
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.
Episode 321: The Journey Begins (Plus Blind Ranking Philosophers)
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 on Odysseus' 20-year-old son Telem...
Episode 320: Forgive Me (Kafka's "A Hunger Artist")
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 accept it on its own mysterious terms. P...
Episode 319: The Shadow of the Object (Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia")
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 arrives at some ideas that laid the gro...
Episode 318: A PTA Meeting
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 the two movies - Pynchon adaptations...
Episode 317: For Shame
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 of Shame." We talk about the method...
Listener Reviews
Read what other people are saying about our podcast!
critical thinking ?!
i really absolutely love that this podcast, more than any other form of media i’ve ever consumed, pushes me to engage with topics that i wouldn’t otherwise have. it’s the only podcast i consistently come back to and i’d absolutely recommend engaging fully with an episode (reading/watching whatever they’re discussing be...
Read MoreVery Cool Wizards
Love the mix of the irreverent with the transcendent.
Welfare
So good I have applied for welfare so I can be a Patreon!!!