Episode 24: The Perils of Empathy (with Paul Bloom)

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 Jan 20221h 33min

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 Dec 20211h 38min

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 Dec 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