Very Bad Wizards
Episodes
Episode 328: Weapons Free
17 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Episode 327: You Ain't So Smart (Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People")
24 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler return to the Southern Gothic well and talk about Flannery O'Connor's short story masterpiece "Good Country People." A nihilistic at...
Episode 326: The Most Important Episode of Your (Academic) Life
10 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 T...
Episode 325: It Is Happening Again
27 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 g...
Episode 324: Irruption of the Sacred
13 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Episode 323: Debate Me 'Phro
23 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler dive into Plato's Euthyphro, part of our intermittent Back 2 Basics series. A young cocksure priest, confident in his holiness, bump...
Episode 322: A Theater of Simultaneous Possibilities (William James' "The Stream of Thought")
09 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler return to William James' monumental "Principles of Psychology", this time wading through his famous chapter "The Stream of Thought." ...
Episode 321: The Journey Begins (Plus Blind Ranking Philosophers)
25 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 gre...
Episode 320: Forgive Me (Kafka's "A Hunger Artist")
11 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Episode 319: The Shadow of the Object (Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia")
28 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 w...
Episode 318: A PTA Meeting
14 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler share some brief thoughts about Paul Thomas Anderson's latest masterpiece One Battle After Another before going deep on his most unde...
Episode 317: For Shame
30 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Episode 316: A Four-Letter Man (Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber")
16 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 charact...
Episode 315: Ceaseless Striving (Schopenhauer's Pessimism)
02 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler tackle the topic chosen by our beloved Patreon supporters in the first VBW madness tournament – Schopenhauer. We discuss his essays...
Episode 314: The In-Betweeny Place
12 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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, ...
Episode 313: The Spontaneous Eruption of Now
29 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Episode 312: MechaSkeptic
15 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler return to David Hume's somewhat slippery brand of skepticism, this time focusing Chapter 12 of his Enquiry Concerning Human Underst...
Episode 311: The Way to Dusty Death (Shakespeare's "Macbeth")
01 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
Episode 310: Bayes, Brains, and Buddhists
10 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 th...
Episode 309: Dissolving Into the One
27 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Bonus Episode: Va Va Boom (Robert Aldrich's "Kiss Me Deadly")
20 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 subsc...
Episode 308: The Gray Man who Dreamed (Borges' "Shakespeare's Memory")
06 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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/l...
Episode 307: What's in the BOX?
22 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler talk about two famous puzzles that for different reasons have bedeviled the rationalist community – The Monty Hall Problem and Newc...
Episode 306: What to Expect When You're Expecting (David Lynch's "Eraserhead" with Barry Lam)
08 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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, ...
Episode 305: Emile Is the Name of the Goat (with Paul Bloom)
25 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 for...
Episode 304: The Planes Don't Land
11 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Episode 303: Measure This
25 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 "V...
Episode 302: Metaphysical Edging
11 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 c...
Episode 301: Believing is Seeing?
28 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 diffe...
Episode 300: If We Only Had A Brain
14 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 i...
Episode 299: Oh the Humility!
24 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler wrap up the new year talking about intellectual virtues and Rachel Fraser's excellent essay "Against Humility." What is intellectual ...
Episode 298: Pass the Peace Pipe
10 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 exam...
Episode 297: No Pleasure in Meanness (Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find")
26 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler face off with the Misfit in Flannery O'Connor's classic short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find." We sort through the biblical allusi...
Episode 296: The Other CRT
12 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler share a few brief thoughts on the election and then raise some questions about Tucker Carlson being attacked by a demon as he slept i...
Episode 295: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
29 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler hop into their Scooby Van and drive into Tobe Hooper's mad and macabre horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. How does this e...
Episode 294: The Scandal of Philosophy (Hume's Problem of Induction)
08 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
CD Broad called induction "the glory of science and the scandal of philosophy." As a matter of habit, we're all confident that the sun will rise tomor...
Episode 293: Who Is the Dreamer? (Borges' "The Circular Ruins")
24 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler crawl up a riverbank, kiss the mud, and dream a discussion of Borges' "The Circular Ruins." We sort through various interpretations ...
