Mixed Mental Arts

For months and months, the members of the Mixed Mental Arts community have been pushing me (Hunter) to have Thaddeus Russell in the dojo. It is a testament to the wisdom of crowds that so many people have pushed so consistently for this meeting of the minds. The #ideasex was outstanding. Thaddeus Russell is the author of A Renegade History of the United States He hosts the superb Unregistered podcast and has founded Renegade University It's a genuine pleasure to have Thaddeus in the dojo! Thank you to the many, many people who have suggested we have him on. Bryan "The Emperor" Callen and Hunter "Toto" Maats thoroughly enjoyed it.

Humans have always been a strongly symbolic species. We painted on the walls of caves. Pharaohs, Kings and Emperors created symbols of their power like crowns and thrones. Religions have fought over religious symbols. Nations have fought over national symbols. Today, we are no different. We are in a massive war over symbols: Confederate statues, Google and much more. The real question is what do we do about all this? Well, while the rest of the world continues to argue about symbols Bryan "The Emperor" Callen, John "The Caveman" Durant and Hunter "Toto" Maats just keep wandering around the elephant and trying to understand why other humans see the world the way they do.

Ricky Varandas is the host of The Ripple Effect Podcast. Recently, Hunter and Ricky met up in Dartmouth, MA. As they looked out over Buzzard's Bay, they chatted about what it means to live in an age when everyone gets a voice. Right now, we're in what Joe Rogan calls the internet's painful adolescence. There's turmoil, uncertainty and blindly clinging to simplistic ideologies that give us a feeling of certainty. But just like Middle School, this too shall pass :) You can check out more of Ricky's awesome convos at The Ripple Effect Podcast and find him on Twitter at @rvtheory6

Search Mixed Mental Arts (Official) in the search bar :)

Ever since we had Jon Aguilar on the show back in Episode 251, Jon has been telling me I had to have his very brilliant wife on. And so, while driving back from a friend's wedding, I stopped by Casa Aguilar in Santa Barbara and started a conversation with Jenni Aguilar. Hours later, I understood why Jon felt so strongly that that I should talk to Jenni. Coming from an entirely different angle, she had reached many of the same conclusions as I had. For me, the arrival at evolutionary thinking and a desire to mix the mental arts had come from a desire to make sense of the cultures of the world. For Jenni, the emotional driver was something much more primal: her child was hurting. After a series of traumatic brain injuries, Jenni scrambled around the available science looking for anything that might help her son. In the tradition of Lorenzo's Oil, that tremendously strong emotional experience drove her to overcome intimidation, impenetrable medical jargon and assumptions about what was medically possible. The result is that today you would never know there was anything wrong with her son. In the end, what Jenni has done, what Katie and I did with The Straight-A Conspiracy and what many of the authors who have contributed to Mixed Mental Arts is to take pieces of fractured science and made kintsugi. They have filled in the cracks with gold. In the end though, the efforts of a handful of humans are nothing compared to what the evolutionary efforts of many Mixed Mental Artists can do testing these ideas against each other and against reality. Why? Because evolutionary processes are way smarter than individual humans. Once you accept that, then you approach evolutions' solutions with an appropriate humility, try to understand what evolution has done and figure out how to work with it. A prime example of that is aligning your body in a way that supports childbirth. For more on that, you can read Jenni's superb article Pervert Kings and Childbirth at MixedMentalArts.Co

They must put something in the water in New Hampshire because Brett Veinotte and Katie O'Brien reached very similar conclusions through tutoring: as an experience school sucks for A LOT of kids. And so, Brett decided to do something about it and create better resources for parents and kids looking for an alternative. Out of that was born The School Sucks Project. For more on the work of Brett and his team, check out their website. In this episode, Brett and Hunter compare notes on The School Sucks Project and The Straight-A Conspiracy. There's no doubt that school sucks for many, many kids. The question is why and what should we do about it? That's exactly what this episode is focused on exploring! This is the beginning of a beautiful bromance. [mbm_book_grid id="6425"] P.S. Brett has already released this episode on his podcast feed.

When ordinary men have birthdays, they receive gifts. However, Big Mike knows it is better to give than to receive and so, on his birthday, Big Mike has gifted to the people of the Callenphate his wisdom. You're welcome, humanity. Just remember that your fearless leader is Bryan and not his far more physically imposing and wise father.

Andrew Hunt and I first got to know each other a decade ago doing stand up in Los Angeles. During the intervening decade, we both learned how to learn and how environment shapes behavior but in entirely different ways. Regular listeners to Mixed Mental Arts know my story all too well. Andrew's though is more interesting. Andrew grew up in Los Angeles and was diagnosed with numerous learning disorders. Like a lot of kids I've worked with, rather than empowering him, school left him feeling disempowered and alienated from learning. Then, he got involved with Jacques Fresco of the Venus Project who among other things changed Andrew's life by teaching him how to learn. The day after we recorded this episode, Jacques Fresco passed. Now, it's on us to stand on his shoulders and see further. [mbm_book_grid id="8450"]

At this point, Chris Ryan probably doesn't need any introduction but why not give him one anyway. He's the author of Sex at Dawn and one day he'll be able to call himself the author of Civilized to Death. In the meantime, he hosts the superb podcast Tangentially Speaking which Mixed Mental Arts' own Isaiah Gooley probably loves more than Mixed Mental Arts. That's how good it is. This summer Chris will be traveling the US in his van. He took me inside it. It was amazing! [mbm_book_grid id='6901']

Walid Darab is the host of the Greed for Ilm podcast. Bored and in traffic, he looked around for podcasts for Muslim-Americans and found they were either all SUPER religious or in foreign languages. So, he decided to start one for everyday Muslim-Americans who were curious about a lot of things. And thus was the Greed for Ilm podcast born. What is ilm? Ilm is the Arabic word for knowledge. And Walid is greedy for ilm. So, it's only natural that he should have found his way to Mixed Mental Arts, formerly known as The Bryan Callen Show. Out of this, Walid has had Bryan, Katie and me (Hunter) on Greed for Ilm. It's about damn time we repaid the favor. That's just basic Afghan hospitality. In this episode, Walid and I discuss the process of moving beyond the immature arrogance of adolescence when wisdom does not go beyond your throat and the journey towards getting it into your heart. This is the process of blind copying through the emotion of awe by which culture is transmitted and by which young people like @evidence_reason get duped by genius myths created by Fundamentalists like Sam Harris who project a cool, arrogant certainty. It's a genuine pleasure to have Walid on the show and I can't recommend that everyone do Walid's assignment. Go talk to a Muslim and get them to tell you about life in the Islamic world and see if that fits the statistics people like Sam Harris have told you. Who has a more realistic model of life in the Islamic world? Mohamed Ghilan, Walid Darab and Hunter Maats or Sam Harris? The people will decide but for them to decide they must hear both sides.

Isaiah Gooley is an analyst, musician, and writer. He's been all over the place, and is still trying to learn as much as he can along the way. Check out his music at greatghouls.com, greatghouls.bandcamp.com,or soundcloud.com/isaiah-gooley. He'll be sharing some of his favorite chengyu (or Chinese rules of thumb) to help up your mental game!

Christopher Leon Price (aka Big Papa Werewolf) teaches kids The Art of Losing through chess. He learned it in large part from Megaman 2. In addition, he heads up Team Werewolf (the audio team at Mixed Mental Arts) and takes the messes Hunter hands him and mixes them as best he can. Fortunately, Hunter is a master at The Art of Losing and is perfectly happy to learn from his mistakes one screw up at a time. Slowly but surely, Big Papa Werewolf is teaching Toto how to record better audio. You can find Christopher Leon Price on Twitter at @clpfilm.

One of the more interesting things to come out of the last few months in my own personal Mixed Mental Arts experience has been hearing more from all of you how these ideas resonate with all of you. In particular, I appreciated a conversation with Matty (@Matt_Maurer on Twitter) about how he appreciated that history could be seen as one long progression. Humanity has always been trying to solve very much the same problems. It is just that over time we have been able to see further because we have had more and more shoulders to stand on. Why are we so much smarter than the people of the past? Well, coming of age in the culture of science, I was led to draw a sharp line between the scientific project and religions. Science was real. It was tangible. It was based on evidence. It was TRUTH. And anyone who disagreed, questioned or thought anything else was an idiot and a fool. However, as I've mentioned elsewhere, in reading the science that simple narrative has become increasingly problematic for me. The people of the past weren't so biologically different. Their brains recognized patterns. Did they not recognize patterns in human behavior that have stood the test of time? Yes. They did. And it wasn't until I was confronted by having to spend time among Christian Fundamentalists that I had to really think hard about what, if anything, made science special. Someone else who has had to think hard about these questions is today's guest sensei in the dojo Mohamed Ghilan. Mohamed was born in Saudi Arabia like yours truly. Unlike yours truly, he has a PhD in Neuroscience, is getting an MD and is a Muslim. As a scientist and a Muslim, he knows full well that the evolution of better and better beliefs and mental tools was going on well before science showed up on the scene. Today, someone like Mohamed is often portrayed in the media as a bit of a unicorn. He's a Muslim AND a scientist. Whaaaaaat?!? Is that even possible?!? But in the first four or so centuries of Islam the majority of "scientists" were Muslim. Richard Dawkins captured the two parts of this story in his now infamous tweet "All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though." Dawkins' own tweet creates problems in his narrative that religion is the problem. If Muslims did great things in the Middle Ages, then why is the problem Islam? If Newton was religious AND a scientist AND an alchemist, then why is the problem Christianity or even magical thinking? And what is science anyway? As I've discussed in previous podcasts, some Christians objected to Newton's Theory of Gravity because the idea that the planets moved all by themselves conflicted with their belief that God actively moved the planets. Then, they moved on. Gravity was something they could confirm with their own eyes and to keep Christianity relevant and practical they had to evolve their understanding of God. Did they stop believing in God? Nope. They just adopted a more mature of God. "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." - 1 Corinthians 13:11 Were the people who didn't understand Newton's Universal Theory of Gravitation idiots? Nope. In large part, they just didn't have the glassmaking technology to make the kind of telescopes necessary to observe the planets. And The Scientific Method itself evolved over time but some consider the founder of The Scientific Method to have been a Muslim named Ibn al-Haytham due to his emphasis on experimental data and reproducibility of results. Why then are we repeatedly told the story that science and religion are somehow incompatible? By some analyses, a Muslim FOUNDED Science. If we want to popularize science, then isn't it in science's interest to tear down this popular story that science and religion are at odds. Of course, some of the beliefs of science and religion don't overlap, notably on the age of the Earth and the origins of life. But, it turns out that science has found its way back to many of the beliefs that religious people figured out long ago. In my article Was Jesus Christ a Better Neuroscientist than Sam Harris?, I explored my own journey towards the painful realization that in the realm of human affairs science had 2000 years later merely reinvented the wheel. In response, I got a comment from someone named Arslan Atajanov asked "Since when science became a belief system?" Ten years ago, I would have asked the same question as Arslan. Now, I know better. Science has always been a belief system. It is a response to how our minds work. Humans form beliefs. We have always formed beliefs. And apparently by the time of Ibn Haytham there was already awareness that testing one's beliefs against the evidence was a good thing to do. In practice, people do this all the time. Look at Game of Thrones. People had theories about Jon Snow being dead or not. Then, they watche

