Mixed Mental Arts

Michael Malice is has co-written books with MMA legend Matt Hughes, comedian DL Hughley and legendary rocker Brett Michaels and Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il. In this second interview, we explore Michael's worldview. For a list of all of Michael's books, please visit: http://www.michaelmalice.com/books/.

Dr. Thomas E. Woods, Jr. began his life as a neoconservative but came to realize that the two political parties were broadly the same. Dissatisfied with the narrow range of options offered by the Republican and Democratic parties, he embarked on a journey to re-examine for himself our most commonly held assumptions about history, politics, foreign policy and the role of government. In this interview, we focus on just two of his twelve books How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization and Real Dissent: A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion. You can listen to Dr. Woods radio show The Tom Woods Show at http://tomwoods.com. You can follow him on twitter at @ThomasEWoods. All of his books are available through his website and through Amazon.

Although the concept of the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol is an ancient one (think scouts), they only began to be used by the US Army in Vietnam in the latter part of the war. Dropped far behind enemy lines, these five to six man Long Range Patrol teams (often referred to as "Lerps") would be tasked with gathering intel on terrain, water supplies and enemy troop movements. Far from significant American military support, these teams had to blend into the jungle and do everything they could to avoid detection. Adopting many of the same techniques as the insurgents gives those who served in these units a unique perspective on the American War in Vietnam.In today's episode, it is our pleasure to have Jim Seymour on the podcast who completed 54 LRP missions during three years spent in Vietnam. In his book, In the Jungle...: Camping With the Enemy Seymour lays out what he learned from his time deep behind enemy lines, how he survived training and how he learned to deal with the possibility that he might not survive the war. Jim's book is a deeply personal account of a war that still has many lessons to teach us today. Many of those lessons are the same as the lessons laid out by John Nagl in his books and in our interview with him.In the Jungle...: Camping With the Enemy is available on Amazon. We strongly recommend it as a first-person account that strongly complements John Nagl's books and Fiasco.

Matthew E. May spent over eight years as a close advisor to Toyota. During that time he developed an appreciation for the power of elegance. As he explains in this interview, all too often in order to make things better we focus on what we can add. However, many of the most powerful pieces of art and engineering achieve their power by having things removed from them. The iPhone was revolutionary because Steve Jobs removed the keyboard. Matt has written four books on business innovation, including In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing and his latest The Laws of Subtraction: 6 Simple Rules for Winning in the Age of Excess Everything. You can follow him on twitter at @MatthewEMay. All of his books are available on Amazon.

The Institute for Justice has been described (by Hunter and probably others) as the libertarian ACLU. In this interview, Scott Bullock (who joined the Institute for Justice at its founding in 1991 and now serves as a senior attorney) tells us about the cases they're currently fighting and the Institute for Justice's strategy and philosophy. You can follow the Institute for Justice on twitter at @ij.

In the wake of countless scandals at the highest corporate levels, it's easy to think that the key to getting ahead in business is to be a taker, but actually it turns out that the success of Enron execs like Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay are the exception rather than the rule. As Adam Grant, the youngest full professor at Wharton has found, Givers are the most successful…and the least successful people. In his fascinating New York Times Bestseller, Give and Take, Adam takes readers through the latest research on the promise and pitfalls of being both a Giver and a Taker. In this interview, Adam shares not only some of his superb book but also some of the other interesting insights in who make the best leaders. (Hint: it's people who are not men.) Give and Take is available on Amazon, Audible and everywhere else. You can follow Adam Grant on twitter @adamgrant.

After fighting in the first gulf war, John Nagl returned to the United States and took part in a simulated military exercise. As a tank commander, he had all the overwhelming firepower any soldier could hope for…and yet he lost to a group of Alaskan National Guard infantrymen, known as the Nanooks. Nagl's unit was unassailable by any conventional military force but a group of lightly armed troops, defying all the rules of how wars "should" be fought had defeated a much, much stronger force. That failure bothered him so much that he decided to devote the rest of his life to understanding it and making sure it never happened again. During the 90's, the American military trained for the war it wanted to fight: a war just like the first Gulf War. Nagl's experience with the Nanooks had convinced him that no conventional military would ever make the same mistake that Saddam Hussein had made in taking the US Army on head on. Instead, he suspected that the US' major threats would come from small, irregular groups of troops employing hit and run engagements rather than full frontal assaults. Even though it would reduce his chances of rising through the ranks, Nagl convinced the Army to send him to Oxford to study counter-insurgency and figure out how the US could defeat an enemy as irregular as the Nanooks. As he read through the histories and primary sources, he came to realize that what the Nanooks had done was a very old form of warfare. In fact, it was the exact form of warfare used by the Viet Cong in Vietnam. The exact form of warfare that America (focused on the conventional military tactics of World War II) had been unable to defeat. While in traditional war, the goal is to annihilate the enemy this strategy is counter-productive in fighting a counter-insurgency. Counter-insurgency is much more complicated, subtle and time-consuming. It is what T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) described in his book as being like learning to eat soup with a knife. This phrase so inspired Nagl that he made it the title of his own book on the topic, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam.Throughout the 90's and early 2000's, little attention was paid to this book. By the time Nagl deployed to Iraq for the War on Terror, the book was still virtually unknown. However, as America found itself mired in another insurgency, the American military began to realize the vital importance of Nagl's insights. And so, General Petraeus asked Nagl to write the official Army and Marine Field Manual on Counter-Insurgency. In his most recent book, Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice, Lt. Col John A. Nagl (Ret.) tells the story of the incredible revolution in military thinking that he has helped pioneer. If you don't want the terrorists to win, you should read all of John Nagl's books.

