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The Bigger Stage w/ Matt Stone is a conversation series about leadership, relationships, and the stories that expand influence.
Matt Stone sits down with CEOs, founders, leaders, and creatives to explore the human moments behind growth—how trust is built, how visibility changes responsibility, and how storytelling becomes a leadership skill as stakes rise.
This show is for entrepreneurs and leaders stepping into bigger roles, bigger audiences, and bigger impact—who want to lead with clarity, credibility, and connection, not performance.
Meridith Grundei 0:00
People are starting to even talk like bots, let alone write like bots. I just feel like there's always more need for human connection. And to be completely honest with you, I'm bored out of my gourd at most of the conferences I go to. I think every single presenter sounds the same. It was a pretty high stakes talk, and she practiced the heck out of it, and she gets on stage in this huge auditorium at a conference, and the deck goes out, the power went out, and you have two choices in that moment. There are so many different things that you can be doing to get your audience involved in the content, and the problem is you've limited yourself to the idea of what you think your audience wants from you, and what you think the event planners want from you.
Matt Stone 0:46
If you're an entrepreneur on a mission to build something bigger than yourself, someone who knows that showing up powerfully on stages, literal and digital, is part of how you get there. This episode is for you. It's not an exaggeration to say that meeting Meridith Grundei changed my life last year at a retreat she calls unscripted, I was part of a cohort of speakers who prepared and delivered a three minute talk on a stage in Denver. That experience revealed something I couldn't unsee, that I needed to re imagine who I serve and how I serve them. It was the beginning of the bigger stage. I stepped onto a stage and never looked back. Meridith reached the highest levels of improv, including teaching at the famed Second City in Chicago. These days, she takes everything she's learned in the theater and puts it in the hands of leaders and entrepreneurs who need to get their ideas across, earn trust in rooms that matter and move people to action, not by performing, but by connecting. If you're striving to stand out in a crowded space, if you want your message to land in the head and the heart, this conversation will show you what's possible at a minimum, it's going to make you think differently about the opportunity sitting in front of you every time you step in front of an audience. Meridith Grundei, welcome to The Bigger Stage. So. Meridith, yeah, I'm always happy to talk to you.
Meridith Grundei 2:17
I'm always happy to talk to you. The world
Matt Stone 2:19
needs you now more than ever, in a world of chat bots and semi human or non human expressions of humanity all over the place, we need to be unscripted. Yes, we do, yes, but I want to get into a little bit of like your, to rewind a little bit in terms of your coaching business. Meridith Grundei coaching, tell us what the business is first, what's the name of it, and what's the headline on the business?
Meridith Grundei 2:46
Yeah, so Meridith Grundei is a it's gone through a couple different incarnations. So Grundei coaching Meridith. Grundei, now I feel like it's kind of going back to Grundei Coaching, because I'm now accumulating a team, which is incredible, because now I have people who have, like, a niche focus that can help folks out, but it's to help people be unforgettable, to be unscripted, to show up and to speak clearly, and to also just be engaging and start connecting more with audiences. Because, like you said, we're inundated with the world of AI, people have actually started coming and have started telling me that people are starting to even talk like bots, let alone write like bots. So there's an there's there's a need. I just feel like there's always more need for human connection. And to be completely honest with you, I'm bored out of my gourd at most of the conferences I go to, I think every single presenter sounds the same. It's difficult to differentiate yourself these days, and so that's what I'm in the business of. I'm in the business of helping you tap into, I will say, your heart center, to speak from the heart and not be so stuck in the head. I'm in the business of helping you trust your own expertise so that you can better engage and connect with your audience.
