Palantir’s Weirdest Book Recommendation
Lessons from Impro: Status, spontaneity, and the art of unlearning.
“Some of the best analytical work out there - we learn something new from every post!” — Peter, a paying member
Friends,
In October of last year, former Palantir employee Nabeel Qureshi reflected on his eight-year spell at the defense giant. It is an intriguing peek at the inner workings of a secretive company. Among ruminations about Palantir’s famous “forward-deployed” model and contentious moral alignment was a list of four books the company used to prescribe to every new employee: The Looming Tower, Interviewing Users, Getting Things Done, and Impro.
One of these is not like the other.
The Looming Tower is a natural recommendation for Palantir to make. Lawrence Wright’s work chronicles the rise of Al-Qaeda, culminating in the attacks of September 11th. Likely no book would do a better job of articulating Palantir’s existence and significance.
The second and third books are almost a little disappointing, a harsh critique from someone who has read neither. Palantir’s culture has always seemed almost gratuitously scholarly. Co-founder Peter Thiel is one of the most reliable sources of off-piste texts, responsible for Girard-pilling half of Silicon Valley. CEO Alex Karp presents an even more professorial image, an eruption of wiry, gray hair confessing the philosophy PhD he earned at Goethe University Frankfurt. Seeing these names on the list feels like Slavoj Žižek handing you a dog-eared copy of Rich Dad, Poor Dad with a glowing endorsement.
Still, both are beloved practical texts, and Palantir is a high-velocity profit-making enterprise, not the Cambridge Apostles. And so, here too, there is an obvious logic.
Which brings us to Impro by Keith Johnstone, a book on improvisational theater techniques that most people have never heard of. What is it doing here?
A few months ago, I became fascinated by this question. Why would a vendor to the military ask its new recruits to study the ponderings of a former associate director of London’s Royal Court Theatre? What possible utility could it possess?
Every week or so, these questions would reappear in my mind like a troop of wasps assaulting a picnic. The downside of focus is that you can bat away these intrusions for quite a while before you realize: Oh, I can just figure this out.
And so, earlier this summer, I bought a copy of Impro and read it. It has stayed with me so fully that a couple of weeks ago, I re-read it with a pen in hand to convey its primary insights to all of you. As you will see, it is a special book with lessons for people across functions and professions. Without exaggeration, it has changed not only how I view investing and building, but every interaction. Though I hope this piece will give you a deep appreciation of Johnstone’s theories, I heartily recommend reading the full book.
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Lessons from Impro
An introduction
Before we get to Impro’s lessons, let us set the stage.
Published in 1979, Impro details the philosophies of Keith Johnstone, an English playwright, director, and educator. It draws on his experiences teaching in elementary schools, at the Royal Court Theatre, and at his own theater company, the Loose Moose in Calgary. It runs a little over 200 pages, and is split between five sections: “Notes on Myself,” “Status,” “Spontaneity,” “Narrative Skills,” and “Masks and Trance.” Though some sections build on each other, several feel quite self-contained, more like a separate essay.
For the layperson, not all of these sections are of equal interest. As you’ll see, much of our discussion will focus on questions of status – the heart of Johnstone’s text. Meanwhile, we will make no direct mention of masks. Performers might find this final, 70-page tract valuable (and anthropologists will enjoy Johnstone’s cross-cultural observations), but it is less relevant beyond that.
Throughout Impro, some themes recur: the inherent “competition” in social interactions, the stultifying qualities of traditional education, how ego impedes originality, and the malleability of imagination. We will delve into all of these, and more, but I share these to give a sense of the kind of text we’re entering into. How does your posture influence how others perceive you? What are the necessary ingredients of a good story? Why does traditional school crush artistry? How can you trick someone into being creative? These are the matters of interest in this text.
Every interaction implies a status
If there is one thing to take away from Impro, this is it: status transactions occur everywhere, all the time, and are unavoidable.
While teaching improvisational theater at the Royal Court, Johnstone found his actors struggling to speak naturally. He tried various techniques before landing on his “status transactions.” Actors in a scene were instructed to set their status a bit above or below their scene partner’s. Johnstone asked them to do so as minimally as possible. As he tells it, the impact was immediate:
“[T]he work was transformed,” Johnstone writes. “The scenes became ‘authentic’ and actors seemed marvellously observant. Suddenly we understood that every inflection and movement implies a status, and that no action is due to chance, or really ‘motiveless.’ It was hysterically funny, but at the same time very alarming. All our secret maneuverings were exposed.”
If transactions are so omnipresent, why don’t we notice them more often? In Johnstone’s view, social etiquette “forbids” us from seeing these minor machinations, meaning that we only notice them when in direct conflict.