Michael Malice is has co-written books with MMA legend Matt Hughes, comedian DL Hughley and legendary rocker Brett Michaels but we brought him on to talk about the celebrity biography of one Kim Jong Il. In Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il, Michael Malice takes you through the life of North Korea's dictator as he would have seen it. All of the weirdness that the Western Media likes to use as comedic fodder, but that is only the reader's way into the book: the real purpose of the book is to bring us face-to-face with the uncomfortable reality of North Korea. In this interview, Michael Malice tells us why he felt compelled the book and gives us a look not just inside the Hermit Kingdom but inside the thoughts and psychology of dictators and the people they oppress. But, as Bryan and Hunter discover, Michael also reveals that he's one interesting dude. So interesting in fact that when Harvey Pekar, creator of the American Splendor comic book series, met Michael in 2003 they ended up talking for hours…and then Harvey realizing that Michael was one of the most creative, unusual, confusing and fascinating people Harvey had ever met…and then Harvey decided to write a book all about Michael. The result is Ego & Hubris: The Michael Malice Story. For a list of all of Michael's books, please visit: http://www.michaelmalice.com/books/.

Hannah Lane describes herself as a human-centered designer and social entrepreneur. Basically that means she designs systems that help make the world a better place. While she began in the health space (specifically focusing on HIV/AIDS in Africa), she is currently working for a for-profit technology company that believes in using the tools it develops to work for social and economic justice all over the world. Most recently, she's been down in Ferguson, MO helping to connect and organize the ongoing movement around the Aug. 9 shooting of Michael Brown. In the last few years, tools like Twitter and Facebook have been used by social movements from the Arab Spring to the Bring Our Girls Back campaign. They have succeeded in channeling and coordinating people's angry enough to do something; the question is what is that something? With a background in psychology and her current work in technology, Hannah Lane has thought deeply about these questions. How far can technology go in changing the world and to what extent are human problems still fundamentally human? You can find out more about Hannah Lane and the continuing work on what happened in Ferguson at www.handsupunited.org and follow Hands Up United at @handsupunited_ Hannah Lane is on twitter at @hannahmlane; Hannah is also a co-founder of Social Impact House which mentors future social entrepreneurs. You can find out more about the accelerator program at www.socialimpacthouse.com and like them on Facebook.

Vanessa Tyson is a Professor of Government at the Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. In this fourth episode of our series of conversations with Vanessa, Bryan is hunting in the woods! So, Hunter and Vanessa take this one alone. And, finally, they get to discuss districting AND campaign finance which makes Hunter very, very happy. You can follow Vanessa on twitter at @vanessactyson. Her book: Twists of Fate: Multiracial Coalitions and Minority Representation in the US House will be coming out in 2015. We'll be buying it and when it does come out, we'll be bringing her back on to discuss that. In the meantime, stay tuned for round of Tyson. Next up: the media.

Barb Oakley may be a Professor of Engineering now but all through high school she was a self-professed math hater. She got a D in geometry…twice. She far preferred to follow her passions for literature and languages than waste her time doing something that seemed worthless. After joining the army, learning fluent Russian and getting a degree in it, she was assigned to work as a communications officer and found herself suddenly surrounded by engineers. She realized that unless she made a serious course correction her opportunities in life were going to be severely limited. So, she decided to follow her non-passion and master mathematics. In her latest book, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Mathematics (even if you flunked Algebra), Barb (as she insists we all call her) lays out the simple techniques that she, top teachers and students have used and that you can use too to master mathematics…or anything. What makes Barb's latest book so interesting is how it fits in with her previous books. While this book heavily explores the individual's power to determine what their brains become, previous books like Evil Genes and Pathological Altruism explore the parts of human nature that are hard-wired within us. In this interview, we further explore the relation of Nature + Nurture and how ideological agendas can distort the fearless investigation of the science. All of Barb's books are available on Amazon. We'll be reading them all and bringing her back on the show. (Huge thanks to David Sloan Wilson for recommending her.) In other news, Barb is starting a Learning How to Learn MOOC this Friday (aka tomorrow) on Coursera. You can find it here: https://www.coursera.org/course/learning. It looks awesome. Just like Barb. Here are the links to the studies Barb mentioned in the show: McCord, Joan. "A Thirty-Year Follow-up of Treatment Effects." American Psychologist 33, no. 3 (1978): 284. And here's the link to the study on the virtually non-existent replication of research in education: Matthew Makel, Jonathan Plucker, "Facts Are More Important Than Novelty: Replication in the Education Sciences," Educational Researcher, August 14, 2014. DOI: 10.3102/0013189X14545513 There's also a very nice popular article discussion of Makel and Plucker's study from Inside Higher Ed: "Failure to Replicate," by Charlie Tyson

Since ISIS captured the attention of the West by beheading foreign journalists, the news media has been obsessed with covering them. Since 9/11, some of the most eye-catching terror-related stories have been about Western muslims who have joined the ranks of international terrorist organizations. That storyline has come to the fore with the coverage of ISIS. In this episode, we ask Justin Gest, assistant professor at George Mason University and author of Apart: Alienated and Engaged Muslims in the West, to give us a sense of what life is like for young Muslim men living in Europe and to give us a sense of why these young men turn to terror and what society as a whole can do to engage them in Western society so they aren't driven to want to tear it down.Apart: Alienated and Engaged Muslims in the West is available on Amazon. Visit Justin Gest online

Caitlin Doughty thinks an awful lot about death. In fact, she's been doing it for years and that's what lead her to become a mortician. In Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, Doughty describes how being constantly faced with death (far from making her morbid) has actually helped bring her emotions back to life. While in former centuries we were constantly faced with the dead, today the dead have been quietly removed from public view. The result is a culture of death denial that is out of touch with reality. Until you accept death, it's hard to really appreciate just how rare and special every moment of life is. After reading Doughty's book and hearing her talk, you might want to go work in a crematory for a little while too. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is available on Amazon. You can follow her on twitter at @TheGoodDeath.