As you navigate the #Jobocalypse, one of the most important skills to learn is how to be innovative. Fortunately, in that regard, we are incredibly lucky to have Adam Hansen as a sensei in the dojo. He's literally an innovation expert at a company that is all about helping companies innovate called Ideas To Go. How cool is that?!? Even cooler, he's using his innovation expertise to help evolve the Mixed Mental Arts project forward. [mbm_book_grid id="6552"] You may remember Adam's voice from the podcast he, James Miller and Drew Sample recorded as part of the Columbus Meet Up episode. You can listen to that here. You can also read the #knowledgebomb in text form here. You can also find Adam Hansen in the MMA Facebook Group. We're going to be getting the world's experts in every field to break down their core insights for you for free! As Bryan Callen would say, "Hope you're ready to learn EVERYTHING!"

Isaiah Gooley is an analyst, musician, and writer. He's been all over the place, and is still trying to learn as much as he can along the way. Check out his music at greatghouls.com, greatghouls.bandcamp.com,or soundcloud.com/isaiah-gooley. You can read the original post at the Mixed Mental Arts site. There are lots of great people out there like Isaiah who have stepped forward to volunteer whatever they have to offer to help evolve Mixed Mental Arts and move these ideas. You can share make Kintsugi like Isaiah. You can help make videos like Andrew Hunt and Reid Nicewonder. You can make memes and graphics like Marko Strok and Omar Dunne. You can provide amazing tech advice like Eric Hunley and The Twilight Princess (Mandi Ainslie). You can donate money like all the awesome people who have given both to my Patreon (thanks for the caffeine, guys!) and to the Mixed Mental Arts Patreon. You can go around merrily dropping #knowledgebombs around the internet like Ryan Pedersen. Or like William Graham you can rally the troops to invite people like Russell Brand for #ideasex. You decide how #MixedMentalArts grows and evolves. Pretty cool, huh?

One of the biggest questions I get when I tell people about atomistic and holistic biases is whether this affects Western medicine. Well, yes. It actually does. And secretly behind the scenes for quite some time now, I've been familiarizing myself with a series of medical innovations that quite simply haven't diffused. Why? Because they don't fit within Western medicine's cultural biases. WHAT?!? Are you saying you know more about medicine than doctors?!? Who in the heck are you? Exactly. Even saying things like this sets off people's intuitions of authority. Medical doctors are brilliant. They're great. I'd far rather have a surgeon do surgery on me than me do surgery on me. However, doctors are also human. And all humans blindly copy culture from the people they're in awe of without them even realizing it. And so, the Romans blindly copied atomism from the Ancient Greeks whom they were in awe of. And then everyone else in the West blindly got atomistic biases from the West because they were in awe of them. The result is that baked into the very structure of medicine is an atomistic structure. You can see it in the way medical care is delivered. Medicine divides up the body into lots of tiny subspecialties. If you have back pain, you go to a back doctor and that doctor looks at that localized region. The problem is that the body is all interconnected. Very often, the problem with your back often originates with a lack of dorsiflexion in your foot. Those forces are then transmitted all the way up your legs and express as a back problem even though the real issue is the foot. How many unnecessary back surgeries are performed around the world? We just don't know. But we're committed to helping doctors create awareness of their cultural biases so that we can make sure that medicine's cultural blindspots don't cause it to miss out on simpler and less harmful opportunities for care. If I'd met Tony Molina straight out of college, I would have thought he was straight up nuts. My reaction would have been "WHAT?!? Are you saying you know more about medicine than doctors?!? Who in the heck are you?" I would have gotten #Triggered and blindly defended my culture. And I would not have been behaving scientifically. Science isn't about intuitions about human authority. It is about the evidence. And so, when I met Tony Molina more recently, I still thought he was kind of nuts, but through The Straight-A Conspiracy and The Bryan Callen Show, I'd seen the ways in which ideas didn't diffuse. And so, I spotted something. Here was a man who had done everything his culture had told him to do. He'd pored over the data. He'd learned what it all added up to. And he had confronted people with that data...only to be repeatedly dismissed because he didn't have the right credentials. Humans--including doctors it turns out--don't respond to facts. They respond to stories. They have to get WHY things work. They have to get WHY doctors don't get these things. And they have to be told a story where none of this is anyone's fault. We all blindly copied a culture from our parents. Now, it's time to reflect and evolve a better culture. It's time to ask simply "Why Doesn't Western Medicine Turn Us On?"

Bryan Callen cares about his people. Oh, sure. Heaven may be high and the Emperor may be far away. But this Emperor is always listening. And so, when Emperor Callen heard that the people of the #Callenphate felt we didn't have enough diversity at court, he decided to hold audience and to hear the concerns of his people. And so, with our continued commitment to open all the cans of worms and talk about all the elephants in the room, we had the first of many conversations about sexism. The fact that Bryan actually REQUESTED a conversation and then SHOWED UP to the conversation shows how seriously he takes the issue. He loves his people and wants them to be happy. And so, Cate Fogarty, Katie O'Brien and Claire Gerety-Mott showed up to the Forbidden City that is Bryan's house and had the first of many conversations to try and unravel our feeeeeeeeelings about sexism and to figure out what we can do to improve things. Part of it is simply having honest conversations about what we know and don't know and giving people a voice who might otherwise not have a voice. That's what the internet is for. Everyone gets to say their piece. We're excited to hear yours. Rest assured, MMA will keep evolving until humanity has talked out ALL its problems. Oh, and I get it. Everyone hates my plough story. Love to all humanity - Toto

After Bryan and I did our episode on the #Jobocalypse, someone rightly commented on the Mixed Mental Arts subreddit that this was all great but what practically do I do? Well, this episode is a practical response to that. Mixed Mental Arts is not just about identifying problems but empowering you to solve them for yourselves. Part of that is going to be teaching you how to learn, unlearn and relearn. That's something the Mixed Mental Arts community will be doing taking everything that's in The Straight-A Conspiracy and everything else we've learned in the last 200 interviews, breaking those ideas down into easy, bite-sized chunks and giving them away. The other thing we're going to be doing is introducing you to people who have made the transition into the new economy to give you a playbook on how you can do that too. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jon Aguilar. Jon Aguilar works in what may be the oldest profession. No, he's not a prostitute. He works with dry stone. It literally doesn't get much older than that. Stone on top of stone with no mortar. And yet, Jon Aguilar is thriving in the new economy. That's because he's transformed this oldest of professions by bringing to it a spirit of exploration and Motivation 3.0. Jon reads voraciously. He's constantly rethinking his craft. And he's always learning, unlearning and relearning. In the end, surviving in the new economy doesn't mean you have to become a computer coder. Far from it. In fact, you may end up doing the job you were doing in the old economy BUT you approach it in a very different spirit. You think of yourself and approach your work as a craftsman. In this episode, Jon describes how in 2007 he really started to take his craft seriously as something to be mastered and refined and the books and ideas that were useful to him in evolving his own approach up to this point. Jon is also a fount of t-shirt ideas. I'm sure the Unicorn (@madonna_matt) and Unikitty (@nicoleleepage) will run with some of them. Personally, I'm going to put in a request for "Embrace The Suck" and "What Kind of Smith Are You?" Maybe an "Ideasmith" t-shirt. I defer to them. Pretty sure that something awesome will emerge from this great improv we're all in. You can find out more of the tools Jon is using to navigate the #Jobocalypse here including resources for people looking to become or looking to connect with apprentices. Jon's Stonesmith business = www.heritageearthandstone.com Jon's Facebook = "Heritage Earth & Stone" Jon's Instagram = "jonaguilar_designworks" The Consortium of Craftsmen, Innovators & Thinkers = www.throughstonegroup.com The Consortium's Instagram + Facebook + YouTube channel (will be online by May 1st) = "Throughstone Group" [mbm_book_grid id="1287"] And if you want to buy a sweet Jobocalypse t-shirt and support Mixed Mental Arts at the SAME TIME then go here.