Matt Stone 4:03
When you look at presentations, what are like the top three things that you see that you're that drive you nuts reading
Meridith Grundei 4:09
from the slides, I know that's a pretty typical one, but people still do it a lot. There's so much information on the slides too. I feel like that's driven mostly because corporate and marketing within corporate has said, here's the deck, and when you're done with that deck, we're going to either put it in archive or you're going to need to give that deck to the executive team, whatever the excuse is. So what happens is people present from the deck that they're they're archiving and showing to the executive team, so they feel that they have to put all the information on it. So I have been encouraging now with the companies that I work for, you have two decks. One is for presenting, which is very different than one who's trying to accumulate knowledge and get more into the details of things. So that's the number one issue. The second. One is, people don't practice enough. People get up there. They wing it. They think winging it's okay, because they are the expert. They're off the cuff, but there's no real structure to what they're sharing. And so the message is often getting missed. It's getting it's getting muddled, if you will. And then the third thing I feel is just overall presence. I don't need you to be a performer, but I need you to I need you to understand the rules of the stage. I need you to understand the rules of engagement that you're creating with your audience. I want to feel you in the room. Because first of all, I've taken the time to be there. I was interested in your topic, so help me stay interested in your topic. And third of all, I need you to want me to come back for more. And so I'm going to put in a fourth one. Most people give us so much information that we just feel paralyzed by it, and so we don't take any action at all whatsoever.
Matt Stone 5:56
So the discipline of limiting the point so that people can actually understand it and take action? Yes, 100% now, some people might be surprised that someone who comes from improv would say, I have to practice. I mean, isn't improv all about doing it on the fly? Can you help people understand what the difference is between preparing and practicing but still being unscripted and in the moment. What help us understand that those two how those two things coexist?
Meridith Grundei 6:26
Yeah, so, so, to give a little context and background I have, my experience with improv is I, I loved it as as a young performer. It was the thing that, just like, brought me so much joy. So I did improv games in college, the Keith Johnstone making stuff up, but you have games very much like, Whose Line Is It Anyway? And you would compete with another team, like theater sports, which is the Keith Johnstone stuff. Then later on, I went off to San Francisco, studied more improv, was in a sketch comedy group, and then went on to Chicago, where I did improv at IO, which is the home of the Herald, and then went on later than to teach at the second city. So all of these different kind of diverse improv forms, and there's others that I've done as well, but let's just stick to those to start all of them. All of them have form. They all have structure. And so what you do with your team is you practice that form together, and the better you get at the form, the more you can find freedom and play, and what I like to call formlessness. So the tighter the container, the more you can find formlessness most people, most people can't memorize very well. They just don't especially business busy business professionals, it's really difficult to memorize your entire script, right? Like and who has time for that? And when you do memorize, you have to be so off book, which means you don't need to look at your script anymore, you have to be so off book that you can find the formlessness, right? So let's make it easier. Let's give you a really clear structure so you know where you're going, and then practice the heck out of that structure. And that is where you start to find the formlessness. And that's where the unscripted piece comes in, because at some point you've got to start trusting.
Matt Stone 8:23
If someone had a choice between a perfect slide deck with beautiful imagery and just the right words, but they really couldn't say much of anything, or no slide deck at all, and just themselves and their words to camera or to the audience. I do have an idea in my head, but I really want to know sincerely, which would you choose?
Meridith Grundei 8:48
The beautiful slide deck, okay, just want to understand the question. Beautiful slide deck, minimal words, no speaking, or a person speaking, no slide deck, no visuals, correct, and what is it that they're trying to
Matt Stone 9:03
achieve, trying to get a point across about something. I mean,
Meridith Grundei 9:07
well, first of all, if it's, I mean, I'm a big fan of you, try everything, right? But if it's, if the visuals are really, really good, why not less is more. But I also want to know you, because I want to trust you so you being able to communicate your message clearly with the same simplicity that a beautiful image can bring with very minimal words is also incredibly impactful and effective. Because if you're trying to get me to trust you or buy into something, then getting to know your personality is everything. What's your What was it you said you had an answer to this, or you had a way that you were leaning Yeah.
