Neil B MSSP 24.06.26 (FINAL)

Speaker: [00:00:00] You're good. All right.

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Here we go. Three,

Michael Schweisheimer: two, one. And a hearty welcome back to the Mission Story Slam podcast, which is brought to you by PWP Video. I'm Michael Schweissheimer. I'm the executive producer at PWP Video, the Mission Story Slam, and I'm also an aspiring raconteur. So the Mission Story Slam podcast is all about the story behind the stories from our slams.

For instance, I learned at Mission Story Slam 8 that today's guest's last name rhymes with Lard Fan. Dr. Neil Bardhan is the Executive Director of the Philly Culture Publication, Broad Street Review. He's the founder of Bardhan Consulting, and he's the Director of Applied Storytelling for First Person Arts.

Speaking of First Person Arts, they are back with their annual storytelling festival starting June [00:01:00] 29th with the 2024 Grand Slam to name the best storyteller in Philadelphia. This year the theme is speechless and Mission Story Slam producer Dave Winston Other events in the festival include a conversation with author Roxanne Gay, and there will be a live podcast recording of Beautiful Anonymous with Chris Gethard, and that's also part of the Wawa Welcome America and Fringe Arts Festivals.

Tickets and info are available on the website FirstPersonArts. org So, firstpersonarts. org. Neil Barthan's story, that I'm about to play for you, explains how his academic career prepared him for his work in applied storytelling. There's also some great late night snack suggestions, so let's give it a listen.

Dr. Neil Bardhan: I was in a fairly sterile conference room in the central Netherlands, uh, not exactly an exciting place to be in a lot of ways. Um, and, uh, a young [00:02:00] man, Ph. D. candidate named Alistair. was giving a practice job talk. Uh, he had about 82 slides that he was trying to cram into about 15 minutes. You can't do it.

Uh, his, his colors were mismatched. His graphs were akimbo. I have no idea what he was talking about. And I asked myself in that moment, what am I doing here? The room was 20, 25 cognitive psychologists and linguists, myself among them. And, um, About half of them had PhDs, the other half were working on their PhDs, you know, a bright little bunch.

Um, but I felt like an outsider there. Um, nobody in this group was interested in the research areas I was into, nobody was using the same methods. Um, My boss, who had hired me, had left her position, so I'd been kind of [00:03:00] adopted by this department. Uh, and that made me kind of, uh, an agitated young man, right?

I was the difficult guy in lab meeting. Uh, and I was like, what's going on here? Why are we doing this? I just didn't feel like I had an intellectual home there.

So that was a Tuesday morning. The next Wednesday, I'd just seen A symposium talk, right? Some professor flown from halfway across the world, um because that's the only way to get to the Netherlands is you leave halfway across the world to get there. Uh, and I was standing around afterwards with my colleagues, Allie and Sarah.

Lovely, lovely characters. And we were talking about what we had just seen and how none of us were able to process what we had just experienced. And I thought, well, this is a problem that I keep having. This isn't good. Um, so Our higher ups, the administration, they kept saying, Oh, you guys should be collaborating with each other.

So, [00:04:00] um, Ali, Sarah and I were from different departments and we're just standing there like, what are we supposed to be doing though? Like we don't understand these talks that we're at. This isn't on us completely. I don't think

at night though. I'd go home. I lived alone in an apartment. I didn't know any of my neighbors. I had a quizzo team, um, right? I wasn't totally alone. Uh, I had a couple people I could like go to Ikea with on Saturday. Um, but I just didn't know what I was supposed to be doing. These people would fly in from all over the world, semantics experts, learning experts, and they couldn't communicate what they were doing.

So there was this irony there that I just couldn't work out.

So I'd be in my kitchen late in the evening alone. Um, I'd pour myself a nice Dutch beer, and I would take on a kitchen project. Now one of the things that always amused me there was, I owned a Dutch oven, but I also owned a [00:05:00] Dutch oven. You put the Dutch oven in the Dutch oven. And I would catch myself occasionally baking a cake, eating half of it on my own in one evening, uh, then chasing it with a nightcap of the Dutch oven.

