:20:44) - And if you can get somebody up there, get them out of their emotionality, out of the relationship, it's like, let's just look at this problem or this thing that you have suggested in an abstract, better way. I understand why you're doing it. You can do validation stuff, which is interpersonal. Yep. Which is basically interpersonal persuasion techniques.

Else Kramer (00:21:04) - But listen, let's emphasize this because I think a lot of people don't realize is right. But it's so insanely helpful to say, listen, I see where you're coming from. Just that one thing. Right? I get it. I get it. And I don't. Don't. Right.

Dan French (00:21:20) - So you do a little relational work with your interpersonal techniques of validation and, you know, acknowledgement and all those things that people like as human beings. But then you have to move them up into the meta. Yeah. And not everybody wants to go up there and not everybody can go up there. They don't really review their decisions. They don't really look at the rationality or that long term consequences or the wide consequences of what they're doing.

Else Kramer (00:21:47) - Which is exactly what can be so frustrating. Yes.

Dan French (00:21:50) - It's very frustrating for smart people. These are the the the existential frustrations of life 100%. You can't get people to matter with you.

Else Kramer (00:21:58) - Yeah. I love that you're saying, okay, this is this is only going to be a quote. You can't get people to meet up with you. It's like we need a like a title. Yeah, that's meta, baby.

Dan French (00:22:10) - Yeah, Because you know as well as I do and again, anybody that likes to learn the meta is where you solve everything.

Else Kramer (00:22:17) - Yes. Like long term, right? Like, no, it's not like, okay, there's a dike, there's a hole in the dike. Let's move my finger in. That is not a long term solution, people. Yeah.

Dan French (00:22:30) - So the question becomes as a rhetorical challenge, how do I get people to enter the meta sphere without even if they don't want to go there.

Else Kramer (00:22:42) - Without making them feel like, threatened or inferior in any way? Right.

Else Kramer (00:22:46) - Or vulnerable. Yeah.

Dan French (00:22:47) - Yeah, yeah. You can't lose your mind and be like, you're just an idiot.

Else Kramer (00:22:51) - Exactly. Are you stupid?

Dan French (00:22:53) - Get you into the meta. Cannot get you to where I need you so we can solve this. That's your fault. That's not their fault. You just don't have the right techniques to get them there.

Else Kramer (00:23:02) - Amen. So everybody needs to learn rhetoric, basically, at least part of it.

Dan French (00:23:10) - It's so it's so useful to be able to design your interactions. To optimize them to get what you want.

Else Kramer (00:23:18) - Yeah. So, okay, so let's talk to the ethics of that, because if I get what I want. Maybe somebody else does it.

Dan French (00:23:29) - Yeah, there's all sorts of potential outcomes. So I teach ethical only persuasion, like Tell me more. That's my thing. I don't like to use unethical techniques. And partly because the morality of it and partly because the pragmatics of it, whenever you do an unethical technique to win in persuasion, you are also losing in ways you don't need to lose.

Dan French (00:23:53) - Because somebody if somebody gets moved somewhere through unethical persuasion, you've injured that relationship in the future.

Else Kramer (00:24:02) - Yeah. So this is again, the long term vision. Yeah.

Dan French (00:24:06) - And that's, that's not acceptable to a rhetorician. I'm here to win in the moment and in long term. Yeah. And the big win is we have a great relationship now. We can talk. Yeah. And there's more problem. There's going to be more things that need from you. Yeah. And so that's that's the ultimate goal and really good rhetoric, ethical rhetoric is to create a great relationship, which only works if both sides are winning.

Else Kramer (00:24:32) - I love this. Okay, So people in business pay attention, right? Because I see so many, especially in the coaching world like and also marketing, by the way, people would like short term, let's push a product, let's create lots of FOMO, sell lots of shit. But then people, you know, are never going to trust you again. And you have to find new people to sell it to.

Else Kramer (00:24:52) - And like at some stage, surprise, surprise, you're going to run out of people.

Dan French (00:24:57) - So yeah, business is a weird environment. Like I worked in academics and I worked in entertainment in the last ten years or so. I've done a lot in business as well. Have a marketing agency out of Austin and it's mostly dude. All right.

Else Kramer (00:25:08) - So that's another thing that helps you not be bored. You run a marketing agency, okay.

Dan French (00:25:14) - Which has an attached marketing think tank to it. See how fun? Because that's what I really do. I don't I don't really I'm not really good at servicing other people's visions, like because I get bored. Yeah. So I like to do the creative parts. Like I'm really good at naming and slogans and the kind of high kinetic kind of diamonds that you need in your messaging because they're fast. Yeah, they would joke writing is fast. But in marketing business, I've learned a lot about how business needs to function. Or how it dysfunctions, whether it should or not.

Dan French (00:25:51) - Yeah. And you can't change business. You have to adjust your stuff so that they can still be useful within business contexts. Like when I first started, I'm like, You all need to slow down. Let's really study this. Like, yeah, we don't slow down. Yeah.

Else Kramer (00:26:06) - Yeah, that's right.

Dan French (00:26:07) - Business.

Else Kramer (00:26:08) - It's it's interesting. It's and there is some stuff that you may want to change as well, right? There's some business practices that some of us are like, this is just ridiculous. It's just not do it anymore. Okay.

Dan French (00:26:21) - But then you're always you're always a salmon swimming upstream and business trying to get them to change. Yeah, like you can change a little bit and admire people. I've got a lot of friends who work in business consulting and some of them are really interesting mismatches. Yeah, like I have a great friend who's hugely spiritual. She does Reiki and she does every spiritual modality. She's really good at it, but she sells that in business. You know, which is a weird.

Dan French (00:26:48) - It's a weird market. But they gain from it like it sounds like what you're doing with teaching people, you know, to avoid boredom and to, you know, incorporate these principles into their business. It's a tough sell at first, but once they get in, they're like, Oh, there's value here. Even for business people, it's not.