Episode 292: Boundary Issues
10 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler lead off with a breakdown of the new commercial for "friend (not imaginary)" a new AI necklace that takes hikes with you, interrupts...
Episode 291: Shoe Shining
27 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Cornell philosopher David Shoemaker joins us for a long winding journey up to the Overlook Hotel, a DEEP dive on Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. We ta...
Episode 290: Blinded by the Light (Plato's Cave Pt. 2)
06 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler continue their discussion of Plato's allegory of the cave. We talk about the connections with mystical traditions including Gnosticis...
Episode 289: Shadows on the Wall (Plato's Cave Pt. 1)
23 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 m...
Episode 288: The Despised Foot (The Denial of Death Pt. 2)
09 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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?), ...
Episode 287: Gods With Anuses (The Denial of Death Pt. 1)
25 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David faces his greatest fear as he and Tamler dive into Ernest Becker's 1973 Pulitzer Prize winner The Denial of Death. Blending existentialist ide...
Episode 286: Laugh and the World Laughs With You
11 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler dive into the mysteries at the heart of Park Chan-wook's deeply disturbing masterpiece "Oldboy" (2003). An ordinary man, Oh Dae-su,...
Episode 285: On Culture and Agriculture
28 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
It's an old-school episode as David and Tamler dive into some intriguing research on the origins of cultural differences. Two neighboring communitie...
Episode 284: Reel Choices
15 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler choose an episode topic that will define the identity and meaning of the Very Bad Wizards podcast going forward – our top 3 exist...
Episode 283: When Elephants Podcast
30 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler talk about Caitrin Keiper's wonderful sprawling essay on elephant life and society and the many philosophical questions surrounding t...
Episode 282: Fearful Symmetry (Borges' "Death and the Compass")
16 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A Rabbi is found dead in a hotel room, stabbed in the chest. The room is filled with Kabbalah texts and a single page in an typewriter that reads "T...
Episode 281: Choose Your Fighter
26 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We dig into the biggest rivalry in Tamler's profession, analytic vs. continental philosophy. Are analytic philosophers truly the rigorous, precise, ...
Episode 280: Mad Masque (with Phil Ford and J.F. Martel)
12 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Phil Ford and J.F. Martel from the great "Weird Studies" podcast join us for a whirling discussion of Edgar Allan Poe's mesmerizing tale of decadence ...
Episode 279: The Greenhouses We Burned Along the Way (Lee Chang-dong's "Burning" Pt. 2)
27 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler conclude their discussion of Lee Chang-dong's "Burning" – we talk about the hunger dance at twilight, Ben's greenhouse burning hab...
Episode 278: Schrödinger's Everything (Lee Chang-dong's "Burning" Pt. 1)
13 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler fall under the spell of Lee Chang-dong's 2018 masterpiece Burning, a movie where nothing is what it seems, or maybe it is. An alien...
Episode 277: The Merits of Buggery (Nagel's "Sexual Perversion")
30 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler play the old hits – Thomas Nagel and sex robots. In the main segment we talk about Nagel's essay "Sexual Perversion", a surprising ...
Episode 276: Attention Please
16 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler are back for the new year and one of our resolutions was to do more episodes on William James. Today we talk about his account of 'At...
Episode 275: The Ineffable Center (Borges' "The Aleph")
26 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
An episode interesting from every point of view, we train our eyes on Jorge Luis Borges' "The Aleph." The first segment wins the kudos of the learned,...
Episode 274: Can I Get a Kidney Voucher? (with Vlad Chituc)
13 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
RETURNING guest Vlad Chituc joins us for a wide-ranging discussion about donating his kidney to a stranger, the effective altruism movement, and his s...
Episode 273: Ah. Ah. (Miyazaki's "Spirited Away")
29 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler board the train for Hayao Miyazaki's mystical dreamy coming of age masterpiece Spirited Away. This is a true VBW deep dive. Plus a st...