Matt Stone 9:47
I mean, I I really wanted to know what your answer would be. Because it seems to me that one of the things I've noticed is that people will make a slide deck, yeah, as their container. Yeah, and so I don't want I can't memorize it to your point. I don't have time to do the memorization. And maybe I'm not good at it. Maybe I am, but I don't have the time to do it and practice it that many reps to memorize it. So I'm going to essentially put my own cues on the deck, so the deck becomes cues for me to remind me they're essentially an outline. They're an anchor. They're an anchor. And the problem with that is that you find situations like someone reading the title of their slide to the audience when the slide is right there for everyone to see. Yes, what? Are the things that many speakers that you work with do not understand in the beginning are at their disposal in terms of expressing themselves in an effective way?
Meridith Grundei 10:51
Oh, my goodness, there's Everything is at your disposal. The problem is you've limited yourself to what you think is at your disposal. So for example, we were just talking about visuals. Everyone thinks they need to have a slide deck. There are so many ways you could structure your talk where it's like at the very beginning, you start off with some music. You enter in, there's no deck at all whatsoever. You start talking to your audience. Maybe you tell a story, and then all of a sudden, you have your first main point, and then now there's a visual. It comes up. It's very intentional. It's just there to support your message. It's not there for you to read and compete with your slide. And I'll explain compete here in a second. Then all of a sudden it's like, okay, that slide goes out, and now there's a flip chart, because you're going to get your audience engaged, and you're going to start to brainstorm with them, so that the the learning becomes more integrated, and then you're going to flip back to the slide deck, and then maybe bring in some music, and maybe there's a prop that you've brought on stage. I know one guy who makes a phone call from the stage. There are so many different things that you can be doing to get your audience involved in the content, and the problem is, you've limited yourself to the idea of what you think your audience wants from you, and what you think the event planners want from you. I've worked with yes, there are some event planners who will whose posture might get a little bit more rigid, and their thinking might be a little bit rigid if you say to them that you want to do certain things, they're outside of the box. But there's a lot out there who are excited for the out of the box thinking, so I say sky's the limit. You just got to practice it. I even tell my clients, practice picking up the glass of water and drinking from it, because when nerves kick in, the weirdest shit happens. The weirdest shit happens, and you've got to be prepared for it. It's all about the muscle memory.
Matt Stone 12:40
It's almost like an out of body experience when you're in it.
Meridith Grundei 12:44
It really can be, yeah, and it depends on the size of your audience, it depends on how high stakes The talk is. It really so many things can happen during a talk. It's unbelievable. You're I have a friend who works for HP. She flew out to India from Colorado to give a talk, and it was a pretty high stakes talk, and she practiced the heck out of it. And she gets on stage in this huge auditorium at a conference, and the deck goes out, the power went out, and you have two choices in that moment. You can either let your audience sit there while everyone fusses through it, right? Or you can just start because you're so well prepared. And so she just started. And was she panicking and having an OH SHIT experience on the inside? Yes, but was she able to, like, be present, stand there and connect with her audience and use that opportunity as a gift. Yes, that's what improv teaches you, too. It teaches you how to take the things that might go wrong and use them as gifts, rather than looking at them as disasters, right? And also, don't be apologetic about it. Shit happens makes you look more human the way that you handle it.
Matt Stone 14:05
Yeah, it's like the unscripted things that happened, and how you handle it reveals so much to the audience about you.
Meridith Grundei 14:11
Yes, how I love that you just said that. How you handle something on the fly reveals so much about who you are yesterday, it happened to me. I got a call. I You will, you know, because you came, I had this, this amazing accelerator program that I do once a year. Everyone was about to present. I love having people come into the room a half hour before so that they can check their tech we can drop in, do some breathing, address any additional issues that are happening. But I got a call from my daughter's school, from her counselor. I'm going to answer that. I'm sorry. I'm also a mom. I have a kid who I love, who's having a little bit of a struggle, and if her school counselor calls me. So I negotiated it, though. It didn't impact anything. I was a little scattered, yes, but I called it out, and I think that's what we need to be doing more of, is just being human. Yeah, absolutely. And she's okay, by the way. Oh, good. Everything was okay, good, good. It was just one of those moments where, like, this is, this doesn't happen often, and I need to, I need to address it
Matt Stone 15:17
good for you. Great. Great example. Just thinking about your clients. Many of the clients you work with, tell me about some of the types of clients that you work with, and set the second part of the two part question is, what are their ideas about their own need? What? How do they come in when they start working with you? What's their self perception of what they need and why?