If you follow #MixedMentalArts on Instagram, then you know that Bryan Callen has been reading about Jesus. Unfortunately for Bryan, his first attempts at Bryan's Book Club have succeeded in doing one thing and one thing only: putting Bryan to sleep. And then, Bryan tried pontificating about these ideas to young men and women in their 20s...and they were more interested in the Tequila. It turns out that missionary work is hard work. Fortunately, Bryan Callen has been reading about Jesus. Specifically, he's been reading Stephen M. Miller's Complete Guide to the Bible. It turns out that changing people's beliefs is tough stuff. Jesus made his own beliefs as crystal clear as he could and still people didn't get them. People like Saul didn't get Jesus' beliefs so much that they persecuted him. Then, Saul got them so much that he not only converted he changed his name to Paul and went around trying to help other people get "The Good News." 2000 years later a lot of people who think they get Jesus' message still don't get it. In short, teaching is hard. It requires patience and persistence. You have to teach the same old lessons in new ways and break them down to make them clearer and clearer. In fact, that's the exact same problem with moving scientific ideas. There are a lot of people who THINK they get science but have actually missed its core message. Humans tell stories. That's what we do. We tell stories about ourselves, about each other and about reality. The problem is that because we ALL have naive realism all our stories make perfect sense to us. The key is evolving stories that do a better and better job of fitting reality. That's what scientists like Spiros, David Sloan Wilson, Joe Henrich, Jon Haidt, Jennifer Jacquet and Carol Dweck do ALL day. The problem is that some scientists have become so obsessed with defining science in opposition to religion that they've literally forgot that science is a belief system and that its beliefs need to be promoted and made accessible to the general public. They cloister themselves in their Ivory Tower or their floating magnetic island named Laputa and then wonder why the public can't relate to them and seems disinterested in what they have to offer. In the end, science wants converts. And if it wants converts, then it's going to have to accept that it's a belief system just like all the others...and that it will win or lose in the Marketplace of Ideas based on its ability to provide accessible value to the people. It's time Smart Goes Pop and we made ideas lickable. It's time we became evangelists for the best ideas from all times and places. And this is where the real changing of the guard happens. For over 200 episodes, Hunter has bringing ideas to Bryan and now it's time for Bryan to take those ideas to the people. How can Bryan Callen become the Savior of the World that he has always dreamed of being? Well, he has to diffuse innovations. Fortunately, most of the books we've read basically have one core idea and then in true academic fashion endlessly belabor that idea with examples that are designed not to communicate to the general public but to appease other super obtuse academics. Take Thinking, Fast and Slow. What's the main idea? There's fast thinking and there's slow thinking. That's literally the title of the book. You may not be able to judge a book by its cover but you can certainly extract the core idea. And you can then slap that on a t-shirt which is exactly what Unikitty (@nicolepagelee) and the Unicorn (@madonna_matt) have done. You can buy that shirt here. And that is what scientific missionary work looks like. You wear a cool shirt with a core idea on it and people ask you questions. And then, you explain the idea and off they go. The crowd becomes a little wiser. And like the little idea bees that we all are we spread these ideas until the crowd is really freaking wise. And that brings us back to sleeping Brendan and all those 20 somethings. What do they want? They want success. They want to impress people. They want to do something super cool that saves the world. We have all the pieces to do that scattered across the 7.5 billion humans that make humanity. Now, the challenge is to make kintsugi. To take the broken pieces and fill in the cracks with gold. Doubtless as we go out, we will be misunderstood. That's the Life of Bryan.

Cate Fogarty is the Callenphate's Chief Artillery Officer and has been making pretty amazing knowledge bombs for MixedMentalArts.co. If you want to help Cate in her work as The Callenphate's Chief Artillery Officer, you can contact her on Twitter at @cateclysmic or find her in the Mixed Mental Arts Facebook group. You too can make #knowledgebombs! In this #knowledgebomb, she covers The Growth Mindset. You can read the original article at http://mixedmentalarts.co/growthmindset/ As always, all t-shirt sales and Patreon.com/mixedmentalarts donations go to fund intellectual terrorism. So many minds need to be blown and with people like Cate on the team…nobody's pre-conceived notions are safe!

Cate Fogarty is the Callenphate's Chief Artillery Officer and has been making pretty amazing knowledge bombs for MixedMentalArts.co. If you want to help Cate in her work as The Callenphate's Chief Artillery Officer, you can contact her on Twitter at @cateclysmic or find her in the Mixed Mental Arts Facebook group. You too can make #knowledgebombs! In this #knowledgebomb, she covers Descartes' Error. You can read the original article at mixedmentalarts.co/descarteserror As always, all t-shirt sales and Patreon.com/mixedmentalarts donations go to fund intellectual terrorism. So many minds need to be blown and with people like Cate on the team...nobody's pre-conceived notions are safe!

After hearing the Theories of Everything Part 1 and Part 2, everyone got suuuuuuper jealous that Hunter was getting Spiros all to himself. In the spirit of Mixed Mental Arts, Hunter decided to share Spiros with Dave Colan, Cate Fogarty, Andrew Hunter and Christopher Leon Price. Continuing off from the last conversation, Spiros unpacks how he thinks of truth in thinking about physical reality. Then, Dave Colan (after struggling to remember Sam Harris' name) brings up Sam's recent comments about Hunter on the Joe Rogan Experience. Sam's comments prove to be an excellent teaching opportunity because they reveal the sort of theories we form about other people based on limited and emotionally provocative evidence. The whole point that I (Hunter) was trying to clumsily make on Joe Rogan was that because of the Dunbar Number most humans are an abstraction. We have to stereotype. The question is what we stereotype around. Spending time at Oaks Christian, it was clear that the stereotype people had of scientists was formed around people like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins was formed around people who insulted beliefs they did not understand. In fact, I came to realize that Jesus Christ was a better neuroscientist than Sam Harris which you can read about here. Now, Sam has proved my point. He has formed an opinion about me based on very limited evidence and his feeeeeeeeeelings about me. It's an amazing demonstration of #DescartesError and the #DunbarNumber. Is the model that Sam Harris laid out of Hunter Maats a good model of me? Well, I'll leave that for you to judge. But take a look at what he has said here. For regular listeners to Mixed Mental Arts, you'll see that while Sam's impression of me is perfectly understandable that it's a great example of what Spiros talks about with "truncate and renormalize." Sam has a truncated data set around who I am and that he has then renormalized around that very limited data. Can he justify his impression? Of course! He can point to that very limited amount of information and justify his impression. And yet, there's other data. There's over 200 episodes of Bryan and me interviewing hundreds of different scientists and then synthesizing those ideas together into a coherent worldview. Sam Harris has said I'm wrong about the "relevant biology." That's a huge problem. Whether I'm wrong or he is doesn't much matter. What matters is that the "relevant biology" has become so overcomplicated and atomized that either me (a Harvard biochemistry grad who has interviewed hundreds of scientists) or him (a neuroscience PhD) don't understand the "relevant biology." If we can't figure it out, then it's no wonder science can't win the public over. Science needs to figure out and present a coherent worldview in order to effectively win people over. The #MarchForScience is a nice show of support...but which science are these people in favor of? Is it rationalism or intuitionism? Is it the multi-level selection of David Sloan Wilson, Jon Haidt and Joe Henrich or the gene-centric model of Dawkins and Harris? And, more basically, what is science anyway? Because it's clear that Spiros, Jon Haidt and me are operating on a very different understanding of what science is than Sam Harris is. Sam Harris has painted a picture of religious people with statistics that is actually a terrible model of who they actually are. I'm an apatheist. I don't really care about God. I don't go to Church or Mosque. I care about practically improving people's lives using whatever tools are available. And that's why I'd moved on from Sam Harris and was focused on making Smart Go Pop but then Brentwood Boy got so emotional about the whole thing that he couldn't help saying Candyman five times. As Cate Fogarty points out in this article, I was just doing exactly what Joe Rogan did with Carlos Mencia. I was calling out someone who was hurting the community. Why does Joe defend Sam? Because Joe has feeeeeeeeeelings about Sam that cause him to value defending his friend over examining the evidence impartially. Sam Harris is Joe Rogan's sacred cow. And that's okay. That's the way humans work. All of us. You, me, New Atheists and old school Arabs. And if we want to have a better world, then we all have to stop pretending like we have it all figured out and start reflecting on the problems in our own culture and do the difficult work of self-reflection and calling out the Fundamentalists who have wrapped themselves in the flag of our cherished causes. As I've covered in earlier episodes, the challenge for people is to spot who is and who is not a Fundamentalist and to see who preaches our values but doesn't actually practice them. Joe Rogan's defense of Sam Harris will reveal before this community just how hard this is. Thank you, Sam Harris! You're the best. You beautifully proved my point and have created the social drama that will drive attention to the science. Don't believe me. Decide for yourself. That's what science is ab

Dave Colan is an improv comedy teacher at the legendary Second City which gave us alums from Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Dave is working with us on the #CultureMatters series and will generally be calling me (Hunter) out regularly and often ;) You can follow Dave on Twitter at @davecolan or his other Twitter account @nexttokimdavis. http://www.pride.com/entertainment/2015/09/03/17-genius-tweets-person-who-allegedly-sits-next-kim-davis

Street Epistemology is a dialectical approach intent on helping people reflect on the reliability of the methods used to arrive at deeply-held beliefs. Reid Nicewonder is an independent filmmaker seeking to promote critical thinking and skepticism through entertainment. He conducts in-person interviews using at various public parks around Los Angeles. SE Resources: Top 10 SE Videos (Anthony Magnabosco) Cordial Curiosity (Reid Nicewonder) SE Website SE Facebook Page SE Facebook Group (Private study group) SE Twitter Profile

Download For Eternity Cate Fogarty is the Callenphate's Chief Artillery Officer and has been making pretty amazing knowledge bombs for MixedMentalArts.co. If you want to help Cate in her work as The Callenphate's Chief Artillery Officer, you can contact her on Twitter at @cateclysmic or find her in the Mixed Mental Arts Facebook group. You too can make #knowledgebombs! In this #knowledgebomb, she covers The Dunbar Number. You can read the original article at mixedmentalarts.co/thedunbarnumber As always, all t-shirt sales and Patreon.com/mixedmentalarts donations go to fund intellectual terrorism. So many minds need to be blown and with people like Cate on the team...nobody's pre-conceived notions are safe!

