Mixed Mental Arts

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

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 la

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

"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 f

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 p

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 witc

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 d

In the wake of The Depression and World War II, it's understandable that the focus of North America's agricultural system became producing as many calories as cheaply as possible. And so, competitions were held like the Chicken of Tomorrow contest which aimed to produce chickens that grew more quickly and were in every way better suited to industrial production. The one thing that wasn't a priority was flavor. The result was that even by the 1960s Julia Child was warning that American chickens for all their impressive size were beginning to taste like teddy bear stuffing. This it turns out isn't some trivial concern. In fact, it may be the driving force behind why Americans overeat. Given how much of the human genome is devoted to tasting (with flavor sensors not just in your nose and tongue but also in your gut), it would be incredibly strange if flavor was something trivial. In fact, more of your genome is devoted to flavor than is devoted to your genitals which gives you a sense of just how evolutionarily

Thanks to a suggestion by @ElliotBlair_ on Twitter, Mixed Mental Arts is introducing something new and very exciting. We will now be awarding belts. First up, the white belt which is already live at mixedmentalarts.club. Except, that's not how The Kid rolls. The Kid gets excited and wants to talk about the difference between being a rationalist and an intuitionist…which is definitely green belt-level material. Fortunately, any Mixed Mental Artists knows how to be like water. As Master Bruce Lee said, “You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.” And so, Hunter flows like water into whatever direction the Kid takes the conversation and then channels that energy into breaking down what it means to be an intuitionist. It means accepting your elephant. After hundreds of years of science, we h

In the last few years, ISIS has attracted people who don't feel like they belong in their own society to Syria with the promise that together they're going to rebuild The Caliphate. From the outside, it's pretty understandable. Being part of a revolution is exciting. You're changing the world. You're part of a great cause. And you get to destroy the old society which you feel treated you like crap. Revolutions are like start ups. The problem is that ISIS' startup is trying to make a place filled with rape, slavery, beheading and the sort of anti-scientific attitude that will lead really bad internet speeds. It's terrible really. Fortunately, there's an alternative. If you're feeling dissatisfied with the existing system in anyway, then you can help us in building The Callenphate. All ideas and suggestions are welcome. It's time to take Mixed Mental Arts out on the road and use it to beat up some of the world's toughest problems. There are some similarities but also some important differences between The Calle

The number one book Hunter is getting recommended right now is Tribe by Sebastian Junger. It's an amazing book. Mostly, it's about why US soldiers often have such a hard time reintegrating back into US society. It's pretty easy to understand. You go off to war and you have a group of people who will die for you, who look out for you and who are engaged in a great mission together. And then you come back and there's no sense of shared purpose. In war, people have tribe. In the modern world, most of us don't. And when people don't have tribe, they go looking for it; they try and create it and that's a big part of why you have ISIS. What is it that tribes provide? They help provide food and defense against violent death. Modern societies do that incredibly well. Way better than hunter-gatherer tribes ever did. But tribes also provide belonging, shared purpose, community and a magical thing called dignity. When you bring back food, the tribe (your family) recognizes what you have done and they're grateful for it.

Albert Einstein famously said, "Everything should be as simple as possible but no simpler." Sadly, though he's famous for saying this, it's pretty clear that like most internet quotes he never actually said this. Still, it's a great principle and quotes are like tennis shoes, hamburgers or sodas. If you put them next to a celebrity, they seem way more legit. Regardless of who came up with it though, it's a great principle. Silicon Valley understands this trade off really well. Great software often becomes worse over time because it suffers from a disease known as featuritis or feature creep. It's an easy trap to fall into. The idea is that if the software is good then if you keep adding new widgets, doodads and other functionalities that it will be even better. Actually though, it gets worse because it becomes increasingly unusable. While writers of New York Times op-eds can wave their hands and say things are complicated, Mixed Mental Artists don't have that option. And while pandering politicians can offer

A century ago, the world faced a tremendous problem: horse shit. The world was full of it. And then an amazing invention pollution-saving device was invented: the car. As the world fills up with all kinds of horse shit (this time of the verbal and behavioral kind), it's worth revisiting this experience to see what lessons Mixed Mental Artists can learn to clean things up. When the horse-drawn carriage was updated, the only thing that was changed initially was the form of locomotion. The horse was swapped out for a gasoline-powered engine. It was a super-specific and fairly limited change. That is exactly what Mixed Mental Arts is going to do for your culture. We're going to swap out very specific parts to retrain your beliefs, values and intuitions for the Information Age. A great example of what that looks like for a culture comes from Japan's Meiji Restoration. After 200 years of isolating itself from the world, Japan got a massive shock when Commodore Perry sailed his big, black steamships into Tokyo Harbo