Sweetened condensed milk straight from the can. I highly recommend it if you've never tried it.

Something else was happening in the kitchen at that time. I was listening to podcasts, which weren't really a thing then. This was before cereal happened. But I was listening to dozens of different podcasts, because on weekends I would take myself for little trips, right? I'd take the train somewhere, um, just explore, try to find out where am I going to land?

Where am I going to go next? And I was listening to one podcast called Risk, which was telling these outrageous stories of human behavior and deviance, um, and just like things going [00:06:00] totally awry. And it was, it was gripping. And then I would follow that up with, um, a series called the Story Collider, which is stories about science and people's lives.

And what was happening was I kept listening to these stories and thinking, I'm getting more out of these podcasts from strangers than I am out of the podcast. Talks that I'm paid to go see that are in my field. What's going on here? And I realized that the learning and language and memory experts are all very bright, but the storytellers, the podcasters, they were prepared, they were connecting, they delivered something to me and they transported me to somewhere else.

So I met up with Sarah and Allie again and I said, let's try something new. Let's try something radical. We're gonna get the other postdocs together, and we're going to share what it is we do, and how we do it, and why we do it. [00:07:00] Allie, she studies how, like, six month olds turn their heads to different sounds.

I still don't understand it, even though she explained it very well. Sarah had a PhD in Oxford, from Oxford, in glycobiology, and studied, um, mouse genes, which I think are very small.

I had studied spoken word recognition, word learning, uh, accents, understanding, all sorts of great stuff, right? Uh, but I couldn't tell an Erlenmeyer flask from a beaker. And importantly, what we did was we just brought our lunches to the table and with intention shared how the hell we do what we do. We put into place a space and a format that the administration was not doing for us.

So I realized that the thing that I needed to do was take a look at science. How do people talk about it? How do scientists talk about it, most importantly, to each other? And understand how do we repackage that, like the podcast that I [00:08:00] was listening to. And I finally understood that I wasn't going to be a linguist for the rest of my life.

I wasn't going to be an academic forever. I was going to sit down with people. and listen to them and help them share their stories in different ways. And so that's what I do now. I do also enjoy sweetened condensed milk from the can from time to time. Thank you.

Michael Schweisheimer: Neil, thank you so much for joining me on the Mission Story Slam podcast.

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Michael, happy to be here and be in conversation with you.

Michael Schweisheimer: So I am Desperately curious to know if sharing about condensed milk was in your mind in any way tied to how a story is condensed. And often sweet and also in a story slam format. It's definitely straight from the can

Dr. Neil Bardhan: I had never drawn those connections before so thank you for doing it for me.

I Think of sweetened condensed [00:09:00] milk as an indulgence and a necessity at times And honestly sharing that bit was just a little bit of vulnerability About where I was emotionally.

Michael Schweisheimer: I will tell you yet the loneliness aspect of that time in your life seemed to be You really important to express to you.

The facts of the story don't change without the loneliness, but it certainly adds a lot of color and helps us understand a lot of things. Like, how is it that you decide when you're putting a story like that together, that you need or want those notes in there?

Dr. Neil Bardhan: I think it, um, speaking specifically of the, the bits of loneliness, it grounds the listener in a very concrete way into where I was, what my days looked like.

And my days looked like me alone in my kitchen for hours on end. Um,

Michael Schweisheimer: can you help share a little bit about the path from. That academic world in Amsterdam to the world of [00:10:00] applied storytelling in Philadelphia.

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Yes,

Speaker: a

Dr. Neil Bardhan: dear old friend of mine had told a story at a first person art story slam in 2007 or 2008 which is five years before basically the events of the story So I'd seen the name before even if it hadn't totally registered and and to be clear I hadn't spent any time in the Philly area Before 2013.

I was in touch with a couple people in the Philly area who I'd known for years, and I said to one of them, Hey, I know that you're involved in comedy. Maybe you know things about storytelling. What's there? What's around? And first person arts name came up, and Right around the same time, First Person Arts was launching their first podcast and an associated crowdfunding campaign with it.

