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 r

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.

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 @e

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 o

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

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.

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 peo

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

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