Hosted by Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro · 🇺🇸 US · EN · 338 episodes
Established thought leaders with verified media credentials.
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.
Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro hosts Very Bad Wizards, a society show with 338 episodes published.
What are the legitimate ways to inquire about the nature of the universe? We have science, metaphysics, phenomenological inquiry, but what about mystical and meditative practices? David and Tamler talk about a paper that
David and Tamler do another tier ranking--this time on philosophical thought experiments, so as not to further alienate our chemistry-adjacent listeners. We hit most of the big ones: Pascal's wager, Pascal's mugging, Mar
David and Tamler talk about Jorge Luis Borges' disorienting short story "The Other." A 70-year-old Borges sits on a bench by the Charles River and who should he encounter but himself as a 19-year-old, by the Rhône River
In another Back 2 Basics episode, David and Tamler talk about Plato's "Crito," a dialogue that takes place two days before Socrates' death by hemlock. His friend Crito wants him to escape, but Socrates will only agree if
David and Tamler return to the strange world of Nikolai Gogol and discuss his absurdist masterpiece "The Overcoat," a story that both calls for and steadfastly resists interpretation. But first we discuss a forthcoming P
David and Tamler return to the work of Richard Shweder and colleagues, focusing this time on his foundational paper "The "Big Three" of Morality (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) and the "Big Three" Explanations of Sufferi
David and Tamler cross the border into Denis Villeneuve's taut and propulsive thriller Sicario, the story of an FBI agent who gets pulled into a task force drawn from the shadiest elements of the US government. The assig
David and Tamler return to the Southern Gothic well and talk about Flannery O'Connor's short story masterpiece "Good Country People." A nihilistic atheist philosophy PhD named Joy or Helga (depending on who you ask) live
Are you a college student or about to be one? Do you have friends or family in college? This is the most important episode of your life. David and Tamler do something a little different this episode and tier rank a wide
David and Tamler return to Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and Profane and discuss the chapter "Sacred Time and Myths." How does viewing time as circular give us a periodic window into the sacred? What does it mean to reactua
David and Tamler consecrate their podcast with a discussion of "The Sacred and the Profane" by Mircea Eliade. We focus on the first chapter on sacred spaces, where the divine breaks through (or irrupts) our homogenous an
David and Tamler dive into Plato's Euthyphro, part of our intermittent Back 2 Basics series. A young cocksure priest, confident in his holiness, bumps into Socrates on his way to court to prosecute his father for a wrong
David and Tamler return to William James' monumental "Principles of Psychology", this time wading through his famous chapter "The Stream of Thought." We talk about his rejection of empiricist theories of consciousness in
David and Tamler begin their long journey home to Homer's Odyssey, the tale of king Odysseus' 10 year journey home after the Trojan war (maybe the greatest story ever told). We dive into the first two books, which focus
David and Tamler return to one of their favorites, Frans Kafka, this time on his beautiful and distressing short story "The Hunger Artist," a story that brims with metaphorical possibilities but also implores us to accep
David and Tamler transfer their libidinal energy to Freud's 1917 article "Mourning and Melancholia," in which he tries to understand what's going on with depression, attempts to distinguish it from normal grief, and arri
David and Tamler share some brief thoughts about Paul Thomas Anderson's latest masterpiece One Battle After Another before going deep on his most underrated movie Inherent Vice. We explore the many connections between th
What is the psychology of shame? Is the experience of shame a human universal? How can we investigate the nature of shame across cultures? David and Tamler dive into Richard Shweder's "Towards a Deep Cultural Psychology
David and Tamler go big game hunting and explore their first Hemingway short story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." We dig into his characteristic themes of courage, cowardice, shifting power dynamics in marri
David and Tamler tackle the topic chosen by our beloved Patreon supporters in the first VBW madness tournament – Schopenhauer. We discuss his essays "On the Sufferings of the World" and "The Vanity of Existence," their s
Richard Dawkins
ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author · Federated Farmers
1 appearance on this show
Barry Lam
author of Fewer Rules, Better People The Case for Discretion · University of California, Riverside
1 appearance on this show
Dr. Paul Bloom
Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology · University of Toronto
1 appearance on this show
C. Thi Nguyen
philosophy professor
1 appearance on this show
C. Thi Nguyen
philosopher
1 appearance on this show
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Very Bad Wizards is hosted by Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro. The show is categorised under society (culture) and has published 338 episodes.
Very Bad Wizards has published 338 episodes.
Very Bad Wizards regularly covers society, culture, philosophy. It sits in the society category, with a culture focus.
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Episodes of Very Bad Wizards average 85 minutes, giving guests a long-form format with plenty of time to expand on their expertise.
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