Very Bad Wizards

By Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro

Society & Culture Philosophy Social Sciences

What's Very Bad Wizards about?

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.

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Episode 253: Tarkovsky's St...

01.31.2023

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 by their guide (Stalker) into a cordoned off “zone” that may have been visited ...

Very Bad Wizards episodes:

01.31.2023 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 by their guide (Stalker) into a cordoned off “zone” that may have been visited ...
01.10.2023 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? What does Seneca actually think about Epicureanism? Can Seneca's philosophy be reconciled with his ...
12.20.2022 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 horror, finds it. Plus some thoughts on the utterly shameless ChatGPT. Sponsored By:BetterHelp: ...
12.06.2022 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 of language but part of thought itself? David and Tamler “dive into” George ...
11.22.2022 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 hateful, then what do philosophers have to offer when it comes to happiness? If reason is powerless, ...
11.01.2022 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 prelusory goal, as well as Skepticus’ objection to the giant ...
10.18.2022 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 Man? What does the second monolith do exactly? Why are the humans ...
10.04.2022 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 when we know at some level that they’re reinforcing our loneliness ...
09.20.2022 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 is,” independent of our own culturally influenced methods of inquiry? If not, does that ...
09.06.2022 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 like to have perfect memory, to have full access to every perceived ...
08.16.2022 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 writing two of the greatest novels ever written. Our eventual death, Tolstoy thought, strips life ...
08.09.2022 Bonus 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 inaugural edition of "The Ambulators" (we promise the name makes sense), Tamler and David discuss ...
08.02.2022 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 then? What about our kids? They’re going off to college. Why? What for? ...
07.19.2022 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? Dreams? Wealth and power? Marriage? Jealousy? Female sexuality? Masculinity issues? The Illuminati? Pedophilia? ...
07.06.2022 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 talk about a couple of philosophy articles that analyze the ...
06.21.2022 Episode 239: Lose Yourself David and Tamler lose themselves in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (pr. ‘chick sent me high’) classic paper on the concept of flow. We talk about the features of flow activities – loss of ego, the merging of your awareness with the activity, ...
06.07.2022 Episode 238: I Am Not Ivan Ilyich...Am I? Ivan Ilyich is a man. All men are mortal. So Ivan Ilyich is mortal. Sure absolutely, that’s true for Ivan Ilyich and for all men. But we’re not Ivan Ilyich and we’re not ‘all men’- so what does this have ...
05.24.2022 Episode 237: Glitches Ain't Shit David and Tamler explore the many variations of simulation theory, the view that our universe is just a computer generated model created by an advanced civilization that has reached “technological maturity.” What does the growing popularity of simulation theories reveal ...
05.03.2022 Episode 236: Your Outie Is Skilled at Lovemaking (With Paul Bloom) We welcome Paul Bloom to talk about the first season of "Severance," the new mind-bending and mind-splitting TV series on Apple TV+. What happens when you separate your home life from your work life? Do you create a completely different ...
04.19.2022 Episode 235: Animated Objects Panpsychism didn't give us river spirits or mischievous sootballs, so this time we go straight to the source - a defense of animism, and in a top 10 analytic philosophy journal. Could a failed argument for the existence of God ...
04.05.2022 Episode 234: Like A Dog (Kafka's "The Trial" Pt. 2) David and Tamler conclude their discussion of "The Trial," Franz Kafka's darkly comic vision of an opaque and impenetrable bureaucracy that comes for us all in the end. Plus we interrupt our previously scheduled opening segment because apparently something happened ...
03.22.2022 Episode 233: Keeping It Surreal (Kafka's "The Trial" Pt. 1) David and Tamler wander through the bewildering dream-like world of Franz Kafka’s "The Trial." In part one of a two-part discussion we discuss the circumstances of its publication, the various interpretative approaches that can be taken to the novel, and ...
03.08.2022 Episode 232: Mind Over Matter It’s the topic voted on by our beloved Patreon patrons, panpsychism! David and Tamler delve into the resurgent debate over whether consciousness is the fundamental stuff that makes up the universe. We hoped we might be entering Miyazaki land - ...
02.22.2022 Episode 231: Ideal Critics (Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste") Many of us think that art is subjective, but at the same time it seems like some artistic judgments are better than others. Do you think Crash deserved to receive an award for Best Picture? Did you like Season 2 ...
02.08.2022 Episode 230: Be Happy (Lars von Trier's "Melancholia") David and Tamler sink deeper and deeper into Melancholia, Lars von Trier’s harrowing and stunningly beautiful depiction of depression, anxiety, and a wedding reception that just won’t end. They bring Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” into the conversation and confront the ...
01.25.2022 Episode 229: Skin Deep? We think racism is wrong but what about “lookism” – a bias that favors attractive people over unattractive ones? If it’s wrong to judge people by the color of their skin, what about judging people for something that is only ...
01.11.2022 Episode 228: Forever Jung David and Tamler confront their shadows and dive into Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious. What are the central differences between Jung and Freud? What did Jung mean by archetypes and what’s his evidence for their centrality in the ...
12.21.2021 Episode 227: A Terrible Master (David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water"). David and Tamler dive into David Foster Wallace’s celebrated and surprisingly earnest Kenyon College commencement speech “This is Water”. How can we escape the prison and prism of our (literally) self-centered perspective? Can we choose to adjust our natural default ...
