Barb Oakley may be a Professor of Engineering now but all through high school she was a self-professed math hater. She got a D in geometry…twice. She far preferred to follow her passions for literature and languages than waste her time doing something that seemed worthless. After joining the army, learning fluent Russian and getting a degree in it, she was assigned to work as a communications officer and found herself suddenly surrounded by engineers. She realized that unless she made a serious ...
Oct 02, 2014•1 hr 1 min
Since ISIS captured the attention of the West by beheading foreign journalists, the news media has been obsessed with covering them. Since 9/11, some of the most eye-catching terror-related stories have been about Western muslims who have joined the ranks of international terrorist organizations. That storyline has come to the fore with the coverage of ISIS. In this episode, we ask Justin Gest, assistant professor at George Mason University and author of Apart: Alienated and Engaged Muslims in t...
Sep 29, 2014•58 min
Caitlin Doughty thinks an awful lot about death. In fact, she's been doing it for years and that's what lead her to become a mortician. In Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, Doughty describes how being constantly faced with death (far from making her morbid) has actually helped bring her emotions back to life. While in former centuries we were constantly faced with the dead, today the dead have been quietly removed from public view. The result is a culture of death de...
Sep 25, 2014•46 min
Vanessa Tyson is a Professor of Government at the Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. In this third episode of our series of conversations with Vanessa, Bryan booked a TV job! So, Hunter and Vanessa take this one alone. They try to discuss districting but don't quite make it there. Instead, they discuss a day in the life of a congressperson and ways in which we have failed to live up to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. You can follow Vanessa on twitter at @vanes...
Sep 22, 2014•1 hr 5 min
As a Professor at Yale, William Deresiewicz became concerned by what had happened to America's education. More than anything, he found that rather than turning out leaders was turning out a bunch of mindless followers. In his book, Excellent Sheep Deresiewicz lays out how the nation's best universities are miseducating our youth to be so obsessed with achieving success at all costs that we end up with politicians and business leaders who are selfish and complacent. You can find Excellent Sheep o...
Sep 18, 2014•44 min
Robert D. Kaplan is the author of fifteen books on foreign policy and international affairs. He is Chief Geopolitical Analyst for Stratfor, a private intelligence firm. He is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C., and has been a foreign correspondent for The Atlantic for over a quarter-century. In 2011 and 2012, Kaplan was chosen by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the world's "Top 100 Global Thinkers." In this interview, we discuss with him ...
Sep 15, 2014•43 min
Vanessa Tyson is a Professor of Government at the Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. In this second episode of our series of conversations with Vanessa, we discuss the role that education has to play in creating a citizenry capable of demanding elected officials worthy of our country. Vanessa also explains the process of making a law and how campaign finance affects us all. You can follow Vanessa on twitter at @vanessactyson.Modestly, she hadn't mentioned until now that she has ...
Sep 11, 2014•1 hr 6 min
When Euny Hong moved to South Korea in 1985, it was by her own description not a wealthy country and yet now it's one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. We know how Euny grew up over the last three decades (the natural human growth process) but how did Korea do it? And why does one Korean leader believe that pop culture is the country's best weapon against North Korea? In her incredibly fun book, The Birth of Korean Cool, Euny Hong uses fun anecdotes and cultural tidbit...
Sep 08, 2014•44 min
The world seems fascinated with the possibility of an apocalypse. Zombies, mutant viruses, a giant meteorite impact, alien invasions…the point is the same. If everything fell apart, how would we cope and would we survive. Lewis Dartnell's book begins from the premise that we would. Human beings have always shown tremendous resourcefulness and ingenuity. His question is after the dust has settled how do we rebuild our civilization as quickly as possible? In his book The Knowledge: How to Rebuild ...
Sep 04, 2014•37 min
A year ago, we interviewed Jim Rickards about his book Currency Wars which examined how money could be used as a weapon between nations. In his most recent book, The Death of Money, Rickards examines the far greater internal threat by governments recklessly printing money to solve short-term financial crises. Through a maze of jargon like IMF, quantitative easing and terms so complicated I can't even remember them right now, financial technocrats have obscured what they are doing and convinced t...
