Shows / Very Bad Wizards
Very Bad Wizards
Very Bad Wizards is a podcast featuring a philosopher (Tamler Sommers) and a psychologist (David Pizarro), who share a love for ethics, pop culture, and cognitive science, and who have a marked inability to distinguish sacred from profane. Each podcast includes discussions of moral philosophy, recent work on moral psychology and neuroscience, and the overlap between the two.
Episodes
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 297: No Pleasure in Meanness (Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find")
David and Tamler face off with the Misfit in Flannery O'Connor's classic short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find." We sort through the biblical allusions, dark…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 296: The Other CRT
David and Tamler share a few brief thoughts on the election and then raise some questions about Tucker Carlson being attacked by a demon as he slept in the…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 295: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
David and Tamler hop into their Scooby Van and drive into Tobe Hooper's mad and macabre horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. How does this endlessly…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 294: The Scandal of Philosophy (Hume's Problem of Induction)
CD Broad called induction "the glory of science and the scandal of philosophy." As a matter of habit, we're all confident that the sun will rise tomorrow…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 293: Who Is the Dreamer? (Borges' "The Circular Ruins")
David and Tamler crawl up a riverbank, kiss the mud, and dream a discussion of Borges' "The Circular Ruins." We sort through various interpretations and…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 292: Boundary Issues
David and Tamler lead off with a breakdown of the new commercial for "friend (not imaginary)" a new AI necklace that takes hikes with you, interrupts your…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 291: Shoe Shining
Cornell philosopher David Shoemaker joins us for a long winding journey up to the Overlook Hotel, a DEEP dive on Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. We tackle all…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 290: Blinded by the Light (Plato's Cave Pt. 2)
David and Tamler continue their discussion of Plato's allegory of the cave. We talk about the connections with mystical traditions including Gnosticism…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 289: Shadows on the Wall (Plato's Cave Pt. 1)
Over the years we've referred repeatedly to Plato's cave, Platonic forms, and phrases like "copies of copies" without ever really explaining what we mean by…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 288: The Despised Foot (The Denial of Death Pt. 2)
David and Tamler conclude their discussion of Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. We talk about Becker's philosophy of science (does he have one?), his…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 287: Gods With Anuses (The Denial of Death Pt. 1)
David faces his greatest fear as he and Tamler dive into Ernest Becker's 1973 Pulitzer Prize winner The Denial of Death. Blending existentialist ideas within a…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 286: Laugh and the World Laughs With You
David and Tamler dive into the mysteries at the heart of Park Chan-wook's deeply disturbing masterpiece "Oldboy" (2003). An ordinary man, Oh Dae-su, is…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 285: On Culture and Agriculture
It's an old-school episode as David and Tamler dive into some intriguing research on the origins of cultural differences. Two neighboring communities in…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 284: Reel Choices
David and Tamler choose an episode topic that will define the identity and meaning of the Very Bad Wizards podcast going forward – our top 3 existentialist…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 283: When Elephants Podcast
David and Tamler talk about Caitrin Keiper's wonderful sprawling essay on elephant life and society and the many philosophical questions surrounding these…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 282: Fearful Symmetry (Borges' "Death and the Compass")
A Rabbi is found dead in a hotel room, stabbed in the chest. The room is filled with Kabbalah texts and a single page in an typewriter that reads "The first…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 281: Choose Your Fighter
We dig into the biggest rivalry in Tamler's profession, analytic vs. continental philosophy. Are analytic philosophers truly the rigorous, precise, clear…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 280: Mad Masque (with Phil Ford and J.F. Martel)
Phil Ford and J.F. Martel from the great "Weird Studies" podcast join us for a whirling discussion of Edgar Allan Poe's mesmerizing tale of decadence and…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 279: The Greenhouses We Burned Along the Way (Lee Chang-dong's "Burning" Pt. 2)
David and Tamler conclude their discussion of Lee Chang-dong's "Burning" – we talk about the hunger dance at twilight, Ben's greenhouse burning habit, Shin…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 278: Schrödinger's Everything (Lee Chang-dong's "Burning" Pt. 1)
David and Tamler fall under the spell of Lee Chang-dong's 2018 masterpiece Burning, a movie where nothing is what it seems, or maybe it is. An alienated young…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 277: The Merits of Buggery (Nagel's "Sexual Perversion")