Welcome to the dojo! By special request of Hunter's mom, we're going to take our skills on the road and see what Mixed Mental Arts can do about a current, real world social issue like Black Lives Matter. One of the many wonderful things about social media is that it has revealed just how bad at humans are at making sense of things are. We're the same species that for a long time believed that the best explanation for lightning was an angry man on a cloud. Well into the 1800s, scientists believed infectious diseases were caused by bad smells and that if you didn't smell your own droppings then you wouldn't get sick. (The "whoever smelt it dealt it" logic of kids wasn't that far from the medical state of the art just two hundred years ago.) And if you still doubt just how bad all humans are at explaining things, then take a wander around the internet and google 9/11, Obama birth certificate, GMOs, vaccines, global warming, Trump, Clinton or any other damn thing. The number of theories that surround any of these

Global warming, vaccines, evolution…it's pretty clear that scientific ideas aren't doing a very good job winning out. Neil DeGrasse Tyson has proposed building a country called Rationalia that would be entirely ruled by the evidence. But do scientists like Neil DeGrasse Tyson even know the evidence? Sadly, after over 200 episodes, it seems like they don't. The majority of them have become such narrow specialists that they don't even bother to read what other scientists have been up to and so many people with PhDs have heads filled with magical thinking. In this episode, we go through some of the different kinds of magical thinking that many scientists believe in from beliefs about their own brains, other people's brains and how ideas move. Hunter used to be the same way. Basically, he was like that dickhead in the Harvard bar in Good Will Hunting who thought that because he knew a bunch of facts that he had a realistic view of the world and the right to intellectually bully others to make himself feel big. Th

In this next installment in our journey to mastery of Mixed Mental Arts, Bryan and Hunter take a look at the primary method by which culture is transmitted from generation to generation: blind copying. Although, in everyday speech we often talk about power is if it's one thing, scientists distinguish between two forms of power: dominance and prestige. Dominance encourages submission and prestige encourages people to copy people. It's the difference between a bully and a role model. However, as spiderman learned, with great power comes great responsibility and savvy dictators and social media personalities can highjack people's prestige systems to get us to either follow their leadership blindly or to buy whatever product they want. The latter is something that really bothers Bryan. So we talk it out. We really air out all of those feelings. Does Bryan cry? Or does he break something seemingly unbreakable? When you're an actor as versatile as Bryan "Brando" Callen you're never quite sure what choice will come

Harrison Query is a screenwriter who at 25 years old has found success in the film industry that eludes most throughout their lifetime. With the guidance and mentoring by some of Hollywood's biggest writer's - Harrison left college and began writing full time at the age of 19. He has since worked for the industry's biggest studios, directors and producers -- his next project "Honor For Sale" is currently in development with John Hillcoat (Lawless, Triple 9) in the director's chair.

Bryan and Hunter enter the dojo of the mind with Joe Henrich, master of our first fundamental of the mind: cultural accumulation. As regular listeners will know, in his book The Secret of Our Success, Henrich lays out the case for why problem solving and critical thinking are not humanity's great superpower. Rather, our great superpower is social intelligence. It is our ability to pass on culture from generation to generation that makes us so successful and able to conquer everywhere from the tundra to the desert to being able to venture out into space. This idea is the fundamental that is going to allow all of us to make sense of the seemingly chaotic world and benefit from rather than being hurt by the clash of cultures.

After literally hundreds of episodes, you would hope that Bryan and Hunter had learned something. In fact, they think they might have. Now, it's time for a new direction in the show where rather than endlessly collecting more interesting tidbits they try and synthesize it into a unified worldview. There are lots of academics who know a lot about one thing but are clueless in other areas. We're going to try and round out our mental game and yours so we can handle anything that's thrown at us. We'll certainly be wrong along the way but maybe just maybe with the help of a lot of other people we might become slightly less idiotic over time. The fundamentals of your mental game are getting your assumptions right. We start here with the most basic assumption of all. What makes humans succeed? After hundreds of interviews and a lot of reading, we believe Harvard Professor Jo Henrich has found the answer. Humans are the only animal that can acquire culture. You can follow Professor Henrich on twitter @JoHenrich