A week ago, a group of fellows who had never met before showed up at Beer World in Columbus, Ohio. What happened at Beer World remains known only to Adam Hansen, David Foust, James Miller, Nate Fourman, Jeremy Hewett and Drew Sample. What happened afterwards everybody will know because Adam, James and Drew recorded a podcast. This is what the internet is for. People with shared interests and a shared sense of purpose coming together to learn from each other and figure out how to take our collective insights and solve problems. There are a lot of awesome people out there from whom we never really get to hear. We have the tools to change that. And so, have your own meet up. This all came out of Adam posting on the #MixedMentalArts meet up group that he would be in Columbus and asking if anyone else wanted to meet up. You can do the same in your neck of the woods: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1289087351149018/ Let me know if you're doing one and if you record a podcast we can drop it in the Mixed Mental Arts feed as part of this section of what we're doing. You can support Drew's podcast The Sample Hour on Patreon here. You can support James' podcast The Coolest Humans on Patreon here. You can get Adam's book here.

Martin Totland is a journalist and photographer from Bergen, Norway, who's lived in the US for more than seven years. He got involved with Mixed Mental Arts to improve his cultural understanding, and to fight mental atrophy. You can find him on Twitter (@mtotland), Instagram (mtotland2) or in the Mixed Mental Arts Facebook group. If you read this article at MixedMentalArts.co, it includes a picture of a cat with a Viking helmet on it. Download For Eternity

Cate Fogarty and I met a few months ago when I gave a talk at Second City about how to communicate across America's red/blue cultural divide. Why did Cate and I connect after that talk? Because Cate is a Cultural Mutt. She has moved between enough cultures in her life to know how powerfully culture shapes our thinking and how it both binds us into groups and blinds us to the fact that we don't always see the world so clearly. Cate also came up with the idea of the cultural confession so it's only fitting that Cate should be the first person to officially give her cultural confession on the podcast. In the evolving improv game that is Mixed Mental Arts, Cate and I have now been feeding off each other for a couple of months. As we move this from being the Bryan Callen (and Hunter Maats show), I thought it was important to introduce the other people who are getting involved and to make it clear why their contributions are so vital. And here is where Cate's strengths come to the fore. She has been taking my 5000-word blogposts, extracting the core concepts and then rewriting the idea in her own words into under 500-word #knowledgebombs. She's now got a team of people helping her do that. If you want in on that, you should tweet her at @cateclysmic or you can find her at the Mixed Mental Arts FB group. You can read her #TheDunbarNumber #knowledgebomb here: http://mixedmentalarts.co/thedunbarnumber/ And you can read her #GrowthMindset #knowledgebomb here: http://mixedmentalarts.co/growthmindset/ However, there's at least one more way in which Cate's voice is essential. We're aware that until now Mixed Mental Arts has been a bit of a sausage party. Not only that, it has been a white sausage party. There's nothing wrong with weisswurst (German white sausages) but we need some variety. That's what makes idea sex great. Lots of different ideas being thrown into the mix and we let those ideas make looooooove and see what comes out. There's a topic that Cate and Katie O and I have been talking about for months behind the scenes: sexism. Uh oh! Just the word gets everyone breaking out in hives. Even as Cate explained to me many of her female friends. Still, Mixed Mental Arts is about talking about the elephants in the room. So, we do that. There's nothing humans (especially a #basketofreasonables) can't figure out when we talk it out. So, consider this the first step of many into that conversation and towards diversity of perspective in every sense in the dojo. That will be the real mark of what makes Mixed Mental Arts different. When we can talk anything out productively and make progress, that will really set us apart from the crowd. You can share your own cultural confession here (http://mixedmentalarts.co/submit-your-cultural-confession/).

About a month ago, Hunter was on Chris Ryan's Tangentially Speaking podcast. (It's episode 234 if you're interested.) I can't speak for Chris but I had a really great time. Some people on Twitter enjoyed the convo too. Someone even said they were happy that I'd finally found my soulmate. I was disappointed that my soulmate would be a married DUDE...but Twitter don't lie! And so, Chris and I scheduled a second conversation. Two plus hours later my faith in the wisdom of crowds is greater than it has ever been. Chris not only is my soulmate but he succeeded in bringing me to the point of tears. Legitimately, my eyes made water. Chris Ryan extracted my cultural confession from me. One of the patterns that Chris drew out in this conversation is that so much of humanity's cutting edge thinking rests on looking back to how Hunter-Gatherers lived to see what lessons we can learn from them. In short, humanity is trying to return to what it knew before. This is the nature of the Hero's Journey. A hero leaves the tribe and sets out on a quest to find something or solve some problem for the tribe. In the oldest sense, they leave the security of the village to hunt and gather to bring food back for the tribe. In so doing, they risk their lives and face trials from nature, plants and animals. Eventually, the face the ordeal that requires them to draw on all they've learned. If they succeed, they return to the village with their prize. A long time ago, humanity set out on an epic hero's journey. Something was missing from village life. What was it? That's actually a quite tough question. Life for hunter-gatherers is remarkably good. And yet, set out we did. We engaged in agriculture. We enslaved each other. We built great Empires and those Empires fought great wars. Religious and cultural movements swept across the globe. And now, with all we've achieved in our mastery over the natural world, many of us find ourselves looking back with longing to a time of strong communities and social belonging. We want to go back home. However, as Chris and I discuss in this podcast, we cannot turn back yet. For first, we must face the ordeal. What is that ordeal? The fear of our own mortality. And that, ladies and gentlemen, has been the ordeal all along. We have built great pyramids and statues. We have conquered vast Empires. We have created great works of art. And all of it has crumbled away. Shortly after the British Museum acquired a piece of a great broken statue of Ramesses II, the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote Ozymandias about the vanity of thinking that any monument to your own greatness would last. Since time immemorial, mankind has sought the elixir of life and the fountain of youth in the hopes that we would cheat death. And now, there are those among us who believe they will cheat death forever. Men like Ray Kurzweil believe that through the magic of technology we will achieve immortality. And perhaps, we will. But what is it that we want. What do we hunger for? Why as our technology rushes forward do we find ourselves looking back? Chris is fond of a quote from T.S. Eliot "We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." That is the hero's journey. And perhaps man's hero's journey is not a straight line up and up forever. Perhaps in some sense it is one great circle. Whatever great technologies and elixirs we find, perhaps it will not be enough for us to have it. The great joy of the reward that we have hunted and gathered is in returning to share it with the tribe. And that is what we have lost. We have lost community. The challenge of Mixed Mental Arts is to evolve a culture that draws on the best of all times and places. Some of those places we left a long time ago. Chris' favorite quote has a special resonance for me. Robert McNamara quotes it in the Fog of War. For all his explorations and great statistical knowledge, McNamara in the end found solace in the words of a poet who talked about returning home. And that is very much my own experience. I have now wandered widely through the science. But all of those explorations have brought me to where I started. I have had to rediscover a sense of childlike wonder, of curiosity and of a desire for the sort of community that existed 10,000 years ago before the rise of agriculture. Can we have it all? I think we can. And I'm sure as heck willing to devote my life to trying. Chris reminds me in this podcast that Robert McNamara's middle name was "Strange." Robert "Strange" McNamara. And that's fitting. Life is strange. It just gets curiouser and curiouser once you leave your culture behind. And I'm excited to see how deep the rabbit hole goes...even if when I reach the bottom I find I come back out on top. "We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." - T.S. Eliot

Mitch Evers is a Dutch university student who grew up in the south of the Netherlands. When Hunter first claimed that Donald Trump was culturally Dutch, it triggered Mitch's patriotic duty to attempt to save his country's reputation in the eyes of the Mixed Mental Arts community, which led to his involvement in the project. Little does Mitch know that Hunter "The Shitty Dutchman" Maats would be reading his post in a terrible Dutch accent. Will the Dutch King revoke Hunter's passport based on this or will they practice gedogen and simply turn a blind eye? Probably the latter. Some things just aren't worth fighting over. You can find Mitch on Twitter at @kipislekkerME.