Else Kramer (00:27:06) - Even a tough sell. They're like, Oh my God, you are a smart person. You get my brain. Hallelujah. Where have you been all my life? That is usually how it goes. So I'm I have a relatively easy think yeah.

Dan French (00:27:20) - Yeah I have a lot of there are a lot of intellectuals in business right. Who are making a living and they're doing their thing in business, but they are kind of starved. Yes. You know, for really using intellectual ism in business.

Else Kramer (00:27:34) - Exactly right. They and when they may even have had coaches in the past, but they were just running around circles and kind of manipulating them, probably also with rhetoric anyway.

Else Kramer (00:27:44) - Right.

Dan French (00:27:44) - Everybody uses rhetoric. Yes.

Else Kramer (00:27:46) - And and then they encounter someone who does who's like, no, no, that shit's not gonna fly here. And they're like, Oh, this is fun, right? This is a new, new kind of challenge. So yeah, that is fun. Um, I just want to go back actually to stand up and another concept which I think would be super fun to talk about with you, which is rejection. Like, do you even experience because it sounds like you don't even experience rejection in a way. There's just like a mismatching audience. Think what you said.

Dan French (00:28:21) - And that's all it is. Like again, once you've done something so much and you know all the success techniques in it. The only way you're going to fail is if you're like having some night where you can't use those techniques very well or mismatch. And so, like in standup, it's just fascinating. Every time you go through it, you learn new techniques for making the audience like like you.

Dan French (00:28:49) - To to keep the audience psychologically in the moment. You know, and you've already got pre-written super script. Like I have jokes that I still use that I wrote 30 years ago.

Else Kramer (00:29:01) - Wow.

Dan French (00:29:02) - Because they work no matter what. I call them infallible jokes. They're just whatever reason you constructed it correctly, it had really good power. And it just works forever. Yeah. Which is a great way to. That's why everybody's always intimidated. Like, what if they're not laughing? I'm like, Well, that's their fault.

Else Kramer (00:29:20) - But again, this attitude at.

Dan French (00:29:22) - Times.

Else Kramer (00:29:23) - But you're kind of brushing this off like this is a normal thing. I mean, I applaud you for it, but I think for so many people, it is not right. They will instead of thinking, okay, the this, you know, it's an audience mismatch. They will rather like turn against themselves and say, oh my God, I suck or I failed or this went wrong. So what is happening in your brain or what are you what do you think makes you have such a different reaction and such a different attitude?

Dan French (00:29:50) - It's the repetition of that profession.

Dan French (00:29:55) - So it's.

Else Kramer (00:29:56) - Kind of.

Dan French (00:29:58) - You've done it. I've done stand up and everything from biker bars and Florida. Where, you know, it's an aggressive audience and they they're not there to listen to you, to give you any power. You have to take it all the way up to corporate boardrooms or really great nights in comedy clubs when everybody is they're happy and juiced and ready and just I've done it everywhere. And so it's only now like and I still fail. There's still failure in standup, like doing the cruise ships. I only start doing those about a year ago and I've done some of those that are failed like horribly. Partly because I hadn't done Stand up for real for about seven years. A transition and mostly doing comedy writing and then working in business. And so I was my techniques were rusty. I was not, you know, sharp. But my first chip that I did was mostly British are interesting. And it was a mismatch. They just did not like my Americanness. I could not get them to connect with me and talk.

Else Kramer (00:31:11) - Yeah. You like engaging in British audience and audience participation is very different.

Dan French (00:31:18) - Very different. And I've never done that audience before. So completely took me by surprise. I was not rhetorically prepared with techniques for working with that audience. And so it was bad. That was a horrible night. Which amused me, you know.

Else Kramer (00:31:35) - So how did it amuse you? So what happens in your brain? You go like, Oh, this is interesting. Or wow, right? Yeah.

Dan French (00:31:42) - That's where the intellectual pops in, you know, standing back and looking at it. It's like, start analyzing. Oh, here's all the reasons why that failed. Here are the ways I could succeed if I did that again, but haven't worked with another British audience since.

Else Kramer (00:31:57) - Okay, people Universe, send him a British audience.

Dan French (00:32:00) - Please don't want to do another British audience like I've done Canadian audiences, audiences. And they didn't like me either.

Else Kramer (00:32:09) - So there we are. But listen, what you said there is really important to, I think, emphasize curiosity is such a powerful tool, right? Just instead of getting sort of drawn in and starting to feel emotional and that whole spiral of, oh my God, I failed, I sucked or I disappointed, I let people down the other or the other like, Oh.

Else Kramer (00:32:29) - This is interesting. Unhappy audience. Right. Let's solve for what happened here instead of making it mean a shit ton of things about me and, you know, my character, all that kind of stuff, which then turns into a negative spiral pretty quickly. Pretty nasty. Just taking a step back and just doing the analysis is so useful, right?

Dan French (00:32:54) - Yeah. Again, it's that double world of emotion and meta. Yeah, like that's my meta brain sort of jumping up and going, Yeah, yeah. You know, I'm still a human being. You want to have a weird experience, go ahead and go fail early on a cruise and then cruise with those people for another 6 or 7 days and go and walk around the boat. I'm we're all the same spaces and they're like, I'm walking past and they're like going like, yeah, you know, I want to.

Else Kramer (00:33:19) - Tell this guy.

Dan French (00:33:21) - And I would tell them like sometimes on shows now I'll be like, Hey, if you don't like the show or if this doesn't go well, you can still talk to me.

Dan French (00:33:29) - Like, I'm not going to tell you more jokes to punish you at the buffet.

Else Kramer (00:33:33) - It's safe to approach me.

Dan French (00:33:36) - But it is. It's a tough psychological space to know every time you walk out of your cabin, everybody dislikes you. Yeah. Or it's a weird thing because, like, the relationship between entertainers and audience, it's like you've disappointed them. They've now all negatively evaluated you. But I'm like, That's like this much of me. It's a half a percent of what I do. You don't know the rest of the stuff I do. So it's a tough psychological experience of failure. And I have a little presentation I was working on about a Tale of two cruises. So the first one I did was the British one, and then three weeks later, two weeks later, I went to Hawaii to a mostly American thing for two weeks, two straight weeks. And it crushed. I was a star on the ship. So everywhere I walk, people are like Dan, you know, And they knew me and they wanted to talk.