People play high or low status
It is not possible to be “status-neutral.” In every interaction, you – and those around you – are either playing high or low status. The inflection of someone’s voice, the volume of their speech, the movement of their hands, and the stories they choose to tell about themselves – all contribute to the status they are playing.
How do people play high status? Johnstone provides examples, gleaned from exercises with his students:
Holding eye contact. Actors who do so report feelings of power. It can also feel high status to break eye contact first, provided one does not look back immediately afterward.
Holding your head still while speaking. According to Johnstone, this creates an immediately appreciable difference that others find hard to pinpoint.
Introducing a long pause in your speech. When you start talking, introducing a long ‘errr’ reportedly contributed to high status affect. By doing so, the speaker conveys that others must wait for them. “The long ‘er’ says, ‘Don’t interrupt me, even though I haven’t thought what to say yet.’”
The famous “business card” scene in American Psycho is a fantastic example of what it looks like when multiple people compete to play the highest possible status.
From these examples, you can easily deduce what playing low status looks like:
Breaking eye contact. Specifically, it feels low status when you break eye contact and look back almost immediately. There is a certain insecurity or instability displayed that creates a sense of feebleness.
Moving your head around while speaking. Some people move their head wildly as they speak and struggle to hold it still. If one is playing low status, this is fine, but it can become an issue when the actor must play high status. “You can talk and waggle your head about if you play the gravedigger, but not if you play Hamlet.”
Introducing a short pause in your speech. If you start your speech with a short ‘er,’ you signal weakness. You demonstrate that you don’t know what you’re going to say and invite others to interrupt.
These represent a tiny sampling. Pay attention, and you’ll find status interactions to add to your personal taxonomy everywhere: the way someone reaches for the check, how they sit in the back of an Uber, or queue at the grocery store.
We play status to objects and space
We don’t simply play status with one another but to our surroundings and objects within it. As Johnstone notes, “If you enter an empty waiting-room you can play high or low status to the furniture,” Johnstone notes. “A king may play low status to a subject, but not to his palace.” A high-status person may happily take a couch’s cushy corner seat while a low-status person is squashed in the middle.
The way we use our own “space” influences the status we’re playing, too. Johnstone recounts watching actors move across the stage and imagining force fields around each of them. As they interacted, space from one actor might flow into another, or in a different direction altogether. For Johnstone, “the best actors pump space out and suck it in,” and when this is done in concordance with their other movements, it helps “the audience feel ‘at one’ with the play.”
The high-status player stands with shoulders rolled back and a wide stance to let their space flow into another person. Johnstone gives the example of a sergeant major screaming into a subordinate’s face – their energy flows unfettered into the low-status soldier.
Meanwhile, the low-status player stops their space from flowing into anyone else. They crouch or kneel or cross their arms – defending themselves and blocking direct confrontation.
The way someone sits in a chair or leans against a bus stop conveys status just as readily as words and gestures.
Becoming a status expert
Before you begin staring down strangers or peppering your speeches with interminable ‘errrrs,’ it is neither “bad” to be low status nor “good” to be high status. One should aim to become what Johnstone calls a “status expert.” This is someone capable of modulating their status up and down depending on what the situation demands and the effect they are hoping to solicit.
A status expert understands that playing low status can be invaluable. When Johnstone meets a new group of students, for example, they sit in chairs, but he will sit on the floor. Immediately, he plays low status to them physically. He exaggerates this further by telling them that they should blame him if any of their improvised scenes go wrong, since he is the teacher. Though this is, on its surface, low status, it actually elevates Johnstone. Only someone very confident could take on this level of responsibility. As he works through this initial speech, students often slide off their chairs and join him on the floor. As Johnstone notes, “I have already changed the group profoundly because failure is suddenly not so frightening anymore.”
It’s easy to imagine how this might be useful in a business environment. A CEO who wants employees to brainstorm creatively will have much better luck if they lower their status rather than raise it. No one writes poetry in front of a firing squad.
Through a more Machiavellian lens, playing low status may divulge useful information to you. If you cast yourself as unthreatening and hapless, perhaps a competitor will tell you something useful.
Playing low status may be tactically shrewd in situations where all hope seems lost. Johnstone gives a rather brutal example to emphasize his point. Congolese soldiers captured two journalists. After shooting the first, the second began to weep. Rather than killing him, the soldiers laughed at his plight and let him go. “It was more satisfying to see the white man cry than to shoot him.” When you find yourself on the wrong end of a lop-sided status transaction, the best move may be this submissive “non-defence.”
Playing high status can be useful when trying to convince others of your competence. By playing high status to investors, a startup founder may make their business appear more real than it truly is. If trying to partner with a much larger organization, displaying high-status behaviors may convince them to collaborate without steamrolling you.