If anyone doubts the power of Motivation 3.0, they should listen to this episode. In the last couple of months, people from all over the world who have jobs, kids and lives have volunteered to help evolve Mixed Mental Arts and get the ideas that have been trapped in books for decades out into the world. Bryan and I have never met most of these people. Matt Maurer has worked on the website for no money. Nicole Page and Matt "Unicorn" Madonna have set up our t-shirt store and provided endless advice to improve the website. Cate Fogarty has been taking Hunter's wordy ramblings and distilling them into #knowledgebombs that in under 500 words sum up key mental tools to upgrade your cultural software. And even though Brian Otoya makes basically zero dollars he is personally funding ads to drive traffic our way. Chris Price and Jake Brady have stepped in to help teach Hunter how to not screw up the sound. Milk Toast reached out on Twitter and even offered to fly out to LA to help with that. There are a lot of people who are helping out and really it goes to prove something a Ukrainian grandmother once told Hunter: "Everywhere you go, people are nice. Governments are assholes." This has certainly been Hunter and Bryan's experience growing up. There are a lot of great people everywhere. Are they perfect? Nope. But they all have value and the challenge in unleashing the wisdom of crowds is getting all those people to work together. There's a great scene in the Michael Fassbender Steve Jobs movie where Woz asks Jobs what he does... Steve Wozniak: You can't write code... you're not an engineer... you're not a designer... you can't put a hammer to a nail. I built the circuit board. The graphical interface was stolen from Xerox Parc. Jef Raskin was the leader of the Mac team before you threw him off his own project! Someone else designed the box! So how come ten times in a day, I read Steve Jobs is a genius? What do you do? Steve Jobs: I play the orchestra, and you're a good musician. You sit right there and you're the best in your row. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the great challenge of the human family. It is not that the wisdom of crowds isn't there. It's that we need to get the orchestra playing together. For too long, we've been waiting for a conductor to come along. We want a leader who will tell us how to play together. And it's time to realize that that leader isn't forthcoming. Recently, Isaiah Gooley (who I've also never met) wrote a post for MixedMentalArts.co that takes the Chinese proverb "Heaven is High and the Emperor is Far Away" and relates it to modern times. (http://mixedmentalarts.co/tian-gao-huangdi-yuan/) We have become so consumed with who is elected President or Prime Minister that we have forgotten that the wisdom of crowds comes from us. It comes from the orchestra. And if no one will emerge to play us then we must adopt the attitude of jazz. We play our notes and we listen to what other people are doing and we figure out how to build on what others are doing. The Mixed Mental Arts community is a place for anyone from anywhere in the world who wants to do it. If we get together and start playing really cool music, then more and more people will join us. They'll want to be a part of what we're doing. If we build it, they will come. However, the crucial word there is we. Bryan and Hunter have many, many failings. That is the great freedom they have. There's no need for them to worry about trying to seem like they have it all together. They don't. And probably nor do you. In fact, no one does. That's the nature of the world. There are 130 million books. There are so many terabytes of data. It's all far too much for an individual human mind. That's why we have to get together a crowd to solve all these problems. Heaven is High and the Emperor is Far Away. The challenge is in pulling together the orchestra in the greatest improv jazz in history. We're doing that. You should join. And here is where it becomes important to realize the challenge we face: identity. You have been told stories about yourself. We tell stories about each other. And who we are and how we behave changes often within minutes. We get cut off in traffic and we get road rage. Someone opens the door for us and we feel all is right with the world. We get hangry and become snappy. We have a nap and want to give everyone a hug. And we all have our Fundamentalisms. We have things that trigger us and make us freak out. The challenge for all of us is to say sorry and kiss and make up. So, let me say I'm sorry. I'm sorry if I've upset any of the people I've called Fundamentalists over the past few months. As I've said before, I'm sure you're lovely people and I could tell many wonderful stories about you. Every hero has a thousand faces. Why did I do this then? Because the world is in the grip of a lot of bad stories right now. And the way you beat the bad story is with better stories. And one story is a variation on the story of th

Apparently, this whole merging of quantum field theory and general relativity business was a little more complicated than we initially thought and so we extended the podcast into a second hour. All of which is released on a single day! You're welcome humanity. And don't worry. We didn't entirely solve the problem. We just warmed it up for you. Any listener who can unify the four major forces wins...a Nobel Prize! Congratulations!!! In practice, the most important takeaway of the second part of the conversation is how we think about truth--it's about a series of practical tools that do better jobs of approximating reality--and the fact that because we both are super keen to democratize knowledge and make all of this accessible...Spiros is joining the Mixed Mental Arts dojo. In the car, he was super excited to have convos with Mixed Martial Artists, chefs, comedians and anyone else. So, get ready for that world. We're going to all roll together and evolve the best set of beliefs the world has yet seen. The fun is just starting 'cause it turns out we don't just need a Theory of Everything. We need Theories of Everything. We have a lot of work to do!

In an utterly pleasant surprise, Spiros Michalakis reached out to me and said he wanted to get lunch. Actually, he wanted to buy me lunch. The result was a three hour lunch conversation and a two-hour podcast during the course of which we covered everything from Spiros' own work trying to unify quantum field theory and general relativity to everything that has been going on with Mixed Mental Arts. In short, we compared notes on the many kinds of idea sex that we've been having. You don't get to hear what happened in that three-hour lunch which is probably fortunate. For one thing, Spiros talked about being Greek, moving to America and finding out it wasn't culturally appropriate to wear a speedo in public. You do get to hear what happened in the two-hour podcast where we have our own convo about what it means to be a scientist. It is an approach to life. You also get to hear about why we both feel so strongly about making ideas accessible. We both have gone between worlds. For Spiros, growing up in Greece and then moving to MIT, he was very clear that the difference between him and the other kids was largely a sense of possibility and his own potential. Sound familiar? In this episode, we talk about why the idea of a Theory of Everything is so misleading. In fact, scientists use many different theories to make sense of different levels of reality. There are models (aka beliefs are stories) that help make sense of the quantum world, the chemical world, the interaction of whole organisms and there is going to be a theory that makes sense of what underlies quantum field theory and general relativity. In the same way, you have beliefs for doing your job, how to talk to your in-laws and how to make sense of politics. These theories get confronted with data that doesn't fit your theory. The mark of a scientist isn't in being right. It's how you respond when you are wrong. In fact, a real scientist wants to be wrong quickly. Part 1 ends with Spiros talking about ponies with more than one trick...or as we call them Mixed Mental Artists. Tune in to Part 2 as Hunter recruits Spiros to become part of the Mixed Mental Arts dojo with all the subtlety of a Dutchman.

Recently, I appeared on Chris Ryan's Tangentially Speaking podcast and afterwards had a conversation with Euan Grant in the Mixed Mental Arts Facebook Group. Euan said something really interesting: "Have started listening to Hunter Maats on Tangentially Speaking and like the thought of podcast hosts being on the MMA pod, those that have interviewed many experts, what have they 'the common person' learnt? Like when Hunter does a review show with Bryan." I liked Euan's idea a lot and, fortunately, I had an interview already scheduled with Jordan Harbinger of the Art of Charm podcast. And so, off we went. It turns out that although on the surface our podcasts seem very different there are a lot of common threads there. Jordan started his podcast to answer his own questions. I highjacked Bryan's podcast and turned it into a show where we could both talk to our intellectual crushes. And, inevitably, in doing hundreds or in the case of the Art of Charm probably close to a thousand episodes, we've learned a lot that has caused us to evolve far beyond what we originally started doing. Both podcasts have come to focus heavily on why humans behave the way they do. While the internet is full of articles promising that this "one weird trick" will teach you to be charming, Jordan offers a more sobering and realistic reality. If you want to win friends and influence people, a firm handshake won't do it. Why? Because the human brain evolved to spot bullshit. Social intelligence is humanity's superpower and much of that is devoted to figuring out who is trying to manipulate us, cheat us or otherwise dupe us. The real art of charm is to mean it. It's the result of countless hours of work on yourself. As Abraham Lincoln said, "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." In the end, the human brain's hinky meter is amazing at spotting when something is off...even if sometimes as Jordan and Hunter discuss you sometimes foolishly override it. In the last episode, Bryan and I talked about how the key to surviving and thriving in the Information Age is to put the white belt on. Although I couldn't have anticipated it, this interview with Jordan ended up being the perfect follow up because it debunks the very notion of shortcuts. There are more and less effective ways to learn but there is no circumventing the work on yourself and on the challenge in front of you. Putting the white belt on every day is the first vital step to really entering on the path to mastery in any area. And that's where Jordan's skills become especially useful as we build more Mixed Mental Arts dojos. Jordan knows how to run a successful, profitable podcast. What happens when those skills are combined with the knowledge we've picked up about cultural evolution to make an even better Mixed Mental Arts? Well, I'd like to find out. Mixed Mental Arts belongs to no one. It's an ever evolving approach. The more heads we put together the better this will all get. Euan's suggestion was a brilliant one. Can we unite the podcast clans?