Dan French (00:34:27) - And I'm like, Yeah, same exact same show.

Else Kramer (00:34:30) - Fascinating. So that also shows you how relative it all is. And it's not like an absolute meaning on your performance or your character. It's just context, right? Yeah, Yeah. Love that. Talk to me a little bit about, first of all, like your education and and maybe a couple of your thoughts on our educational system while we're at it.

Dan French (00:34:53) - Our educational system or.

Else Kramer (00:34:56) - Well, your.

Dan French (00:34:57) - Your universal education system.

Else Kramer (00:34:59) - Well, let's let's stick to what we know.

Dan French (00:35:03) - Well, I'm from Kentucky originally, and for people who aren't from the US, just think of the most illiterate place where you live. And that's your Kentucky. You know, Kentucky in America is one of the bottom five states in education, in health care. And that's partly because it's got underdeveloped areas in the mountains. The hillbillies. And I didn't grow up there, but I grew up in in a place that didn't really value education. Like it's not a culture.

Dan French (00:35:31) - It values action. You know, it's sort of a working class culture, agrarian culture. So it doesn't really value education. But I did because it was my way of I was bored at five. I knew I was in the wrong culture at five years old. I like when you're abridging your vocabulary because your words are too big for the adults.

Else Kramer (00:35:54) - You were doubling down at five. Yeah.

Dan French (00:35:57) - This is not my. These are not my people. Yeah. And so the only people that were my people were inside of books. And again, most intellectual people have this experience where it's like, I've got to find stimulation. Well, it turns out books have all the smart stuff. Yeah. So I read all the time and that made me good at school and school. If you're good at school, you start getting scholarship offers and you actually go to college. And I was the first person in my entire lineage to go to college and graduate college.

Else Kramer (00:36:27) - Wow. What was that like? Did you get lots of pushback or did they love it for you?

Dan French (00:36:32) - Oh, have jokes about it in the show about like it definitely is strange to me from the rest of my family.

Dan French (00:36:37) - Not all of them. My family is pretty smart, but they're just not educated, formally educated. But they would come to me at like at family reunions. They'd be like, You think you're something up there at that college? Just all your books learn everything but can still kick your ass right now. I'm like, Well, that's not really the issue, is it? And surely.

Else Kramer (00:37:00) - So good.

Dan French (00:37:03) - Um, so I really super value education and. When I was about to graduate as an undergrad, I was in an English major in a journalism double major and already done some writing professionally. But it was so boring writing within the restrictions of journalism and people telling you what you can and can't say, I couldn't deal with it. So I ended up going to grad school because I couldn't find anything that I thought was interesting to do as a job. And a professor was a friend with that, was friends with, sent me to grad school. And as soon as I walked into grad school at the University of Texas at Austin, I was like, Oh my people.

Dan French (00:37:43) - A community of thinkers. Like I remember being in the first graduate student party with the the professor, the faculty and going, Everybody in this room can understand everything I say.

Else Kramer (00:37:54) - Isn't that the best?

Dan French (00:37:56) - Crazy. I'm like, Oh, where have you people been? Yeah. So I was always elevated by education. Some people get knocked down by education. You know, it's built for them to fail. It's not adapted to them. It's not the way they learn. Yeah, but it was perfect for me. And so I just hung around until I got a PhD.

Else Kramer (00:38:16) - You just stayed long enough until they gave you one again.

Dan French (00:38:21) - Wasn't a good academic, Like my dissertation was kind of all over the place and it was sort of interesting, but I wouldn't call it great. Academics had a bunch of interesting ideas in it, but they finally were like, Yeah, just go, Just, we're done.

Else Kramer (00:38:36) - It's good. Okay. And then like, what do you think about the current educational system in the US? What would you love to keep and what do you think needs to go?

Dan French (00:38:47) - Do you think it's under under intellectualized as as you are alluding to for most things like in business and people's lives? They don't really for a place that intellectual houses that manufactures intellectual ism and teaches it for a living, they do not intellectualize themselves very well.

Dan French (00:39:06) - Like, remember my son, they would have sports day at his grade school where for one day, you know, out of the year that all the kids would show up and the whole day was outside playing sports and having competitions and had all these stations and everybody just adapted the whole school for one day to be an outside experience. And I'm like, That's the one day of the year that the kids are happy. Maybe you should do that as the primary foundation. Instead of making them sit in a square in little desks and expecting them to be able to learn. Yeah.

Else Kramer (00:39:44) - Yeah, it's so fascinating how we like, of course, have so many listeners also of ADHD who were told who didn't even find out they were smart until maybe they were in their 40s because they were it was just hammered into them that they were, you know, impossible and stupid because it just couldn't sit still long enough to learn. And the school system just didn't cater to that at all. And they were just made to feel like completely dumb, useless, bad, all the things.

Dan French (00:40:11) - Yeah. It's a processor plant, right? It's just processing masses of human beings and kind of watch as much information into them as you possibly can. But it's horribly designed, horribly ineffective. I would I would completely shred it and be like, okay, let's just think about this. They say we have 20 styles of learners, like a kinetic hit who has to move? Yes, all the time. You can still teach that kid. Of course, he's the math. You can teach him advanced things as long as you're servicing who they are. Yes. You know, or super emotional people like who are highly anxious and neurotic and a lot of fear and a lot of suspicion. Then you've got to adapt over to that. But just driving one huge, boring bus and making everybody get on it is a horrible idea. Yeah.

Else Kramer (00:41:05) - And it's I think it's a problem that is it is hard to solve. I remember when I was in school, I was in one story school and then I went to a normal story school and I was like, okay, when I grow up, I want to fix the school system, right? This is what I was thinking in school.