Um, and so I kicked in, I don't know, 20 or something like that to this organization that I barely knew of. And I just thought, why don't I give these stories a listen when they come out and feel like I'm [00:11:00] connected to, um, a little bit of a creative community. So that was before I moved to Philly. Then I moved here and I knew that one of the first things I was going to do was connect with FPA and see what they had going on.

And that led me to volunteer at their festival in 2013. And I became, if I may, a super volunteer. I didn't just volunteer for one show or two shows. The volunteer manager at the time was somebody I knew a little bit. And she would just call me at one o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon and say, Neil, all of our volunteers for tonight bailed and we need some Ikea furniture built.

What are you doing right now? And the truth was, I didn't have a job. And so I would say, Yeah, I can, I can be over in an hour or so and rearrange my non existent plans for the night. And that's how I ended up volunteering. Feels like 10 days straight at the First Person Arts Festival and getting a sense of what what all this was.

And that led to being at [00:12:00] more story slams and stage managing those and helping out with production in general. And yeah, they seemed to like me and they just kept inviting me back to things and I liked what was going on. Well, your

Michael Schweisheimer: rate was really affordable. Yeah,

Dr. Neil Bardhan: at the time, for sure. My rate increased with time, believe it or not.

And yeah, I just kept exploring what can storytelling do for me and vice versa. And to be clear, right, I also like, I didn't have a storytelling performance background. Before this, right? I had my academic presentation skills and I'd done scripted theater before in high school and college but I never told the true story on stage until 2014

Michael Schweisheimer: so what is your academic background because you talked about linguists and What kind of psychologist?

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Cognitive psychology. Cognitive. Yeah. So, my undergrad degree is from a Department of Cognitive Science, and then I did a Ph. D. program in a Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, where again, I focused in linguistics, specifically psycholinguistics, so how does the human mind [00:13:00] process language.

Michael Schweisheimer: You've shared a good bit with us about how you chose Philadelphia and fell in with first person arts and all of that.

Is there, was there a title of Applied Storytelling Professional before? Did you invent that?

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Uh, so I didn't invent it, but it showed up in the First Person Arts world after I got connected to First Person Arts. The department formally started around 2016, 17? Yeah, part of that off ramp that I, I don't I'm going to talk about in the story as clearly is that there was a period where I was using cognitive psychology to talk about PowerPoint slide design.

Michael Schweisheimer: Okay.

Dr. Neil Bardhan: There's a kind of a parallel story to the one I told.

Michael Schweisheimer: That goes back to Alistair slides. You got it.

Dr. Neil Bardhan: That lab group, because it was actually fairly new, the head of the lab sat everybody down one day and said, look, this is new. We're figuring out kind of what our lab culture is. I don't know some of you really well.

What do we. Value what do we want to think about when we're talking about communicating our work and somebody happened [00:14:00] to share a Journal article about the cognitive psychology of PowerPoint slides. They weren't a psychologist themselves. They just said hey, this looks cool and I looked at it and I said, yes, this looks cool and very applicable So I brought this to my lab group and I said, hey guys Everybody should pay attention to this because I think we're all We've all forgotten attention and learning 101 when we're using PowerPoint, which is, that's the upshot of this paper.

And so, part of what I figured out was, okay, I can take my book learning, as it were, of cognitive psychology, and teach people about how to design slides.

Michael Schweisheimer: Um, to think that a bunch of linguists could be confounded by words is impressive, or that sharing the research that you're doing when the, The research you're doing is around semantics, communication, language, pathways.

Let's just, yeah, that kind of gobsmacked me. Yeah.

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Everybody gets lost in the sauce, right? You get lost in all the details. You have 85 other priorities that you're working on. You're [00:15:00] putting these slides together the day before or the hour before you're actually delivering the talk. Um, you're going to, you're going to lose something along the way.

Um, but there's, there's other ways to play with it. Uh, and one of the things that I started saying was, It's a particular formatting. It's a particular template, just like different journals have different needs for different articles and different books and talks at conferences, you name it. The whole point is that we can repackage what we're talking about many times over.

How do you respect your audience and your medium?

