David and Tamler return to one of their favorites, Frans Kafka, this time on his beautiful and distressing short story "The Hunger Artist," a story that brims with metaphorical possibilities but also implores us to accept it on its own mysterious terms. Plus gooning. <a href= "https://harpers.org/archive/2025/11/the-goon-squad-daniel-kolitz-porn-masturbation-loneliness/"> The Goon Squad</a> by Daniel Kolitz [harpers.org] <a href= "https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gooning">"Gooning" definition</a> [urbandictionary.com] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hunger_Artist">A Hunger Artist</a> [wikipedia.org] <a href="https://www.kafka-online.info/a-hunger-artist.html">A Hunger Artist (full text)</a> [kafka-online.info]

Episode 321: The Journey Begins (Plus Blind Ranking Philosophers)

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.