Else Kramer (00:41:22) - I was like, This has to be fixed. This was in the 70s, people and it's still a complete mess. It is a hard thing to fix because it's very. Well, maybe I mean, that's an assumption. I guess it's expensive to cater to all kinds of different people. That is an assumption. Maybe that isn't even true if we get super creative around it.

Dan French (00:41:44) - Yeah, I think if we intellectualized it well and actually put resources into it, then it wouldn't be. It's not a. Unsolvable problem. Yeah, I agree. But the big the big solution that we've used, at least for the last few hundred years, has been to mass ify and, you know, institutionalize and industrialize and.

Else Kramer (00:42:06) - Standardize everything.

Dan French (00:42:08) - That those concepts have worked well for, creating things like cars. Yes, but they don't work very well. Like even now, if you look at what happened to the car industry, it's like, yeah, okay, let's mass ify it. But then once it matures, it's like, no, people don't want mass product, they want crazy, weird creative cars.

Dan French (00:42:28) - Yeah. And so it's forced to change and there's money in it for if it changes well and it dies if it doesn't change, yeah. Education just keeps going no matter whether it's bad or not.

Else Kramer (00:42:39) - That's the other thing, right? There's always going to be kids. There's there always need to be schools because that's the way we kind of society operates. And there's very little punishment if you don't get it right. Other than, well, we're looking at it right now. Guess like what happens in society? What are we.

Dan French (00:42:55) - Going to do now? We're going to change it. All these two people on the podcast.

Else Kramer (00:43:00) - Hey, we got to start somewhere. Okay? So the next thing I'd love to talk about is play. So how does play enter into your world? Because it's such a good antidote to boredom. Do you feel like you're playing when you're doing stand up when you work?

Dan French (00:43:17) - Um, yeah, so I. I have to be multimodal all the time. I can't take creativity out of my constant experience.

Else Kramer (00:43:29) - You can't shut it off, basically.

Dan French (00:43:31) - I can't shut it off. And most people can't. Like I have all these sort of sub things that pop up all the time and I always save them. Like because I'm a comedy writer and intellectual, I obsessively save everything in a place I can go find it again. I've got this massive list of ideas of things that make life more interesting that we should put into the world. And like one is, comedians should be given way more power, right? Like comedians, Everyday comedians, not just professional comedians. Yeah. There's a big swath of the world which is is comic, and that's one of the foundations of their persona and their psyche and their orientation to the world. But it is the most oppressed group. You are not allowed to be the comedian in most business situations.

Else Kramer (00:44:20) - Yes.

Dan French (00:44:22) - In most organizational formal situations.

Else Kramer (00:44:25) - Because you have to be serious.

Dan French (00:44:27) - Yeah, because the serious decided that they dominate the world and the comedians are not allowed to have as much power.

Dan French (00:44:33) - So my one of my little political sub projects is to get comedians more into power. I love it.

Else Kramer (00:44:40) - This is this is your personal revolution, right? Like, Yes.

Dan French (00:44:44) - Because we're oppressed. We get fired if we say what our comic thoughts, you know, we get attacked because, like, you're wasting time or you're in the way. So all that comedy, creativity and joy and playfulness and happiness that it engender is moved down to this tiny little layer of after the meeting. Or go find somebody in their office and you can talk to them about joke around, but you can't do it in public because you get fired.

Else Kramer (00:45:13) - Yeah, it is fascinating how but this this also ties into our insane obsession with productivity, right? That everything we need to do, everything we do needs to be productive in some way, which is just makes people very depressed. And it also shows up in like arts, like I used to teach creativity and people be like, Oh, but what I've just created is that could I do something with it? Could I sell it like or at least I would be like, this hidden agenda in the back of their mind instead of just being in flow and experiencing the joy of playing with paint or taking pictures.

Else Kramer (00:45:46) - Right? There's always this like, Oh, can I show this on Instagram? Can I commodify it? Can I monetize it? Like, it's so utterly depressing.

Dan French (00:45:55) - Yeah, capitalism and joy kind of don't really.

Else Kramer (00:45:59) - They don't mesh well do they? I'm think mean Joy in humor, of course is often very subversive, which is another reason like if you like capitalism and you also like hierarchies, you're not gonna like stand up. Right?

Dan French (00:46:14) - Because it's not I would say it's not really subversive. It's lateral, like interesting comedy wants is everybody to have the same level of power and be able to talk and things like that. And yes, like comedy will go after whatever's in power because whatever's in power doesn't want to give the power to comedy. So it has to compete. There's a great Russian theorist, literary theorist named Mikhail Bakhtin, who talks about the second voice, that there's a dominant voice in every culture and every situation. But then there's a second voice. There are other voices going on. There's usually inside of other people's heads.

Dan French (00:46:53) - They don't get to be released. And in with comedy, that's always like, Whatever you say. The comic will use all these techniques to have an alternative version of what you just said or a reaction to what you just said. But it's just not allowed to, you know, dominate the room.

Else Kramer (00:47:12) - It's like kind of the undercurrent of what's going on and you actually get to speak that.

Dan French (00:47:17) - Yeah, that's the nice thing. Again, about standup, it completely inverts that. Oh, the fool, the jester, the comedian is now in power. Yeah, Come on into the room. You're going to deal with the comedian for an hour.

Else Kramer (00:47:30) - Yeah, I love that. It is actually a beautiful reversal. And it's also a space. Um, I mean, also used to do a lot of facilitation and of course a lot of stuff that happens when you work with groups is around power like in power dynamics and do people feel safe to even try stuff, But also when they enter a room where there's going to be standup, basically they're handing over power, right? All their status is gone.

Else Kramer (00:47:54) - They say, Well, but but I am the senior blah, blah, right? You're just another human sitting in a chair maybe getting picked up on, maybe not. But you can't sort of defend yourself by saying, but you know, I put a lot of weight over here. Yeah.

