Very Bad Wizards

Episode 247: Open the Pod, Dave (with Sam Harris)

October 18th, 2022  |  2 hrs 34 mins

2001: a space odyssey, anti-semitism, kanye west, richard rorty, sam harris, stanley kubrick

David and Tamler welcome Sam Harris back to the show for a deep dive into Stanley Kubrick’s confounding 1968 masterpiece "2001: A Space Odyssey." How long is the Dawn of Man? What does the second monolith do exactly? Why are the humans so banal and expressionless? What are HAL’S motivations? Has he planned his mutiny from the start, or does the Council’s deception make him manlfunction? Or something else? Who is the Council anyway? Was HAL meant to go through the stargate? What is the final leap forward in consciousness? The hotel room, the starchild, all the rectangles, rectangles everywhere, the music – what does it all mean????

Plus Sam has some thoughts about our Rorty episode and David tries to rile Tamler up about Kanye’s antisemitism.

Note: there's a bit of an abrupt transition between our brief opening and Sam telling a story about Rorty in around the 9 minute mark... couldn't be helped.

Episode 245: Pragmatically Speaking

September 20th, 2022  |  1 hr 31 mins

listener selected topics, pragmatism, relativism, richard rorty, the little mermaid, truth

David and Tamler take their first real look at pragmatism via Richard Rorty’s “Solidarity or Objectivity.” Can we discover facts about the world as it “really is,” independent of our own culturally influenced methods of inquiry? If not, does that make us relativists? Is David right about pragamatism being an ass-backward approach to scientific truth, or is he just a pragmatist who’s not ready to admit that to himself? Plus, does "The Little Mermaid" have to be white? What about Clark Kent? And we select the topic finalists for our Patreon listener selected episode.