David and Tamler return to the work of Richard Shweder and colleagues, focusing this time on his foundational paper "The "Big Three" of Morality (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) and the "Big Three" Explanations of Suffering. What are the various ways that people explain suffering and illness across cultures? What do we lose when we only emphasize biomedical explanations? Why can't social psychology be more like this?

Plus a new Chalmers (not that one) paper argues that monogamy is impermissible. Hello ladies!

Join at the right Patreon tier and vote on an episode topic! [patreon.com]

Chalmers, H. (2019). Is monogamy morally permissible?. The Journal of Value Inquiry, 53(2), 225-241.

Harry Chalmers' Substack post on Monogamy

Shweder, R. A., Much, N. C., Mahapatra, M., & Park, L. (1997). The "big three" of morality (autonomy, community, and divinity) and the "big three" explanations of suffering. In A. Brandt & P. Rozin (Eds.), Morality and health (pp. 119–169). Routledge.

David and Tamler cross the border into Denis Villeneuve's taut and propulsive thriller Sicario, the story of an FBI agent who gets pulled into a task force drawn from the shadiest elements of the US government. The assignment: to disrupt, infiltrate, and take down a major Mexican cartel. But what's the deal with Alejandro, and who does he work for? This is Roger Deakins in God mode and Villeneuve, Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, and Benicio Del Toro at the very top of their games.

Plus, we select 16 topics from the hundreds submitted by our beloved patrons for VBW Madness 2, a tournament to determine what we discuss on the listener selected episode. Join the VBW Patreon to vote on the winner!

Sicario [wikipedia.org]

David and Tamler return to the Southern Gothic well and talk about Flannery O'Connor's short story masterpiece "Good Country People." A nihilistic atheist philosophy PhD named Joy or Helga (depending on who you ask) lives with her mother and some tenants on a farm in rural Georgia. One day 19-year-old aw-shucksy Bible salesman comes to the house and shakes up her philosophical convictions. Plus a case study of a sexsomniac who masturbates (and more) in his sleep.

Support Eliza's film project [seedandspark.com]

Brice, M., Gales, A. Z., Attali, V., Chauvin, M., & Arnulf, I. (2026). Left hand sleep masturbation in a right-handed male patient with sexsomnia. Sleep Medicine, 108823. [scientificdirect.com]

Good Country People by Flannery O'Connor [wikipedia.org]

Are you a college student or about to be one? Do you have friends or family in college? This is the most important episode of your life. David and Tamler do something a little different this episode and tier rank a wide range of academic fields from engineering to art history, computer science to women & gender studies. Step aside U.S. News and World Report, the new definitive rankings have just dropped. Plus, Dave reveals he's in the Epstein files, but do we buy his explanation? Have you always wanted to ask us a question but too cheap to spring for Patreon? Join us Saturday 2/21 at 6pm Eastern for our first ever reddit AUA on r/verybadwizards

Final Tier List [spoiler!]

David and Tamler return to Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and Profane and discuss the chapter "Sacred Time and Myths." How does viewing time as circular give us a periodic window into the sacred? What does it mean to reactualize the creation of the universe in ritual and to view time as "starting anew"? How did Christianity radically change the experience of time by locating the incarnation of the sacred in the historical past?

Plus, do you believe in conspiracy theories? A new study says you should think twice about putting them in your dating profiles.

Green, R., Kamitz, L. C., Toribio-Flórez, D., Biddlestone, M., Gasking, F., Sutton, R. M., & Douglas, K. M. (2022). Conspiracy theories and online dating: It'sa (mis) match!. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 01461672251399448.

Eliade, M. (1959). The sacred and the profane: The nature of religion (Vol. 81). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

David and Tamler consecrate their podcast with a discussion of "The Sacred and the Profane" by Mircea Eliade. We focus on the first chapter on sacred spaces, where the divine breaks through (or irrupts) our homogenous and chaotic reality, creating a center that gives us meaning and allows us to orient our lives. Plus speaking of the profane, a new study shows that cursing makes you stronger – but why in god's living fuck do they always end up spewing nonsense about the "underlying psychological mechanisms"?

