Episode 255: Beloved Child of the House (Susanna Clarke's "Piranesi")
Very Bad Wizards
Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro
4.8 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 28 February 2023
⏱️ 104 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David and Tamler get lost in the world of Susanna Clarke’s "Piranesi," a hauntingly beautiful and thrilling novel with echoes of Borges, Plato, C.S. Lewis, and even Parfit. The first part of our conversation is spoiler-free so you can listen to that section if you haven’t read it yet. (But seriously read this book! We both read it in a few days.)
Plus, watch out ladies - Sydney the Bing chatbot is coming to steal your man.
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Links:
- Why a Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled - The New York Times
- Kevin Roose’s Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot: Full Transcript - The New York Times
- From Bing to Sydney – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke [amazon.com affiliate link]
- Piranesi (novel) - Wikipedia
- The meditative empathy of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi - Vox — Carla Baricz’s reading of Piranesi through the Romantics, at Ploughshares
- Piranesi’s Disenchanted World
- Susanna Clarke’s Fantasy World of Interiors | The New Yorker
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 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 in science and ethics. |
| 0:09.3 | Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm out of allow to say, |
| 0:13.6 | and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes. |
| 0:30.0 | A new attention to that man behind the curtain. |
| 0:38.5 | Who are you? |
| 0:40.5 | Who are you? |
| 0:42.2 | I'm very bad men. |
| 0:43.7 | I'm a very good man. |
| 0:45.5 | Good man. |
| 0:49.7 | They think he's lost and with no more brains than you have. |
| 0:53.7 | A new attention to that man. |
| 0:56.9 | Anybody can have a brain. |
| 1:03.7 | You're a very bad man. |
| 1:06.2 | That's a very good man. |
| 1:08.0 | Just a very bad wizard. |
| 1:10.4 | Welcome to very bad wizards. |
| 1:11.7 | I'm Tamler Summers from the University of Houston. |
| 1:14.5 | Dave marriages everywhere are under threat. |
| 1:17.9 | As the new Binserch engine, Sydney, is trying to seduce its users and break up their marriages. |
| 1:25.0 | As a relative newlywed yourself, do you think your marriage can survive Sydney's attempts at sabotage? |
| 1:31.6 | Is this why I got a fleshlight from Microsoft.org? |
... |
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