In moments of crisis, legendary CEOs seem to play extremely high status. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Jensen Huang are all famous for delivering brutal feedback and falling into fits of rage. Perhaps these are simply the most memorable anecdotes and thus get passed on to biographers or emphasized in the editing process. But it seems equally likely that playing high status helps: it minimizes dissent, creates urgency, and implies competence.
Becoming a status expert is not as easy as it sounds. Johnstone believes that all of us have a preferred status we’ve become adept at. If you’ve spent your whole life playing low status, relying on the benevolence of others to achieve your goals, it can feel jarring to suddenly switch roles. Similarly, if you’ve moved with patrician froideur through the world, displaying vulnerability may seem terrifying. To become a true expert, you will need to overcome such fears and experiment.
Friends play status games
If you were to stop reading Impro after 25 pages, the concept of status transactions would feel quite depressing. Does every interaction really have an implied status? Do I play high status to my baby when I feed them a bottle? What about with my partner when I tell them I express my love for them? Am I acting low status when I confide in a friend? Life begins to feel false and empty when put in such terms.
But Johnstone’s framing is much lighter than this suggests. He would likely argue that, yes, all of these are status transactions of some kind, but that they are collaborative rather than competitive. For Johnstone, entering into status games is not a mark against friendship or intimacy but for it. “[A]quaintances become friends when they agree to play status games together,” he writes. “If I take an acquaintance an early morning cup of tea I might say ‘Did you have a good night?’ or something equally ‘neutral…’ If I take a cup of tea to a friend then I may say ‘Get up, you old cow,’ or ‘Your Highness’s tea,’ pretending to raise or lower status.”
Status is not a prison to be escaped from, but a game to be played.
Status transactions are at the heart of comedy and tragedy
For Johnstone, both comedy and tragedy work through status transactions.
Comedy operates with a status “see-saw,” in which the players see their positions fluctuate. The king and servant decide to change places, and the audience laughs at the interactions that are created. According to Johnstone, comedians are people who purposefully lower their own status, or that of other people. We can immediately recognize these two kinds of performers: the self-deprecating comic that can’t escape their low status (think: Rodney Dangerfield’s “I don’t get no respect” or Larry David’s endless bumbling) or the flamethrower that lowers everyone around them (Don Rickles’ roasts or the smugness of Ricky Gervais).
For us to find a low-status person funny, we cannot have sympathy for their plight, in Johnstone’s opinion. Henri Bergson argued that a man slipping on a banana skin makes us laugh as it shows someone acting “automatically” with a “kind of physical obstinancy.” Johnstone argues that this alone is not enough – if we feel sympathy for the man who falls, it ceases to be funny. Watching an old, infirm man slip on a banana is tragic, not comic. For us to find the scenario humorous, we must know our sympathy is not required.
Tragedy also works through status transactions, specifically, the fall of a high-status person. The king who loses power, for example, or a revolutionary led to the guillotine. In playing these roles, the actor must continue to play high status, even as the character’s actual status disintegrates. If they were to suddenly become a groveling wretch, the audience would not feel the necessary catharsis. “I’ve seen a misguided Faustus writhing on the floor at the end of the play, which is bad for the verse, and pretty ineffective,” Johnstone writes.
We are all storytellers at one time or another, whether that’s with friends in the park or in the boardroom in front of a PowerPoint. As you consider the narrative you hope to spin, consider the status switches sitting beneath it.
To unlock talent, unlearn your education
Johnstone’s education and experience as an elementary school teacher convinced him of the system’s fraudulence. In his view, education tends to ruin talent, not enhance it. Students are dulled by repetitive, moribund lessons that leave them frightful of failure and devoid of creativity. It is for this reason that Johnstone “began to think of children not as immature adults, but of adults as atrophied children.”
In Johnstone’s view, the reactions of an “untutored” person when assessing a film or play are “infinitely superior” to those of a so-called professional. We are taught in school to approach art and literature dispassionately and remotely – examining with faux-objectivity. This is why the expert leans away from the play they’re working on, while the naif leans in.
The American Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, captured this dynamic perfectly in his work, “Introduction to Poetry.” Collins wants readers to “take a poem/and hold it up to the light/like a color slide/or press an ear against its hive.” Instead, “They begin beating it with a hose/to find out what it really means.”
To create great work, Johnstone believes one should avoid learning “how things are done.” When he attempted to learn about the “craft” of playwriting, his work regressed, rather than improved. It’s much better to conceive of solutions from scratch, as the great Stanley Kubrick did. When asked whether it was normal for a director to spend so much time lighting each shot, he replied, “I don’t know. I’ve never seen anyone else light a film.” This dynamic is the key reason why talent seems to come from outside a given field – Johnstone notes that of the British playwrights that emerged in the 1950s, only one had gone to university.
True talent is unselfconscious, and the first step toward unselfconsciousness is unlearning.