Episode 272: Neigh Means Yay
15 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The morality of zoophilia has received shockingly little attention in contemporary ethical discourse…until now. David and Tamler break down the pa...
Episode 271: Concept-Con 2023
13 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It's the first annual "Concept-Con" – a not at all cringe episode where David and Tamler apply the methods and rigor of analytic philosophy to disse...
Episode 270: Take Me to the River (Blood Meridian, Pt. 3)
10 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler conclude their three-part discussion of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. We talk about the Judge's coin trick by the fire and the qu...
Episode 269: Death Hilarious (Blood Meridian, Pt. 2)
10 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In part 2 of our journey into Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Tamler and David talk about the kid and his form of resistance to the judge's gleeful...
Episode 268: Blood Meridian, Part 1
12 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In part one of our two-part episode on Cormac McCarthy's blood-soaked phantasmagorical 1985 masterpiece Blood Meridian, David and Tamler talk about th...
Episode 267: The Thickness of Reality
22 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler return to the work of old favorite William James and argue about the 6th lecture (inspired by the French philosopher Henri Bergson) o...
Episode 266: I Want to Half-Believe
08 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Last December, with Argentina minutes away from a World Cup championship, friend of the show Yoel texted David "congratulations." David was furious, a...
Episode 265: Kekulé (Oh Yeah!)
25 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Summer of Cormac McCarthy continues – this time we dive into his one piece of non-fiction, the short essay "The Kekulé Problem." How does our...
[BONUS] Overton Windows Episode 1: Israel and Palestine
18 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A new mini-series with Tamler Sommers and Robert Wright on the range of politically acceptable discourse for a given topic and how this "Overton win...
Episode 264: The Rule You Follow (The Coen Brothers' "No Country for Old Men")
11 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler dive into the Coen brothers' bleak and beautiful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel "No Country for Old Men." What's the unde...
Episode 263: Free Yoel
27 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A VBW exclusive report! For years David and Tamler have been a little dismissive of fears about cancel culture in academia but now the SJWs have come ...
Episode 262: Supposing Truth is a Woman (Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil")
13 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler dive into the first two parts of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil which contain some of Nietzsche's best drive-bys on philosophers li...
Episode 261: Death of the Author
30 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What's the meaning of a work of art? Does the text mean just what the author intends it to mean? Does it matter what Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark think...
Episode 260: The Scream That Never Found a Voice (Murakami's "Sleep")
09 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler take the first excursion into the work of Haruki Murakami and talk about his short story "Sleep." A thirty-year-old woman, the wife o...
Episode 259: Losing Time ("Tár" with Paul Bloom)
25 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The great Paul Bloom returns to the show to explore the many mysteries of Todd Field's 2022 film "Tár." Is it a ghost story? A movie about cancel cul...
Episode 258: Mystic Peeza
11 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler talk about William James' chapter on mysticism from his book "Varieties of Religious Experience." What defines a mystical experience?...
Episode 257: Aural Fixation
28 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler deliver a PODCAST episode, one of many that comes from the INTERNET, that you'll probably listen to through Air Pods or some other ki...
Episode 256: The Right to Punish?
14 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Here's an episode with something for both of us – a healthy serving of Kantian rationalism for David with a dollop of Marxist criminology for Tamler...
Episode 255: Beloved Child of the House (Susanna Clarke's "Piranesi")
28 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler get lost in the world of Susanna Clarke's "Piranesi," a hauntingly beautiful and thrilling novel with echoes of Borges, Plato, C.S. L...
Episode 254: Nobody's Parfit
14 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Tamler's earlier self committed to doing an episode on Parfit, and David holds his current self to that promise, which shows how unconvinced David was...
Episode 253: Tarkovsky's Starchild
31 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
It's the episode that Tamler has been waiting for – a long deep dive into Andrei Tarkovsky's mysterious masterpiece "Stalker." A writer and professo...
Episode 252: Yes We Sene-can
10 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler dive into Seneca's "On the Happy Life" and stoicism, the topic selected by our beloved patreon supporters. Why is stoicism so popular...
