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Episode 181: The Fraudulence Paradox (David Foster Wallace's "Good Old Neon")

Episode 181: The Fraudulence Paradox (David Foster Wallace's "Good Old Neon")

FromVery Bad Wizards


Episode 181: The Fraudulence Paradox (David Foster Wallace's "Good Old Neon")

FromVery Bad Wizards

ratings:
Length:
129 minutes
Released:
Jan 28, 2020
Format:
Podcast episode

Description

Our whole lives we’ve been frauds. We’re not exaggerating. Pretty much all we’ve ever done is try to create a certain impression of us in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. This episode is a perfect example, Tamler pretending to be a cinephile (check out his four favorite pieces of 2019 “pop culture” in the first segment), David trying to connect with the people (Baby Yoda, Keanu Reeves etc.) – and of course what could be more fraudulent than a deep dive into a David Foster Wallace story, rhapsodizing over the endless sentences, the logical paradoxes, the seven-layer bean-dip of metacommentary (Jesus Christ I’m surprised there aren’t like eight footnotes in this episode description), and meanwhile the Partially Examined Life dudes refresh their overcast feeds and wonder through the tiny keyhole of themselves how David and Tamler have sunk so low that they’d ramble on about “Good Old Neon” like a couple of first year Comp-Lit grad students trying to impress that girl who works at the Cajun bakery.
Released:
Jan 28, 2020
Format:
Podcast episode

Titles in the series (100)

Very Bad Wizards is a podcast featuring a philosopher (Tamler Sommers) and a psychologist (David Pizarro), who share a love for ethics, pop culture, and cognitive science, and who have a marked inability to distinguish sacred from profane. Each podcast includes discussions of moral philosophy, recent work on moral psychology and neuroscience, and the overlap between the two.