x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

PODCAST

Very Bad Wizards

Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro

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.

society & culture philosophy

All Episodes

01:33:15

Episode 316: A Four-Letter Man (Hemingway's "The...

Very Bad Wizards ·

2025/09/16

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 marriages, and what it truly means to live a happy life. Plus, neuroscience may be complex, but can these AI generated neuroscience jokes tickle David’s funny bone? And a super timely discussion of an urgent issue: The Cracker Barrel logo. Cracker Barrel Redesign Controversy [apnews.com]

en

01:30:00

Episode 315: Ceaseless Striving (Schopenhauer’s...

Very Bad Wizards ·

2025/09/02

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 strikingly modern perspectives on human life and behavior and the influences Schopenhauer took from Eastern thought. Plus, David has Tamler do a blind ranking of movie directors. Arthur Schopenhauer [plato.stanford.edu] Arther Schopenhauer [iep.utm.edu] The Essays of Schopenhauer:

en

01:58:56

Episode 314: The In-Betweeny Place

Very Bad Wizards ·

2025/08/12

David and Tamler go long on McDonagh’s 2008 masterpiece "In Bruges." We talk about the terrific performances and all the weighty themes - sin, guilt, redemption, honor, language, and very inappropriate jokes. Plus philosophers talk about “sex within the discipline” and Tamler can’t handle it. To Philosophers of Easy Virtue by Alex Rails [dailynous.com] In Bruges (2008) [wikipedia.org]

en

01:15:30

Episode 313: The Spontaneous Eruption of Now

Very Bad Wizards ·

2025/07/29

David and Tamler try to wrap their heads around the metaphysics of past and future via the Borges essay(s) “A New Refutation of Time.” What does it mean to be a time skeptic or a time realist for that matter? If you’re a Berkeleyan idealist and Humean skeptic about the self, do you have to deny succession and simultaneity? The world, unfortunately, is real; and we, unfortunately, are Very Bad Wizards. Plus for centuries philosophers insisted that you couldn’t measure qualia, but then scientists

en

01:16:24

Episode 312: MechaSkeptic

Very Bad Wizards ·

2025/07/15

David and Tamler return to David Hume’s somewhat slippery brand of skepticism, this time focusing Chapter 12 of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Plus speaking of things to be skeptical about, we dive into a recent paper called “Your Brain on ChatGPT” – does neuroscience show that LLM users incur a “cognitive debt”? MIT study shows ChatGPT reshapes student brain function and reduces creativity when used from the start [edtechinnovationhub.com] Your brain on ChatGPT [arxiv.org] People are

en

01:26:06

Episode 311: The Way to Dusty Death (Shakespeare's...

Very Bad Wizards ·

2025/07/01

David and Tamler screw their courage to the sticking place and talk about their first Shakespeare play – The Tragedy of Macbeth. Plus we select 16 topics for our first VBW topic tournament suggested and voted by our beloved Patreon patrons.

en

01:14:45

Episode 310: Bayes, Brains, and Buddhists

Very Bad Wizards ·

2025/06/10

David and Tamler try to wrap their heads around the predictive processing theory of the mind and brain function and talk about a paper that applies the framework to meditation practices. But first a new Psychological Science article expresses skepticism about the existence of people who have no inner voice. So is David a new kind of human or is he just making up this condition to get attention? Assistant Editor’s note: When Tamler says he doesn’t talk to his dog “weirdly often,” he is lying. Lind,

en

01:23:21

Episode 309: Dissolving Into the One

Very Bad Wizards ·

2025/05/27

David and Tamler heed the call to journey into the realm of Joseph Campbell. What are the unifying elements shared by myths and religions across time and culture? Does myth give us a portal into the hidden cosmic forces of the universe? Can it take us into depths of our unconscious and the nature of our own being? What is the legacy of Campbell’s thought today? Plus, three brave scholars of fascism at Yale flee the country to form in a center of resistance at…The University of Toronto. We’re

en

01:14:48

Bonus Episode: Va Va Boom (Robert Aldrich's "Kiss Me...

Very Bad Wizards ·

2025/05/20

We kick off our Bonus "Noir Summer" series with Robert Aldrich's "Kiss Me Deadly" (1956). While the rest of the bonus series will be for Patreon subscribers only, the first is free to all.

en

01:14:50

Episode 308: The Gray Man who Dreamed (Borges'...

Very Bad Wizards ·

2025/05/06

David and Tamler return to their happy place and talk about two pieces by JL Borges – the story “Shakespeare’s Memory” and the [essay/story/poem/literary sketch??] “Everything and Nothing.” What would it mean to have the memory of a supreme artist like Shakespeare? Would it help us understand his work, or how he was able to produce masterpiece after masterpiece What does it mean to have our own memories? How does all this connect to our sense of self? Plus cancel culture comes to Cornell, but don’t

en

01:16:37

Episode 307: What's in the BOX?

Very Bad Wizards ·

2025/04/22

David and Tamler talk about two famous puzzles that for different reasons have bedeviled the rationalist community – The Monty Hall Problem and Newcomb’s “paradox.” Why is it so hard for people to see that a 66% chance of winning a car is better than a 33% chance? Why do famous mathematicians struggle with this problem? And David and Tamler split on the Newcomb case – can you guess which one of us is the one boxer? Plus since we’re basically a TV recap podcast now, some thoughts on White Lotus

en

02:04:08

Episode 306: What to Expect When You're Expecting...