Dan French (00:48:11) - There are different rules operating in comedian space and you have to, you know, either accept those rules or challenge those rules. And that's the heckler, you know, will challenge the rule. But who gets to talk? And, you know, I get every once in a while somebody it's not heckling like attacking usually it's just disrupting like they want to say something or they're drunk and it just comes out of their brain and they're suddenly wanting to be in the space with a voice. Yeah. And I'm always like, even sometimes they'll say something funny, but I'll be like, Well, that was funny. I was like, that's. Do you have anything else? Do you have a more routine? Because I do and I've got a microphone, so let's play.

Dan French (00:48:53) - And I just eviscerate them because I've been doing this. I've been on stage 5000 times talking to random audiences. Like, there's no way you can compete with me.

Else Kramer (00:49:02) - Yeah, you're not going to win.

Dan French (00:49:04) - But I prefer not to create conflict. I turn every piece of conflict into cooperation. Like you want to talk? Great. Let's see if you're funny. And if you're not, I'm going to invite you to not talk, you know? And if you don't take that invitation, I'm going to make you not talk. Yeah.

Else Kramer (00:49:23) - Okay, let's talk about community. That's another thing on my cards. You just said, like I found my people when I did my I started doing my masters, right. My graduate thing. What about community with regards to the stand up community? Is that also does that feel like your people? Is it a special kind of scene? Do you feel like you belong?

Dan French (00:49:45) - It's definitely a special kind of scene. I was hanging out last night with three other comedians who I've known forever, and they're all really funny and just interesting people.

Else Kramer (00:49:56) - I think a lot of neurodivergent peoples end up as comedians, right?

Dan French (00:50:02) - Well, I think a lot of neurodivergent people, because they're not always super social, they're attracted to things like comedy, but they can't get themselves out to do it. Like improv communities are interesting for that because improv, you know, it's a group activity and it's very supportive. It's very tiny, cultish where they, you know, they help each other and they have all these techniques and they they end up doing pretty cool things. Not but not as really as individuals. Standup is exactly the opposite. Standups do not want to play with somebody else. They want to control every bit of it. And it takes for.

Else Kramer (00:50:41) - Autism, right?

Dan French (00:50:43) - Yeah.

Else Kramer (00:50:43) - So, yeah.

Dan French (00:50:45) - I hate doing improv. I can't do it. I don't enjoy it. It feels incredibly oppressive. I'm like, Y'all hush for a minute. Let me do this.

Else Kramer (00:50:55) - I did it once and I got super annoyed. I was like, No, this is not where I wanted this to go.

Else Kramer (00:50:59) - Can you please write like that? Yeah, yeah, which.

Dan French (00:51:03) - Is perfectly fine. I yes, completely applaud it. Go do it if you get. It's beautiful. It's just not my thing.

Else Kramer (00:51:09) - Yeah, 100%. Now I just read an autobiography by an autistic standup comedian in the UK. I forget her name because I suck with names, but she actually ended up right. She. She was like, I love this because this is, you know, with standup, I am in control, right? Not someone else. And that is perfect for my kind of brain. And I don't need to be palatable or to mask. Right. I just get to say what I think.

Dan French (00:51:34) - Yeah, there's a weird like because I'm a professional stand up like that kind of auteur theory of I'm just here to express who I am. And if you guys enjoy it, great. If you don't, you don't. You know, I get that. And like.

Else Kramer (00:51:50) - Amateur, she's. She's a famous stand up.

Else Kramer (00:51:52) - She's a she's a professional as well. She's a famous. Right.

Dan French (00:51:54) - I'm just saying like there's, there's things within standup that have been imported like from artistic theory and then add to the natural, you know, brain showing you who I really am. That's not really what stand up to do stand are adjust to the audience because the audience is forced them to adjust. Yeah, like if you're getting silence from everything you say, you will change. Yeah. And it's really standup is kind of co-created with the audience. Like they tell you what they like and you drop that. You drop the stuff they don't like until they shape you into something that they found really palatable and really, you know, affable. So in some ways it's, you, but in some ways they are. Co They're editing everything you say.

Else Kramer (00:52:38) - Yeah. Which I think is beautiful. It's almost like you're, you're creating a statue, right? They're sort of carving, you know what the, the actual set is going to be with you.

Else Kramer (00:52:47) - You come with the stone and together you create a statue. It's not just you saying this is what it's going to be.

Dan French (00:52:54) - Yeah, it's awesome. It's an awesome way to create because you get a tight feedback loop that you never really get to experience. And even in business, part of the problem with businesses, they're creating products mostly in vacuums. Yeah, creating their messaging, mostly in vacuums. Then they'll test it at the end. I'm like, That's an awful idea. You know, you don't get you don't hit the mark without constantly, you know. Oh, look, we found it. But you have to go through 100 iterations with real people. Yeah.

Else Kramer (00:53:25) - Basically, you were MVP ING before. MVP ING was a thing.

Dan French (00:53:30) - Yeah, that's essentially good.

Else Kramer (00:53:32) - Which is so good like, and the amount of times you have to tell like, no, do not create a product and like record 50 hours of video before you have like an audience and sold stuff and yeah, are sure people are willing to pay for this.

Else Kramer (00:53:46) - It's insane. Yeah, I love that as a metaphor. I think it could be a great example of like a very, very fast feedback loop, then adjust it the next night, right? It's like immediately update improve, which I think again is also super fun for, for fast brain people who get bored very quickly. I mean, we love to iterate. We don't want committee meetings like, okay, so what are we going to be doing 2025 right? Tomorrow is going to be better. We're going to change Abcd, get feedback next.

Dan French (00:54:21) - Well. And you'll find again, I think one of the fascinating things that I've that I've been able to do back and forth between these different worlds I work in is I constantly poach from the other world and bring it over into this world and like what you're doing with creativity and business, I do with sort of entertainment. And like I worked in Hollywood for a long time and Hollywood production systems are incredibly sophisticated and creating messaging and messaging that is super produced.

Dan French (00:54:51) - It's super creative and it's fast. So like I used to work in talk shows for a long time and on talk shows you walk in in the morning and there's no show. It's got to be put together in one morning, early afternoon, rehearse, practice vetted, and suddenly it's on the air that night. An hour of fresh comedy and entertainment.

