Episode 227: A Terrible Master (David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water").
Very Bad Wizards
Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro
4.8 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 December 2021
⏱️ 99 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David and Tamler dive into David Foster Wallace’s celebrated and surprisingly earnest Kenyon College commencement speech “This is Water”. How can we escape the prison and prism of our (literally) self-centered perspective? Can we choose to adjust our natural default settings, take a break from our running inner monologue, and pay attention to what’s in front of us right now? Is DFW appealing to Buddhist ideas or something more general that you can be found across all spiritual traditions?
Plus we ask the AI ethics program “Ask Delphi” some tough moral questions (spoiler alert: "just the tip" is "rude"), and almost get into a big fight about the potential of AI ethical robots (but we’re saving that argument for a future episode).
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Very bad wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and a psychologist, Dave Pizarro, |
| 0:05.9 | having an informal discussion about issues and signs and ethics. |
| 0:09.4 | Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm out of love to say, |
| 0:13.6 | and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes. |
| 0:17.2 | Wait a minute. What? Did you steal it? What did he steal? He stole his beat was stolen. Oh my god. |
| 0:24.0 | The lady on his phone says, |
| 0:30.0 | they do attention to that man behind the curtain. |
| 0:40.0 | Who are you? Who are you? |
| 0:44.0 | I'm very bad man. |
| 0:46.0 | I'm a very good man. |
| 0:48.0 | Good man. |
| 0:50.0 | They think he's lost and with no more brains than you have. |
| 0:56.0 | Wait a minute. |
| 0:58.0 | Tell my dad. |
| 1:02.0 | Anybody can have a brain. |
| 1:06.0 | You're a very bad man. |
| 1:08.0 | I'm a very good man. |
| 1:10.0 | Just a very bad wizard. |
| 1:12.0 | Welcome to very bad wizards. |
| 1:14.0 | I'm Tamler Summers from the University of Houston. |
| 1:16.0 | Dave, another year, another series of snubs in the year's best podcast articles. |
| 1:22.0 | Who do we have to blow to get noticed by the corporate media? |
... |
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