With the sounds of Bryan's offspring gently playing in the background, Bryan's thoughts turn to how to prepare the progeny he has sired from his loins for a world of constant technological disruption. Obviously, Bryan has already prepared them for the apocalypse. They're both proficient in using compound bow and dressing their own kills. They can also strip a firearm and set a bone. And thanks to Bryan's beautiful wife they have (like Alexander the Great, the Comanche, Mongol warriors and slightly foppish aristocrats) they have been rigorously trained in equestrian. These are basic skills that every Callen must know. But what if the apocalypse doesn't happen? What if society more or less continues as is and Bryan's children rather than stalking deer through the shattered wreckage of our civilization and leading conquering hordes on horseback instead find themselves getting jobs. What jobs can they get and how should he prepare them for that? And that, ladies and gentlemen, turns out to be a question we should all be asking. We are in the middle of a #Jobocalypse and it's only going to get worse. While Donald Trump told a great story about jobs going overseas and the coming back, it's not a very good reflection of what's actually been happening. Instead, the shift of jobs overseas was made possible by improved technology. You can't have a call center answering calls half a world away if you don't have good telecommunications technology. You can't manufacture goods in China for sale in America unless shipping technology is so good, cheap and efficient as to make it economically viable. The Donald can bring some jobs back but the greater force at work here is that much of routine work is being and will continue to be automated out of existence. If your job rests on doing routine tasks, then it can be done by a robot or software. Automated cars and trucks, accounting software, McDonalds self-service kiosks and computer programs that trade stocks and write increasingly complex legal contracts are all just some of the ways in which life-long careers can be either disrupted out of existence or change so massively as to be unrecognizable. The defining feature of the future is the need to constantly adapt and that is not something that the world has been prepared for. To reform an educational system, you first need to reform the understanding of the voters. That's the core challenge. Using the internet to empower people to take charge of their own educations. And that is what Mixed Mental Arts and The Straight-A Conspiracy are all about. As WhatUpO recently wrote on the Mixed Mental Arts subreddit: "I found MMA through the JRE and was hooked from the first episode I listened to (the Jordan Peterson episode I believe). The discussions had on the podcast about culture and learning are captivating not only because they are full of interesting info but because of how genuinely the ideas are presented. Today's entertainment/news realms only seem to deal in absolutes. MMA's "you don't have to believe us - look for yourselves" approach is a breath of fresh air to say the least. I've listened to all of the past podcasts and I'm just now discovering these extra resources that have been set up (the blog, this sub and the website) and I've begun diving into the books in the reading list so this won't be the last you hear from me!" Bryan Callen and Hunter Maats do not have all the answers. We do, however, have relentless faith in the wisdom of crowds. There's nothing that a random group of humans can't figure out if they all bring their minds to bear on the problem. And, now, it seems that is happening. People like Martin Totland in Norway and Cate Fogarty in LA are contributing blogposts. Sandy Bagga in Canada has set up a subreddit and Chris Reid in New Zealand has populated it with threads. Matt Maurer and Matt Madonna have built a way better website than the TERRIBLE one Hunter made. And all of this has been done by people (who like Bryan and Hunter) are not in it for the money. And Nicole Page Lee has connected Hunter with the similarly-minded Argument Ninja and helped design t-shirts and pressure Hunter to make them. Individually, none of us can solve the world's problems. Together, we can draw together people from all over the world who can do a better and better job of figuring it out. The key to doing that is the same as the key to thriving and surviving in the wake of the #Jobocalypse. Every day, we wake up and we put the white belt back on. We approach the world with a Beginner's Mind and make whatever progress we can make and learn whatever we can trusting that if we keep evolving then it will all add up to measurable results and lives changed for the better. We've made some crude knowledge bombs with these podcast episodes and blogposts. Now, it's time to make better knowledge bombs that can empower the Mixed Mental Arts community to go out there and be #IntellectualTerrorists. We want to make videos so short, so t

In Part 1 of "What Does Your Hinky Meter Tell You?", Bryan and Hunter explored the controversy that the Frying Dutchman, Hunter Maats, had created in calling out Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. In Part 2, we look at why that behavior is so problematic: it creates an emotional climate that divides cultures rather than uniting them. At the end of a great stand-up comedy show, something truly wonderful happens. People's differences fall away and people of all races, genders, colors and creeds come together. In that moment, there's a possibility in the air. The possibility that people from totally different experiences strike up a conversation and connect because they realize that beyond their superficial differences that they can learn things from each other. The spirit at the end of one of Bryan's stand up shows is the Spirit of '76. It's the spirit of curiosity and possibility that fills garages where great start-ups are born. It's the spirit of openness, curiosity and possibility that filled the Caliphate in the age of its greatest scientific breakthroughs. It's the spirit that Hunter wants the Callenphate to create worldwide...and that Bryan thinks we probably won't. Whatever happens, it's what these two silly geese are aiming to spread. The problem is that there are divisive figures among us who thrive on using lawyerly rhetoric to promote bad ideas. In the write up to the last episode, I asked you to recommend someone who set off your hinky meter. One of you did. You suggested Ben Shapiro. And so, the Tutor of Death looked at Ben Shapiro and in this episode you can hear his rhetorical strategy broken down. People like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Ben Shapiro, SJWs and Tom Woods are critics. They criticize religious people or liberals or government or the red states. People like Alex Jones spread division. They don't get into the ring and try and practically solve problems. Mixed Mental Arts is not about theory. It is about turning the best available theory into practice. As Teddy Roosevelt said: "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." Do we know exactly what we're doing? Of course not. If someone knew how to solve the world's problems, they would. We're a stand-up comedian and a tutor and if we fail, at least we will fail while daring greatly. And so, this podcast marks our commitment to do a very simple thing: to try, to fail and try again and again. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the answer to a question that Bryan and I have both been trying to answer for a very long time: what makes a real man? It's someone who can bet it all on a single game of pitch and toss, lose and start again. We are done with trying to be liked. Instead, we choose to grow up and become men. The world is on the verge of doing something truly stupid. And so, perhaps it takes two guys who aren't worried about looking stupid to help fix that. Perhaps the Cincinnatuses...or should that be Cincinnati...of our age are one, two cutie pies. Maybe not. But we're certainly willing to have a go. After all, if we can do that, then we might finally become the men our fathers raised us to be. Over to Rudyard Kipling... If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools: If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!' If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtu

You know that feeling that something is off. It's the feeling that things don't quite add up. Something bugs you and you can't quite put your finger on it. That is what detectives call your hinky meter. We all have a hinky meter. The only question is what has your hinky meter been trained to detect. Great auto mechanics can listen to a car and figure out what's off. Doctors like House M.D. can suss out that a seemingly plausible diagnosis doesn't quite make sense. And Hunter Maats a.k.a The Tutor of Death can quickly find holes in people's mental game. That's what sets his hinky meter off. And Fundamentalists drive his hinky meter wild. However, just because you sense that something is off that's not the same thing as putting your finger on it let alone fully revealing to people what is off. In this first part of a two part series, Bryan and Hunter unpack why people like Alex Jones, Tom Woods, Sam Harris, Donald Trump and Joseph McCarthy send our hinky meters wild. Who sends your hinky meter wild? Tweet us and we miiiiiiight talk about them in part two.

A guest who needs no introduction...Big Mike is back!!!

Mixed Mental Arts: The Two Paths to Power: Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.

Living in America, Bryan and Hunter constantly hear demands for Muslims to call out the fundamentalists in their own midst. We think this is a great idea. However, before you can do that, you have to be able to spot a fundamentalist. And that it turns out is quite easy when you're looking at a fundamentalist in someone else's tribe and quite hard when you're looking at the fundamentalists in your own tribe. It's easy for Westerners to see the fundamentalists in the Arab world and quite hard to see the fundamentalists in their own midst. Recently, we had Jordan Peterson on The Bryan Callen Show and the community cheered Jordan Peterson on for calling out the Social Justice Fundamentalists on college campuses. How great? A lot of listeners knew these college kids had gone nuts. Thank goodness someone was standing up to them. That is not the reaction Jordan Peterson has gotten on college campuses and from his fellow Professors. Some people in his own community have cheered him on but many have attacked him. Hunter had a similar experience recently when he challenged certain fundamentalists whom we've had on The Bryan Callen Show, namely Peter Schiff and Thomas Woods. Some people cheered Hunter on and one Mixed Mental Artist even congratulated him on making it through the Peter Schiff interview "in spite of all the government that was getting in the way." Others were either confused by what he was doing and many insulted him. And that gives you a reality on why Muslims don't call out the Fundamentalists in their own midst. Many have a hard time spotting which imams are the fundamentalists and their sense of loyalty to the tribe outweighs their commitment to figuring out realistic solutions to the problems of their society. In short, it was a perfect demonstration of why Hunter and Bryan have been focusing so much on the work of people like Jon Haidt. Feelings drive our choices without even realizing it and it's only when those feelings are brought into conflict that we realize that those feelings are there. And this is the big difference between a Mixed Mental Artist and a Fundamentalist. The Mixed Mental Artist craves finding conflicts between their beliefs and reality. That's what it's all about. When your beliefs don't fit reality, then you have an opportunity to improve them. You are forced to confront your existing feelings and potentially change them. You are forced to re-examine your existing beliefs and potentially realize that you've been wrong about yourself and the world for decades. And that is upsetting. That is what Fundamentalists don't do. In fact, the Arab language has two words that capture beautifully what makes a fundamentalist. They don't engage in ijtihad. You're probably familiar with the word jihad. It means struggle. Ijtihad though is the reflexive form. It means struggle with oneself. Fundamentalists don't struggle with themselves. They decide they have a monopoly on the truth and they have all the answers and then they spend their lives pursuing that simple answer to the end of the line. In every case, the Fundamentalist believes that their tribe is the source of all good and that anything that threatens that is the source of all the world's problems. If only we could get rid of all the world's problems, everything would be solved. A few examples should suffice: Islam: The Way of the Prophet is the answer to everything. Anything that doesn't fit with that must be eliminated. And so, Islamic Fundamentalists like the Taliban try to eliminate toothbrushes and kites. Social Justice: Racism and sexism and colonialism are the sources of all our problems. We must deny the white man banh mi and sushi. If someone feels oppressed by the need to use a limited number of pronouns, we must recognize all 70 pronouns. In the name of social justice, there is nothing we won't do. It sounds good but like all virtues taken too far it becomes ridiculous and self-defeating. Sharing food between different cultures promotes tolerance. Words, including pronouns, are tools. Languages simplify over time. English used to have an informal version of you, namely thou. Ultimately, speakers threw out that pronoun because it was more of a pain in the ass than it was worth. Language is a tool that people use and 70 pronouns just isn't user-friendly. The Free Market: The free market is not the same thing as a free for all. Free market fundamentalists like Peter Schiff and Thomas Woods don't understand that. They hate government and so they just keep foolishly wanting to strip it away. To them, the FDA is like the toothbrush. It wasn't there in the time of the prophet so we rip it out. In fact though, you only need to look at what is happening with food safety in China right now to see what would happen. People are injecting cancer-causing gel into shrimp to make them look plumper. Some people will do anything for a buck, including peddle free market fundamentalist ideology as if they are representing the free market. A