Vanessa Tyson is a Professor of Government at the Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. In this third episode of our series of conversations with Vanessa, Bryan booked a TV job! So, Hunter and Vanessa take this one alone. They try to discuss districting but don't quite make it there. Instead, they discuss a day in the life of a congressperson and ways in which we have failed to live up to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. You can follow Vanessa on twitter at @vanessactyson. Her book Twists of Fate: Multiracial Coalitions and Minority Representation in the US House will be coming out in 2015. We'll be buying it and when it does come out, we'll be bringing her back on to discuss that. In the meantime, stay tuned for the next round of Tyson.

As a Professor at Yale, William Deresiewicz became concerned by what had happened to America's education. More than anything, he found that rather than turning out leaders was turning out a bunch of mindless followers. In his book, Excellent Sheep Deresiewicz lays out how the nation's best universities are miseducating our youth to be so obsessed with achieving success at all costs that we end up with politicians and business leaders who are selfish and complacent. You can find Excellent Sheep on Amazon. You can follow Professor Deresiewicz on twitter at @WDeresiewicz. If you reach out to him, he asks that you call him Bill.

Robert D. Kaplan is the author of fifteen books on foreign policy and international affairs. He is Chief Geopolitical Analyst for Stratfor, a private intelligence firm. He is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C., and has been a foreign correspondent for The Atlantic for over a quarter-century. In 2011 and 2012, Kaplan was chosen by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the world's "Top 100 Global Thinkers." In this interview, we discuss with him his recent article Terrorism as Theater (http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/terrorism-theater) and explore how terrorists are taking advantage of the media age and how by getting enraged we are playing right into their hands. You can follow Mr. Kaplan on twitter @robertdkaplan. His most recent books include Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific and The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us about Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate.

Vanessa Tyson is a Professor of Government at the Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. In this second episode of our series of conversations with Vanessa, we discuss the role that education has to play in creating a citizenry capable of demanding elected officials worthy of our country. Vanessa also explains the process of making a law and how campaign finance affects us all. You can follow Vanessa on twitter at @vanessactyson.Modestly, she hadn't mentioned until now that she has a book coming out in 2015: Twists of Fate: Multiracial Coalitions and Minority Representation in the US House. We'll be buying it and when it does come out, we'll be bringing her back on to discuss that. In the meantime, stay tuned for the next round of Tyson.

When Euny Hong moved to South Korea in 1985, it was by her own description not a wealthy country and yet now it's one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. We know how Euny grew up over the last three decades (the natural human growth process) but how did Korea do it? And why does one Korean leader believe that pop culture is the country's best weapon against North Korea? In her incredibly fun book, The Birth of Korean Cool, Euny Hong uses fun anecdotes and cultural tidbits to show us not just what makes Korean Culture tick but a practical demonstration of the Soft Power that Professor Joseph Nye was talking about. You don't need to nuke North Korea out of existence, you can make them disappear with a pop culture invasion.The Birth of Korean Cool is available from all good booksellers. You can follow Euny Hong on twitter at @Euny.

The world seems fascinated with the possibility of an apocalypse. Zombies, mutant viruses, a giant meteorite impact, alien invasions…the point is the same. If everything fell apart, how would we cope and would we survive. Lewis Dartnell's book begins from the premise that we would. Human beings have always shown tremendous resourcefulness and ingenuity. His question is after the dust has settled how do we rebuild our civilization as quickly as possible? In his book The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, Dartnell shows us much more than how to rebuild our civilization; he shows us how we built it in the first place. Part history of technology and part tribute to human ingenuity, The Knowledge is highly enjoyable way to learn things that are vital but which in anybody else's hands wouldn't be nearly as much fun. There's loads more available on the book's website: http://the-knowledge.org You can also get the book directly from: http://georiot.co/Hardback or by going to Amazon. His personal website is www.lewisdartnell.com and his twitter handle is @lewis_dartnell.

A year ago, we interviewed Jim Rickards about his book Currency Wars which examined how money could be used as a weapon between nations. In his most recent book, The Death of Money, Rickards examines the far greater internal threat by governments recklessly printing money to solve short-term financial crises. Through a maze of jargon like IMF, quantitative easing and terms so complicated I can't even remember them right now, financial technocrats have obscured what they are doing and convinced themselves that they have the situation under control just as they used complex mathematics to convince themselves that housing prices could never go down. It's a pleasure to have Jim Rickards on the show again. Both Currency Wars and The Death of Money are available on Amazon and Audible. You can visit Jim on the web at http://www.jamesrickardsproject.com/ and follow him on twitter at @jamesgrickards.