David and Tamler play the old hits – Thomas Nagel and sex robots. In the main segment we talk about Nagel's essay "Sexual Perversion", a surprising essay on…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 276: Attention Please
David and Tamler are back for the new year and one of our resolutions was to do more episodes on William James. Today we talk about his account of 'Attention'…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 275: The Ineffable Center (Borges' "The Aleph")
An episode interesting from every point of view, we train our eyes on Jorge Luis Borges' "The Aleph." The first segment wins the kudos of the learned, the…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 274: Can I Get a Kidney Voucher? (with Vlad Chituc)
RETURNING guest Vlad Chituc joins us for a wide-ranging discussion about donating his kidney to a stranger, the effective altruism movement, and his sexuality…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 273: Ah. Ah. (Miyazaki's "Spirited Away")
David and Tamler board the train for Hayao Miyazaki's mystical dreamy coming of age masterpiece Spirited Away. This is a true VBW deep dive. Plus a study by…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 272: Neigh Means Yay
The morality of zoophilia has received shockingly little attention in contemporary ethical discourse…until now. David and Tamler break down the paper…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 271: Concept-Con 2023
It's the first annual "Concept-Con" – a not at all cringe episode where David and Tamler apply the methods and rigor of analytic philosophy to dissect not one…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 270: Take Me to the River (Blood Meridian, Pt. 3)
David and Tamler conclude their three-part discussion of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. We talk about the Judge's coin trick by the fire and the question of…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 269: Death Hilarious (Blood Meridian, Pt. 2)
In part 2 of our journey into Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Tamler and David talk about the kid and his form of resistance to the judge's gleeful nihilism…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 268: Blood Meridian, Part 1
In part one of our two-part episode on Cormac McCarthy's blood-soaked phantasmagorical 1985 masterpiece Blood Meridian, David and Tamler talk about the…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 267: The Thickness of Reality
David and Tamler return to the work of old favorite William James and argue about the 6th lecture (inspired by the French philosopher Henri Bergson) of his…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 266: I Want to Half-Believe
Last December, with Argentina minutes away from a World Cup championship, friend of the show Yoel texted David "congratulations." David was furious, and soon…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 265: Kekulé (Oh Yeah!)
The Summer of Cormac McCarthy continues – this time we dive into his one piece of non-fiction, the short essay "The Kekulé Problem." How does our unconscious…
Very Bad Wizards[BONUS] Overton Windows Episode 1: Israel and Palestine
A new mini-series with Tamler Sommers and Robert Wright on the range of politically acceptable discourse for a given topic and how this "Overton window"…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 264: The Rule You Follow (The Coen Brothers' "No Country for Old Men")
David and Tamler dive into the Coen brothers' bleak and beautiful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel "No Country for Old Men." What's the underlying…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 263: Free Yoel
A VBW exclusive report! For years David and Tamler have been a little dismissive of fears about cancel culture in academia but now the SJWs have come for one…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 262: Supposing Truth is a Woman (Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil")
David and Tamler dive into the first two parts of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil which contain some of Nietzsche's best drive-bys on philosophers like Plato…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 261: Death of the Author
What's the meaning of a work of art? Does the text mean just what the author intends it to mean? Does it matter what Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark thinks about…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 260: The Scream That Never Found a Voice (Murakami's "Sleep")
David and Tamler take the first excursion into the work of Haruki Murakami and talk about his short story "Sleep." A thirty-year-old woman, the wife of a…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 259: Losing Time ("Tár" with Paul Bloom)
The great Paul Bloom returns to the show to explore the many mysteries of Todd Field's 2022 film "Tár." Is it a ghost story? A movie about cancel culture and…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 258: Mystic Peeza
David and Tamler talk about William James' chapter on mysticism from his book "Varieties of Religious Experience." What defines a mystical experience? Why do…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 257: Aural Fixation
David and Tamler deliver a PODCAST episode, one of many that comes from the INTERNET, that you'll probably listen to through Air Pods or some other kind of…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 256: The Right to Punish?
