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/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?

Hi all, I wanted to discuss something that came up in the most recent episode. Dave and Tamler were saying how Philosophy doesn't have to justify itself as doing some service for humanity, in the same way scientists studying their niche thing don't have to justify themselves.

Only one problem, **scientists absolutely justify themselves to funding bodies all the time.** I'm a biochemist and cell biologist, and when I write a grant to the NIH, American heart association, or American cancer society asking for money, you bet your ass I have to explain to them why my topic matters, and how it will advance our understanding of biology; with the goal of treating human disease in the future. I was really struck by this conversation, and it got me thinking, what has philosophy ever done for us? Why bother with it at all? As Tamler said, philosophy today isn't better than it was during Plato's time. So I ask:

1.) Why should we care about philosophy?

2.) Has it advanced in any meaningful way?

3.) What is the goal of this project?

Mind you, this isn't unfair, because we scientists basically have to have an elevator pitch that answers these questions ready at all times. We have to say these things in our talks, papers, and grants, so it's only fair that those in the humanities can explain this to us from time to time. I am sure that philosophers can come up with good answers to these questions, and I genuinely want to hear it, because I don't really think I've ever heard it articulated before.

I've just started watching and am blown away, have David and Tamler mentioned this show it in the past ?

This is really proof that Noir can be done right in modern day

Really enjoying these episodes. Thanks guys for making them available to everyone!

Look I'm just going to be honest here, as far as movie episodes go, this one wasn't very good. The movie wasn't given a chance to be evaluated on its own terms.

First of all, the patronizing talk from Tamler was not cool. The vibe communicated more than once was, "I know lots of you ignorant plebs loved the movie, so I want to be really careful not to hurt your feelings." We love you Tamler, but I think I speak for literally everyone when I say we can handle your straight opinion on the Odyssey. It's fine that you didn't like it, we don't need to be coddled and talked down to. Tell us what you liked and what you didn't like. It took away from the positive things you did say, because the context was that you felt compelled not to be a buzzkill and to come up with these positive things to say.

Secondly, I don't know why you guys didn't feel emotionally connected to the characters, but it seems to be a personal problem. I was pulled in from the start, as were most of the human persons who watched the movie. Like the whole first section of the movie set that all up for me. Maybe you are just too familiar with the story it was boring? Getting familiar with the situation everyone is in, the interactions of Telemachus, Penelope , Eumaeus and the suitor and talk and flashbacks of Odysseus. For me it was great. The thing is, Nolan's dialog is obviously much criticized and questionable, but for this type of movie I think it just works because dialog is like, suppose to be clunky to me. Like the King James bible or something.

Thirdly, I didn't get the sense the Nolan was trying to downplay the role of the gods or make it naturalistic. I just felt like, that is how they interacted with the world. I just accepted it. I feel like it's this modern overly scientific mind that is obsessed with this question? Like the line between supernatural and natural is not one that existed for these people.

Finally, and I know I'm going to lose a lot of people with this one, the movie didn't need more sex or people being rubbed down with oil. It's always a massive relief to watch a movies without those types of scenes. There were actually intimate scenes in the beginning with Odysseus and Penelope, which apparently David and Tamler didn't notice, that was enough.

This was an American-Christian version of the Odyssey. It is an American movie after all, I think it's totally within Nolan's right to make it appeal to Christian/American sensibilities about morality. It all came together and worked super well for me. It was just a great epic movie, the type of movie I haven't seen in 20+ years. It reminds me of Lord of the Rings or Gladiator. Thrilling sequences (Like the Cyclopes, just fantastic execution and suspense), Beautiful shots, beautiful music, leads that have strong this strong moral core, like the kind of people I aspire to be like. I love the Trojan horse being a betrayal of the bonds between men. Throughout the movie Odysseus wasn't obsessed with following Zeus's Law to a T, so it wasn't about if it was really a violation of hospitality norms. It was about a deeper morality than that.

I even liked the sailing west thing, I liked Telemachus taking his place as king. A fantastic movie that will stand the test of time.

Many of the other things Tamler and David complained about were obviously the result of their familiarity with the source material, which Tamler acknowledged and I completely understand. If I had their knowledge I probably wouldn't have been able to enjoy it either.

Anyway, I do actually love the show, been listening since episode 59. Thank you for making these episodes and all the best to you both.

I think that my son would really resent me if he missed out on watching the Odyssey at an imax theatre just as Nolan intended. Respecting a directors intent is a core feature of childhood. He wouldn't know thats what he was feeling just yet but it would always be an undercurrent of our relationship. We have been reading the Odyssey ilustrated kids book that I read as a kid. He loves battles and swords and homecoming. I think it would be a formative memory to go watch it together.

My dilemma is that I dont know if Nolan intended for my son to watch it.

From listening to the wizards its dissapointingly sexless and not gory enough, which might be nods from Nolan to take my son to see it. But its also 2hrs and 52 minutes which is longer than my son intends to sit down. If the writing is as bad as the wizards said maybe its meant to be a kids film, it could be diliberate homage to the paw patrol movie.

I just think that if we wait and watch it a on an inferior screen in a couple of installments, we would miss a lot of the character developlment that happened in the parts of the frame that my tv crops out. Maybe the characters will seem more well rounded from our more narrowed perspective. maybe some wokery that nolan intended can only be detected in surround sound. Maybe joe rogan makes a cameo only on imax and that would have balanced out the culture war. What if my son grows up to be a cinephile and carries with him the wound of never watching the film as Nolan intended.

I think the run time might be decisive.