Meridith Grundei 15:41
Oh, so many different I'm gonna give you. I'm gonna give you two examples of clients. One is the entrepreneur. Often the entrepreneur who they know that in order to grow their business, getting on more stages is going to be a great lead gen for them. They just really don't know how. They don't know. They kind of know how, based off what other people have said, but they don't know where to go. They don't know how to build their personal brand. They don't know how to present. Quite a few people come to me where they just don't feel confident. They're they the nerves are really getting the better of them. They want, they want that support. I've had even seasoned speakers come to me who are like I've been doing, like one of my clients right now, she is. She's an incredible facilitator, but she hasn't ever done a keynote, right so she wanted to figure out, how do I bring in all of this wisdom from over the years and everything I've built into a keynote I can now sell right and get on bigger stages. She wants to grow her speaking business. So though that's one group, it's just the entrepreneurs who really know that they can use it as a lead gen and then the second one is organizations. So in those organizations. A lot of my clients are in technical fields. So one of my bigger clients is Amazon, AWS. I work with some of their customers and partners as well. These are engineers who are being asked to speak a lot reinvent is a big, huge conference in Vegas that I've been working at for the past four years. They are the builders, they're they're building the technologies they need to then get up on a stage and share what those those solutions are with customers. But the problem is, they want to give you all the details. They want to tell you about all the features, and that's really not what the customers care about. They do, but not, not in that moment. That's not what we should be speaking about. We should be speaking about and I always say this, every single product or service has a pulse, and you need to bring the pulse to that product or service. And that means you're going to need to bring in more comparisons, more story. You're going to have to simplify things dramatically, and it's going to be tough, because you're you're living with it every day. It's your baby often, but we, we've just been introduced to it, so you have to talk to us as if we have the because we do the least amount of knowledge. So one exercise, for example, and now I'm going off on an exercise. Is that okay with you? Because I know you asked this question, but it's now sending me down a tangent. Let's do it. One exercise I give and this is funny because it's oftentimes to, like senior executives will say, okay, the solution that's been built. I need you to now tell me. How would you explain this to me, if I were a six year old and you were reading me a children's story, and at first they're like, What? What do you want me to do? I'm like, No, seriously, just tell me a children to, like, read me a bedtime story. I'm six years old. On what you do, and it's really cool to see what people do. The other exercise I do with them is, I will say, Okay, there's a time machine. You just met this person who has arrived here from 1412 I'll make up some number from 1412 I want you to think for a second what kind of technologies were around in 1412 Okay, now you need to explain the cloud to them here in 2026 how would you do that? And it's cool, because it helps them break things down and think about what they do in the world and what they're providing in the world in a different way. That's helpful for the people who are not living in their world on a day to day basis.
Matt Stone 19:38
How long does it take for a person to substantively, materially improve their presentation effect.
Meridith Grundei 19:48
I feel like it's an ongoing practice. I feel what I do is I give you my ready room framework, which is a very simple way to map out your presentation. If you follow that each and every time, it shows what to think about, before you even start diving into content. Then it structures things, the content from there. So your introduction, the body, the conclusion, how to handle Q and A, your call to action, all that fun stuff. And then what you're what you're going to need to do after that to maintain it. And of course, the more you get on stage and the more you present this, the better you're going to get. But I do feel it's an ongoing practice, and that you need to give yourself time to practice, which a lot of people don't. So to answer your question, it's not a quick fix. It's just not a quick fix. And I like to look at it, at your talks as Lego blocks. It's a framework that I've given you, and depending on who your audience is, you might take out the red Lego and replace it with the blue Lego, or the yellow Lego and replace it with the red one, because it's going to change a little bit here and there. But based off who your audience is, that's where the improv, the structure framework, is going to be helpful to you
Matt Stone 21:04
on the other side of the journey with you. Yeah, I know it's ongoing, potentially ongoing, but there are finite time limits for most things and careers and jobs, roles, seasons, if you will. At the end of the transformation, the initial transformation, what changes for them internally, and what have you seen externally as well? In the transformation?
