Very Bad Wizards

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 'Attention' from his 1890 volume The Principles of Ps...

16 Jan 20241h 27min

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, the academician, the Hellenist, as we talk about ...

26 Dec 20231h 34min

RETURNING guest Vlad Chituc joins us for a wide-ranging discussion about donating his kidney to a stranger, the effective altruism movement, and his sexuality. Was EA's turn to 'long-termist' goals li...

13 Dec 20231h 35min

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 study by our secret crush suggests we may not be opt...

29 Nov 20231h 57min

The morality of zoophilia has received shockingly little attention in contemporary ethical discourse…until now. David and Tamler break down the paper "Zoophilia is Morally Permissible" from the latest...

15 Nov 20231h 24min

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 dissect not one, not two, but four new concepts. We start...

13 Nov 202358min

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 question of the supernatural in the novel. Next we d...

10 Okt 20231h 43min

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 nihilism - does he (as the man) ultimately succumb...

10 Okt 20231h 31min