12.07.2021 Episode 226: Unraveling Time Traveling (with Barry Lam and Christina Hoff Sommers) First, it’s the return of the annual drunken Thanksgiving segment! Tamler and based wicked stepmom Christina Hoff Sommers fight about JFK, systematic racism, corporations, and how to pronounce valium. (We find more common ground than usual though on Covid and ...
11.16.2021 Episode 225: Forbidden Modules David and Tamler talk about the often rancorous debate among cognitive scientists and evolutionary psychologists over whether the mind is modular -- composed of discrete systems responsible for vision, reasoning, cheater detection, sexual jealousy, and so on. David and Tamler ...
11.02.2021 Episode 224: Hurts So Good (With Paul Bloom) VBW favorite Paul Bloom joins us to talk about the pleasures of suffering, flow states, Sisyphus, meaning, and dating questions. Check out his new book The Sweet Spot which comes out today! Plus what are NFTs and why does everyone ...
10.19.2021 Episode 223: The Hopeless Dream of Being (Bergman's "Persona") David and Tamler dive into Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 masterpiece Persona, a film about two (?) women, Elisabet, a famous stage actress who has stopped speaking, and Alma the chatty young nurse assigned to care for her at an island cottage. ...
10.05.2021 Episode 222: Choosing Sartre for All Mankind David and Tamler don black turtlenecks and light up a couple of Gauloises to talk about Jean Paul Sartre's classic essay “Existentialism is a Humanism.” Why are choices so fundamental to our experience? What does Sartre mean when he says ...
09.21.2021 Episode 221: Granite Cocks vs Robot Overlords David and Tamler wind their way through the long-requested “Meditations on Moloch” by Scott Alexander, a comprehensive account of the coordination problems (personified by Allan Ginsberg’s demon-entity Moloch) that lead to human misery and values tossed out the window. Does ...
09.07.2021 Episode 220: On Your Marx In honor of Labor Day, David and Tamler dive into two works by Karl Marx - "The Communist Manifesto" and "Estranged Labor." What is Marx's theory of historical change? Why does capitalism produce an alienated workforce? What role does philosophy ...
08.17.2021 Episode 219: Multiplied by Mirrors It’s a Borges bonanza! David and Tamler dive into two stories: “Emma Zunz” and “Borges and I.” The first seems like a straightforward daughter revenge story (Tamler’s favorite genre), but Borges being Borges there are layers of doubt and fuzziness ...
08.03.2021 Episode 218: ...But You Can't Hide (Michael Haneke's "Caché") David and Tamler go deep on Michael Haneke’s unnerving psychological thriller Caché. An upper middle class French intellectual couple receives mysterious videotapes of the exterior of their house, forcing them to confront their past and present. Can we run from ...
07.20.2021 Episode 217: Dropping Paradigms (Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions") David and Tamler hit the books and cram for their beloved Patreon listener-selected episode – this time on Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” David thinks Kuhn is a great sociologist of science but recoils at the relativistic tenor ...
07.06.2021 Episode 216: Oral Judgments We’ve promised you for years that we would do an episode on apologies and never got to it until today. So we both want to say from the bottom of our hearts: we’re sorry. We recognize we’ve let so many ...
06.22.2021 Episode 215: Touch My Pink Monkey David and Tamler argue about the philosopher L.A. Paul’s ideas on “transformative experiences” – big life decisions that will change you and your values so much that our normal decision-making models break down. Tamler is fully on board and hopeful ...
06.08.2021 Episode 214: You Shouldn't Feel Bad (Except You Should) Tamler welcomes social psychologist David Pizarro of Cornell University to the podcast to talk about his recent article (along with Raj Anderson, Shaun Nichols, and Rachana Kamtekar) on “false-positive emotions.” When agents commit accidental harms, we typically tell them they ...
05.25.2021 Episode 213: What Is It Like To Be a Robot Fish Man? (with Ted Chiang) We’ve done deep dives on three of his stories, and now THE MAN HIMSELF, multi-award winning science fiction author Ted Chiang, joins us to explore the post-apocalyptic world of the video-game SOMA. You play Simon Jarrett, a man who goes ...
05.11.2021 Episode 212: Follow Your Nose (with Yoel Inbar) Canada’s leading Russian literature scholar Yoel Inbar joins us to try to make sense of Gogol’s 1836 short story “The Nose.” A nose goes missing from a Russian official’s face and winds up in the barber’s loaf of bread. A ...
04.20.2021 Episode 211: To Live and Die in Kurosawa's "Ikiru" "Sometimes I think of my death," Akira Kurosawa said, "I think of ceasing to be...and it is from these thoughts that Ikiru came.” David and Tamler explore what it means to truly live in Kurosawa’s 1952 masterpiece about a bureaucrat ...
04.06.2021 Episode 210: The Priming of the American Mind (with Jesse Singal) Journalist, podcaster, and rapper Jesse Singal joins us to talk about his new book The Quick Fix, positive psychology (scam?), cancel culture in the media and academia (overblown?), Substack incentives, and lots more. Plus David and Tamler argue about the ...
03.23.2021 Episode 209: Basic Instincts (with Paul Bloom) VBW favorite Paul Bloom joins us to talk about William James’ account of instinct and its parallels to the nativism/empiricism debates in developmental psychology today. Also discussed: Richard Dawkins trolling philosophy, the ghost in Tamler’s kitchen, and why William James’ ...
03.09.2021 Episode 208: Dream Theater We’ve always had nothing but praise for neuroscientists and their work, and today is no exception. We talk about a fantastically rich and ambitious essay by Erik Hoel that offers a theory of dreams and connects it to storytelling, the ...
02.23.2021 Episode 207: Sometimes a Paper Tray is Just a Paper Tray David and Tamler wander through the maze of Room 237, the great documentary by Rodney Ascher about five people and their views about what Stanley Kubrick’s "The Shining" is really about. When do interpretations become conspiracy theories? Why does Ascher ...
02.09.2021 Episode 206: Angel Chasing (Ted Chiang's "Hell is the Absence of God") David and Tamler return to the TCU (Ted Chiang Universe) to talk about his short story “Hell is the Absence of God." How would we behave if we had unequivocal proof of God, heaven, hell, and angels? Would that answer ...
01.26.2021 Episode 205: Making Your Nervous System Your Ally (William James on "Habit") Ever wonder why you’re still listening to VBW all of these years? Or why you check your phone 50 times a day? Or why you put on your pants the same way every morning? (If you still wear pants these ...