Episode 251: First Order, Then Chaos
20 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler wind their way through another Borges story - "The Immortal"- about a Roman soldier who seeks the secret of immortality and, much to ...
Episode 250: Metaphors All the Way Down
06 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We often think of metaphors as poetic flourishes, a nice way to punctuate your ideas and make them more relatable. But what if metaphors aren’t...
Episode 249: Phlegm and Carelessness (Hume's "The Sceptic")
22 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler gild and stain David Hume’s essay “The Sceptic†with their sentiments. If nothing is inherently valuable or despicab...
Episode 248: Checkmate, Grasshopper
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this podcast we examine a recent argument for the view that chess is not, in fact, a game. We discuss the Grasshopper's claim that all games must h...
Episode 247: Open the Pod, Dave (with Sam Harris)
18 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We welcome Sam Harris back to the show for a deep dive into Stanley Kubrick's confounding 1968 masterpiece "2001: A Space Odyssey." How long is the Da...
Episode 246: Existential Poker-Face (David Foster Wallace's "E Unibus Pluram")
04 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We dive into David Foster Wallace's sprawling 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." How do TV and new forms of media keep their h...
Episode 245: Pragmatically Speaking
20 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler take their first real look at pragmatism via Richard Rorty's "Solidarity or Objectivity." Can we discover facts about the world as it...
Episode 244: Thanks for the Memories? (Borges' "Funes the Memorious)
06 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler return to Borges land to get lost in the infinite, this time with his legendary and tragic character Funes the memorious. What would ...
Episode 243: Finding My Religion
16 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler continue their discussion of Leo Tolstoy's 'Confession.' When we left him last time, the famous author had bottomed out just years af...
Bonus Episode: The Ambulators (A "Deadwood" Podcast)
09 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We have a sneak peek for our listeners--the first episode our new Patreon bonus series on David Milch's brilliant (but short-lived) series "Deadwood."...
Episode 242: Losing My Religion
02 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler find themselves unable to attach rational meaning to a single act in their entire lives. Let's say we publish more articles and books...
Episode 241: Very Bad Orgies (Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut")
19 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler mask up and wander through the audio and visual orgy of Stanley Kubrick's final masterpiece Eyes Wide Shut. What is this movie really...
Episode 240: Evil
06 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler descend into the dark pits of Hell to look Satan in the eyes and discover the nature of evil. OK…that's not fully accurate, we just...
Episode 239: Lose Yourself
21 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler lose themselves in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's (pr. 'chick sent me high') classic paper on the concept of flow. We talk about the featu...
Episode 238: I Am Not Ivan Ilyich...Am I?
07 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Ivan Ilyich is a man. All men are mortal. So Ivan Ilyich is mortal. Sure absolutely, that's true for Ivan Ilyich and for all men. But we're not Ivan I...
Episode 237: Glitches Ain't Shit
24 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler explore the many variations of simulation theory, the view that our universe is just a computer generated model created by an advance...
Episode 236: Your Outie Is Skilled at Lovemaking (With Paul Bloom)
03 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We welcome Paul Bloom to talk about the first season of "Severance," the new mind-bending and mind-splitting TV series on Apple TV+. What happens when...
Episode 235: Animated Objects
19 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Panpsychism didn't give us river spirits or mischievous sootballs, so this time we go straight to the source - a defense of animism, and in a top 10 a...
Episode 234: Like A Dog (Kafka's "The Trial" Pt. 2)
05 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler conclude their discussion of "The Trial," Franz Kafka's darkly comic vision of an opaque and impenetrable bureaucracy that comes for ...
Episode 233: Keeping It Surreal (Kafka's "The Trial" Pt. 1)
22 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
David and Tamler wander through the bewildering dream-like world of Franz Kafka's "The Trial." In part one of a two-part discussion we discuss the cir...
Episode 232: Mind Over Matter
08 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It's the topic voted on by our beloved Patreon patrons, panpsychism! David and Tamler delve into the resurgent debate over whether consciousness is th...