Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro
335 episodes listed below
Moral philosophy with sharp edges.
Very Bad Wizards treats stories, movies, papers, and sacred ideas as material for argument. Recent episodes move from Gogol and Sicario to suffering, sacred experience, academic status games, and listener-driven topic tournaments.
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Very Bad Wizards is a conversation-driven show about ethics, psychology, literature, film, religion, and whatever intellectual irritant has lodged under the skin that week. It moves fast. Recent episodes range from Gogol's "The Overcoat" to Denis Villeneuve's Sicario, from Flannery O'Connor to academic field rankings, from AI skepticism to the sacred spaces that survive inside modern life. The show likes big questions, but it rarely treats them politely. A discussion of suffering turns into a serious reading of autonomy, community, divinity, and the different causal stories people use to explain illness, distress, death, and misfortune. A film episode can linger on desert geography, border crossings, color grading, and the uneasy moral architecture of violence. A literary episode can begin with jokes, then settle into bureaucracy, humiliation, desire, ghost-story ambiguity, and the strange pressure of institutions. The format is loose. The attention is not. Ideas are tested through argument, interruption, mockery, memory, and sudden close reading. The show has an academic spine, but it resists the classroom mood. Listener tournaments, Patreon voting, recurring callbacks, sports detours, and side arguments give the conversation the feel of a long-running friendship with footnotes. Its cultural range is part of the appeal. Philosophy papers sit beside Sicario. Gogol sits beside football. Sacred writing sits beside complaints about social media and the state of the year. The show can be blunt. It can also be surprisingly patient with ambiguity, especially when a story refuses to become a clean moral lesson. That tension is the draw. Very Bad Wizards is not trying to make difficult material respectable. It makes difficult material usable for argument, suspicion, pleasure, and occasionally awe. The result is a brainy, jagged culture show for people who want moral seriousness without piety and jokes without intellectual surrender.
Made for: For listeners who enjoy philosophy, psychology, film analysis, literary interpretation, and academic argument when the tone is informal and unsentimental. Best for adults comfortable with irreverent humor and messy moral questions.
What sets it apart: Very Bad Wizards stands out by treating papers, fiction, movies, religion, and pop-culture obsessions as serious occasions for argument. Its signature is the swing from crude joking to careful interpretation without smoothing out the contradiction.
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 inability to distinguish sacred from profane. Each podcast includes discussions of moral philosophy, recent work on moral psychology and neuroscience, and the overlap between the two.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Very Bad Wizards turns close movie talk into lively arguments about character, perception, guilt, and the moral ideas carried by images.
Very Bad Wizards treats movies as arguments about how people see themselves and the moral worlds around them. Tamler Summers and Dave Pizarro move easily from comic provocation into close film criticism, testing an interpretation against scenes, character behavior, visual…
A bar scene in In Bruges becomes a question about guilt; your movie night just changed.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A funny border-crossing hangout that finds real charge in Sicario's landscape and craft.
Very Bad Wizards turns Sicario into a loose, funny conversation about borders, desert geography, and the film's visual control. Tamler and Dave do what the show does best: offhand jokes sit alongside real cinephile attention, especially when they get to the Juarez crossing, the…
A loose philosophical conversation about how modern life still leaves some places and moments feeling sacred.
The episode opens on a bleak New Year note, with political outrage and social-media fatigue turned into jokes that keep the mood a little off-kilter.
A conversational debate about consciousness that stays lively even when it wanders.
The episode frames consciousness as a real argument: whether it is best explained by breaking experience into pieces or by treating it as something that arrives whole.
A jeans-ad controversy gives way to a sharp, funny reading of In Bruges.
The episode opens with Sidney Sweeney's American Eagle jeans ad and the backlash around it, including the eugenics reading of the "good jeans" pun, then shifts into a lively take on In Bruges.
Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins dissect Oscar races, new releases, and Hollywood news.
Layered audio documentaries on hidden histories, with some episodes hosted by Frances McDormand.
BBC World Service panel show tracing the global history behind jewellery, robots, and education.
Journalists Leigh Sales and Annabel Crabb riff on TV, books, and celebrity culture between themselves.
Abbi Jacobson tours specific MoMA artworks with curators and guests like RuPaul.
Tyler Green interviews artists and curators about specific artworks, one exhibition at a time.
Very Bad Wizards hosts Tamler Summers and Dave Pizarro examine Brian Francis’s paper “Philosophy as Fact-Based Discipline: 200 Philosophical Facts” and question whether statements about beliefs, evidence, expertise, and open-mindedness qualify as facts known mainly by philosophers.
Very Bad Wizards examines Harry Chalmers's 2018 paper Is Monogamy Morally Permissible?, which argues that monogamy must answer an analogy with restricting a partner's additional friendships.
Tamler and Dave announce the topics for their VBW Madness listener-selected episode tournament, featuring suggestions like Apocalypse Now and twin studies.
Tamler and Dave discuss listener backlash to their tier ranking of academic fields and introduce a discussion of Flannery O'Connor's 'Good Country People'.
Tamler and Dave discuss the upcoming Super Bowl matchup between the Seahawks and Patriots.
Tamler Summers and Dave Pizarro discuss an unambiguously good use of ChachiBT, with Tamler revealing it involves the New England Patriots.
Tamler Summers and Dave Pizarro open with Texas A&M’s attempt to block Plato readings, then pivot to Richard Stevens’s swearing study in the American Psychologist.
Tamler and Dave discuss their memories of 2025 in the final main episode of the year.
William James says consciousness is "a theater of simultaneous possibilities" shaped by selective attention.
Tamler Summers and Dave Pizarro discuss the Epstein email leaks involving Larry Summers and begin a blind ranking of philosophers.
Tamler Summers and Dave Pizarro open with Daniel Kolitz's Harper's article "The Goon Squad," which they describe as a sociology-style portrait of a gooning subculture built around edging, PMVs, Discord, and shared porn edits.
Tamler Summers opens episode 319, dedicates it to Ryan Lake, and uses Taylor Swift's new album as the first topic with Dave Pizarro.
Two philosophers reluctantly dissect a controversial academic essay about hookup culture in philosophy departments before diving into an enthusiastic analysis of Martin McDonagh's film 'In Bruges.' They explore the essay's cringe-worthy advice for academic 'players' and its problematic framing of intellectual-sexual relationships.
Tamler and Dave discuss Grok's anti-Semitic rant and its implications.
Tamler and Dave discuss Shakespeare's Macbeth, analyzing its themes and characters through a philosophical and psychological lens.
Tamler Summers and Dave Pizarro discuss Bayesian reasoning, neuroscience, and Buddhist philosophy in an informal conversation.