In the wake of The Depression and World War II, it's understandable that the focus of North America's agricultural system became producing as many calories as cheaply as possible. And so, competitions were held like the Chicken of Tomorrow contest which aimed to produce chickens that grew more quickly and were in every way better suited to industrial production. The one thing that wasn't a priority was flavor. The result was that even by the 1960s Julia Child was warning that American chickens f...
Oct 11, 2016•1 hr 9 min
Thanks to a suggestion by @ElliotBlair_ on Twitter, Mixed Mental Arts is introducing something new and very exciting. We will now be awarding belts. First up, the white belt which is already live at mixedmentalarts.club. Except, that's not how The Kid rolls. The Kid gets excited and wants to talk about the difference between being a rationalist and an intuitionist…which is definitely green belt-level material. Fortunately, any Mixed Mental Artists knows how to be like water. As Master Bruce Lee ...
Oct 04, 2016•1 hr 4 min
In the last few years, ISIS has attracted people who don't feel like they belong in their own society to Syria with the promise that together they're going to rebuild The Caliphate. From the outside, it's pretty understandable. Being part of a revolution is exciting. You're changing the world. You're part of a great cause. And you get to destroy the old society which you feel treated you like crap. Revolutions are like start ups. The problem is that ISIS' startup is trying to make a place filled...
Oct 01, 2016•1 hr 5 min
The number one book Hunter is getting recommended right now is Tribe by Sebastian Junger. It's an amazing book. Mostly, it's about why US soldiers often have such a hard time reintegrating back into US society. It's pretty easy to understand. You go off to war and you have a group of people who will die for you, who look out for you and who are engaged in a great mission together. And then you come back and there's no sense of shared purpose. In war, people have tribe. In the modern world, most ...
Sep 10, 2016•55 min
Albert Einstein famously said, "Everything should be as simple as possible but no simpler." Sadly, though he's famous for saying this, it's pretty clear that like most internet quotes he never actually said this. Still, it's a great principle and quotes are like tennis shoes, hamburgers or sodas. If you put them next to a celebrity, they seem way more legit. Regardless of who came up with it though, it's a great principle. Silicon Valley understands this trade off really well. Great software oft...
Aug 20, 2016•48 min
A century ago, the world faced a tremendous problem: horse shit. The world was full of it. And then an amazing invention pollution-saving device was invented: the car. As the world fills up with all kinds of horse shit (this time of the verbal and behavioral kind), it's worth revisiting this experience to see what lessons Mixed Mental Artists can learn to clean things up. When the horse-drawn carriage was updated, the only thing that was changed initially was the form of locomotion. The horse wa...
Aug 06, 2016•56 min
Welcome to the dojo! By special request of Hunter's mom, we're going to take our skills on the road and see what Mixed Mental Arts can do about a current, real world social issue like Black Lives Matter. One of the many wonderful things about social media is that it has revealed just how bad at humans are at making sense of things are. We're the same species that for a long time believed that the best explanation for lightning was an angry man on a cloud. Well into the 1800s, scientists believed...
Jul 30, 2016•55 min
Global warming, vaccines, evolution…it's pretty clear that scientific ideas aren't doing a very good job winning out. Neil DeGrasse Tyson has proposed building a country called Rationalia that would be entirely ruled by the evidence. But do scientists like Neil DeGrasse Tyson even know the evidence? Sadly, after over 200 episodes, it seems like they don't. The majority of them have become such narrow specialists that they don't even bother to read what other scientists have been up to and so man...
Jul 02, 2016•48 min
In this next installment in our journey to mastery of Mixed Mental Arts, Bryan and Hunter take a look at the primary method by which culture is transmitted from generation to generation: blind copying. Although, in everyday speech we often talk about power is if it's one thing, scientists distinguish between two forms of power: dominance and prestige. Dominance encourages submission and prestige encourages people to copy people. It's the difference between a bully and a role model. However, as s...
