The Upright Citizens Brigade is one of the premier teaching institutes for improv comedy.

Their latin motto is: Si Haec Insolita Res Vera Est, Quid Exinde Verum Est?

Which translates to: “If this unusual thing is true, what else is true?”

That question is at the heart of their entire improv comedy method, and the skillset of every improviser you admire.

It’s a way of looking at life that lets us mentally go down the rabbit hole and stick with crazy ideas. It’s how we stay in the scene and keep building on a premise.

It’s what Conan O’Brien does, it’s what Einstein did. “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

The very same technique that helps us be funnier on stage helps us explore the possibilities of technology—the good and the bad.

Asking this simple question daily will change the way we see the world.

By the time the late 80s rolled around, strings and singers had been doing their thing for hundreds of years.

But the primarily Black artists of Detroit Techno didn’t want to paint with that brush. Living in dystopian, post-crash Detroit, they were surrounded by a unique form of mechanized decay and abandonment.

They used drum machines and samplers to create the kind of techno music that expressed that emotion. And they threw  raves in former factories, which increased the connection between the listener and this new form of futuristic music. And no, a guitar and a drum-kit wouldn’t have done the job.

Today, I’m shocked when I see electronic musicians rallying against AI instead of using it daily.

Electronic music has always been about pushing the boundaries of technology. Why should this quest have stopped in the 90s or early 00s?

Don’t fight it, embrace it. Use these tools to create the emotion that’s right for this time, not twenty years ago.

Don’t use technology to create what you used to. Use it to create something new that you never could have before.

In the face of an uncertain future, and with our “learning debt” growing as technology marches on, life can feel overwhelming and like we’re constantly falling behind.

Today, remember that learning just one thing, however small, is progress.

Even if it’s not as much as you’d like, it’s something. And it matters.

If you’ve ever managed human beings, you know one of the great challenges is to properly explain what needs to be done.

No one can see inside our heads, and what is obvious to us is seldom obvious to other people.

When we get lazy, we ask people to fill in the gaps for us, and then we get frustrated when they don’t make exactly what we want.

In a world where AI will soon be able to create anything we can imagine (as long as we can properly explain it), we’re all going to have to get a lot better at explaining what we are trying to solve.

This exercise will benefit our communication for years to come.

Never before has it felt more like there are two different worlds growing simultaneously.

In one world, tech is moving at such an absurd rate that we need to chronicle its updates in minutes, not days.

In the other? A plumber without a website is booked solid for months and will arrive sometime between 9AM and 9PM (hopefully).

Half of the world feels like it’s being upended in real time, never to return to normal.

And the other half feels like a glass of cool lemonade on a summer porch.