Bryan and Hunter were feeling pretty manly. Bryan was punching imaginary enemies of freedom. Hunter was being tall and Dutch. And then…in walked John Durant, author of The Paleo Manifesto. His hair was luxuriant. He was wearing camo. And he had a stride best suited for stalking and taking down meat sources with only his bare hands. What were one-two cutie pies to do? Fortunately, John was wearing some really cute little shoes that utterly undermined everything else he had going on. Probably, he was just trying to set Bryan and Hunter at ease. Good thing he did because John Durant was leading them into the kind of territory that constitutes thoughtcrime in the Blue Echo Chamber. Fortunately, as Mixed Mental Artists, Bryan and Hunter fear no idea. They take it all in stride and they welcome intellectual diversity. They like idea sex. And let me tell you these three dudes had some serious idea sex. And it totally wasn't gay at all. 'Cause it's idea sex. You can just come all up in another person's brain and it's not gay; it's not straight; it's not going to give you an STD. The only thing you're gonna catch is some wisdom…and nothing is going to get rid of it. And that's why idea sex is the best. It doesn't matter who you are or where you come from. It doesn't matter what your political affiliation. We mix all those ideas up and we all come away with better ideas. And that's what the Mixed Mental Arts dojo is all about. Anyone is welcome. Bring your ideas. We test each other's ideas and we all make our ideas better in the process. Let's grapple with the issues of our day. Oh yeah! Featured Links The Paleo Manifesto Guest Links WEBSITE: http://huntergatherer.com/ TWITTER: https://twitter.com/johndurant Guest Promotions The Paleo Manifesto

I'd strongly recommend viewing this episode and episode 226 with Peter Schiff as an exercise in contrast. I didn't design it this way but it worked out that way. Here you have two individuals who both are saying that they care about American democracy and yet their behavior and approach couldn't be more different. In fact, this interview goes a long way to answering why. Yascha Mounk is Jewish and grew up in post-war Germany. When you have that kind of experience, you know firsthand just how fragile democracy and economics are and how carefully they must be guarded. There is no room for complacency or arrogance or behaving in any way that might put your own narrow, selfishness at odds with the health of the system. Instead, you try to figure out ways that your personal desires for profit and success can align with the larger goals of the health of the system. I'm sure Yascha wants a nice house or apartment and a nice car. I certainly do. But when you've been to places like Libya like I have or when the hellscape of World War II and the Holocaust are vivid in your mind like Yascha, then you just aren't going to risk destroying the system that makes your present prosperity possible. However, as Yascha found out and as The New York Times reported in its article "How Stable Are Democracies? 'Warning Signs Are Flashing Red'" that has become less real for most people in the West. Yascha found that roughly 75% of people born in the 1930s in America believed it was important to live in a democracy but only 25% of people born in the 1980s believed that it was important to live in a democracy. This is why history repeats itself. People get lazy, complacent and forget why a society in which the power of leaders is checked by the people is so important. And you end up with people like our previous guest, Peter Schiff. It may not seem fair to single out Peter Schiff. It's not. Peter is just one among many voices. And that is the point. That's all a democracy is. It's the collective intelligence of the crowd. And if your crowd is full of people like Yascha Mounk then you respect the problem enough to be constantly trying to figure out what you're missing. And if your crowd is full of people like Peter Schiff then you relentlessly self-promote and figure out how to make money without really wondering if your worldview might be part of destabilizing America AND you convince yourself that you are part of saving your country even as you drive the dysfunction that will ultimately tear it apart. Everybody thinks they're part of the solution and, yet, we have all these problems. That you think you're one of the good guys and can spot the idiocy of others doesn't tell you that you're one of the good guys; it tells you that you're human. That's how humans think. Actually serving your country and humanity requires relentlessly looking for holes in your own thinking because you have a constructive paranoia that you might end up in a Holocaust-type situation or that yours might be the generation that rather than moving democracy and human progress forward destroys it. You're always wondering "what am I missing?" Yascha does that and so he's open to new ideas. Peter bloviates, self-promotes, shills his products and finds the fault in Wall Street but can't see the log in his own. It's a perfect exercise in contrast. I actually didn't set Peter Schiff up. A listener did without asking me. We've corresponded for a while. Throughout the election, he made light of my concerns about Russia and undermined my own limited attempts to have a conversation about Russia on Facebook. Then, after the election, he finally read about Russia and realized he was wrong. When I tried to hold him accountable, he said I was acting like he'd killed someone. Trolling was fun he said. And he was just one voice. That's how democracies are killed. They're killed by indifference, complacency, the promotion of foolish ideologies that line your pockets and by not bothering to inform yourself about potential threats to that democracy. They're killed because of Hanlon's Razor. Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. Stupidity is a choice. It's a choice to not listen, not take personal responsibility and to revel in a certain self-righteous self-satisfaction. It's the sum total of a lot of people trolling for fun and not thinking about the effects of millions of people doing that. In the end, if a democracy gets killed, all the people will have its blood on their hands. Anyone who wants to join us in helping improve humanity's thinking is welcome but Mixed Mental Arts is a discipline with standards. We challenge each other. We hold our beliefs accountable to reality. We do everything we can to transcend our obliviousness. And we recognize that all actions have consequences. Our brains enable us to think them through. It requires behaving like a grown up to take responsibility for doing that.

One of the major challenges of our age is that there are a lot of words everyone uses as if we're all talking about the same thing but actually mean entirely different things. Case in point: "capitalism" gets thrown around a lot but it means something totally different to the Chicago School of Economists, Behavioral Economists, the Austrian School of Economics and to Adam Smith. Today, Hunter interviews Peter Schiff one of the most prominent voices in the libertarian movement, a word that has so many different meanings that it's hard to criticize as a whole. We can, however, look at what one man believes in this interview. What and how does Peter Schiff think? Well, I've got to say that I don't think that Peter Schiff's worldview makes much sense either internally, with what we know about human thinking, the historical record or what Adam Smith and America's Founding Fathers taught. In short, I don't think the cargo cult Peter Schiff is proposing will deliver prosperity for humanity. It will, however, deliver prosperity for him. In any evolutionary system, parasitism will emerge as a strategy and the same is true in human societies. You can create a following peddling a plausible-sounding worldview and then extract both money and political power from your followers. Usually, people think of this behavior only in terms of religion but, in fact, you can do it any arena. It applies to self-help. It applies to financial advice. It applies to political promises that gain you power but are so out of touch with reality that they have no chance of delivering your followers prosperity. So, let's look at what I took away from this. Firstly, there's where Peter and I agree. Wall Street has severe problems. It has lost touch with capitalism and confused self-interest with short-term greed that will line the pockets of bankers while destabilizing society as a whole. And I'm quite sure that Peter can help his followers make money by shorting the market. However, in that sense, he is little different from the people he criticizes. He profits while potentially destroying the system that allows him to profit. America's Founding Fathers believed in checks and balances. Nowhere is this laid out more clearly than in Federalist Paper 51 where James Madison writes "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." The key lies in setting the ambitions of men against each other. You make people compete and check each other's behavior. In the same way, the free market is not about a free for all. As Adam Smith, Capitalism's Founding Father wrote, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." And one of the things that merchants of drugs or ideas like Peter will do if left to their own devices is peddle things that enrich themselves while harming the people to whom they sell. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. As I mention in this podcast, one of the reasons why the FDA was given increased powers was because of the case of Eben Byers. At the time, one of many patent/quack medicines was Radithor. It was water filled with radium. People drank radioactive water which was marketed as "Perpetual Sunshine." Eben Byers' doctor prescribed it to him (in part because he was getting kickbacks) and Eben Byers ended up becoming riddled with cancer and with holes forming in his skull. He became so radioactive that he had to be buried in a lead-lined coffin. As The Wall Street Journal titled an article about his death ""The Radium Water Worked Fine until His Jaw Came Off." Now, Peter Schiff had never heard of this story. As far as I can tell, he never bothered to try and understand why the FDA or any other government bureaucracy was founded. As I explained to him, I understand that too much government regulation is a problem. That's why I brought Luigi Zingales on to talk about A Capitalism for the People. It's also why I'm such a huge fan of Hernando DeSoto's Other Path. However, I don't know that no government regulation is the answer because that is simply removing the checks and balances. Further on in Federalist 51, James Madison pretty much nails it: "The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has

America's two political parties can't seem to solve their problems or figure out how to talk to each other and that's going to make for a lot of awfully awkward Thanksgivings. Fortunately, there's a group of people who know how to understand both sides and understand what each culture gets right and what each culture gets wrong. You are part of that group of people. You are Mixed Mental Artists. You are mankind's last, best hope. Can you handle the pressure? Can you? Well, you're going to have to because humanity needs you. So, let's get into the dojo so we can train and shatter the echo chambers that have built up around each culture. In the red corner, we have the conservatives weighing at 300 pounds. On their side, they have a willingness to talk about culture mattering and helping determine success and they have a love and respect for the Founding Fathers. In the blue corner, we have the liberals weighing in at 150 pounds soaking wet. On their side, they have a dominance of the media and academia but a lack of familiarity with what the science actually says. They also are so focused on where the Founding Fathers didn't fully live their principles that they have a hard time seeing all the things they got right like the profound benefits of a culture founded on the idea that you could learn anything from books. Who will win in a fight? We don't know. Who cares? Because it's much more interesting to watch them fuck. Not with their genitals although at this point there's so much tension in the air the sex would be amazing. No, we want them to fuck with their minds. It's time to get it on. Aw yeah! Let's have some blue-red idea sex and make beautiful purple babies. You're welcome, America. And the world. While you're over there fighting, we're over her fucking…with ideas. Yeah, baby. Idea sex. The kind of sex where you don't catch STDs. The only thing you catch is wisdom. Let's make that shit contagious!