Michael Schweisheimer: And I will just put in a personal thing here as someone who does a lot of visual work and is often given PowerPoint slides, tiny little graphs are not fair. No. Just If it's hard to read on your laptop at home, it's not good on the screen. So for a while in the story, and as I think about the thinking that you were doing that brought you eventually to the world of applied storytelling, it seems like there was an opportunity for you to focus [00:16:00] specifically on either storytelling or speaking skills for the academic community.

But it seems like at least the work that I know you for at First Person Arts is Usually not academic. It's usually more personal and truthful storytelling.

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Yeah. I had the opportunity to work in the world of science communication and scientific storytelling a bit. And for one thing, my being around folks at first person arts and honestly, Philly in general was remembering that the world is much bigger than science and much bigger than technical fields in general.

I speaking of lost in the sauce, right. I was working at a little ivory tower, right? That quizzo team I mentioned. Yeah. Everybody had a PhD. I thought, gosh, there's so many interesting people out there. Why limit myself? But it turns out I just like listening to people, talking to people, and not everybody's a scientist.

Michael Schweisheimer: Does the work in linguistics and psychology research end up [00:17:00] being ported into the work in storytelling? Or is that, is it a little bit far apart?

Dr. Neil Bardhan: It's a little bit far apart. There's certain things that bubble up for me, this idea that is formerly called common ground. And it's speakers knowing what their listeners know and remembering that.

Not everybody has the same knowledge base as you. It's a big problem in a lot of technical talks, but also in, in storytelling, sometimes I have to remind a, an early career storyteller, as it were, Hey, the people that you're telling this story to. Most of them don't know who you are. They're not your friends.

They're not your colleagues. They're getting a five minute, seven minute story from you. And that's really all they have to go on. I had a particular example with a bunch of nurses where the question came up, of should a storyteller use the phrase heart attack in their story is the event that occurred technically a heart attack.[00:18:00]

That's one of those things where I was like, okay, assume that your audience isn't nurses or medical professionals and that it's okay to just say heart attack when it's some kind of cardiac event. I like, I don't even know enough now to know what the issue was, right?

Michael Schweisheimer: So as the most overeducated storyteller that I get to talk to that I know of, when you are teaching, coaching, Storytellers.

This isn't necessarily a what's your best advice question. I am curious because are there other issues that seem to keep recurring that you have to educate people on as you're trying to help them use storytelling?

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Yeah. One of the things that you and I were talking about earlier is pacing. People have no idea how long Anything it turns out, if they look at a page, they're going to say, well, that's a three minute story.

And I'm like, it might be a six minute story, honestly, but you have to get practiced at reading it out loud. There's all sorts of things that can change. How do you make room for responding to audience laughter? If you're somebody who wants to do [00:19:00] that, or how do you play with language that goes like outside of sentence structure, right?

We're so used to writing sentence, sentence, sentence. Now I have a paragraph. Okay. But telling a story out loud doesn't necessarily need to do that. Right? Right.

Michael Schweisheimer: Well, it's like your, it's your Dutch oven joke. I think is actually a really good example of

Dr. Neil Bardhan: it. Thank you. Thank you. I don't get to use that one often enough yet.

There's all sorts of things that you can do. One of the tricks that I learned when I was taking standup comedy classes, actually record yourself, particularly if you can in front of a live audience and then transcribe it afterwards and make notes where you're disfluent, make notes where you're getting laughs or applause.

Michael Schweisheimer: Disfluent is a new word to me, yeah.

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Disfluent is some kind of hesitation, speech error, uhs and ums. There's lots of things that get categorized as disfluencies. Um, there, I just did one there. They're actually very useful to listeners, is what the research shows. They can indicate that there's new, a new word coming up or new information.

Many of us are trained out of using them in formal [00:20:00] speech. But within a lot of informal settings, there's a lot of good reason to have them. And More to the point of the, of the practice of performing storytelling. It's good to know where you, the storyteller, are going to slow down, or where you need to think about, should I rephrase this because all of a sudden it came out goofy out of my mouth?

Maybe I need to reword this because it's a tongue twister, and it didn't look like that on the page.