Darwin had a problem with bees. Understanding how evolution might work at the level of individuals was easy. Have an individual whose genes give them an advantage in resisting disease or avoiding predators and on average they will breed more and pass on more of their genes to the next generation. But bees and other social insects weren't so easy. Kamikaze-like, bees will dive in and sting you, their barbs getting stuck in you and die to save the hive. Of course, when a human being sacrifices their life to save their child, that's easy enough for evolution to explain. By sacrificing your life for your child, you are helping to ensure that your genes are passed on. But the bee that stings you at a picnic, can't have children because those bees are sterile. In the Origin of Species, Darwin referred to sterile subgroups as the "one special difficulty, which at first appeared to me insuperable, and actually fatal to my theory." Nowadays, evolutionary biologists have no problem providing an explanation for this behavior. In fact, the problem is that they have two competing explanations with explanations not just for bees but for how evolution makes sense of religion. Biologists like Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne argue that the bee gives its life because by defending the hive it is helping to pass on the genes of its closely related hive mates. They deny that natural selection can operate at the level of groups and so large human social organizations (like religion) have no function. Biologists like EO Wilson and today's guest David Sloan Wilson argue that selection can happen not only at the level of individuals but also at the level of groups. If that's the case, then our groupishness (including religion) are useful. As you can imagine, the idea that religion could be on balance or even sometimes useful is something that people like Dawkins take issue with. The consequences of this rift are beautifully summed up in Jon Haidt's Righteous Mind: "To Dennett and Dawkins, religions are sets of memes that have undergone Darwinian selection. Like biological traits, religions are heritable, they mutate, and there is selection among these mutations. The selection occurs not on the basis of the benefits religions confer upon individuals or groups but on the basis of their ability to survive and reproduce themselves. Some religions are better than others at hijacking the human mind, burrowing in deeply, and then getting themselves transmitted to the next generation of host minds. Dennett opens Breaking the Spell with the story of a tiny parasite that commandeers the brains of ants, causing them to climb to the tops of blades of grass, where they can more easily be eaten by grazing animals. The behavior is suicide for the ant, but it's adaptive for the parasite, which requires the digestive system of a ruminant to reproduce itself. Dennett proposes that religions survive because , like those parasites, they make their hosts do things that are bad for themselves (e.g., suicide bombing) but good for the parasite (e.g., Islam). Dawkins similarly describes religions as viruses. Just as a cold virus makes its host sneeze to spread itself, successful religions make their hosts expend precious resources to spread the "infection." These analogies have clear implications for social change. If religion is a virus or a parasite that exploits a set of cognitive by-products for its benefit, not ours, then we ought to rid ourselves of it. Scientists , humanists, and the small number of others who have escaped infection and are still able to reason must work together to break the spell, lift the delusion, and bring about the end of faith." To be clear, Professor Wilson is not saying that religion is here to stay. He is saying that our tendency towards groupishness (including religion) is an outcome of evolution and that in thinking about religion we have to recognize that. Once you understand that perspective, you begin to see how science and religion can finally start talking to each other. Professor Wilson is president of the Evolution Institute (http://evolution-institute.org ) and SUNY Distinguished Professor at Binghamton University. His books include Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way we Think About Our Lives, and The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time. His next book, titled Does Altruism Exist? will be published in 2015 by Yale University Press. The Books Professor Wilson mentioned were Complexity and the art of public policy by David Colander and Roland Kupers, Give and Take by Adam Grant and Evil Genes by Barbara Oakley.

Vanessa Tyson is a Professor of Government at the Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. In this episode, Vanessa, Bryan and Hunter discuss various aspects of government, what is wrong with it and what can be done to fix it. This is the first part in a series. You can follow Professor Tyson on twitter at @vanessactyson.

Dave Goldberg works on issues in theoretical cosmology. He also writes books that make physics accessible to the general public including the subject of today's interview: The Universe in the Rearview Mirror: How Hidden Symmetries Shape Reality. In this interview, Professor Goldberg (or Dave) explains some of the ideas covered inside the book and discusses why the sort of physics he's talking about matters so much. His first book (co-written with Jeff Blomquist) is A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertainty. You can follow him on twitter at @askaphysicist. Be sure to rate and comment in iTunes. Also, you can find the show on Stitcher.

In a recent survey of internatinal relations scholars, Professor Nye was ranked as the most influential scholar on American foreign policy, and in 2011, Foreign Policy named him one of the top 100 Global Thinkers. If you've ever heard the term "soft power" then you're familiar with Professor Nye's work. A University Distinguished Service Professor, and former Dean of the Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Professor Nye joins us today to discuss how foreign policy is formed, how it should be formed and why voters must involve themselves in understanding foreign policy if they are going to get better foreign policy from their officials. You can follow him on twitter @Joe_Nye. He is the author of the following books:Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era (Princeton University Press, 2013)The Future of Power (PublicAffairs, 2011)The Powers to Lead (Oxford University Press, 2008)The Power Game: A Washington Novel (Public Affairs, 2004)Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (PublicAffairs, 2004)Power in the Global Information Age: From Realism to Globalization (Routledge, 2004)The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go it Alone (Oxford University Press, 2002)Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History, 7th ed. (Longman, 2008)Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, (Basic Books, 1990)Nuclear Ethics (The Free Press, 1986)Hawks, Doves and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear War, co-authored with Graham Allison and Albert Carnesale (Norton, 1985)Living with Nuclear Weapons. A Report by the Harvard Nuclear Study Group (Harvard University Press, 1983)Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition, co-authored with Robert O. Keohane (Little Brown and Company, 1977; Longman, 2000)Peace in Parts: Integration and Conflict in Regional Organization (Little Brown and Company, 1971)Pan Africanism and East African Integration (Harvard University Press, 1965)

Dr. Wendy Chen is an assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an oncologist affiliated with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital. Initially, we contacted Dr. Chen because we'd read an article she'd co-written in The New York Times about the beneficial effects of aspirin on cancer. Then, we looked at the rest of her publication record and realized she was perfectly positioned to tell us about the effects of everything from red meat to alcohol in preventing and treating cancer. In this episode, we cover all of that but more fundamentally Dr. Chen helps us figure out how to tell credible scientific claims from claims that don't have solid science to back them up. It turns out we couldn't have asked for a better tour guide through the issues. It's a real pleasure to have Dr. Chen on the show. You can read that New York Times article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/20/opinion/a-cancer-treatment-in-your-medicine-cabinet.html?_r=0.

Aubrey De Grey is fighting the deadliest cause of death in the world. It kills two thirds of all people, far more than all other forms of death combined, and yet very little attention is given to curing it or solving it. That's because unlike malaria or cancer or car accidents, people believe that aging is natural. This belief, which Dr. De Grey refers to as the pro-aging trance is the real barrier to combatting aging. In this episode, we focus on Dr. De Grey's book, Ending Aging. Previously a researcher in the field of Artificial Intelligence, Dr. De Grey brings a unique perspective to the problem of aging. He approaches it as an engineering problem and in his book lays out the seven basic engineering problems that need to be solved in order to bring about the slowing and reversal of aging. In particular, we take a close look at the problem of mutations in mitochondrial DNA and how engineering can overcome this challenge. If you want to end aging, you can donate money to Dr. De Grey's foundation http://sens.org/donate. It might be the best gift you can give your future self. Ending Aging is available on Amazon. You can follow Dr. De Grey on twitter at @aubreydegrey. By the end of this episode, we'll be sure you're convinced as we are that the biggest barriers to ending aging are not technological, they're psychological.

