Very Bad Wizards

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 Des 20211h 56min

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 Nov 20211h 42min

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 Nov 20211h 42min

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 Okt 20211h 28min

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 Okt 20211h 37min

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 Sep 20211h 50min

In honor of Labor Day, David and Tamler dive into two works by Karl Marx - "The Communist Manifesto" and "Estranged Labor." What is Marx's theory of historical change? Why does capitalism produce an a...

7 Sep 20211h 50min

It's a Borges bonanza! David and Tamler dive into two stories: "Emma Zunz" and "Borges and I." The first seems like a straightforward daughter revenge story (Tamler's favorite genre), but Borges being...

17 Aug 20211h 45min