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.
The hosts
Tamler Sommers is a philosopher at the University of Houston whose work centers on moral responsibility, honor, and the strange shape of free will. He’s the author of Why Honor Matters, A Very Bad Wizard, and Relative Justice.
David Pizarro is a psychologist at Cornell whose research probes moral emotion, disgust, and the way reasoning bends under feeling. His papers have shaped two decades of moral-psychology debate.
What you’ll find here
Episodes alternate between two registers. Texts dig into a single short story, dialogue, or philosophy paper — from Borges to Plato, Hume to Flannery O’Connor. Films pull apart something we’ve watched together — horror, noir, prestige drama — for the philosophical seam underneath the surface.
The bonus series for members include The Lotus Eaters, a slow read-through of the Odyssey, and Noir Summer, one film a week through the season.