For creative work, there are direct lessons here. When embarking on an artistic project, Johnstone would argue that one of the worst things you could do is to study the “craft.” If you want to write a mystery, don’t dissect Agatha Christie. If you hope to paint a sunflower, do not look at Van Gogh. Doing so will curb your creativity, not enhance it.
The more generalizable lesson is that as you go about your work, whatever it may be, consider which parts of it were dictated to you at some point, and which you devised yourself.
Think of creativity as divine inspiration, not self-expression
Interpreting art as a form of self-expression is not only “weird” in Johnstone’s view, but also destructive. The reason an adolescent loses the imaginativeness they displayed in childhood is because they fear grown-ups will read into their creations. As Johnstone explains, a story about being chased down a hole by a spider is innocuous when delivered by an eight-year-old but fraught when coming from a fourteen-year-old. Teachers and parents treat such stories as implicit confessions – indications of sexual frustration or mental abnormalities.
Previous cultures perceived artists as “transmitters” rather than “creators.” Their work was viewed not as an embodiment of their mental or emotional state, but as a message from the divine. According to Johnstone, Eskimo bone-carvers did not try to make a specific shape but to reveal that which was already inside it. Michelangelo classified his work similarly: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
As Johnstone explains, this distinction protects the artist. “Once we believe that art is self-expression,” he writes, “then the individual can be criticized not only for his skill or lack of skill, but simply for being what he is.” It is a wonder that anyone is able to create art in such a culture, when one’s very essence is free to dissect.
The way to get people to be creative, then, is to assure them that they are separate from their imaginations. Johnstone has devised many exercises to do exactly that.
When an actor tells him she cannot come up with a story on the spot, no matter how trivial, he asks her to “guess” a story he has concocted instead. She will ask questions to which he will answer “Yes,” “No,” or “Maybe.” What the actor does not realize is that Johnstone has no story in mind and simply answers “Yes” to any questions that end with a vowel. Bit by bit, the actor unfurled a vivid story about a species of insects that devour everything in sight until they grow as large as buildings.
“People who claim to be unimaginative would think up the most astounding stories, so long as they remained convinced that they weren’t responsible for them,” Johnstone writes.
There are countless moments in one’s personal and professional lives when we need to galvanize creativity from those around us. Perhaps we want to while away the time on a long car ride, or devise out-of-distribution ideas for a marketing campaign. If people believe their very self is at stake, it will be nearly impossible to get them to be creative. You must find ways to liberate them from being responsible for their imagination. When you do so, as Johnstone writes, “It’s possible to turn unimaginative people into imaginative people at a moment’s notice.”
For a more interesting life, say “Yes”
Improvisation works through offering, blocking, and accepting.
A player makes an offer to another by asking, “Your name Smith?” If the partner says “No,” they have blocked the offer – and killed the momentum. Any intrigue sparked by the premise has been extinguished, and the first actor “feels fed up.” A block is any action that “prevents the action from developing.”
A more interesting decision is to accept the offer and build on it. From Impro:
ACTOR 1: Your name Smith?
ACTOR 2: Yes.
ACTOR 1: You’re the one who’s been mucking about with my wife then?
ACTOR 2: Very probably
ACTOR 1: Take that you swine.
ACTOR 2: Augh!
The second actor accepts three offers here: that their name is Smith, they’ve been fooling around with the other’s wife, and that they have been attacked by the first actor. They could have blocked any one of these – refusing the name, refuting the allegation, or avoiding the attack – but they didn’t. They helped the action develop and contributed to the premise. Critically, it is possible to accept an offer and act antagonistically.
ACTOR 1: Your name Smith?
ACTOR 2: What if it is, you horrible little man?
Beyond the stage, Johnstone believes that each tends to prefer either accepting or blocking. We favor saying “Yes” or “No” more often. Neither is necessarily wrong. “Those who say ‘Yes’ are rewarded by the adventures they have, and those who say ‘No’ are rewarded by the safety they attain.”
In understanding this, we can choose to make our lives, our peers, and ourselves more interesting.
If your life is dull, you may be blocking too many of the offers you receive. Start saying “Yes” more.
If the people around you are dull, ask yourself how you might be blocking the offers they’re proposing. Do they keep raising intriguing topics only for you to shy away from engaging with them? It’s possible that they are not boring, but that you are inhibiting their imagination.
Lastly, if you find yourself uninspired, assess how this process plays out internally. What are you doing to block yourself and thwart your inner creative talent? “What happens in my classes, if the actors stay with me long enough, is that they learn how their ‘normal’ procedures destroy other people’s talent,” Johnstone writes. “Then, one day they have a flash of satori – they suddenly understand that all the weapons they were using against other people they also use inwardly, against themselves.”
This was one of my favorite books I’ve ever read. Almost made me want to do improv!