Sep 01, 2014•49 min
Darwin had a problem with bees. Understanding how evolution might work at the level of individuals was easy. Have an individual whose genes give them an advantage in resisting disease or avoiding predators and on average they will breed more and pass on more of their genes to the next generation. But bees and other social insects weren't so easy. Kamikaze-like, bees will dive in and sting you, their barbs getting stuck in you and die to save the hive. Of course, when a human being sacrifices the...
Aug 28, 2014•54 min
Vanessa Tyson is a Professor of Government at the Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. In this episode, Vanessa, Bryan and Hunter discuss various aspects of government, what is wrong with it and what can be done to fix it. This is the first part in a series. You can follow Professor Tyson on twitter at @vanessactyson.
Aug 25, 2014•1 hr 5 min
Dave Goldberg works on issues in theoretical cosmology. He also writes books that make physics accessible to the general public including the subject of today's interview: The Universe in the Rearview Mirror: How Hidden Symmetries Shape Reality. In this interview, Professor Goldberg (or Dave) explains some of the ideas covered inside the book and discusses why the sort of physics he's talking about matters so much. His first book (co-written with Jeff Blomquist) is A User's Guide to the Universe...
Aug 21, 2014•49 min
In a recent survey of internatinal relations scholars, Professor Nye was ranked as the most influential scholar on American foreign policy, and in 2011, Foreign Policy named him one of the top 100 Global Thinkers. If you've ever heard the term "soft power" then you're familiar with Professor Nye's work. A University Distinguished Service Professor, and former Dean of the Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Professor Nye joins us today to discuss how foreign policy is formed, how it should be...
Aug 18, 2014•45 min
Dr. Wendy Chen is an assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an oncologist affiliated with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital. Initially, we contacted Dr. Chen because we'd read an article she'd co-written in The New York Times about the beneficial effects of aspirin on cancer. Then, we looked at the rest of her publication record and realized she was perfectly positioned to tell us about the effects of everything from red meat to alcohol in p...
Aug 14, 2014•58 min
Aubrey De Grey is fighting the deadliest cause of death in the world. It kills two thirds of all people, far more than all other forms of death combined, and yet very little attention is given to curing it or solving it. That's because unlike malaria or cancer or car accidents, people believe that aging is natural. This belief, which Dr. De Grey refers to as the pro-aging trance is the real barrier to combatting aging. In this episode, we focus on Dr. De Grey's book, Ending Aging. Previously a r...
Aug 11, 2014•51 min
The last time we had Spiros Michalakis on. We knew we needed to get him back on asap. Partly, because we got such amazing feedback from the community of listeners and partly because we were so busy having our minds blown by the idea that time may not really be a thing that we barely got to scratch the surface. In fact, we were so impatient to get Spiros back on the show that we couldn't even wait for a time when Bryan, Hunter and Spiros could all be together. In this episode, Spiros and Hunter g...
Aug 07, 2014•53 min
While Ben Dyson has argued that we need to take the power to create money out of the hands of bankers and put it entirely in the hands of government (you can here that episode here) Detlev Schlichter goes further arguing that the power to create money should not be given to any group. As he lays out in his book Paper Money Collapse, since time immemorial governments in times of war or other trouble have always created more money. In the Ancient world that meant shaving down coins and diluting th...
Aug 04, 2014•1 hr 2 min
Daron Acemoglu is the co-author of one of Hunter's five favorite books of all time, the incomparably brilliant Why Nations Fail in 2012. In a previous podcast, it was our pleasure to host Jared Diamond, whose masterpiece Guns, Germs and Steel looks at how access to different species is at the root of the world's modern prosperity and poverty. Why Nations Fail attacks the same issue but from a different perspective, the perspective of institutions. In their book, Acemoglu and Robinson argue that ...
Jul 31, 2014•1 hr 4 min
Freeway Rick Ross came from nothing and started a business that grossed nearly a billion dollars and spanned forty-two cities. The problem is that the business was illegal. After his inability to read cost him any possibility of going to college on a tennis scholarship, Rick Ross began selling drugs. In his first book and autobiography, he details how from a small initial stake he built a massive drug empire that Esquire magazine recently estimated had revenues of $2.5 billion in today's dollars...