Else Kramer (00:55:15) - Relevant right to what happened that week. Yeah.

Dan French (00:55:18) - And so they cannot abide any kind of failure, any kind of dysfunction. It's all been cleaned out of the system. Yeah. Because anything doesn't work. They get rid of it instantly replace it until they find what works. Yeah. And so it's super effective in creating these really high level messages incredibly fast. But it does that because it's got all these structures that have been learned over time, over the last 100 years of, you know, creating filmed and videoed and TV entertainment. And then they just travel from show to show, but they all use the same techniques. I walked in the business and I'm like, okay, so how are you guys? I'm looking at the way they build messaging and it's ridiculously set up.

Dan French (00:56:01) - That's brainstorm. Like, no. But I'm not going to do that with you.

Else Kramer (00:56:07) - Let's not brainstorm. Yeah.

Dan French (00:56:09) - Because you are capable. You are not froze. You're not talent. You haven't been trained how to do this. You're executives. You're not even creatives. Why would we brainstorm? You're just going to be in the way. So I would never do that. It would never let an executive into a creative process.

Else Kramer (00:56:31) - So how did people take that?

Dan French (00:56:35) - Well, again, you have to meter it. I usually start. Yeah. When I do consulting, I usually start with, Hey, uh, great to be here. Like, I'll talk to the C-suite people. What? I'm like, awesome to be hired by this person. Let me. Let me orient you to how I do things. You're all super smart. I get it. But you all have. SPS. And that is smart people syndrome. Which means your brain can intellectualize this and you're usually fast processors because you have to be in order to, you know, be you.

Else Kramer (00:57:08) - Can do all the analytical stuff.

Dan French (00:57:10) - You can move through things great. That does not make any of you creatives. You can understand creativity. It doesn't mean you don't have. You're not creative, but you're not professional creatives. I can bring in three idiots right now to this room who would never say an intellectual thing, but they're so good with language and images and stories and ideas and characters. They'll say things. You're like, Oh my God, where did that come from? And it'll blow the space open. And that's what you need if you're looking for really kinetic message development. The rest of you guys are in the way. You're stopping those people, you're hampering them and slowing it down. So let me move all you smart people to where you do good things. Right? And just work with the creator.

Else Kramer (00:57:53) - You're so good at this, right? You get to do. You get to.

Dan French (00:57:59) - Have to convince them like you're ruining your own messaging by being in the room.

Else Kramer (00:58:04) - So listen, what fascinates me is like sort of the also the economics behind this.

Else Kramer (00:58:08) - I'm sure people are wondering like, okay, I mean, Dan sounds so good, but how do you live, right? How how do you either you run a business and that's supposed to like take up a lot of time or you do stand up on cruises, but then how do you eat?

Dan French (00:58:26) - Well, my business. I have a partner who's a business guy. Like, we've worked together now for five years in this agency. Hard core business guy, has a big sales background, has an MBA. So he he runs the business side of the business. I could not do that. I could not deal with business. Business? And then I'm kind of the weird wizard that he brings into things and drops in there as sort of like special ingredient. Like, well, we need to bring Dan into this because he's going to design this your marketing from a rhetoric history of rhetoric perspective. I'm going to I'm going to Greek a failure your marketing.

Else Kramer (00:59:06) - So good let's also it.

Dan French (00:59:09) - Yeah we're going to bring in some out onto this boardroom and see what he says.

Dan French (00:59:14) - Yeah so that only works because I have a business partner and I recognize that really early because I found business. The business processes themselves be incredibly boring.

Else Kramer (00:59:24) - Again, right? The boredom? Yep.

Dan French (00:59:26) - I don't do the things that bore me.

Else Kramer (00:59:29) - Yeah, I think that is such a great way to live. Seriously, if you're looking for like a guidance system or like, how do I decide if it's boring, you probably don't want to do it.

Dan French (00:59:39) - I can't. I literally have such a strong intolerance to boredom, and I usually have like an hour and a half limit, like on creativity. Yeah, I'll be like, after like an hour or an hour and 15 minutes or whatever, somebody will be like, Well, let's keep grinding on this. I'm like, Nope, I'm at my limit. I'm done. We can come back later tomorrow or something and I'll have fresh battery again. But I don't push past battery.

Else Kramer (01:00:03) - Oh, interesting.

Dan French (01:00:04) - I'm not good.

Else Kramer (01:00:05) - Yeah, nothing's going to happen.

Else Kramer (01:00:07) - So do you have any rituals or any, like, ways in which you set yourself up for creative success or just to organize your day?

Dan French (01:00:16) - Yeah, tons of them. I'm very patterned, usually most of my day. Most of my days. I will bounce over to work out for two hours in the mornings and I keep working. I have my phone and I take notes and I think Brain is still. Yeah, Yeah. Because it's fun. Yeah. Like enjoy that stuff. I don't care about just being entertained or like listening to music or just looking at beautiful things. I want to think about them. Yeah. And as a comedy writer who sells comedy to people and works, works the comedy minds for a living. My brain's always coming up with crazy little things, and I always write them down. Because I know they have value and I can make money with those. Drives people in your normal life a little crazy that you're suddenly taking a note on something they just said. But you know, it's what I do.

Else Kramer (01:01:12) - Yeah. So you get up, you work out, you do your ideation sort of on the fly. What else?

Dan French (01:01:18) - Just know that I've got pockets of battery during the day and I can do intellectual ism for a little while and then I'll be. I'll reach my saturation limit. I'm like, okay, I'm just going to do jokes now.

Else Kramer (01:01:30) - Right? So you sweat, you kind of batch different activities and then you know, when you need to switch to.

Dan French (01:01:36) - Yeah, yeah, definitely patchwork my day between creative, intellectual and interaction. Like, I like interaction, but it wears me out. So this will be the only I have to record a working on some courses for the marketing think tank right now and we're going to record a session later where we're going to build an entire business and it's marketing in an hour.