The last time we had Spiros Michalakis on. We knew we needed to get him back on asap. Partly, because we got such amazing feedback from the community of listeners and partly because we were so busy having our minds blown by the idea that time may not really be a thing that we barely got to scratch the surface. In fact, we were so impatient to get Spiros back on the show that we couldn't even wait for a time when Bryan, Hunter and Spiros could all be together. In this episode, Spiros and Hunter go deeper into the ideas behind quantum mechanics and Spiros' work. There'll definitely be another interview because it turns out that quantum mechanics takes more than two one-hour interviews to crack. You can follow Spiros at @quantum_spiros. The Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech has a blog with more on their work: quantumfrontiers.com. The institute's website is iqim.caltech.edu. Spiros hasn't written a book yet. We think he should. Tweet him to that effect.

While Ben Dyson has argued that we need to take the power to create money out of the hands of bankers and put it entirely in the hands of government (you can here that episode here) Detlev Schlichter goes further arguing that the power to create money should not be given to any group. As he lays out in his book Paper Money Collapse, since time immemorial governments in times of war or other trouble have always created more money. In the Ancient world that meant shaving down coins and diluting the amount of gold or silver in them. In the Civil War that meant printing more and more paper currency. The result was simple: a loss of faith in the currency. In Ancient Rome as the silver denarius dropped in silver content, trade began to dry up and this destruction of the money supply by emperors may well be one of the reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire. Today, governments are not only printing more money to solve short-term crisis; they're doing it as a long-term strategy. Whereas historically, countries always returned to some sort of gold-backing for their currency since the 1970s the amount of currency in the system has been determined by nothing but the decision of governments. They can print as much money as they want. That Detlev Schlichter argues is too great a power for any government to have. In the desire to be re-elected parties have an incentive to buy their way out of problems by flooding the system with cash. This model of money which Schlichter refers to as elastic money (because governments and banks can expand the amount of money limitlessly) is nearly absolute financial power and has the power to make even the most decent elected or appointed official behave recklessly. In our complex modern system, it can seem like an inelastic money supply like the gold standard is massively out of date but when you listen to Schlichter explain it in his book and in this podcast a return to an inelastic money supply shouldn't be of any one time; it should be of every time because avoiding excessive concentrations of political or economic power is the purpose of democracy and the free market. Governments and banks have granted themselves the monopoly on money creation. That's bad for everyone in the long-run. Detlev became an independent economist, market commentator and investment strategist after a 19-year career in international financial markets as a trader and portfolio manager, including stints at J. P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch, and Western Asset Management. His book, Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money, is now entering its second edition. It is available everywhere. You can follow him on twitter @DSchlichter and at http://detlevschlichter.com/. Be sure to rate and comment in iTunes. Also, you can find the show on Stitcher.

Daron Acemoglu is the co-author of one of Hunter's five favorite books of all time, the incomparably brilliant Why Nations Fail in 2012. In a previous podcast, it was our pleasure to host Jared Diamond, whose masterpiece Guns, Germs and Steel looks at how access to different species is at the root of the world's modern prosperity and poverty. Why Nations Fail attacks the same issue but from a different perspective, the perspective of institutions. In their book, Acemoglu and Robinson argue that the true roots of prosperity are politically and economically inclusive institutions like democracy and free markets which allow the ideas of many minds to compete. As the United States flounders under a massive debt and Europe faces its own woes, it's easy to think that the politically uninclusive countries of Asia like China and Singapore offer significant benefits. However, in this interview, Acemoglu warns that the type of growth they produce is not sustainable and cannot generate innovation. It is an utter treat to have Daron Acemoglu on today's podcast. Bryan and Hunter both strongly recommend everyone in the world read Why Nations Fail. It's better than every cat video on YouTube put together! Website: whynationsfail.com Twitter: @whynationsfail Book: Why Nations Fail Origins Prosperity

Freeway Rick Ross came from nothing and started a business that grossed nearly a billion dollars and spanned forty-two cities. The problem is that the business was illegal. After his inability to read cost him any possibility of going to college on a tennis scholarship, Rick Ross began selling drugs. In his first book and autobiography, he details how from a small initial stake he built a massive drug empire that Esquire magazine recently estimated had revenues of $2.5 billion in today's dollars. His empire was founded on a single drug, one which he is often credited with popularizing: crack.In this interview, Rick discusses the African-American experience and where he is taking his life from both as an author and a music producer. Joining us in the studio is one of his artists, Tp9. The show opens with one of her latest songs.

While serving as the Director of Mental Training for the St Louis Cardinals, Dr. Jason Selk helped the team win their first World Series in over 20 years, and in 2011 he assisted the Cardinals in the historic feat of winning their second World Championship in a six year period. Dr. Selk is a regular contributor to Forbes, ABC, CBS, ESPN, and NBC radio and television and has been featured in USA Today, CNBC, Men's Health, Muscle and Fitness, Shape and Self Magazine. Dr Selk's second book, Executive Toughness, is a best-selling business book and his first book, 10-Minute Toughness, is on pace to be one of the best-selling sport psychology books of all time.Dr. Selk is considered to be one of the premier performance coaches in the United States. He helps numerous well- known professional and Olympic athletes as well as Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 executives and organizations develop the mental toughness necessary for high-level success.Dr. Selk utilizes his in-depth knowledge and experience of working with the world's finest athletes, coaches and business leaders to help individuals and organizations outperform their competition. Dr. Selk works with such clients as professional athletes in the NFL, NHL, NBA, PGA, LPGA, MLB and NASCAR. In addition, he works with such business clients as UBS Financial, Edward Jones, Wells Fargo, Northwestern Mutual and Enterprise Holdings, to name a few.Be sure to rate and comment in iTunes. Also, you can find the show on Stitcher.