Very Bad Wizards ·

2025/04/08

David and Tamler welcome Barry Lam back to the show. In the first segment we violate one of our own rules by talking about his new book "Fewer Rules, Better People", a full frontal attack on David’s strict Kantian worldview. Then we dive DEEP into David Lynch’s first movie, "Eraserhead," and eventually arrive at a few coherent interpretations of Lynch’s “most spiritual film." Barry Lam [ucr.edu] Fewer Rules, Better People: The Case for Discretion by Barry Lam [amazon.com affiliate link] Eraserhead

en

01:44:26

Episode 305: Emile Is the Name of the Goat (with Paul...

Very Bad Wizards ·

2025/03/25

VBW favorite Paul Bloom joins us to break down the Severance season finale and season 2 in general. We all agree that it’s a much-needed return to form and debate some of the choices and questions the episode raises. Plus, an evolutionary account of the ‘ick’ and the adaptive trait of graceful ping-pong ball chasing. Collisson, B., Saunders, E., & Yin, C. (2025). The ick: Disgust sensitivity, narcissism, and perfectionism in mate choice thresholds. Personality and Individual Differences, 238,

en

01:40:28

Episode 304: The Planes Don't Land

Very Bad Wizards ·

2025/03/11

What has four thumbs and can effortlessly glide from the a priori to the a posteriori in a single episode? These guys. In the first segment we tackle a brand new paper called “Being Exalted: an A Priori Argument for the Trinity.” That’s right, the Holy Trinity arrived at through reason alone. Then in the main segment we talk about Richard Feynman’s classic 1974 Caltech commencement address “Cargo Cult Science.” Does Feynman’s metaphor suggest that whole paradigms might be systematically misguided

en

01:26:20

Episode 303: Measure This

Very Bad Wizards ·

2025/02/25

Everyone knows Tamler hates numbers but he’s not the only one who worries about them. We talk about the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s excellent paper “Value Capture” which examines how the ever-increasing presence of metrics, data, indicators, rankings, and other forms quantification shape our values as individuals and institutions. Plus, VBW Does Conceptual Analysis – we’re on to the ‘S’ words now: smug. Nguyen, C. T. (2024). Value capture. J. Ethics & Soc. Phil., 27, 469.

en

01:17:08

Episode 302: Metaphysical Edging

Very Bad Wizards ·

2025/02/11

What makes something weird? What makes something eerie? David and Tamler wander into Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie to learn more about these concepts. How does weird art expand our imagination of what’s possible? Why does the feeling of eeriness dissolve when we get an explanation for what we see? What draws us to phenomena that evoke these unsettling feelings? Plus – DeepSeek has Silicon Valley shitting themselves but how does it really stack up against good old American AI? The Weird and

en

01:29:34

Episode 301: Believing is Seeing?

Very Bad Wizards ·

2025/01/28

It’s Back 2 Basics: Psychology edition! Do coins look bigger to poor people? Do hills look steeper to people wearing heavy backpacks? What’s the difference between perception and attention, or perception and judgment? David and Tamler discuss the long standing debate over whether our beliefs, desires, and past experience can penetrate our vision and change our visual perception. Plus some thoughts on the passing of Tamler’s favorite artist David Lynch. Firestone, C., & Scholl, B. J. (2016).

en

01:48:01

Episode 300: If We Only Had A Brain

Very Bad Wizards ·

2025/01/14

David and Tamler celebrate their 300th episode with a deep dive into the movie that inspired the podcast’s title. Why is "The Wizard of Oz" the most influential American movie of all time? How does it dig deep into our collective psyches? What makes the effects so timeless and effective? And what’s the actual moral of the story? Plus we crawl up our own asses and talk about what we’re proud of from last year, excited for in 2025, and the ways the podcast has changed since episode 1. The Wizard of Oz

en

02:06:33

Episode 299: Oh the Humility!

Very Bad Wizards ·

2024/12/24

David and Tamler wrap up the new year talking about intellectual virtues and Rachel Fraser’s excellent essay “Against Humility.” What is intellectual humility exactly and do we need it for knowledge and understanding? Does the value of humility depend on the person or the circumstances? Are there contexts where intellectual arrogance is the epistemic virtue? We arrive at the definitive answers to these questions and anyone who disagrees with us is a stupid idiot. Plus in the second segment we

en

01:20:38

Episode 298: Pass the Peace Pipe

Very Bad Wizards ·

2024/12/10

Why do we punish people? How did our punishment practices evolve and what is their primary function? David and Tamler talk about a new paper that examines punitive justice in three small-scale societies - the Kiowa equestrian foragers in late 19th century North America, Mentawai horticulturalists in Indonesia, and Nuer pastoralists. The authors challenge the dominant view of punishment as a means of norm enforcement arguing instead that its main function is reconciliation, restoring cooperative

en

321 results

Similar Podcasts

The Daily Horoscope

The Daily Horoscope

The Michael Decon Program

Michael Decon

Kalimera Koveos

Andrea Koveos

The Documentary Podcast

BBC World Service

Smarter leben

DER SPIEGEL