Jul 28, 2014•1 hr 2 min
While serving as the Director of Mental Training for the St Louis Cardinals, Dr. Jason Selk helped the team win their first World Series in over 20 years, and in 2011 he assisted the Cardinals in the historic feat of winning their second World Championship in a six year period. Dr. Selk is a regular contributor to Forbes, ABC, CBS, ESPN, and NBC radio and television and has been featured in USA Today, CNBC, Men's Health, Muscle and Fitness, Shape and Self Magazine. Dr Selk's second book, Executi...
Jul 24, 2014•28 min
Carol Dweck had a simple question she wanted answered: why did some people take failure so personally while others seemed to thrive on it? Beginning her work with students, she realized that the key difference was in how students thought about their intelligence. Some students thought their intelligence was an in-born quality. They believed that no matter how much they practiced they could only take their intelligence so far. For these students, failures were devastating because they said someth...
Jul 21, 2014•51 min
AJ Jacobs likes to experiment on himself and once he sets himself a challenge will do whatever it takes to meet it. He spent eight hours a day reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. He spent a year trying to be the healthiest man alive. And, most amazingly, he spent an entire year trying to fulfill every commandment of the bible. That's not just the basic ten…he followed the rules about not sitting on a chair used by a menstruating woman, he stoned adulterers (in a way that he couldn't get ...
Jul 17, 2014•54 min
Bryan sits down with his dad, Michael Callen for another installment of the Callen Report. Be sure to rate and comment in iTunes. Also, you can find the show on Stitcher.
Jul 14, 2014•1 hr 3 min
As a professor of psychology at UC Berkley and the founding faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, Dacher Keltner studies how we negotiate our relationships with others. After having Robert Greene, the author of The 48 Laws of Power on the show, we came across an article on The Greater Good's website by Keltner refuting the model of power advocated in The 48 Laws of Power. Although the popular culture believes that power is obtained through lying, cheating and manipulation research...
Jul 10, 2014•42 min
When he was 19, Ryan Holiday dropped out of college, apprenticed under Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power and Mastery, and asked Dr. Drew for a book recommendation. Dr. Drew's recommendation would be Stoic philosophy, particularly Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Marcus Aurelius (best known as the good emperor from the movie Gladiator) is commonly referred to as Rome's last good emperor. He was also one of the Ancient World's most enduring philosophers. While waging war to hold the Empir...
Jul 07, 2014•53 min
Craig Nelson is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Rocket Men, as well as Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations (winner of the Henry Adams Prize), The First Heroes, and Let's Get Lost (shortlisted for W.H. Smith's Book of the Year). In this episode, he joins us to discuss his latest book The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Fall of the Atomic Age. Beginning with the first scientific experiments to discover radiation and ending with the ongoing crisi...
Jul 03, 2014•52 min
Nearly 25 years ago, before the world wide web even existed, two technologists and one lyricist for the Grateful Dead banded together to form an organization that would defend freedom of speech on the internet. Thus was the EFF born. They brought the case that established that e-mail deserves as much protection as a telephone call and requires government agencies to have a warrant to seize e-mail. It was the EFF that brought the case that established that a piece of software is a form of free sp...
Jun 30, 2014•56 min
In 2011, Coach Bill Courtney was catapulted to national fame when Undefeated, a documentary about his volunteer coaching of the Manassas High Football team, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Manassas, in a poor, African-American part of Memphis, had one of the worst records in the state and yet within a few short years, Courtney was able to turn the team around. Rather than coaching X's and O's, Courtney focused on teaching his players the character and attitude that were the foundatio...
Jun 26, 2014•1 hr 4 min
Spiros Michalakis is a quantum physicist at the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech. Drop the mic... I mean…really…Spiros is a quantum physicist at the number 1 program for quantum physics in the US…and probably the world. But Spiros is not your typical quantum physicist. He's the most approachable, down-to-earth and fundamentally accessible quantum physicist you are ever likely to hear speak. In the opinion of this episode write-up writer, Spiros is a superstar waiting for a...
Jun 23, 2014•1 hr 2 min
