Recently, Michael Eisner, former head of Disney and ABC, lamented that he couldn't find women who were funny and hot. Eisner predicted he'd get flack for saying this and, of course, he did. While many people focused on citing women they believed were funny and hot, this week's guests have a very different perspective: the idea that it's a studio heads job to find talent is largely outdated. In the last few decades, cameras have moved from film to digital and from being so prohibitively priced th...
Sep 05, 2015•1 hr 3 min
Sometimes Bryan and Hunter like to get naked together...emotionally. It's time to bare all their thoughts and feelings!!! In this episode, they review everything they've learned and what the big take home lesson is. There's really only one! Tune in to find out what it is. Tweet Hunter, if there are any books or topics you'd like to see covered. Featured Link #1: https://twitter.com/bryancallen Featured Link #2: https://twitter.com/huntermaats
Aug 22, 2015•40 min
There's no doubt in any modern person's mind that the justice of the Medieval era was unjust. The court considered spiritual evidence, pigs were considered legally competent and tried as adult humans and guilt was often determined by seeing whether the defendant would float or sink in holy water. We think of our modern legal system as far more rational and just but, according to Adam Benforado, we will soon look back at our own present-day legal system with same horror with which we look at the ...
Aug 08, 2015•43 min
It's probably no surprise that Californians have no shame. In fact, as Jennifer Jacquet writes in her latest book, shame has been found to be a central part of the emotional lives of Indonesians but to play virtually no role in the lives of Californians. The question that Jacquet asks is whether the West should in very specific instances bring shame back, in particular when dealing with corporations. Jennifer Jacquet is an assistant professor at NYU. Her website is jenniferjacquet.com. You can f...
Jul 25, 2015•1 hr
In 1759, while working as a tutor, Adam Smith wrote a book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments that begins as follows: "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceiv...
Jul 11, 2015•1 hr 5 min
Today, on The Bryan Callen Show, Bryan and Hunter Maats speak with Jean-Pierre Hocke. Jean-Pierre joined in 1968 the Interntional Committee of the Red Cross - ICRC. After several field assignments he became ICRC's Director of Operations for 12 years. From 1985 to 1989 he headed UNHCR which at the time was protecting and assisting 17M refugees worldwide. Between 1996 and 2003 he chaired in Bosnia-Herzegovina the Independent Commission for Real Property Claims (CRPC) set up by the Dayton Peace Agr...
Jun 23, 2015•1 hr 17 min
Kabir Sehgal is kind of a triple threat. When he's not working at JP Morgan, he often spends his weekends with the US Navy Reserves but when we spoke to him he was using his weekend to go to the Grammy's...where's nominated to win one in the category of Latin Jazz. Actually though, that's not even why we had him on...because he also has a book coming out. A book that has rave reviews from Richard Branson, Bill Clinton...and one of our favorite Nobel Prize winners, Muhammad Yunus. In Coined: The ...
Feb 10, 2015•45 min
Bryan sits down with good friends and authors, Kathrine O'Brien and Hunter Maats, who share what they've learned along the way and a moment they wanted to be nowhere else. Plus a lot of inanity.
Jan 06, 2015•43 min
Today, Bryan and Leo Flowers sits down with Bryan's long time friend, Actor, Writer, Producer and former Scientologist, Allen Barton. They discuss the topic of religion, specifically with regards to Scientology and how they and other organized groups deal with disconnecting with people. Website: http://allenbarton.com/
Dec 30, 2014•1 hr 7 min
This week, Bryan sits down alone with Hall of Fame stand-up comedian, Dom Irrera. Dom reminisced about Robin Williams, Rodney Dangerfield, Sam Kinison and performing in the great comedy 80's.
Dec 23, 2014•48 min
As part of our continuing look at counter-insurgency and nation building, we speak with Ganesh Sitaraman, Assistant Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University, and author of The Counterinsurgent's Constitution: Law in the Age of Small Wars. In the wake of 9/11, the argument was often made that because terrorists did not adhere to the rules of war that meant that we did not need to either. (Here I'm assuming that terrorists don't listen to The Bryan Callen Show.) While there are many moral argumen...