Carol Dweck had a simple question she wanted answered: why did some people take failure so personally while others seemed to thrive on it? Beginning her work with students, she realized that the key difference was in how students thought about their intelligence. Some students thought their intelligence was an in-born quality. They believed that no matter how much they practiced they could only take their intelligence so far. For these students, failures were devastating because they said something about the student's basic ability. Since failure was such an unpleasant experience they avoided challenges that might lead to failure. Their mindset (which Professor Dweck refers to as "fixed) affected every one of their choices in school. On the other hand, students with what Professor Dweck calls a growth mindset did not view mistakes as a set to their basic value. They could fail, learn and get better. The result was that they sought out challenges and continued to grow.In the last few decades, Professor Dweck's research has been taken to fields far beyond education and the power of a growth mindset in business, in relationships and in parenting. Of course, the idea of a growth mindset runs counter to many of America's prevailing notions about ability. While people with fixed mindsets pay lip service to the idea that practice makes perfect, their actions reveal a very different story. We have all grown up in what Professor Dweck calls "The Age of IQ" in which it is believed that people have fixed abilities. In this interview, reveals that her life's work is to undo the mischief caused by one man and to restore the growth mindset that is the foundation of the success of American or any other society. Be sure to rate and comment in iTunes. Also, you can find the show on Stitcher.

AJ Jacobs likes to experiment on himself and once he sets himself a challenge will do whatever it takes to meet it. He spent eight hours a day reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. He spent a year trying to be the healthiest man alive. And, most amazingly, he spent an entire year trying to fulfill every commandment of the bible. That's not just the basic ten…he followed the rules about not sitting on a chair used by a menstruating woman, he stoned adulterers (in a way that he couldn't get arrested for) and he found out the real secret behind Ezekiel bread. In this interview, we talk about the many books that have come out of his self-experiments and what they have taught him. We also talk about his latest project to construct a family tree for the entire human family. So far, the largest family tree is 77 million people. AJ's on it and you can be too by visiting globalfamilyreunion.com. He's even hosting a reunion for the entire human family. You're invited. So is his 17th cousin Gwyneth Paltrow and his 18th cousin Olivia Wilde. You're his cousin too. AJ Jacobs is the author of The Year of Living Biblically, Know-it-All, My Life as an Experiment and Drop Dead Healthy. Visit him on the web at http://ajjacobs.com/, follow him on twitter @ajjacobs or like him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ajjacobs. It's the least you can do. He is your cousin after all. Books Year Living Biblically J Jacobs The Know It All Humble Become Smartest My Life as Experiment Jacobs Drop Dead Healthy Humble Perfection

Bryan sits down with his dad, Michael Callen for another installment of the Callen Report. Be sure to rate and comment in iTunes. Also, you can find the show on Stitcher.

As a professor of psychology at UC Berkley and the founding faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, Dacher Keltner studies how we negotiate our relationships with others. After having Robert Greene, the author of The 48 Laws of Power on the show, we came across an article on The Greater Good's website by Keltner refuting the model of power advocated in The 48 Laws of Power. Although the popular culture believes that power is obtained through lying, cheating and manipulation research shows that that Machiavellian approach tends to fail in mainstream American society. In this episode, Professor Keltner tells us exactly what the research shows us about power. How power is acquired? Do manipulators succeed over the long run? How does acquiring power affect people's brains? Interestingly, the sort of power strategies that Machiavelli described do work in societies where trust has been destroyed like the incredibly violent world of 15th Century Italy where Machiavelli wrote. Is it any wonder that some of the people who responded most strongly to the Machiavellian 48 Laws of Power are the rappers and prisoners people whole live in a world where trust is utterly lacking? Fortunately, as violence decreases worldwide and trust and transparency increase, there's less and less room for Machiavellians. The surprising truth is that the way to power is more and more about cooperation and consensus-building. There are many excellent articles available at http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/. You can also follow them @GreaterGoodSC. Professor Keltner is the author of Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life and The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness. Both books are available on Amazon...and everywhere else. Be sure to rate and comment in iTunes. Also, you can find the show on Stitcher.

When he was 19, Ryan Holiday dropped out of college, apprenticed under Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power and Mastery, and asked Dr. Drew for a book recommendation. Dr. Drew's recommendation would be Stoic philosophy, particularly Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Marcus Aurelius (best known as the good emperor from the movie Gladiator) is commonly referred to as Rome's last good emperor. He was also one of the Ancient World's most enduring philosophers. While waging war to hold the Empire together, Aurelius crafted a little book of philosophy specifically for his own use. That book inspired Ryan Holiday's latest book: The Obstacle is The Way. In this episode, Ryan guides us through stoic philosophy and uses modern examples to reconnect with wisdom that is perhaps even more important today than it was in the age of Ancient Rome. You can follow Ryan Holiday on twitter @ryanholiday and read his blog at http://www.ryanholiday.net/. His latest book The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph is available everywhere. Be sure to rate and comment in iTunes. Also, you can find the show on Stitcher.