Else Kramer (01:01:58) - Oh, how fun.

Dan French (01:02:01) - Because my partner is really techie, so he's really into AI and ChatGPT. Yeah, what it can do and it's this crazy, you know, I'd say it gets like 80% of basic communication really well dialed in.

Dan French (01:02:15) - It doesn't do the top 20% super creative, but in between us we can take one thing and he's using ChatGPT to fill in most of it, which takes away most of my boring work because I hate doing boring basic communication. And then I can drop in the diamonds that make the communication really interesting and we're done. And it's really, I think.

Else Kramer (01:02:37) - ChatGPT for creatives is like manna from heaven because we can outsource all the boring stuff and just do the fun. Shit is so cool and we become like, we can become experts in a couple of hours. Like in topics that are, Oh, this is interesting. Let me learn about the history of ladders, right? Or whatever it is. Okay. And you can just instantly learn everything you need to know and then riff on that super fun.

Dan French (01:03:03) - Well, that's the cool thing about human beings, right? Everybody's looking at like, Oh, dystopian you technology is going to replace. I'm like, Yeah, but that's not the way human beings deal with anything.

Dan French (01:03:13) - We innovate everything that comes to us. Yes. And we suddenly find things that were never there and like that. Just what you just said about, Oh yeah, take away the boring, creative work, you know, the just taking information and turning into basic communication, which is what most writing is. Yeah, but it's dull, you know, it's tech writing. It's just organizing words and concepts. But suddenly now I've got all this free time to be like, Well, what's the craziest image I could throw in there with this text? And yeah, so I found it pretty awesome.

Else Kramer (01:03:49) - It's going to be fun, right? I think for a lot of us. Um, one more question and actually maybe to the first one, like the dark side of rhetoric, right? And the abuse. Um, I know you. I don't know if you're still doing that, but when we met, he's now like probably two years ago, you were trying to convert conservatives. Is it still do you want to speak a little bit to that?

Dan French (01:04:18) - Yeah.

Dan French (01:04:18) - Again, for people that have, like you said, fast and wide ranging brains, rhetoric is a great area because everybody talks in every field and every industry and every part of human life, which means you can go study how they talk. And as a rhetorician, you can extract again the successful techniques and then teach them to people who you want to be successful. And so I find unethical rhetoricians to be a horrible danger to general human society and definitely happiness and shared space and all the things that you would want in sort of the utopian world. And so attacking or like one thing is powering the nefarious rhetoricians. And that's going after an America that's going after the GOP and the right and the authoritarian leaning kind of governments, all this kind of stuff, who are using certain techniques to win over certain types of the population. So going after them and trying to completely destroy them, devour them. But there's also the people that have been converted. Yes. Which is massive herd of mostly innocent people who have just absorbed a dark rhetoric.

Dan French (01:05:33) - Yep. How do you go back and rescue them? How do you retrieve them from that dark wasteland of, you know, bullshit that they've absorbed? And so my podcast, I've got 230 episodes of podcasts, My Rhetoric Warriors brand is about how do you teach the good people much more successful rhetoric, techniques, and how do you give people things like that, like specific political tasks. And if you have the crazy and or mom or grandmother. You know who's gone right wing. You can't talk to them anymore. Yeah. So instead of what everybody does, everybody runs out of technique. And they're like, Well, I can't talk to them, so I'll just stop talking to them. It's no fun to talk to them. They're crazy. Like that's not what a rhetorician does. Rhetorician is like, Oh, it's a difficult target. I need new tests.

Else Kramer (01:06:27) - A challenge. Yes. Yeah.

Dan French (01:06:29) - And so about three years ago, I wrote a book called The 21 Colosseum of Persuasion. And it's essentially Aristotle's definition of rhetoric is that rhetorician is somebody who sees every possible way of persuading, sees the full menu.

Dan French (01:06:47) - And plucks the one that's going to work with this target.

Else Kramer (01:06:50) - Right. It's like you have this toolkit and you know exactly which tool you need to get out and apply in this situation.

Dan French (01:06:57) - Yes. And rhetoricians don't care what the tool is. I limit the unethical techniques because, again, I think they have fundamental flaw. But if somebody has been absorbed by the Borg and, you know, is over in the dark rhetoric, I have to have techniques for getting them out. Yeah, we need extraction.

Else Kramer (01:07:17) - Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Dan French (01:07:19) - Extraction technique. Yep. And so on the podcast, I interview professional persuaders. Interview academic rhetoricians and extract good techniques. I'd also like to have people on who have been, you know, absorbed and see do some deprogramming on them. Amazing and their specific techniques which work just you haven't been taught them.

Else Kramer (01:07:40) - So listen, everybody go check this out. If your uncle or other relatives have joined the dark side. I've crossed over. Check out Denzel calls to see how you can reprogram them.

Else Kramer (01:07:53) - And, yeah, make them walk towards the light.

Dan French (01:07:57) - Like you can't. I'll give you one quick example. In the book I talk about here is the full menu. That's why I call it the 21 Colosseum. If I'm losing here as a rhetorician, I'm just going to move you somewhere else, right? This is why rhetoricians never lose.

Else Kramer (01:08:13) - There's always another technique.

Dan French (01:08:14) - Many options for persuading you. And I don't care which one is going to work, I'm going to use it again. I limited by ethical techniques, but so everybody uses logos to try to persuade. And politics, which is logic and information. Horrible idea. With the right, you will lose every time you go there. Because they're not particularly logical. They've absorbed skewed logic. Their information base is bad. They have misinformation instead of regular information. You can't clean that up. Yeah. What what works much better with the right is something like mythos. So story. This is why so many of the writers are Christian. Christianity is a story.

Else Kramer (01:09:01) - So yes.

Dan French (01:09:03) - It's not logical. You can find logical flaws everywhere. Like I was telling somebody last night, I was hanging out with the comedians. I'm like.

