PEL Presents PvI#109: Choose Your Own Failure w/ Rich Baker
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 10 January 2026
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Rich runs the Dare to Fail improv school and is author of Improv Made Easier. He joins Mark and Mary to discuss contexts of failure, failing to meet your goals vs. "objective failure," how to react in an improv scene to some topic that's too offensive for you, graveyard humor vs. reverence. Featuring Steaks You Deserve, Robo-Carson, cancer torture, interactive cemetery, Sounds of Failure, and open-sourced MST3K.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is philosophy versus improv, where two sages try to teach each other a thing or two, |
| 0:09.5 | and maybe you, the audience, gets something out of it as well. |
| 0:12.9 | This is Mark Linson-Meyer bringing the philosophy to you today. |
| 0:15.5 | And this is Mary Hines bringing the improvisation, and we are joined today by... |
| 0:21.1 | Hey, this is Rich Baker. Nice to be here. Thanks for having me. |
| 0:23.9 | As Mary explained to you, anything about the show? Do you know what the format is? |
| 0:27.7 | Well, I listened to your episode with Vicky. It seems like you'll talk and then improvise and then talk and then improvise. |
| 0:33.6 | That's the way it works. And we post-talk, then decide why the thing that we were talking about and the thing that we improvise into are really saying exactly the same thing and they completely support each other and are a coherent educational entertainment project. |
| 0:48.0 | Like, for example, I just watched the movie Weapons. |
| 0:52.1 | I knew it was going to be amazing, but I was waiting to have, |
| 0:56.2 | be at a client's home that had a really nice flat screen and a really nice sound system. And so I |
| 1:01.3 | had that with my last client. And the layers of storytelling and weapons, oh my gosh, if you |
| 1:08.5 | haven't seen it, you need to. And I'm not going to say anything else. No spoilers. |
| 1:11.2 | But that's kind of like how we do philosophy versus improv. It's layers of storytelling without creepy children. |
| 1:18.1 | Or sometimes with creepy children. Yeah. You're right? Shut up, Heinz. Shut your mouth. |
| 1:23.3 | And what's your Delio in the improv scene? Rich, tell us about yourself a little bit. |
| 1:27.8 | Delio, ah, back to 1994. good times. I run an improv school called Dare to Fail Improv. It's an online school. |
| 1:34.9 | I've been teaching and coaching improv for over 20 years, and I started improvising in 1999. |
| 1:40.9 | And I kind of figured out a way to make a little career out of it, even a space where it's not all that easy to kind of find paying gigs. |
| 1:49.1 | Well, failure. So in most people's presentations in philosophy, they don't want to fail because they want to show that they understand. They want to give accurate information. |
| 1:59.6 | The philosophy that I've generally |
| 2:01.4 | had on my podcasts, I read it, I made something out of it. I'm going to try to articulate it, |
... |
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