Craig Nelson is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Rocket Men, as well as Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations (winner of the Henry Adams Prize), The First Heroes, and Let's Get Lost (shortlisted for W.H. Smith's Book of the Year). In this episode, he joins us to discuss his latest book The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Fall of the Atomic Age. Beginning with the first scientific experiments to discover radiation and ending with the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, The Age of Radiance traces the a journey filled with the hope of world of limitless, cheap energy and the terror of imminent armageddon. In today's episode we talk about Chernobyl, Fukushima, the people behind the scientific legends and the origins of the bikini. Craig clearly loves entertaining anecdotes and makes for a fantastic guest. It's a delight to have him on. The Age of Radiance as well as his other books are available everywhere. You can follow him on twitter @Craig_Nelson.

Nearly 25 years ago, before the world wide web even existed, two technologists and one lyricist for the Grateful Dead banded together to form an organization that would defend freedom of speech on the internet. Thus was the EFF born. They brought the case that established that e-mail deserves as much protection as a telephone call and requires government agencies to have a warrant to seize e-mail. It was the EFF that brought the case that established that a piece of software is a form of free speech. Today, the EFF is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. In today's episode Rebecca Jeschke, the EFF's Media Relations Director and a Digital Rights Analyst, joins us on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the Edward Snowden leaks to discuss his case, Bradley/Chelsea Manning, Aaron Swartz, and the podcast patent trolls currently harassing Marc Maron, Adam Corolla and others. You can follow the EFF on twitter at @eff and Rebecca Jeschke at @effraj. For more information on the Electronic Frontier Foundation please visit eff.org. Be sure to rate and comment in iTunes. Also, you can find the show on Stitcher.

In 2011, Coach Bill Courtney was catapulted to national fame when Undefeated, a documentary about his volunteer coaching of the Manassas High Football team, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Manassas, in a poor, African-American part of Memphis, had one of the worst records in the state and yet within a few short years, Courtney was able to turn the team around. Rather than coaching X's and O's, Courtney focused on teaching his players the character and attitude that were the foundation of success in any area of life: the same attitude he brings to his family and his business. Now, Coach shares these timeless principles in his first book Against The Grain: A Coach's Wisdom on Character, Faith, Family and Love. In this interview, the Coach shares with us why he called the book Against The Grain and why he believes these timeless values are so important to rediscover in how we raise our kids, how we conduct our businesses and how we run our government. Be sure to rate and comment in iTunes. Also, you can find the show on Stitcher.

Spiros Michalakis is a quantum physicist at the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech. Drop the mic... I mean…really…Spiros is a quantum physicist at the number 1 program for quantum physics in the US…and probably the world. But Spiros is not your typical quantum physicist. He's the most approachable, down-to-earth and fundamentally accessible quantum physicist you are ever likely to hear speak. In the opinion of this episode write-up writer, Spiros is a superstar waiting for a place to happen. We can't comment on his research though it sounds pretty amazing. (In this episode, he explains to us that there may be no such thing as time. Whaaaat?!?) We can say without doubt that he has an amazing willingness to communicate quantum physics to people who don't know much about it (us) with patience. Seriously, Spiros is the Carl Sagan of Quantum Physics. In this episode, Spiros talks to us about how work on the Theory of Everything is going, what it means and what the consequences of such a theory for the world would be. Then, we run out of time because apparently you can't quite fit the Theory of Everything into one one-hour podcast. We're pretty sure we can do it in two which is why we'll be bringing Spiros back on the show. Bryan has often said that on The Bryan Callen Show you will learn "everything." We may finally make good on that. Well, maybe not. The Theory of Everything, people, will probably not be revealed on The Bryan Callen Show, but you might get a glimpse of what it would look like and how we'd get there from the best damn tour guide to the quantum world there is. You can follow Spiros at @quantum_spiros. The Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech has a blog with more on their work: quantumfrontiers.com. The institute's website is iqim.caltech.edu. Spiros hasn't written a book yet. We think he should. Tweet him to that effect.

Patricia Johnson and Mark Michaels know a lot about sex. In fact, they may know more about it than anybody else on the planet. They write about it; they interview people about it; they've even done it together inside an MRI machine. The result of this research is their fourth book on sex called Partners in Passion: A Guide to Great Sex, Emotional Intimacy and Long-term Love. In this episode, they dispel many of the myths around love, love making and what it takes to have a successful long-term relationship. All four of their books Partners in Passion, Great Sex Made Simple, Tantra for Erotic Empowerment, and The Essence of Tantric Sexuality are available on Amazon. You can find them on the web at http://www.tantrapm.com/index.html. You can find them on twitter @tantrapm. Be sure to rate and comment in iTunes.

Tim Ferriss is the creator of the 4-Hour Series of books. The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef have all become bestsellers and been translated into dozens of languages. In this his third appearance on the show, Bryan and Hunter draw on Tim's encyclopedic knowledge of how to get the most of life. Tim Ferris blogs at http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/. You can follow him on twitter at @tferriss. His books are all available on Amazon. You can listen to his first and second appearance by clicking on the links. Be sure to rate and comment in iTunes.

On April 24th, Martin Wolf of The Financial Times threw his support behind the proposed reforms of a UK-based group called Positive Money. In so doing, he was joining a growing number of financial experts who have identified fractional reserve banking as the reason why our economy experiences so much instability. As Wolf observed, it is illegal for private citizens to print their own money (it's called counterfeiting) and yet it is entirely legal for banks to print money. Most people just don't realize that they're doing it. As Positive Money explains on their website "Currently only 3% of all the money in circulation is created by the Bank of England, the remaining 97% is created by commercial banks, when they make loans." The numbers are comparable for the US or most of the world's economies. Banks, unlike private citizens, have the right to create almost as much money as they want out of thin air. This monopoly (which other parts of the financial industry don't get) is why banks become too big to fail. In short, it's the root of the instability in our economy…and that's just the beginning of the problems it creates. In this episode, Ben Dyson talks us through why this problem exists and what we have to do to fix it. It's a truly mind-blowing episode. For more information, check out positivemoney.org or the book Ben co-wrote Modernising Money: Why Our Current Monetary System is Broken and How it Can Be Fixed. You can find the group on twitter @positivemoneyuk or like them on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/PositiveMoney. Be sure to rate and comment in iTunes.