Dec 16, 2014•49 min
In the early 1980s, James Tooley went to Zimbabwe to help support and build socialism by teaching under the then hopeful leadership of Robert Mugabe. Returning to England in the midst of the Thatcher Revolution, he aimed to discredit all ideas of market reforms in education. Instead, as he researched his PhD, he became convinced that private education was the way forward and that the government should be kept out of it. However, even as his newfound faith in private education deepened, he saw no...
Dec 09, 2014•1 hr 7 min
In 2006, Warren Buffett told his son that he was leaving the bulk of his fortune to making a difference in the world. That's when he gave his son Howard G. Buffett a billion dollars and told him to go fix the hard problems. As a professional farmer, Howard G. decided to go out and fix hunger. Over time, he has realized that you can't fix hunger without dealing with conflict, with property rights and just about every other aspect of society. In his book 40 Chances (co-written with his own son How...
Dec 04, 2014•1 hr 5 min
If there's one thing we'd like to figure out at The Bryan Callen Show, it's how to get good ideas to spread. Fortunately, Jonah Berger has those answers. While it often seems like things catch on randomly, Professor Berger's research shows there are definite factors that help explain what makes things go viral. Whether you're trying to spread good ideas, market a product or figure out the world's next great cat meme, Contagious: Why Things Catch On is the book for you. Contagious is available on...
Dec 02, 2014•58 min
When Professor Stephen Kotkin set out to write a biography of Stalin, he faced a series of challenges. Perhaps first and foremost, people already thought they knew who Stalin was. The world's view of Stalin has been shaped by opponents like Trotsky and the West. The result is that we interpret the atrocities of Stalin's rule as the actions of a monster. The far more disturbing possibility laid out by Professor Kotkin is that far from being a cardboard cutout Hollywood valid, Stalin was a fully f...
Nov 27, 2014•58 min
Throughout the 2000s, Finland emerged as the country with the best performing educational system in the world. It did so by defying much of the educational conventional wisdom. While the Global Educational Reform Movement (referred to by Professor Sahlberg as GERM) has swept the world, spreading a message of centralization, standardization and accountability, Finland has focused on decentralization and local autonomy. In Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn From Educational Change in Finlan...
Nov 25, 2014•53 min
During a cheese tasting class at Murray's, Hunter heard the teacher say that "Cheese and Culture" was the best book on cheese in the world. Instantly, we knew we had to get its author for The Bryan Callen Show. Professor Paul Kindstedt may well be the world's foremost expert on cheese. Currently at the University of Vermont, he is particularly known for his work on mozzarella. (True statement.)Cheese and Culture is available on Amazon.
Nov 20, 2014•47 min
In the wake of World War II, as the world discovered the full extent of the atrocities committed by the NAZIs, the German people struggled to make sense of their place in the world. Ruined, occupied and reviled, they had every reason to give up all hope. In his most recent book, The Temptation of Despair, Professor Werner Sollors examines contemporary records from the time to understand how they coped. In the process, he shows a side of World War II that is not often discussed.Today, we regard W...
Nov 18, 2014•49 min
Vanessa Tyson is a Professor of Government at the Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. In this fifth episode of our series of conversations with Vanessa, Bryan is missing again. So, Hunter and Vanessa take their seditiousness one step further and mutiny…briefly. In this episode, Vanessa and Hunter discuss the narratives the political parties build and how buying into them can do us a disservice. You can follow Vanessa on twitter at @vanessactyson. Her book Twists of Fate: Multirac...
Nov 13, 2014•1 hr 6 min
In this interview, Bryan and Hunter draw together the lessons they've learned over their most recent podcasts. For more on Robert McNamara, you might enjoy this article: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514591/the-dictatorship-of-data/
Nov 11, 2014•42 min
Michael Malice is has co-written books with MMA legend Matt Hughes, comedian DL Hughley and legendary rocker Brett Michaels and Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il. In this second interview, we explore Michael's worldview. For a list of all of Michael's books, please visit: http://www.michaelmalice.com/books/.