Meridith Grundei 21:29
I would say one is a belief in themselves, that they can do it, because I will work with people in shorter amounts of time, right? So I do have a lot of busy professionals, so I have what's called a VIP day. That's preparation beforehand, you meet with me for an entire day. We we, we get a lot done in that day. You then go and you deliver that high stakes presentation. When they come back from that they most that 99.9% of the time, people come back and they just feel really gratified in the work that they've done and that they've achieved something bigger than themselves. And some of them will take bigger risks than others, like I'm thinking of an executive that I worked with that gave a big talk in South Africa. We worked, shopped some stuff, but then when she got on stage to introduce the conference, she switched it. She didn't do a few of the things. She didn't take the big risks that she thought she was going to take, but she took a baby step, and when she came back, she said, Meridith, next year, next year, because, like she could feel it right, like she didn't take the risk, but she she could feel why it was necessary, and that is a huge win. It's a huge win.
Matt Stone 22:45
So Meridith, one thing I've observed in working with you, myself and being in your community, is that when you work with someone one on one, they may not, in the beginning, understand the full impact and the full set of opportunities that working with you will unleash for them.
Meridith Grundei 23:03
I have seen so many clients where new doors have just been opening up left and right, because they have this newfound belief in themselves and how they're communicating. It helps you also communicate in other places. On a personal level, right now, you find yourself telling more stories in those social settings where maybe you felt uncomfortable doing so before, you are taking more risk, like we had just talked about. So you're not you're not delivering what you think your audience wants you to be delivering anymore. You're actually there in service of your audience, and you're truly connecting with them in a different and more unique way than you ever have before in the past. And so what's happening is the transformation is happening is because not only are you trusting yourself more, but the people that you're touching in life are now trusting you more as well.
Matt Stone 23:56
If I said Your talk is not just a talk, your talk that you're going to give to your audience at a conference in Las Vegas or online to a global networking group or wherever it is that your talk is a potentially life changing moment, it's a catalyst for complete change in some way. Is that overstating it?
Meridith Grundei 24:19
No, I think it depends on who you are as a human being, but I've seen people like transform because they they did something. I mean, you attended unscripted, which is a retreat that we're going to do our second one here in Chicago. There were a couple of people in that group who had never been on a stage before and delivered a talk, and to see them having gone through and this is the thing that makes me also unique. As we go through a I call I bring everything from the theater. Everything I do is from what I've learned in the theater. You do your reps, you have your rehearsals, and then what we get in the theater is we get previews. And a dress rehearsal, and then we get to be in front of the audience, so you can work through some of those things that you need to work through and be witness during, through that dress rehearsal, so that when you get into the final performance, magic, that's where magic can happen. But oftentimes people don't give themselves that that one step that can make or break everything you saw clearly how some people were fumbling all over the place during the dress rehearsal, because they're still working it out. They're still working it out in their heads, and they're still working through the confidence issues or the self talk. But then when, when the when the actual performance came and there was bodies in the audience who are there to witness them, and when they let go of needing to be perfect, that's the other piece. Is that a lot of my clients, because they're all high achievers, there's this need to be perfect. And the thing I am always telling people is, be perfectly imperfect, be comfortably uncomfortable. That's where magic lives. Then they did it, these people on stage, they did it. They allowed themselves to be perfectly imperfect, and they were perfect.
Matt Stone 26:12
One of the things that blew me away about that experience was that the people who were the most afraid, the most nervous and the most stumbling around in the in the rehearsals, I would argue, performed the best. I would
Meridith Grundei 26:28
agree, yeah, oh my goodness. And even one, one of them was, is into cybersecurity, a very dry topic for a lot of people. I actually find it quite interesting, this whole cyber security thing, his was hilarious. I was like, Where did, where did that come from? Like, you put an audience in front of people. Shit changes.