Michael Schweisheimer: I was actually going to ask you, I thought in your story that you used pauses really well, and sometimes they seem to be for dramatic effect. Sometimes I was like, wondering whether or not you had either memorized your story or had like a map of bullet points you wanted to hit and were looking for them.

Sometimes I thought you were pausing for a joke. And I'm I am curious in terms of the, your work with pauses and how much intentionality goes into that and how much of it is your own personal speech patterns. [00:21:00]

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Yeah, it's a learned speech pattern, I would say. I historically sped through things. And in this instance, it was a mix of waiting for things to sink in for the listener.

Hoping for a little laugh sometimes and following that roadmap that I have that isn't very detailed, but is I had this story. I should be clear. I had this written out on a piece of paper sitting at in my back pocket. Quite literally, I think when I told it as part of how I put it together, but mentally I'm not working through word by word of visual representation of it.

I have my bullet points in my head and I know where I'm going. And so it's pausing to remind myself. Okay.

Michael Schweisheimer: Which was the next point, yeah,

Dr. Neil Bardhan: which is the next point

Michael Schweisheimer: by the way I am not picking apart some of your storytelling feel free anyway be critical But what's fun is that I can go into this detail with you in a way that's different because this is what you do Yeah You [00:22:00] had some jokes that were like throwaways that were fast or that were like within a paragraph within a sentence That like people missed and in prepping for this I listened to the story several times and so there was there were a couple ones Like, friends I could go to Ikea with on Saturdays, and then the Ikea being in the region that you were of the world, where, not exactly where Ikea's from, but more where Ikea's from, like, it was doubly funny to me, and it just, it didn't get, some things weren't getting the laughs that I thought they would.

They earned.

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Thank

Michael Schweisheimer: you. But sometimes you would just go over them and I wasn't sure how much of that's on purpose or how much of it was getting where you were going. But yeah, it was interesting.

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Yeah. Again, it's a, it's a little of everything. And for a story like this, which I could make super dramatic, right.

I could have really leaned into how sad I was and what it looked like. I wanted to remind people, like, I still had fun. All right. I enjoyed eating sweetened condensed milk, don't [00:23:00] get me wrong. I

Michael Schweisheimer: need to try it straight. I've had it, but never straight. It's really

Dr. Neil Bardhan: worth it. It's on the

Michael Schweisheimer: list now.

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Yeah. I turn out okay.

I'm not doing this to make you feel sorry for me. I'm showing you that there was always some light for me. And that I can look back on it and say, what a goofy thing I was doing on so many levels. If I'm not having fun up there, talking about myself, the hell am I doing? It's like simultaneously self indulgent and masochistic, and that's no good for anybody.

Michael Schweisheimer: Well, I will say that Mission Story Slam in particular, because we're focused on a specific community that may be less indoctrinated into the world of story or poetry or in Slam, um, are often feeling like masochists may be more than, uh,

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Yeah, fair.

Michael Schweisheimer: And hopefully not. I don't really think there's a lot of self indulgent.

It tends to be a pretty humble,

Dr. Neil Bardhan: No.

Michael Schweisheimer: Group that we get but there is I think some abject terror [00:24:00] That people overcome and for which i'm grateful because we end up hearing so many amazing stories.

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Yeah, i'll say this It's a really lovely room that you run. It felt like a whole lot of generous listeners and just everybody who showed up Just felt like they were Incredibly pure of heart and ears and mind and not every room is like that

Michael Schweisheimer: It is it is a group that is very high on empathy Well, I just hope that if you tell that story again that you Figure out how to get the laugh the erlenmeyer flask.

That's all i'm gonna say So we're talking about your practices When you're coaching someone to tell a story, like I said a lot of people at mission story slam It's their first time trying out that format.

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Yeah You

Michael Schweisheimer: Are there specific best practices that you share, and are they any different than your own practices, or do you find it has to customize for each storyteller?

Dr. Neil Bardhan: In terms of preparation, a tip that I picked up from Kevin Allison at the First Person Arts Workshop that I ever attended in 2013 was, [00:25:00] use the five senses. If you're taking me into a room, Is it an open floor plan? Is it a surgical suite? Is it your, your boss's office where there's a couch 20 feet away?

