Very Bad Wizards

Tamler Sommers is a philosopher. David Pizarro is a psychologist. Together they have been arguing about morality, free will, and horror movies for over a decade, and the result is one of the most genuinely entertaining academic podcasts you will find. Very Bad Wizards has 332 episodes and a 4.8-star rating from nearly 2,700 reviews -- numbers that reflect a fiercely loyal audience. The format is deceptively simple: two smart friends sit down and talk about big ideas. But the execution is what matters. Sommers and Pizarro are both serious scholars who also happen to be very funny, and they are comfortable disagreeing with each other on air. One episode might be a close reading of Kafka, the next a breakdown of the latest moral psychology research, and the one after that a heated debate about whether a particular Coen Brothers film is actually about determinism. They move fluidly between highbrow and lowbrow without ever feeling pretentious about it. The psychology angle comes through Pizarro's research background -- he studies moral judgment and emotion at Cornell -- but the show never feels like a lecture. It is more like eavesdropping on the kind of conversation you wish you could have at a dinner party. Episodes typically run one to two hours, released every couple of weeks. If you are someone who thinks about why people believe what they believe and do what they do, this show will keep you company for a very long time.