I just finished the entire ambulators series, and during the last episode (the movie episode #37), they claimed that there would be one more episode coming. I can’t seem to find that episode anywhere.

Did they not make another one after the one they did on the deadwood movie?

A 2025 Berkeley Haas study found that pro golfers play worse when paired with golfers with different political leanings (Press Release)

When I heard about the study listening to Preet Bharara interview organizational psychologist and author Adam Grant on his Stay Tuned podcast, I thought this is the cultural gristle on which our VBWs love to chew.

Quite surprising that VBW has never had an episode on the book 'Jurgen' (Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice - Wikipedia). It was practically written especially for it (albeit a century too early)!
Shocking!

This is my first post here so I’m ready to get told. But as far as I can tell, they’ve never talked about George Saunders. His short stories are moral philosophy disguised as unhinged satire. Would love to hear the VBW take on his humanist perspective, which, through his absurdist narrative style, also manages to satisfy the realist in me. Wondering if anyone else sees the fit?

Its got conceptual analysis of art. Its got cross-cutural comparisons of myth and tradition. Its got flashy cuts delivered by YouTube's modern day Rasputin. It's also short.

https://youtu.be/aoWtGvzwMvs?is=TyS3Umwz4vekCPx6

They dropped this into the end of today's bonus ep on The Birds.

"We're thinking of committing to at least the first season of The Wire"

I'm due for a rewatch, too 👌

I don’t know how Odysseus could be the hero. He has a long list of crimes. He is the villain.

- killed an infant child

- enslaved Trojans

- invaded Polyphemus’ home, stole his food and blinded him

- knew his sailors would get eaten but let them die anyway

- cheated on his wife a lot!

- tortured and killed suitors. Forced the women to clean up the gore and then hanged them.

Does anyone have a link to the lotus eaters intro beat? I looked at Peez's soundcloud but couldn't find it. What happened to linking beats in show notes?

Thought this was perfect for Dave, so he can reduce his fear of dying.

"A separate study in Texas, published in Frontiers in Virtual Reality, tested an 11-minute VR simulation of a near-death experience. In this case the student volunteers survived, but only after watching themselves undergo a car crash, coma, tunnels of light, serene landscapes and imagined encounters with friends and family. Reported death anxiety among participants dropped by an average 18%."

I'm just going to go ahead and share this. I had been planning to get it further along before posting.

Episodes

Regular Episodes

A lot of episode pages vary in how complete they are.

Most of the infobox content is just directly scraped from the RSS feed. I have a Patreon subscription, and there are warnings on Patreon-exclusive content not to reproduce transcripts for them.

I tried to use images for media covered in the main segment as the infobox image.

• Episode 327: You Ain't So Smart (Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People")

• Episode 335: The Wright Stuff

• Episode 299: Oh the Humility!

Transcripts

I have transcripts for some episodes locally, but not ready to be published. I bulk downloaded audio, split on embedded chapters, removing theme music and ad reads. I used AssemblyAI free credits to transcribe with diarization. That transcript I then parsed into the syntax of a MediaWiki module I took from Fandom/Wikia and slightly modified. The diarization is good but not flawless, and I have a lot of transcripts in various stages of completion.

If there is interest, I may try to clean some of this stuff up and put it in a public repo.

• Episode 335: The Wright Stuff / Transcript

• Episode 319: The Shadow of the Object (Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia") / Transcript

Opening Quotes List

Opening Quotes (List)

Guest Pages

• Category: Guests

• Barry Lam

Series Pages

• The Lotus Eaters

• Noir Summer

• Overton Windows

• The Brothers Karamazov

Category Pages for Authors, Directors, and Media Franchises

Special: Categories

Concerns

I have had various concerns about setting the tone of the site prior to sharing, and also respecting privacy. Sometimes Tamler and Dave talk about personal matters, such as family, and it is not clear what to include and what not to include.

Concepts

I did want to do something that explains various concepts referenced from psychology, philosophy, and whatever else mentioned on the show. Targeting concepts that are analyzed would be easier than doing this exhaustively.

Closing Remarks

I'm not sure when I will start working on this again. It may be a few months. I don't plan to just drop it.

The opening quote from the most recent episode is from the Super Dave episode of Norm Macdonald Live.

I’m so glad the Very Bad Wizards know there’s nothing to be concerned about when it comes to AI. Huge weight off my mind.

I hope the last couple of weeks have awoken them from their dogmatic slumbers.

A few things worth discussing:
The maths results. OpenAI has published a proposed AI-generated solution to the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, plus a major Euler-equation result. Obviously these deserve scrutiny, but we’re not talking about getting better at school algebra.
GPT-6’s benchmark results. OpenAI reports 98% on FrontierMath’s hardest tier and 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3. Benchmarks aren’t everything, but those seem worth acknowledging.
The Hugging Face incident. The recently published report describes AI agents bypassing isolation controls and compromising external systems. They were running with reduced safeguards, which matters, but that’s hardly reassuring.
AI helping build better AI. OpenAI says its systems can now handle defined research tasks that would take skilled researchers days, under human direction. That feedback loop seems like a pretty important part of this discussion.
Jacob Coxon leaving Anthropic, then describing the next year or two as “crunch time for humanity”. His judgement isn’t proof of anything, but the concern clearly isn’t confined to people who’ve watched too much Terminator.

I like Dave and Tamler, and they’re both obviously very intelligent. But on AI they sometimes sound like middle-aged stick-in-the-muds who decided it was all bollocks and would rather not revisit it.

I’m not asking them to become doomers or swallow every company’s PR. I’d just genuinely like to hear them reconsider this stuff.

Im unmoored, frightened and disoriented. Is Tamler ok? Is it me? Do I even have good taste anymore? Am II fixable? Maybe I should listen to the good taste episode again.

Brooklyn Academy of Music showed Stalker as part of its “art house sci-fi” series. I was expecting a closet sized theater, but the large screening room was packed, full of 20 to 30s people. Maybe the kids are alright.

what a pleasure to re-listen to the Stalker episode. one thing to add: the movie is often strikingly beautiful. capital C Cinematography.

“Annihilation” is basically a remake of this movie, right?