PvI#124: Navel Evaluation (Our Season 5 Finale)

We wrap up Mary’s first year with the podcast, and changes are afoot for our upcoming season, but why? Let’s explore to the point of physical discomfort! We act out an odd annual employee review, a dramatic pitch for a new play, and the navel-gazing club. We talk about celebrating and escalating, high points of season 5, how comedy is never a matter of “trying to be funny” but grows out of authentic experience, Mary’s dramatic history, making unpleasant characters redemptive, Morbius, our wish lists for the future , and more. Get started reading Martha Nussbaum’s Therapy of Desire now. Image note: This was my second try with Google Gemini, and in this case it initially generated an image for “performance evaluation” that was way too detailed and (as is inevitably the case with these AIs, looked like it was drawn FOR children instead of drawn BY children), so I asked it for the same but cruder, and so it left out some details and misspelled some words, as I guess AIs “think” that children do. Hear more PvI. Follow us at patreon.com/philosophyimprov to get an ad-free experience and post-game chatter for many episodes (including this one), now absolutely free, or kick in a dollar or whatever to get the remaining bonus content including our Redacted episode. You can choose to watch this on wholly unedited video:

Future co-host philosophy Jenny joins past co-host improviser Bill along with the usual rabble (Mark and Mary) for some tag-team mud swimming, hot takes about The Odyssey (we recorded this on July 23), and discussion and play about Bill’s return to school, Maslow’s hierarchy, gamified syllabi, some dweeby math stuff, and academic dishonesty. Our shared conversation space shall now be referred to as THE CAVE. Don’t worry: No clips from the hit show The Lazy Pedophiles were included in this show. When Jenny becomes a full co-host (in addition to Mark and Mary), she will have a better microphone and no longer sound like she’s broadcasting from a puddle. Here are some Mbappe memes that she mentions at the end. Hear more PvI. Follow us at patreon.com/philosophyimprov to get an ad-free experience and post-game chatter for many episodes (including this one), now absolutely free, or kick in a dollar or whatever to get the remaining bonus content including our Redacted episode. Image Note: I’ve come to the conclusion that MidJourney bites, and I will not be renewing my paid subscription to it when it comes up in October. This “brain taking a shower” image was generated by Google Gemini (the free version), and though it still doesn’t look per my request like a child actually drew this, unlike Midjourney, it didn’t get all pretentious. So suck it, MidJourney. You can choose to watch this on unedited video:

AmirAli is a philosophy researcher who runs the Persian-language philosophy blog Praxis Publication and tries to make Islamic philosophy speak to and with the West. In this, his first international podcast appearance, we hear about doing philosophy in the “Islamic Republic of Iran,” life during wartime, the relationship between play and philosophy, Islamic philosophy in Arabic vs. Persian (and Farsi, English, etc.), Amanah (Persian for “sacred trust”), philosophy as empathy, plus the Dream Police and fun with imperialism. Read AmirAli’s posts on the Strait of Hormuz, hermeneutics, tyranny, and understanding the “enemy” during wartime. Hear more PvI. Follow us at patreon.com/philosophyimprov to get an ad-free experience and post-game chatter for many episodes, now absolutely free, or kick in a couple of bucks to get the remaining bonus content including our Redacted episode. Sponsor: Get 15% off OneSkin with the code IMPROV at oneskin.co/IMPROV. Image Note: The painting here was snatched from an article about Iranian children winning an international painting contest. AmirAli no doubt shares the dream of this illustrator that the trees of all different colors join hands, and the animals with the animals, and the people with the people, but that those three groups shall remain ever parallel and unconnected. I’m pretty sure that was Leibniz’s view. You can choose to experience this on video, entirely unedited:

The LA-based clown, multimedia performance artist, and doll stylist (see maddiemutations.com; she also goes by the name Maddie Forrest) joins Mary and Mark to talk about her Doll Court show, clown types and the role of the fool, failing on stage, cities as women, silly villains, and more. Will Carol overcome her anxiety to go into the big meeting? Will Maddie keep all the nice dolls to herself? What should the demands of the LA doll union be? How edgy can a clown be? We wrap up with an exercise about numeric levels of joy. Follow @maddiemutations. Some things she brought up are the Tiny Baby Talk Show and a Clown class she recommends. Hear more PvI. Follow us at patreon.com/philosophyimprov to get an ad-free experience and post-game chatter for many episodes, now absolutely free, or kick in a couple of bucks to get the remaining bonus content including our Redacted episode. Sponsor: Get 15% off OneSkin with the code IMPROV at oneskin.co/IMPROV. You can choose to watch this as unedited video:

Your wise and authoritative hosts explore forms of respectful address, what counts as good philosophy, the holodeck full-contact Fantasy Island experience, status in economic transactions, Trek not War, default improv scenarios, fear of playfulness, philosophy or improv as education vs. doing philosophy or improv, and more. The potential future textbook I suggested at the end is Martha Nussbaum’s The Therapy of Desire. Hear more PvI. Follow us at patreon.com/philosophyimprov to get an ad-free experience and post-game chatter for many episodes, now absolutely free, or kick in a couple of bucks to get the remaining bonus content including our Redacted episode. Image note: When I asked Midjourney to simply draw me “struggle club,” it unambiguously interpreted this as involving set-upon African-Americans. So I had to go with simply “child’s drawing of clubhouse,” and eventually got two figures out of it. You can choose to watch this on unedited video:

What would PvI be with zero masculine energy? This episode features your usual co-host Mary Hynes and our frequent guest Jennifer Hansen (philosopher at St. Lawrence University). They have a one-on-one chat about being hot in a hostile world, interacting with AI, fighting with parrots, and they act out scenes involving the f*cks store and the actress who is too perfect. There is a lot of reclaiming one’s power and rejecting negativity and other things perhaps anathema to Mark’s sensibility, but you should tell us what YOU think. Image Note: This was a silly idea of Mark’s prior to the actual recording, which should perhaps better be called “Tall Poppies,” or something like that, but it seems a legit feminist point to make that a la “Ms. Pac-Man,” there’s a weird presumption that non-human cartoon characters are by default male, and that the female product thus must be indicated by the addition of a feminine-coded cosmetic element. Hear more PvI. Follow us at patreon.com/philosophyimprov to get an ad-free experience and post-game chatter for many episodes, now absolute free, or kick in a couple of bucks to get the remaining bonus content including our Redacted episode. You can choose to watch this on YouTube:

Mark and Mary are joined by Andrea, an Italian teacher with a broad performing background who’s written a book of philosophical, poetic aphorisms called Think Town: self-help reflections and directives about fear, ego, happiness, etc. There’s a long history of aphorisms in philosophy (Nietzsche, Heraclitus, Confucius, Laozi), and philosophy invented the self-help genre (the Stoics among others), but how does philosophy work given the lack of argumentation? We explore the monster under the bed, AI agents, making philosophy personally applicable, being receptive, DOT ego secretions, and more. Image Note: This is one of the options that MidJourney gave me given the directive to represent the concept of aphorisms. I was picturing, what, little dialogue bubbles with nonsense text in them? AI is clearly a bit disturbed here, and my demonstrating this is a good use of Tennessee lakes. You can choose to watch this on YouTube: Hear more PvI. Follow us at patreon.com/philosophyimprov to get an ad-free experience and post-game chatter for many episodes, now absolute free, or kick in a couple of bucks to get the remaining bonus content including our Redacted episode.

We are REELING from our REDACTED episode, and so we talk about the lessons we learned from that and start thinking about what it is to be out of one’s comfort zone: How do fear and ego issues interact? Is playfulness a lack of professionalism? Are both arrogance and humility products of fear? Plus, cutting-edge surgery reality shows, Schrödinger’s hostile cat and Dr. Brenda’s sentient food samples, Bishop Jim vs. Trudy the Innocent, and more! Image note: The prompt for MidJourney was “a three-breasted angry cat, as if drawn by a child.” This was the only one of eight options that gave me three of anything. Clearly MidJourney is not down with three-boob fetishism. You can choose to watch this unedited on YouTube: Hear more PvI. Support the podcast to get an ad-free experience and all our bonus content, which including the Redacted episode and (for most episodes) post-game chatter.

Every PvI recording is an experiment, and in this case, our guest (a bigwig acting coach in NYC whom I went to high school with) didn’t feel great about the episode, so I offered to paywall it. Here you get to hear what you’re missing, along with a little pitch about why you should support the show. To respond affirmatively to this pitch and hear (and see!) the whole episode, visit patreon.com/philosophyimprov. The episode was a great learning experience, and our next Mark & Mary episode will spend time talking about it, so any true PvI fan will want to hear it.

BJ is an LA improviser/actor/TV host (who teaches wounded warriors among others), and he chats with Mark and Mary about migratory patterns, TV shows that date you, how to draw in students, the realness of birds, and playing unsafe characters. Scenes include a forced-Fargo college experience, improv class on the roof, spying on birds, and keyboard warriors. Plus Marge and Larry. Why did Mary have a 3am call time for some theater thing? You will not know. Watch this episode (without the post-game) on unedited video: Follow him at @bjcomedy. Image note: The children’s pictures of birds were swiped from here. Hear more PvI. Support the podcast to get all the post-game chatter and an ad-free experience.