For regular listeners of the show or readers of the accompanying blog at mixedmentalarts.club, you know that power rests on mystery. That is how you eliminate the possibility of being held accountable. Fortunately, there are decent people in the corridors of power and periodically they get so fed up that they decide to pull back the curtain and let the people see that there is no Wizard. There is just a man pulling some levers. What is he up to? And is he using his power in the interests of the people or is he abusing his power to puff himself up. Well, it's not for us to say, because that's not what science is about. But when you read Cathy's book, you realize that sometimes that data is being used to make people's lives better and sometimes it's not. All math rests on assumptions and if those assumptions are bad assumptions then they can do an awful lot of damage. Math's assumptions can contain all sorts of biases. They can have a liberal bias, a conservative bias, a racial bias, a sexist bias and on and on. Biases like Baskin Robbins ice cream come in 52 Flavors. In addition to laying out a couple of examples of Weapons of Math Destruction (or WMDs), Cathy and I [Hunter] talk about their own experiences leaving the tribe of academia and finding their own way. Science powerfully needs both internal and external accountability in order to make the most progress possible in the least possible time. And that's why Cathy and I [Hunter] will be building a coalition of science writers, scientists and citizens to push for a Scientific Reformation. You deserve to have experts who use their intellectual power responsibly and whose primary focus is on serving you, the citizen. We hope you'll join us and we'll keep pulling back the curtain regardless. As Cathy so neatly puts it, science isn't about taking things on faith or relying on the authority of the establishment. It's about having the evidence presented to you in a clear way so you can form your own conclusions.

"Michael Malice!!!" seems like a fitting title for an episode featuring Michael Malice, because, well, how exciting is it that Michael Malice is on the show? Since Trump's election, Michael Malice is an even bigger deal and we are lucky to even have half an hour of his time. In this episode, we discuss the basic failing of the left's assumptions about other cultures and the personal struggles Michael Malice goes through as a recovering Russian. If you're interested, you can learn more about how you can most productively learn to use optimism and pessimism at http://www.mixedmentalarts.club/single-post/2016/10/07/Optimism-and-Pessimism.

Awww, yeah! Dacher Keltner is back, ladies and gents, and we're going to talk all about power, which seems like a really relevant topic after the election of Donald Trump. Here in California (or as my grandfather describes it the land of fruits and nuts) there's a lot of fear about Donald Trump abusing power. However, Mixed Mental Artists don't just buy into the narratives of one culture, they roam across cultures so other people can help them see the logs in their own eye…and so there's another type of abuse of power at work that it's awful hard for liberals to see: the abuse of intellectual power. A long time ago, Lord Acton said "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Dacher has studied this phenomenon experimentally and improved on that understanding finding that power makes people more impulsive and less empathetic. In one of the all-time great experiments of human psychology, Dacher and his colleagues watched cars at an intersection and recorded which makes and models stopped for pedestrians and which zoomed through. Guess who was super impulsive and less empathetic? People driving luxury cars. And this is why I drive a dinged up 2005 Ford Escape. It's because I want to keep my empathy super high. :) And because this problem of power affects all people it has led to the intellectual abuse of power by experts. In this episode, Dacher and Hunter talk about the intellectual abuse of power by Hunter's old boss, Jim Watson, co-discoverer of the Double Helix of DNA. There is, however, much more than that and I [Hunter] am pulling back the curtain on all of it. I'm going full Toto so you can see that there are no Wizards just a man pulling some levers. You can read about those abuses of power in economics and how my own tribe of scientists helped undermine American democracy by damaging your faith in your intelligence. There are emotionally difficult conversations ahead for all of us and it's time we had them. Featured Links An Apology From Science for Undermining American Democracy Economists' Dirty Little Secret: Greed Was Never Good for Society Guest Promotions The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence

Robb Willer has the best twitter handle of any academic ever: @GhostFaceWiller. Yes, he's a Professor of Sociology and Psychology and Business at Stanford...but he also has an amazing twitter handle. All of these things matter. What's most important? That's not for me to say. I think that really the whole is greater than the sum of any of these parts. As the Germans say, it's the gestalt of Robb Willer that makes him especially cool. He's also done some incredibly cool studies. He darkens Obama's face to see if that makes white folk more anxious. He studies how testosterone affects people's tendency to react to potential perceived threats to their masculinity. And, most awesomely, he studies how the work of Jon Haidt can be applied to help groups be better at recruiting people from different tribes/cultures/cults/political parties/religions to their point of view. Of course, one of the big questions for the college-educated crowd is what is up with Trump's supporters. Part of that story is racism. But a big part of that story is also the Hillbilly Honor Culture that has been passed down for ages from the Scots-Irish. It's a culture that made sense in a herding context. It's not a culture that serves the needs of people in the Information Age. That's not a comfortable thing for humanity to talk about but that's the moment in history we've reached. It's time we became more reflective and each took a look at what we've picked up from our families and why. The science is all there. Now, it's time to put it all together. It's time for Mixed Mental Arts.

When Canada began passing laws that limited what Professor Peterson could say in the name of political correctness, he felt compelled to speak out. And so, in three YouTube videos, he laid out his case for why he would not be complying with the law…in the most reasonable and Canadian way possible. Professor Peterson is a practicing and research psychologist at the University of Toronto and like countless other campuses the University of Toronto has become a place full of people who are going full Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. In fact, a tiny fraction of individuals have decided that there aren't just two gender identities or even three but up to seventy...and they all have different pronouns they want to be addressed by. The reality is that any policy or set of behaviors comes at a cost. Competing goods must be weighed against each other. Words are tools for communication and having seventy sets of pronouns makes communication clumsy. What's more important? Protecting the weak is great but setting off a witch hunt that potentially takes psychologists like Jordan B. Peterson out of working with patients does potentially greater harm. Which is more important? In practice though, the behavior on college campuses is just as listener @TWestGate put it the ouroboros. It is the snake eating its own tail. What is the final result of an academic culture that believes in human reason and is massively atomistic? It's a culture so obsessed with individuality that any weird thought that wanders across a person's brain has to be treated seriously, especially when the person is claiming historical oppression. The sad truth is that Social Justice Warriors aren't bad students. They're great students who have just taken academia's cultural biases to the end of the line. Everyone is now a special snowflake and any claim you make about yourself has to be treated seriously. In the end though, there is further insanity coming such as otherkin. These are humans who believe they're not humans. Instead, they believe they are vampires or werewolves or fairies or wolf-dog hybrids. These even more special individuals want their unique identity recognized too!!! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the snake is eating its own tail. At a certain point though, it just becomes too much. People like Jordan B Peterson can't put up with it anymore. As Bryan points out, alumni are refusing to donate. And, increasingly, people are wondering why anyone would pay $120,000 and spend four years to be surrounded by thinking that is, frankly, garbage.

For the last couple of months, I (Hunter) have been talking about The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace. Why? Because Rob Peace's story is what happens when you have a culture that does not take culture, tribe and emotion seriously. Rob Peace was an African-American kid who grew up in a rough part of Newark, New Jersey. His mom worked hard and paid to send him to a prep school. His dad helped him with his homework whenever he could and through tenacity and hard work he not only got into Yale but a wealthy, white benefactor paid for his entire college tuition. Once at Yale, Rob graduated with a degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry. And yet, after graduation, Rob didn't go to medical school or Wall Street or politics. Instead, Rob drifted back to Newark where he taught school for a little while and then drifted into a life of dealing drugs. By the age of 30, this brilliant man was dead in a drug shoot out. Rob was a man caught between two worlds. By the age of 10, Rob's father was in jail for a double homicide connected with drug dealing. And for all his community celebrated his educational success, he often had to downplay it and hide it in order not to draw attention. Academically, he was a perfect fit for Yale but culturally he never really belonged. In short, Rob's story is the real-life version of Good Will Hunting if there was no Robin Williams character. Without help dealing with that history that lives within us all, a man full of potential and promise has his life wasted. The book Jeff has written is a eulogy to a friend and a roommate gone before his time. Of course, there are the inevitable questions about why Jeff, a white, suburban kid, gets to write a book about his roommate, a black, urban kid. There are uncomfortable feelings here but the human family isn't going to get anywhere by avoiding these feelings. Instead, we must do what any family must do: talk through them. Fortunately, there's The Bryan Callen Show, a safe space where rather than issuing trigger warnings we just manage our own emotions. It's revolutionary stuff. And not something you'll get at Yale...or Harvard. Guest Information GUEST NAME: Jeff Hobbs GUEST BIO: Jeff Hobbs graduated with a BA in English language and literature from Yale in 2002, where he was awarded the Willets and Meeker prizes for his writing. Hobbs spent three years in New York and Tanzania while working with the African Rainforest Conservancy. He now lives in Los Angeles with his wife. Guest Promotions The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League Hillbilly Elegy A Culture of Honor