Episode 228: Forever Jung
David and Tamler confront their shadows and dive into Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconscious. What are the central differences between Jung and Freud? What did Jung mean by archetypes and wh...
11 Tammi 20221h 33min
Episode 227: A Terrible Master (David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water").
David and Tamler dive into David Foster Wallace's celebrated and surprisingly earnest Kenyon College commencement speech "This is Water". How can we escape the prison and prism of our (literally) self...
21 Joulu 20211h 38min
Episode 226: Unraveling Time Traveling (with Barry Lam and Christina Hoff Sommers)
First, it's the return of the annual drunken Thanksgiving segment! Tamler and based wicked stepmom Christina Hoff Sommers fight about JFK, systematic racism, corporations, and how to pronounce valium....
7 Joulu 20211h 56min
Episode 225: Forbidden Modules
David and Tamler talk about the often rancorous debate among cognitive scientists and evolutionary psychologists over whether the mind is modular -- composed of discrete systems responsible for vision...
16 Marras 20211h 42min
Episode 224: Hurts So Good (With Paul Bloom)
VBW favorite Paul Bloom joins us to talk about the pleasures of suffering, flow states, Sisyphus, meaning, and dating questions. Check out his new book The Sweet Spot which comes out today! Plus what ...
2 Marras 20211h 42min
Episode 223: The Hopeless Dream of Being (Bergman's "Persona")
David and Tamler dive into Ingmar Bergman's 1966 masterpiece Persona, a film about two (?) women, Elisabet, a famous stage actress who has stopped speaking, and Alma the chatty young nurse assigned to...
19 Loka 20211h 28min
Episode 222: Choosing Sartre for All Mankind
David and Tamler don black turtlenecks and light up a couple of Gauloises to talk about Jean Paul Sartre's classic essay "Existentialism is a Humanism." Why are choices so fundamental to our experienc...
5 Loka 20211h 37min
Episode 221: Granite Cocks vs Robot Overlords
David and Tamler wind their way through the long-requested "Meditations on Moloch" by Scott Alexander, a comprehensive account of the coordination problems (personified by Allan Ginsberg's demon-entit...
21 Syys 20211h 50min