Else Kramer (01:09:13) - Oh, I'm losing sound again. Hang on. I don't want to miss this. Maybe. Okay. Internet. Stop censoring us. What is going on? Seriously, it doesn't look like it's my internet.

Dan French (01:09:30) - Uh, my. Oh, you're.

Else Kramer (01:09:31) - Back. You're back. Okay.

Dan French (01:09:33) - All right, so we're back. Yeah. So we're doing the Jesus joke. How illogical Jesus was. If Jesus really wanted to be persuasive and convince the whole world, you know, to follow his his belief system, he wouldn't have died. Like during the crucifixion, he would have been like, Oh, this hurts so much. You know, Oh, hit me with another spear. Oh, look, I have a look. Hold my hand. Let me fix that. Check that It's gone now it's back. You know, the whole thing.

Dan French (01:10:03) - Oh, you can kill a god with a couple of thorns and some spears. That's a horrible piece.

Else Kramer (01:10:09) - That's a really. Yeah. Yeah, that's actually really bad. If God was powerful, why. Why did Jesus die? Yeah. Then it does take a lot of explaining.

Dan French (01:10:20) - Right? So there's tons of logic in Christianity and every religion. Horrible logic, but incredibly powerful as a story. Yeah. So if you want to talk to the right, go in and start doing story work. But don't do it while you're finding logic in their stories because that's logos invading mythos work within the story to find new characters. Story is things like hero, villain, victim and stakeholders. Like that's the machinery underneath stories. So like everybody is like, how can they still like Trump? I'm like, he's just acting like a mythical hero.

Else Kramer (01:10:58) - 100%.

Dan French (01:10:58) - Why can't you see through that? I'm like, No, that's not what you do with stories. Yeah. You don't logically decide is he a hero? It's like, Oh, he's acting like a hero.

Dan French (01:11:08) - That's enough for me.

Else Kramer (01:11:10) - So that is what you then a villain? Yeah, exactly. Sort of retell that tale and shift people's perspective. Love that. Okay, So people check it out. One more question. If there was one thing you could change in the world, what would it be.

Dan French (01:11:28) - In the whole world?

Else Kramer (01:11:28) - Yeah. I'm giving you this super power to change one thing.

Dan French (01:11:34) - I would again make comedians have way more power. I think we should have a comedian every four months, every four years in America. It should be a comedian as president. Just think how different life would be if you had a fun way more fun would invert everything.

Else Kramer (01:11:57) - Yeah.

Dan French (01:11:58) - You know, like comedians have ideas that serious people never have. Like I would do, like, socially, there's all these great social ideas. If you watch standups, they come up with these constantly, like, How about this? Every five years we reshuffle everybody. Everybody has to move to a new house.

Else Kramer (01:12:16) - I love it.

Dan French (01:12:17) - You have to pick somewhere like somebody. Everybody has to move to a new house. And you can't take your stuff. You just have to walk into the other house next door down the block or, you know, in the Netherlands. So we constantly just reshuffle everybody. And people are like, What? I'm like, Yeah. How different would life be knowing that, Yeah, you only own this for five years, your bank account, everything changes every five years.

Else Kramer (01:12:41) - Basically what I'm taking away from this, which is so fun as well, like, I don't know if you know this, but I have a degree in philosophy. You guys are actually philosophers in action, but you're so much more fun.

Dan French (01:12:52) - Yeah. Rhetoric is philosophy adjacent. It's. It's language. Philosophy.

Else Kramer (01:12:56) - Yeah, for sure. But, you know, doing stuff like this and having thought experiments and then actually seeing people's reactions, it's the same, right? In philosophy, you ask great questions to sort of make people question things and sort of see things from a different perspective.

Else Kramer (01:13:09) - But if you if you add rhetoric to that and great story, right? It's so much more powerful.

Dan French (01:13:15) - Yeah, well, rhetoric is always about lived uses. Like it's not just an abstraction. It's it's pulling things from the lived culture in the moment. And it once the one thing I don't like about academic rhetoric rhetoricians is that they just sit back and study. Right? I get involved. I'm like.

Else Kramer (01:13:33) - I'm dead language, right?

Dan French (01:13:35) - Yes. I want to get in there and mess with the machinery the real way people are living. And most academics don't. They do great studies, but they never really get anywhere. I think we.

Else Kramer (01:13:47) - Need to make them right, and I think it's the same with philosophy. I think this is why I love coaching so much. It's like actually applied philosophy, right? Ask people questions. So they're like, Damn right, it's philosophy in action. Seriously, it's so good. It's so good that you.

Dan French (01:14:04) - Said like being on a mix, real academics and real intellectuals ism back into the world.

Dan French (01:14:09) - Isn't that what you would want? Like the best thought processes in your business? Yeah.

Else Kramer (01:14:14) - 100%. Okay, so now we have two things you're going to change, right? When you're all powerful.

Dan French (01:14:21) - Oh, endless. I'm a I'm a changer. I'm going to improve or Yeah, like, I think that's partly coming from a working class culture and looking around all the time going, Oh, somebody needs to improve this place. Like that's always been my orientation. It's like, improve yourself through education and you know, and that's an ongoing, unending process. Improve businesses, improve relationships, improve persuasion.

Else Kramer (01:14:45) - Processes, all the things. This has been so fun. I feel like we could talk for at least another hour. Maybe we will someday. Sure.

Dan French (01:14:52) - Thank you.

Else Kramer (01:14:53) - Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Dan French (01:14:56) - Yeah, super fun. I enjoyed it. Like, and people can go to and go to Rhetoric Warriors, which is on YouTube. They can go to 500 rockets as name my marketing agency and marketing think tank and we're coming out with some education products.

Dan French (01:15:09) - This might be interesting to check that out, but yeah, and find me on Twitter. I'm on Twitter all the time so you can message me there or follow me there.

Else Kramer (01:15:17) - Or go on a cruise.

Dan French (01:15:20) - Go on a cruise. Let's go to cruise. Just don't be British.

Else Kramer (01:15:23) - All right. Thank you so much.