David and Tamler tackle the first half of the VBW Madness topic tournament winner, Stanislaw Lem's science fiction masterpiece, Solaris, about a mysterious ocean planet that resists all attempts to understand and communicate with it. We talk about the epistemological obstacles that obscure the meaning of the ocean's behavior, the "guests" that appear to the researchers drawn from their buried memories, Lem's critique of science and lots more. Plus, there's an inexplicable dearth of research into male preferences for breasts or buttocks and their correlation with egalitarian and materialist values. But once again it's evolutionary psychology to the rescue. Mehmetoglu, M. (2026). <a href= "https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42307362/">Buttocks or Breasts? Identifying Latent Subgroups in Male Preferences for Female Bodily Features.</a> Evolutionary Psychology, 24(2), 14747049261452897. [pubmed.gov] <a href="https://amzn.to/4w3lyP0">Solaris by Stanislaw Lem (trans. by Bill Johnston)</a> [amazon.com affiliate link]

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.