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 mind solve problems that
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.
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’ from his 1890 volume The Principles
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 “Zoophilia is Morally Permissible” from
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, not two, but four new concepts.
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 the supernatural in the novel. Next
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 our secret crush suggests we may not be
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 academician, the Hellenist, as we talk
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. Was EA’s turn to ‘long-termist’
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 man meets what seems like his dream
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 many fronts (Sartre, erotic
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 Hae-mi’s mysterious disappearance,
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 disease “The Masque of the Red Death." We
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, Sufism, and Buddhist paths to awakening. We
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 psychoanalytic framework, Becker
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 imprisoned for 15 years in an old,
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 movies. Plus, you’re gonna be shocked
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 extraordinary creatures. What kind of
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 thinkers they take themselves to be? And
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 letter of the name has been
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 communist China were assigned to be wheat