Here's an episode with something for both of us – a healthy serving of Kantian rationalism for David with a dollop of Marxist criminology for Tamler. We…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 255: Beloved Child of the House (Susanna Clarke's "Piranesi")
David and Tamler get lost in the world of Susanna Clarke's "Piranesi," a hauntingly beautiful and thrilling novel with echoes of Borges, Plato, C.S. Lewis, and…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 254: Nobody's Parfit
Tamler's earlier self committed to doing an episode on Parfit, and David holds his current self to that promise, which shows how unconvinced David was by…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 253: Tarkovsky's Starchild
It's the episode that Tamler has been waiting for – a long deep dive into Andrei Tarkovsky's mysterious masterpiece "Stalker." A writer and professor are led…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 252: Yes We Sene-can
David and Tamler dive into Seneca's "On the Happy Life" and stoicism, the topic selected by our beloved patreon supporters. Why is stoicism so popular today?…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 251: First Order, Then Chaos
David and Tamler wind their way through another Borges story - "The Immortal"- about a Roman soldier who seeks the secret of immortality and, much to his…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 250: Metaphors All the Way Down
We often think of metaphors as poetic flourishes, a nice way to punctuate your ideas and make them more relatable. But what if metaphors aren’t simply tools…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 249: Phlegm and Carelessness (Hume's "The Sceptic")
David and Tamler gild and stain David Hume’s essay “The Sceptic†with their sentiments. If nothing is inherently valuable or despicable, desirable or…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 248: Checkmate, Grasshopper
In this podcast we examine a recent argument for the view that chess is not, in fact, a game. We discuss the Grasshopper's claim that all games must have a…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 247: Open the Pod, Dave (with Sam Harris)
We welcome Sam Harris back to the show for a deep dive into Stanley Kubrick's confounding 1968 masterpiece "2001: A Space Odyssey." How long is the Dawn of…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 246: Existential Poker-Face (David Foster Wallace's "E Unibus Pluram")
We dive into David Foster Wallace's sprawling 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." How do TV and new forms of media keep their hold on us…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 245: Pragmatically Speaking
David and Tamler take their first real look at pragmatism via Richard Rorty's "Solidarity or Objectivity." Can we discover facts about the world as it "really…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 244: Thanks for the Memories? (Borges' "Funes the Memorious)
David and Tamler return to Borges land to get lost in the infinite, this time with his legendary and tragic character Funes the memorious. What would it be…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 243: Finding My Religion
David and Tamler continue their discussion of Leo Tolstoy's 'Confession.' When we left him last time, the famous author had bottomed out just years after…
Very Bad WizardsBonus Episode: The Ambulators (A "Deadwood" Podcast)
We have a sneak peek for our listeners--the first episode our new Patreon bonus series on David Milch's brilliant (but short-lived) series "Deadwood." In this…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 242: Losing My Religion
David and Tamler find themselves unable to attach rational meaning to a single act in their entire lives. Let's say we publish more articles and books. What…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 241: Very Bad Orgies (Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut")
David and Tamler mask up and wander through the audio and visual orgy of Stanley Kubrick's final masterpiece Eyes Wide Shut. What is this movie really about?…
- Very Bad Wizards
Episode 240: Evil
David and Tamler descend into the dark pits of Hell to look Satan in the eyes and discover the nature of evil. OK…that's not fully accurate, we just read and…