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Hosted by Unknown Host · 🇺🇸 US · EN
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.
Unknown Host hosts Very Bad Wizards.
![The Lotus Eaters Episode 3: The Halfway House to Humanity [unlocked] episode artwork](https://static.libsyn.com/p/assets/7/c/5/f/7c5f97754682db9016c3140a3186d450/The_Lotus_Eaters-20260813-pm6k0410rz.jpg)
Tamler and David discuss books 5 & 6 of The Odyssey, where we follow Odysseus as he finally leaves Calypso's Island and returns to the realm of the human. We also finally pick a name for the podcast. But only after recor
![The Lotus Eaters Episode 2: Intangible as Wind [unlocked] episode artwork](https://static.libsyn.com/p/assets/4/a/f/3/4af363136ac859f616c3140a3186d450/The_Lotus_Eaters-20260806-maawitbml5.jpg)
Welcome to The Lotus Eaters! This is part 2 of our 12 part series on Homer's Odyssey that will be released every Thursday. The series was supported by our Patreon community , but we are now making it available to everyon
![The Lotus Eaters Episode 1: The Journey Begins [unlocked] episode artwork](https://static.libsyn.com/p/assets/a/9/c/1/a9c113f9de71c47f16c3140a3186d450/The_Lotus_Eaters.jpg)
Welcome to The Lotus Eaters! This is part 1 of our 12 part series on Homer's Odyssey that will be released every Thursday. The series was supported by our Patreon community , but we are now making it available to everyon
Dropping this a week early - after completing a 12-part series on Homer's Odyssey for our beloved Patreon supporters, we now dive into Christopher Nolan's version of this epic tale. We're mixed on the movie. David enjoye
David and Tamler tackle the first half of the VBW Madness topic tournament winner, Stanislaw Lem's science fiction masterpiece, Solaris , about a mysterious ocean planet that resists all attempts to understand and commun
The great Robert Wright returns to the podcast to talk about his new book T he God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning. We debate the magnitude of AI's potential impact, the natural selection an
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
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
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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