Matt Stone 26:51
Okay, so let's talk about that for a minute, because one of the things that I think people might not understand a talk is not a talk. It's an opportunity to change your life? Yeah, one of the ways it can change your life as a leader, I think, is being in a space where you learn new ways of managing the energy, in a room with people who might be going off script, who might be not following the script that you had in your mind, that you didn't even realize when your, for example, control issues might come in. Yep, you're going to give that person an experience and tools to be able to handle that in a more graceful and effective way as a leader. That's just one thing I can think of off the cuff. Yeah, what are some of the leadership tools that someone can walk away with, in addition to having a great presentation,
Meridith Grundei 27:40
oh, my goodness, being able to so if you your your stand ups, or your all hands meetings, that's going to help those tremendously, because you're going to be communicating differently with your team in those meetings, because I'm also going to be talking to you as well about like, how are we handling Q and A, so that how we handle Q and A, or how we handle a panel discussion, or how we handle that, that fireside chat, all of those things weave into how you're going to be leading as well, because it's all communication. So we're talking about, how do you communicate so that the person who just asked the question feels heard without just saying, I hear you right.
Matt Stone 28:23
What tips do you? I mean, do you have a specific technique that comes to mind around that that would help people right now who are watching this?
Meridith Grundei 28:31
Yeah, so, for example, improv. Another reason why it's so impactful is because you have the rule Yes, and which I don't believe yes, and is I'm going to agree with everything that you say, but I am going to use yes and as a thoughtful way to think about how I can acknowledge the other person. And I don't need to agree with them, but I need to at least acknowledge them, because, right, we're human. We want to feel like we're being seen and heard. So I'm going to repeat back what I heard the person say. I'm not going to just say I hear you, I'm going to reflect back what I heard you say, and then I'm going to add on to it. That's the and piece, right? So I feel like that's one example of how I would help somebody with the tough Q and A and also what's going to carry on into your all hands meeting.
Matt Stone 29:22
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I, you know, in my past business, I was working a lot with leadership teams and and helping turn around teams that were struggling. And one of the things that we we worked with them on was understanding that paraphrasing back what someone's saying and and emoting a sense of not only acknowledgement of an idea, but sometimes an acknowledgement of a feeling behind an idea, is not the same as agreeing with it.
Meridith Grundei 29:49
Yes, exactly. And you can also insert your point of view. You can say, I hear you reflect back what you heard them say. However. This, this is where I'm coming from and right, so that it can be a thoughtful conversation. It doesn't, it doesn't have to be contentious.
Matt Stone 30:11
Tell me in our waning minutes here, what are you most excited about in in this, in this next year, coming up? What? What events? What opportunities, what new ideas, what's got you excited? Oh my gosh,
Meridith Grundei 30:24
I'm excited about everything. I just feel like there's so many opportunities. One is collaborating with you more. That is something I'm very excited about. I am excited about unscripted. It's happening in Chicago, October 1 through the fourth. I'm doing that in collaboration with Jamar Jones, who's a personal brand strategist, and so that's very exciting for me. I am totally leveling up my VIP days. So that's exciting for me, because what I've noticed working with senior execs, they don't have a lot of time, so instead of doing a three month program with them, we're going to condense all that into to one day. I either come to you or you come to me, but we get a lot done. So I'm very excited about that. And then I am also excited about building community here in Manhattan and in the greater New York area, just pulling more really smart entrepreneurs together to find ways that we can start creating this heart centered community. It feels really, really exciting for me too.
Matt Stone 31:23
I couldn't agree more. And the opportunity to be even more creatively human is, oh, my god. Has never been great.
Meridith Grundei 31:31
So many great ideas I have going on like so my brain is, is a ping pong ball right now. So if I tried to tell you everything I'm excited about, I don't think we'd have that much time?
Matt Stone 31:41
Well, don't tell me, just just enough. Just tease, tease me and the viewers of this video, just just enough to get them to come in. What else do you want to say to the person out there who feels like they know they could do better with their speaking? They're worried about looking bad, they do well enough, but they're just on the fence.