Older episodes

Very Bad Wizards

What's Very Bad Wizards about?

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Very Bad Wizards episodes:

Episode 253: Tarkovsky's Starchild

Episode 252: Yes We Sene-can

Episode 251: First Order, Then Chaos

Episode 250: Metaphors All the Way Down

Episode 249: Phlegm and Carelessness (Hume's "The Sceptic")

Episode 248: Checkmate, Grasshopper

Episode 247: Open the Pod, Dave (with Sam Harris)

Episode 246: Existential Poker-Face (David Foster Wallace's "E Unibus Pluram")

Episode 245: Pragmatically Speaking

Episode 244: Thanks for the Memories? (Borges' "Funes the Memorious)

Episode 243: Finding My Religion

Bonus Episode: The Ambulators (A "Deadwood" Podcast)

Episode 242: Losing My Religion

Episode 241: Very Bad Orgies (Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut")

Episode 240: Evil

Episode 239: Lose Yourself

Episode 238: I Am Not Ivan Ilyich...Am I?

Episode 237: Glitches Ain't Shit

Episode 236: Your Outie Is Skilled at Lovemaking (With Paul Bloom)

Episode 235: Animated Objects

Episode 234: Like A Dog (Kafka's "The Trial" Pt. 2)

Episode 233: Keeping It Surreal (Kafka's "The Trial" Pt. 1)

Episode 232: Mind Over Matter

Episode 231: Ideal Critics (Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste")

Episode 230: Be Happy (Lars von Trier's "Melancholia")

Episode 229: Skin Deep?

Episode 228: Forever Jung

Episode 227: A Terrible Master (David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water").

Episode 226: Unraveling Time Traveling (with Barry Lam and Christina Hoff Sommers)

Episode 225: Forbidden Modules

Episode 224: Hurts So Good (With Paul Bloom)

Episode 223: The Hopeless Dream of Being (Bergman's "Persona")

Episode 222: Choosing Sartre for All Mankind

Episode 221: Granite Cocks vs Robot Overlords

Episode 220: On Your Marx

Episode 219: Multiplied by Mirrors

Episode 218: ...But You Can't Hide (Michael Haneke's "Caché")

Episode 217: Dropping Paradigms (Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions")

Episode 216: Oral Judgments

Episode 215: Touch My Pink Monkey

Episode 214: You Shouldn't Feel Bad (Except You Should)

Episode 213: What Is It Like To Be a Robot Fish Man? (with Ted Chiang)

Episode 212: Follow Your Nose (with Yoel Inbar)

Episode 211: To Live and Die in Kurosawa's "Ikiru"

Episode 210: The Priming of the American Mind (with Jesse Singal)

Episode 209: Basic Instincts (with Paul Bloom)

Episode 208: Dream Theater

Episode 207: Sometimes a Paper Tray is Just a Paper Tray

Episode 206: Angel Chasing (Ted Chiang's "Hell is the Absence of God")

Episode 205: Making Your Nervous System Your Ally (William James on "Habit")

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