Nov 06, 2014•1 hr 6 min
Dr. Thomas E. Woods, Jr. began his life as a neoconservative but came to realize that the two political parties were broadly the same. Dissatisfied with the narrow range of options offered by the Republican and Democratic parties, he embarked on a journey to re-examine for himself our most commonly held assumptions about history, politics, foreign policy and the role of government. In this interview, we focus on just two of his twelve books How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization and ...
Nov 04, 2014•48 min
Although the concept of the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol is an ancient one (think scouts), they only began to be used by the US Army in Vietnam in the latter part of the war. Dropped far behind enemy lines, these five to six man Long Range Patrol teams (often referred to as "Lerps") would be tasked with gathering intel on terrain, water supplies and enemy troop movements. Far from significant American military support, these teams had to blend into the jungle and do everything they could to ...
Oct 30, 2014•1 hr 1 min
Matthew E. May spent over eight years as a close advisor to Toyota. During that time he developed an appreciation for the power of elegance. As he explains in this interview, all too often in order to make things better we focus on what we can add. However, many of the most powerful pieces of art and engineering achieve their power by having things removed from them. The iPhone was revolutionary because Steve Jobs removed the keyboard. Matt has written four books on business innovation, includin...
Oct 28, 2014•1 hr 1 min
The Institute for Justice has been described (by Hunter and probably others) as the libertarian ACLU. In this interview, Scott Bullock (who joined the Institute for Justice at its founding in 1991 and now serves as a senior attorney) tells us about the cases they're currently fighting and the Institute for Justice's strategy and philosophy. You can follow the Institute for Justice on twitter at @ij.
Oct 23, 2014•49 min
In the wake of countless scandals at the highest corporate levels, it's easy to think that the key to getting ahead in business is to be a taker, but actually it turns out that the success of Enron execs like Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay are the exception rather than the rule. As Adam Grant, the youngest full professor at Wharton has found, Givers are the most successful…and the least successful people. In his fascinating New York Times Bestseller, Give and Take, Adam takes readers through the late...
Oct 21, 2014•1 hr 1 min
After fighting in the first gulf war, John Nagl returned to the United States and took part in a simulated military exercise. As a tank commander, he had all the overwhelming firepower any soldier could hope for…and yet he lost to a group of Alaskan National Guard infantrymen, known as the Nanooks. Nagl's unit was unassailable by any conventional military force but a group of lightly armed troops, defying all the rules of how wars "should" be fought had defeated a much, much stronger force. That...
Oct 16, 2014•1 hr 3 min
Michael Malice is has co-written books with MMA legend Matt Hughes, comedian DL Hughley and legendary rocker Brett Michaels but we brought him on to talk about the celebrity biography of one Kim Jong Il. In Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il, Michael Malice takes you through the life of North Korea's dictator as he would have seen it. All of the weirdness that the Western Media likes to use as comedic fodder, but that is only the reader's way into the book: the real purpo...
Oct 14, 2014•1 hr 5 min
Hannah Lane describes herself as a human-centered designer and social entrepreneur. Basically that means she designs systems that help make the world a better place. While she began in the health space (specifically focusing on HIV/AIDS in Africa), she is currently working for a for-profit technology company that believes in using the tools it develops to work for social and economic justice all over the world. Most recently, she's been down in Ferguson, MO helping to connect and organize the on...
Oct 09, 2014•45 min
Vanessa Tyson is a Professor of Government at the Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. In this fourth episode of our series of conversations with Vanessa, Bryan is hunting in the woods! So, Hunter and Vanessa take this one alone. And, finally, they get to discuss districting AND campaign finance which makes Hunter very, very happy. You can follow Vanessa on twitter at @vanessactyson. Her book: Twists of Fate: Multiracial Coalitions and Minority Representation in the US House will ...
Oct 06, 2014•50 min