Lay that out for me. If there's not every scene needs a smell attached to it, but if there's an interesting one, you better tell me that it was a fall day and it smelled like pumpkin spice lattes. Cause that's what was in your face. You can just drop these in. But again, like so many beginning storytellers.

It's almost like they don't know that's an option.

Michael Schweisheimer: Got it.

Dr. Neil Bardhan: But for a listener, Hey, you're already transporting us to a different time. Give me something tangible to work with. And then on top of that, the last thing I'll throw is like, people don't always know what emotions are and how to label them. This is a particular experience of my own.

10 years ago, I was learning like, Oh, I just have the same face for everything and it's all fine, but no, you can be sad. You can be mad. The [00:26:00] thing I picked up from improv comedy, and I think this is Jill Bernard, who says this is, forgive me if it's not Jill, listeners, the four main emotions are sad, mad, glad, and a frat.

You don't forget them then, like, and just being able to pepper that into a story and being able to say like, OK, well, now I need to convey. I'm lonely at night. How do I convey that? All right. Sweetened condensed milk as a flavor to it. Right. Being able to connect those does a lot more than saying, and then in 2013, I was promoted to head leader, right?

Whatever.

Michael Schweisheimer: Yeah. And if you get too many facts, too many figures, cause you know, you say 2013 and you're like, there is a fact as a listener that I might want to retain because it might come back or it's been brought up with intent. So I might now be thinking about what was happening in 2013. Who was president?

Where was I? How old was I at that time? And if you can skip those, sometimes if you can skip those details, particularly if it's not really the crux of the biscuit, [00:27:00] I'm like, get it out. Get it out of the way. So you've clearly done a lot of standup. You've told a lot of stories, or at least it seems like you've done some standup.

Dr. Neil Bardhan: A little, a little bit, like three shows. Not a lot.

Michael Schweisheimer: Okay. Nerves. Do you still get them before you tell a story and like, what are your coping mechanisms or your favorite recommendations to cope?

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Yeah, I absolutely still get it. And that's another thing that I, another thing that actually drove me into this profession is that I, if I could give a little anecdote here before I get to the tips, at some point in my academic career, I was relying on PowerPoint presenter notes a lot.

And this is not always advisable, we'll say, uh, because if you don't end up using your own laptop or the presenter view doesn't work right, or in my case, you've copied pasted the slides, but didn't actually add any notes to them, you're going to lose the script that you're reading from because you haven't [00:28:00] learned your story well.

So I was giving a talk one day and I realized my presenter notes were missing for several slides and I all but passed out from anxiety because all of a sudden I just, my feet were gone. Your safety

Michael Schweisheimer: net's gone. Yeah. That's

Dr. Neil Bardhan: crazy. And so that was a big indicator for me of, hey Neil, you've got to figure out how to give a talk and not rely on this.

Little device all the time is you just don't know what you're going to come across Something that helped me along the way that isn't necessarily an immediate tip is I took improv classes and have performed improv comedy for ten Years now I remind myself before a show or an event like like this most of the time I don't know what's what I'm going to say when I'm on stage All I need to get started is a one word suggestion like and at these You Moments where I'm talking about my own lived experience.

I'm reminding myself like, Neil, you were there, you lived it, you can talk about this. [00:29:00] You love to talk about yourself. You love to put on a little show. And you've already done some homework. For other people, as I point out, look, if you're nervous, it's a reminder that you want to do a good job. You're excited for what you're doing.

You care about it. That's great

Michael Schweisheimer: before we wrap up I know I mentioned in the open that you are the executive director of broad street review And i've been really grateful to talk about the work that you do with first person arts and storytelling But just tell me a little bit about broad street review and and what that is and what you're doing there

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Yeah, broad street review is an All digital arts and culture publication that covers the Philly region.

And so it's essays, reviews, features, and interviews. There's also a podcast that people can listen to with local arts and culture makers. It is entirely free to access. There's no paywall, no login. It's been that way since its creation in 2005. It's a really [00:30:00] living, Breathing organization teaches me all sorts of things about what's going on around town.