In 1532, an Italian diplomat and political theorist named Niccolo Machiavelli wrote a book on how best to most effectively acquire and keep power. It was called The Prince. Machiavelli argued that for a ruler "It is much safer to be feared than loved." The idea that power is best achieved through fear, dishonesty and coercion rather than through empathy, honesty and cooperation has been argued about ever since. It's why House of Cards is so popular. It's also why every single one of Robert Greene's books is a bestseller. In particular, his work have been particularly popular with two groups who deal with power acquisition at its most savage: hip hop stars and foreign policy analysts. As 50 Cent (a huge fan of Greene's and his later collaborator on The 50th Law) noted, working as a crack dealer in South Queens could never have prepared him for the viciousness, manipulation and deception of the music industry.

As a regularly-employed writer on TV shows like That 70's Show, How I Met Your Mother, Chuck and The Neighbors, Kristin Newman had two big things going for her: disposable income and months of vacation time. What she didn't have was any particular desire to settle down, get married or start creating tiny humans with her body. So, instead she went traveling. While initially she was focused on the exotic locales pretty soon her trips became about the exotic locals. The world was filled with Israeli bartenders, Finnish poker players, sexy Bedouins, and Argentinean priests she could fall madly in love with… knowing that she had a way out thanks to the plane ticket on the bedside table. She would then return to her much more sensible and generally puritanical life in Los Angeles, where her friends were breeding away. As Kristin's wanderlust transformed into lustful wanderings, she developed a confidence and freedom of spirit that she had always craved and that she began to carry with her everywhere. What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding is definitely a collection of really funny, foreign flings, but for anyone who has ever wondered whether settling down is for them it might be something more than that. It might be the answer to that question. What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding is available everywhere. You can follow Kristin on Twitter at @theotherkristin and on Tumblr at theotherkristin.tumblr.com. Be sure to rate and comment in iTunes.

Bryan sits author and movie maker, Joe Cross. Joe Cross is an Australian entrepreneur, author, filmmaker, and wellness advocate. He is most known for his documentary Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead in which he tells the story of his 60-day juice fast. He is the founder and CEO of Reboot with Joe, a health and lifestyle brand. Following the release of his documentary, Cross has published four books about juicing. In February 2014, Cross released his latest book titled The Reboot with Joe Juice Diet: Lose Weight, Get Healthy and Feel Amazing that became a best-seller. Be sure to rate and comment in iTunes.

John Durant is the author of The Paleo Manifesto and that is exactly what it is. Far from being just another book about the Paleo Diet, John lays out for us why paleo makes sense from an evolutionary, agricultural and historical perspective. There are plenty of books that tell you what to eat; John's is much more powerful because it explores the why's behind how we eat. Why does it makes sense that Jews eat kosher? Why are urban females more likely to become vegan? And why from a biological standpoint is eating like hunter-gatherers so important for our health? Even if you have no interest in changing your diet, The Paleo Manifesto is a fascinating read. And if you are interested in changing your diet but can't seem to stick to a regimen, then Durant's book (by making sense of why Paleo works) will give you the psychological tools to get onboard with the program he advocates. The Paleo Manifesto is available from all good booksellers. You can find John on the web at huntergatherer.com. His twitter account is @johndurant.

After trying to read his kid to sleep one night with little success, writer Adam Mansbach posted as a joke on his Facebook look out for my upcoming children's book Go the Fuck to Sleep. That joke eventually turned into a book and that book ended up being #1 on Amazon. Then, Samuel L. Jackson read the audiobook. In this interview, Adam Mansbach tells us about that experience, discusses parenting and shares with Hunter and Bryan what motivated him to write a novel about graffiti culture in NYC called Rage is Back. When he's not writing children's books with swear words in the title, Adam Mansbach writes really interesting novels. You can find him on the web at adammansbach.com or on twitter at @adammansbach. His books include Go the Fuck to Sleep, the PG version Seriously, Go to Sleep, The Dead Run, Angry Black White Boy, Rage is Back, The End of the Jews, Nature of the Beast, Shackling Water, A Fictional History of the United States (with huge chunks missing) and Genius B-Boy Cynics Getting Weeded In the Garden of Delights. Be sure to rate and comment in iTunes.

Bryan sits down with pornstar and author of "Insatiable: Porn - A Love Story," Asa Akira. She's been in the porn industry for several years and and has been cleaning house at the Adult Video Awards (AVN) for the past 3 years. Plus, she's already in the works with her second book. Follow her on Twitter, twitter.com/AsaAkira.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee are both MIT professors. They also wrote a book together called The Second Machine Age and it's amazing. Over the last few decades, technology has been increasing at an exponential rate. In the 1960s, the creators of Star Trek imagined that centuries in the future there would be a handheld device that would be a communicator, scanner and computer called a tricorder. Turns out it's called an iPhone and it took way less time to develop. Driverless cars exist and are getting better all the time; 3D printing is already in commercial use; robots are doing more and more jobs than ever before. Technologies that seemed like part of a distant future are increasingly a part of our everyday reality. In this book, the two professors go way beyond examining what these technologies are and look at how they are affecting our society already and what we can expect in the next few decades. In this interview, we find out how AI, robotics and nanotechnology will affect business, the distribution of wealth and the search for a job. (We also talk about how likely a Terminator-type scenario is.) Professors Brynjolfsson and McAfee can't tell you how to survive a Zombie Apocalypse; they can give you good advice on how to cope with a much more realistic challenge: the rise of the robots.Their book is available pretty much everywhere because that's how things are in the Second Machine Age. You can follow them on twitter at @erikbryn and @amcafee. Be sure to rate and comment in iTunes.