Cover image of Very Bad Wizards

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, and who have a marked inabil... Read more

Ranked #1

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Episode 75: A Golden Shower of Guests

Episode 75: A Golden Shower of Guests

Dave and Tamler celebrate their 75th episode by welcoming six BFFs of the podcast and asking them to share the biggest t... Read more

6 Oct 2015

2hr 29mins

Ranked #2

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Episode 169: A Bug's Life (Kafka's "The Metamorphosis")

Episode 169: A Bug's Life (Kafka's "The Metamorphosis")

David and Tamler try to control their emotions (with varying success) as they go deep into Franz Kafka's masterful novel... Read more

30 Jul 2019

1hr 50mins

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Ranked #3

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Episode 84: Lifting the Veil

Episode 84: Lifting the Veil

David and Tamler talk about the perils of trying to step outside of your own perspective in ethics, science, and politic... Read more

23 Feb 2016

1hr 33mins

Ranked #4

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Episode 189: The Anality of Evil (Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents")

Episode 189: The Anality of Evil (Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents")

David and Tamler dive into Sigmund Freud’s world of unconscious drives, death instincts, and thwarted incestuous urges i... Read more

26 May 2020

1hr 37mins

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Ranked #5

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Episode 176: Split-Brains and the (Dis)Unity of Consciousness

Episode 176: Split-Brains and the (Dis)Unity of Consciousness

David and Tamler discuss famous 'split brain' experiments pioneered by Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga. What happens ... Read more

12 Nov 2019

1hr 48mins

Ranked #6

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Episode 85: A Zoo with Only One Animal (with Paul Bloom)

Episode 85: A Zoo with Only One Animal (with Paul Bloom)

Philosophers can be funny and funny movies can be philosophical. David and Tamler welcome frequent VBW guest and arch-en... Read more

12 Mar 2016

1hr 9mins

Ranked #7

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Episode 78: Wizards Uprising

Episode 78: Wizards Uprising

David and Tamler return to the minefield of campus politics and talk about recent events at Yale, Missouri, and Amherst.... Read more

24 Nov 2015

1hr 8mins

Ranked #8

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Episode 81: Domo Arigato, Mr. Robot (With Yoel Inbar)

Episode 81: Domo Arigato, Mr. Robot (With Yoel Inbar)

Hello, listener. Hello, listener? That's lame. Maybe I should give you a name, but that's a slippery slope. You're only ... Read more

12 Jan 2016

1hr 47mins

Ranked #9

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Episode 106: American Grandstand

Episode 106: American Grandstand

David and Tamler take a break from moral grandstanding to talk about moral grandstanding. How often do we moralize to ma... Read more

10 Jan 2017

1hr 17mins

Ranked #10

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Episode 180: Chekhov's Schrödinger's Dagger (Kurosawa's "Rashomon")

Episode 180: Chekhov's Schrödinger's Dagger (Kurosawa's "Rashomon")

Eleventh Century Japan. A samurai and his wife are walking through the forest and come across a bandit. The bandit attac... Read more

14 Jan 2020

1hr 56mins

Ranked #11

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Episode 187: More Zither

Episode 187: More Zither

With a global pandemic and a collapsing economy upon us, it's time to ask ourselves some tough questions. Sex robots or ... Read more

21 Apr 2020

1hr 40mins

Ranked #12

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Episode 3: "We believe in nothing!" (Cultural diversity, relativism, and moral truth)

Episode 3: "We believe in nothing!" (Cultural diversity, relativism, and moral truth)

Tamler and Dave discuss recent work in philosophy and psychology about the differences in moral values and practices acr... Read more

8 Sep 2012

1hr 1min

Ranked #13

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Episode 138: Memory, Pain, and Relationships (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)

Episode 138: Memory, Pain, and Relationships (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)

Award-winning screenwriter and medieval philosophy scholar Yoel Inbar joins us for a deep dive on the Charlie Kaufman/Mi... Read more

24 Apr 2018

1hr 45mins

Ranked #14

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Episode 160: Everything is Meaningless: The Book of Ecclesiastes

Episode 160: Everything is Meaningless: The Book of Ecclesiastes

David and Tamler dive into the book of Ecclesiastes, an absurdist classic that is somehow also a book of the Bible. Is e... Read more

19 Mar 2019

1hr 33mins

Ranked #15

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Episode 90: Of Mice and Morals

Episode 90: Of Mice and Morals

David and Tamler have their first real fight in a while over an article defending "social mixing"--distributing babies r... Read more

25 May 2016

1hr 20mins

Ranked #16

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Episode 122: Nothing but a "G" Thing (Intelligence Pt. 1)

Episode 122: Nothing but a "G" Thing (Intelligence Pt. 1)

David and Tamler do their best to talk frankly about intelligence and IQ research. (It's our Patreon listener-selected t... Read more

29 Aug 2017

1hr 40mins

Ranked #17

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Episode 119: A Brief History of Values

Episode 119: A Brief History of Values

What happens when we discover why we believe the things we believe? What if we discover that our values are the product ... Read more

12 Jul 2017

1hr 26mins

Ranked #18

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Episode 175: At Least We Didn’t Talk About Zombies (Nagel’s “What is it Like to be a Bat?”)

Episode 175: At Least We Didn’t Talk About Zombies (Nagel’s “What is it Like to be a Bat?”)

We try (with varying success) to wrap our heads around Thomas Nagel’s classic article “What is it Like to be a Bat?" Doe... Read more

29 Oct 2019

1hr 42mins

Ranked #19

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Episode 94: Buttery Friendships

Episode 94: Buttery Friendships

Dave and Tamler don’t agree about much, but one thing they do share is an affinity for character-based approaches to eth... Read more

19 Jul 2016

1hr 36mins

Ranked #20

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Episode 91: Rage Against the Machines

Episode 91: Rage Against the Machines

Inspired by a recent ProPublica report on racial bias in an algorithm used to predict future criminal behavior, David an... Read more

7 Jun 2016

1hr 24mins

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