I've been a writer there. I was our social media manager for a minute right now. It's important because mainstream arts media is basically disappearing. The big outlets are doing away with having journalists, full time journalists. And so an independent group like broadster review can really shore up and add to the conversation, right?

We're not just running things as publicity, it's dialogue, it's commentary on what's out there in a way that is, we're finding incredibly useful to the artists and the organizations that support them.

Michael Schweisheimer: It's close to 20 years it's been going.

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Yeah. It's crazy. Think about the internet in 2005 and what websites you were looking at then.

I'm

Michael Schweisheimer: actually, I'm having a hard time trying to think about what

Dr. Neil Bardhan: other than like Yahoo and CNN, right, it was Dan Rottenberg, who was our founder, had a really great idea. He was interested in using the internet as a [00:31:00] medium and forum for conversation and pieces like this.

Michael Schweisheimer: So if anyone in the audience here wants to connect with you, what are the best ways to reach you?

Is it on social media or email?

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Email, email, please. If you want to talk to me about first person arts, you can email me at Neil B, B as in Bardhan rhymes with Lard fan. Neil B at first person arts. org. If you want to talk to me about broad street review and Bardhan at broad street review. com. And if you're not sure which of these things you're into, just use neilpbardhan at gmail.

com. P as in beer. Is that the

Michael Schweisheimer: same address you use for your consulting practice? The Gmail address?

Dr. Neil Bardhan: No, that's neil at bardhandconsulting. com. Let's talk domain names on another day.

Michael Schweisheimer: Okay. All right. Well, you've got the, you've got the corner on the Bardhan names though, apparently for email addresses and domains possibly.

Dr. Neil Bardhan: No, I'm getting there. It's a slow, Rome wasn't built in a day, Michael.

Michael Schweisheimer: You have to fight with your brother for some of them.

Dr. Neil Bardhan: Yeah, right.

Michael Schweisheimer: You brought Quizzo up. URL Quizzo for [00:32:00] anyone who needs it. First Person Arts, where is that?

Dr. Neil Bardhan: First Person Arts, you can follow us on social media at First Person Arts on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, StudOrg.

You can learn about our upcoming events, including we've got film screenings, story slams, learn about our applied storytelling work that I head up there as well.

Michael Schweisheimer: Broad Street Review is

Dr. Neil Bardhan: easy

Michael Schweisheimer: because it's

Dr. Neil Bardhan: just BroadStreetReview. com. You got it, and Broad Street Review on social media, yeah.

Michael Schweisheimer: And then, I guess we can get BarhandConsulting.

com from your email address earlier,

Dr. Neil Bardhan: right? Yeah, that's easy enough, too. I'll plug one thing here, actually, of my own. I perform improv occasionally with The N Crowd, Philly's long running short form improv comedy. We are largely on East Patchunk at Sawubona Creativity Project. Look up Philly N Crowd.

Everywhere you get your internet.

Michael Schweisheimer: That's N like November N? N

Dr. Neil Bardhan: like November. Yep.

Michael Schweisheimer: Okay, cool. Listen, Neil, really appreciate the conversation and the time. This was fun. Yeah. Well, I can tell you, I had an absolute blast talking to Neil and getting his perspective on storytelling. I really [00:33:00] hope that you all enjoyed listening as much as I enjoyed having the conversation.

If you want to get more of Neil and his organization, First Person Arts, check out their storytelling festival that starts on Saturday, June 29th. with the 2024 Grand Slam naming the best storyteller in Philadelphia. When you go, make sure you say hello to Mission Story Slam producer Dave Winston. He will be one of the judges.

You can get your tickets and learn about all the other events at the festival at firstpersonarts. org. If you have feedback for us and what we're doing at Mission Story Slam, I suggest you go see Dave in person at the Grand Slam, or you can reach out to us via missionstorieslam. org. You can connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

The Mission Story Slam podcast is produced by Dave Winston. It's edited by James Robinson, and it's brought to you by PWP Video. We are Video With A Mission. Find us at pwpvideo. com. I remain Michael Schweitzheimer, and I [00:34:00] continue to look forward to sharing the next story behind the story with you soon.