Meridith Grundei 32:05
I would say the first thing, and the hardest lesson, is that it's not about you, and that judgment is real, but you cannot worry about what other people think that will just continue to keep you paralyzed. So I would say, please start looking at mindset, and you can do this. You are meant to be in the rooms that you're in. You do have something interesting to say, and your gifts need to be heard, because they will ultimately help another person, save another life, make this world a better place, but that's going to be impossible if you just keep hiding,
Matt Stone 32:46
speaking in whatever venue. I'll just say it again, in my experience, is absolutely life changing, yeah, and in that moment when you are standing there on that stage, literal or figurative or digital, you have a unique opportunity to see inside of yourself. And I just want to thank you, because when I went to unscripted, I was in a in a battle internally, because I knew that where I wanted to go wasn't where I was, I was not in the space I wanted to be in exactly. It wasn't completely misaligned, but it was. It was time to move on to a new thing. And so here I am developing this three minute talk, and I'm comfortable on a stage. That's not the issue, the disappointment for me was and the great gift. The great gift was the disappointment, because I was crafting a message around what I had been doing, yeah, and I that didn't fit. That container wasn't right for me anymore. So my experience wasn't a great climax of joy of I said my message, and I got a standing ovation. The benefit I got out of it was seeing unambiguously that I had no choice but to move forward to where I really wanted to go. I could see it. It was like across the river.
Meridith Grundei 34:17
It's beautiful. So you just i It's beautiful, because you have transformed tremendously since then, like you let go of that old part of you, which you needed to so that this new part of you could come through. And so that talk was like that pivotal point for you, which is gorgeous. And this is so I was also a part of another theater form, an improv form, called playback Theater, which is where it was started by psychotherapists, actually, where an audience member would come up on stage and they would tell a story that's going on in their life, a true story about themselves, and then we as the improv actors, would play that story back. And so what you just shared with me is that you didn't see someone play your story back. Back, you played your own story back, and then you got to see, because we did do video for that, you got to see the playback of that, and I would imagine that had a profound impact on you. And so sometimes that is the
Matt Stone 35:13
work as well. It is, it's the work. It's the work that never would have asking chat GPT or Claude or some other tool to tell me what direction I should go was not the way I was going to unearth, yeah, and be able to really use all my senses. That's what speaking and working on. Speaking, does it? It touches on all your senses, and you do such a brilliant job of playing to all the senses too, the tactile, the energy that all of it.
Meridith Grundei 35:43
So, yeah, we don't sit. When you come work with me, we're not sitting in a chair. This is it's very physical. Of course. I if you're somebody who's like, I am not a very physical person, it's okay, because remember, I'll meet you where you're at but you're not going to be sitting in a chair.
Matt Stone 36:00
You may be flailing your arms around whatever you can move, you'll be
Meridith Grundei 36:04
whatever you can move, what you're ever you're able bodied, able to do you I'm still gonna get you out of your comfort zone.
Matt Stone 36:11
I'll just, I know I'm beating a dead horse at this point, but I think of Simon Sinek and that, that talk he did. I think it was 12 minutes where he did start with why? Yeah, and it was a, it was a, I've watched it so many times, yeah, for the craft of it. Yep, it wasn't flashy either. It was him. No, it's on a flip chart. Remember when I said, use a flip Yes, it was a flip chart, yeah. But it was very intentional, very I mean, and simple, crystal clear, and it transformed his life, his life. It did and remember that idea that he had wasn't new, but the way he expressed it made it new for people. It made it actionable for people. And that is what I've seen happen with a great talk. Is the underlying idea may be as old as time, but our job is to deliver it in a way that other people see it and can action, action it, yeah, in a meaningful way for them. And you help people do that brilliantly. I think you. Thank you. Thanks for spending some time with me too. Thanks for spending time with me, Matt, who knows what's gonna happen next? Who knows? I don't know. All right, well, let's step on to some new and bigger stages together.
Meridith Grundei 37:23
Shall we love it? Let's do it. Do.