Jun 25, 2016•1 hr 12 min
Harrison Query is a screenwriter who at 25 years old has found success in the film industry that eludes most throughout their lifetime. With the guidance and mentoring by some of Hollywood's biggest writer's - Harrison left college and began writing full time at the age of 19. He has since worked for the industry's biggest studios, directors and producers -- his next project "Honor For Sale" is currently in development with John Hillcoat (Lawless, Triple 9) in the director's chair.
Jun 15, 2016•51 min
Bryan and Hunter enter the dojo of the mind with Joe Henrich, master of our first fundamental of the mind: cultural accumulation. As regular listeners will know, in his book The Secret of Our Success, Henrich lays out the case for why problem solving and critical thinking are not humanity's great superpower. Rather, our great superpower is social intelligence. It is our ability to pass on culture from generation to generation that makes us so successful and able to conquer everywhere from the tu...
Jun 04, 2016•59 min
After literally hundreds of episodes, you would hope that Bryan and Hunter had learned something. In fact, they think they might have. Now, it's time for a new direction in the show where rather than endlessly collecting more interesting tidbits they try and synthesize it into a unified worldview. There are lots of academics who know a lot about one thing but are clueless in other areas. We're going to try and round out our mental game and yours so we can handle anything that's thrown at us. We'...
May 21, 2016•43 min
May 07, 2016•58 min
Adam Grant is the youngest tenured and most highly rated Professor at the Wharton School of Business BUT he passed up the opportunity to invest in the massively successful eyewear company Warby Parker. Why did he do this? Why did Steve Jobs think the Segway was going to change the world? Why do some people do things so original that they change the world and why do people who are brilliant in one area often misread brilliance in other areas. We loved Adam's first book Give and Take. Then, as he ...
Apr 23, 2016•1 hr 3 min
Best selling author, John J. Ratey, MD, is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and an internationally recognized expert in Neuropsychiatry. He has published over 60 peer-reviewed articles, and 8 books published in 14 languages, including the groundbreaking ADD-ADHD "Driven to Distraction" series with Ned Hallowell, MD. With the publication of "Spark-The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain," Dr. Ratey has established himself as one of the world'...
Apr 09, 2016•48 min
Mar 26, 2016•1 hr 5 min
Twice in a row, ladies and gentlemen. Hunter debriefs Bryan on what he missed and they catch up on the books they've been reading.
Mar 12, 2016•36 min
That's right, ladies and gentlemen. It's Michael Malice and a mystery guest host. Could it be Bryan Callen is back on The Bryan Callen Show? Guest Info Guest Name: Michael Malice Guest Promo Dear Reader Ego & Hubris: The Michael Malice Story I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up: How the Audacity of Dopes Is Ruining America...
Feb 27, 2016•1 hr
In the age of the internet, the world seems to be full of conspiracy theories. 9/11 was an inside job. Obama is a secret Muslim. And Donald Trump is actually running for President as a favor to the Clintons. As Rule 1969 of the internet goes, if it happened then someone on the internet believes it was actually done by the government. Of course, while we think of the conspiracy theory as a modern phenomenon arising out of the internet, they've been around for a long time. Kennedy's assassination ...
Feb 13, 2016•1 hr 4 min
A lot of people have tried to kill political correctness. Mostly, they do this by just saying racist, sexist, offensive generalizations. That's not really killing it. That's just ignoring it. To actually kill it, you have to find political correctnesses vulnerabilities and attack those. That's what this episode of The Bryan Callen show does with the help of probably two of the only men on the planet who could do it, Richard Nisbett and Joe Henrich. Though, by the end of this episode, you'll be a...
Jan 30, 2016•1 hr 8 min
Richard Nisbett grew up in Texas. So when he was looking for a culture he could say potentially uncharitable things about as a white man, he turned his attention squarely to Southern culture. In his book, Culture of Honor, Professor Nisbett takes a look at why certain very specific parts of the South (and West) of the US have higher homicide rates than the rest of the country. The answer it turns out is that the South and West have the same culture of honor that you find among herding peoples th...