Stephens, R., Dowber, H., Richardson, C., & Washmuth, N. B. (2025). "Don't hold back": Swearing improves strength through state disinhibition. American Psychologist.

Eliade, M. (1959). The sacred and the profane: The nature of religion (Vol. 81). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

David and Tamler dive into Plato's Euthyphro, part of our intermittent Back 2 Basics series. A young cocksure priest, confident in his holiness, bumps into Socrates on his way to court to prosecute his father for a wrongful death. After a few rounds with Socrates on the nature of piety, he becomes a little less sure of himself. We talk about Plato's decision to set the dialogue in the days before Socrates' own trial, the famous Euthyphro dilemma, the seemingly little progress that's made in defining piety, and much more.

Plus Oliver Sacks wrote books where the truth seemed stranger than fiction, but how much of what he wrote was really true?

Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost? by Rachel Aviv [newyorker.com]

Plato's Euthyphro [wikipedia.org]

We are teaming up with givedirectly, and a whole bunch of podcasters to help families in Rwanda. While match funds last, your donation will be 1.5x matched, meaning every $100 donation will turn into $150 for families in need. Go to givedirectly.org/wizards if you find it in your heart to give a donation.

David and Tamler return to William James' monumental "Principles of Psychology", this time wading through his famous chapter "The Stream of Thought." We talk about his rejection of empiricist theories of consciousness in favor of a view that consciousness is a continuous stream of thoughts, sensations, and emotions without any elements (atoms) that repeat or appear in other people's streams. We talk about how vividly James captures certain features of consciousness, like trying to recall a forgotten name, or the ways that the subjective per of two people differ radically in the same environment. And we debate the merits of James' methodology as well as his universalist ambitions.

Plus, we discuss one of the early to mid-2000s papers, how seeing Batman on a subway makes you more altruistic because – wait, hold on, what, this study is from 2025??

Pagnini, F., Grosso, F., Cavalera, C., Poletti, V., Minazzi, G. A., Missoni, A., ... & Bertolotti, M. (2025). Unexpected events and prosocial behavior: the Batman effect. npj Mental Health Research, 4(1), 57.

James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. Chapter 9: "The Stream of Thought" [free access to fulltext via psychclassics.yorku.ca]

We are teaming up with givedirectly, and a whole bunch of podcasters to help families in Rwanda. While match funds last, your donation will be 1.5x matched, meaning every $100 donation will turn into $150 for families in need. Go to givedirectly.org/wizards if you find it in your heart to give a donation.

David and Tamler begin their long journey home to Homer's Odyssey, the tale of king Odysseus' 10 year journey home after the Trojan war (maybe the greatest story ever told). We dive into the first two books, which focus on Odysseus' 20-year-old son Telemachus, the swarm of suitors who have descended on Odysseus' house during his long absence in the hopes of marrying his clever and beautiful wife Penelope, and the goddess Athena, whose plan to get Odysseus home to Ithaca is finally set into motion. (Much more to come on this monumental work for our beloved Patreon supporters).

Plus for all you Homer haters, David makes Tamler blind rank a list of (pre-1950) philosophers.

The Odyssey [wikipedia.org]

The Odyssey (transl. by Emily Wilson) [amazon.org affiliate link]

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.

The Goon Squad by Daniel Kolitz [harpers.org]

"Gooning" definition [urbandictionary.com]

A Hunger Artist [wikipedia.org]

A Hunger Artist (full text) [kafka-online.info]

David and Tamler transfer their libidinal energy to Freud's 1917 article "Mourning and Melancholia," in which he tries to understand what's going on with depression, attempts to distinguish it from normal grief, and arrives at some ideas that laid the groundwork for his later theory of normal human development. Plus, another blind ranking segment--this time Tamler gives David a list of rappers to rank blindly. Finally, in between segments we make an announcement about the topic of our next bonus series (it's gonna be epic).

Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" [wikipedia.org]

• Link to PDF [sas.upenn.edu]

The Odyssey (translated by Emily Wilson) [amazon.com affiliate link]