About Our Podcast
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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Recent Episodes
Episode 289: Shadows on the Wall (Plato's Cave Pt. 1)
Over the years we’ve referred repeatedly to Plato’s cave, Platonic forms, and phrases like “copies of copies” without ever really explaining what we mean by these things. So as part of a new mini-series we’re going dive deeper into Plato’s famous images ...
Episode 288: The Despised Foot (The Denial of Death Pt. 2)
David and Tamler conclude their discussion of Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death . We talk about Becker’s philosophy of science (does he have one?), his sweeping explanations for strongman leaders, neuroses, mental illness, sexual fetishes, and the refr...
Episode 287: Gods With Anuses (The Denial of Death Pt. 1)
David faces his greatest fear as he and Tamler dive into Ernest Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer Prize winner The Denial of Death . Blending existentialist ideas within a psychoanalytic framework, Becker argues that the ultimate source of human motivation is not t...
Reviews
What the people say about us
Smart and funny
Very Bad Wizards may not be for everyone, but I love it. Tammler and Dave are smart, open, and really funny. If you’re interested in psychology and philosophy and do you want to blend that with a good belly laugh, this is the podcast for you. I’ve been listening to it for years and still enjoyed tuning in whenever the ...
Read MoreYikes
Love these two and their banter and their terrific analysis of academic and literary texts. Moved to rate by the cringey superficial analysis of the political landscape. Docked zero stars for the distasteful discussion but please guys if you’re going to lampoon and criticize politicians for their flaws start with the w...
Read MoreConsistently fun and informative
Love the show - been listening for many years!
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