Jan 16, 2016•58 min
Alvaro Bedoya is the founding Executive Director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown. In this episode, Alvaro lays out for us the current state of privacy (or lack thereof) and the state of a Congress that either can't or won't keep up with the state of the art in privacy violating technology. Alvaro doesn't have a book yet but he should. So tweet at him with your questions and suggested titles. Guest Links Website: https://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/bedoya-alvaro.cfm Twi...
Jan 02, 2016•57 min
Humans have always been pretty sure that they were special but we've never quite been sure why. Was it because we were made in God's image? Was it our opposable thumbs? Was it that we had bigger brains? Far be it for us to tell you what God does or does not look like but what Professor Joe Henrich can tell you is that it's not because we have bigger brains. In fact, when you compare the baseline intelligence of human toddlers, chimpanzees and orangutans you find out that we're really not smarter...
Dec 19, 2015•43 min
When Hunter went to Peru this summer, he naturally went looking for books to read in preparation. Universally, the consensus was that THE book on the Inca Empire was Kim MacQuarrie's Last Days of the Inca. It was amazing. And apparently, Hunter wasn't the only one who thought so. In his latest book, Life and Death in the Andes, Kim MacQuarrie draws together a lifetime of researching and writing about the South of American continent. During his trip all the way down the mountain range that serves...
Dec 01, 2015•59 min
Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, Hari Seldon figures out how to create a mathematical model that can predict the future. Well, Wired magazine has described today's guest as a 'real-life Hari Seldon." Peter Turchin began his career as a biologist but is currently at the forefront of a field called cliodynamics which uses the past as a data set to develop mathematical models that can predict how societies behave. In his latest book Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Co...
Nov 21, 2015•1 hr
Growing up in Italy, Luigi Zingales got to experience firsthand something that looked a lot like capitalism but definitely wasn't. Government subsidies, regulations tailored to serve the interests of existing corporations and a system in which connections were more important than merit combined to ensure a capitalism that was anything but inclusive or competitive. Wanting to live in the most competitive and inclusive system on the planet, Zingales moved to the United States. However, during his ...
Nov 14, 2015•30 min
Geoffrey Miller studies the evolutionary psychology of sex and since sex is the cornerstone of evolution his work ends up having implications that affect pretty much everything. If you've wondered why women's evolutionary programming makes them spend more time shopping and makes men want to get the heck out of the store as quickly as possible, then, in this podcast, Geoffrey Miller will tell you why. If you've wondered why people buy cars like Hummers when they are so wasteful, it's precisely be...
Oct 17, 2015•47 min
In 1872, in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals Charles Darwin hypothesized that emotions were hard-wired into our biology. However, it wasn't until near a century later that Dr. Paul Ekman and his longtime collaborator Wallace Friesen proved that Darwin was right.At the time, the prevailing wisdom was that pretty much everything including the facial expressions were culturally learned and so when Dr. Ekman headed into the Highlands of Papua New Guinea he was searching for one thin...
Oct 03, 2015•41 min
If you listen to a random episode of The Bryan Callen Show, you can bet that Bryan and I will be talking about how amazing Republic, Lost and its author Lawrence Lessig are. Well, we got him!!! Ladies and gentlemen, it is our extreme pleasure to present to you Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law Professor, advocate for internet freedom, campaign finance reformer and our choice for the next President of the United States. If you want to support fixing democracy first, then tweet at @joerogan to get him ...
Sep 21, 2015•59 min
Both Daron Acemoglu (MIT economist and co-author of Why Nations Fail) and Dacher Keltner (Berkeley psychologist and author of many books including Born to Be Good) have appeared on The Bryan Callen Show before. They both were amazing and that is reason enough to bring them back and put them on together to see what happens. But, wait. There's more. Because these two together have the power to do something unprecedented in human history. At least since Plato's Republic, humans have debated the bes...
Sep 19, 2015•1 hr 3 min
