Big ideas, louder than necessary.
Mixed Mental Arts turns big ideas into loose, argumentative conversations with academics, writers, and friends of the show. It moves quickly from moral psychology to misinformation, meditation, gender bias, creativity, politics, and family banter.
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Mixed Mental Arts is a long-running conversation show about the stories people inherit, the beliefs they defend, and the mental tools they might steal from somewhere else. It is not tidy. The show’s best moments come when a serious guest tries to explain a careful idea and the room immediately starts testing it against comedy, politics, family, status, bodies, money, aging, and whatever else happens to be nearby. That friction gives the show its shape. Caroline Criado Perez’s conversation turns gender bias and design into a debate about representation, venture funding, and who gets to define a problem worth solving. Mark Manson’s episode uses morality, Kant, masculinity, and self-authorship to ask what kind of story a person can actually live with. Cailin O'Connor’s visit pushes into misinformation, narratives, replication, and the uncomfortable fact that memorable science is not always durable science. Jonathan Haidt’s episode circles moral psychology, religion, technology, social science, racism research, and the difference between measurable progress and murkier human understanding. Dan Siegel brings meditation, presence, attachment, and aging into a conversation that keeps trying to make contemplative practice less precious. Ed Solomon and Alex Kurtzman pull the show toward creativity, writing, and the odd personal rituals around making work. There are also looser family and friend episodes, including Big Mike Callen, where the philosophical machinery gives way to teasing, memory, and blunt life perspective. The show can sound chaotic because it is comfortable thinking out loud. It makes room for bad jokes, interruptions, corrections, exaggerated fund-raising bits, and sudden sincerity. That looseness is also why it works. Ideas do not arrive as polished takeaways; they get argued into shape. The show is best for listeners who like philosophy and behavioral science but do not want them wrapped in academic stillness. It rewards people who can follow digressions and enjoy a conversation that turns seriousness into comedy, then turns the comedy back into an argument.
Made for: For listeners who like philosophy, psychology, culture, and self-improvement when they are argued through jokes, interruptions, and concrete examples. It suits people who prefer energetic conversation over polished expert panels.
What sets it apart: Mixed Mental Arts stands out by making high-concept guests survive a fast, comic, skeptical room. The show turns abstract research into messy, memorable arguments without sanding off the weirdness.
As kids, we're like little sponges blindly copying culture from the people around us. The cultures into which we were all born evolved to fit very old agricultural environments. Each contains timeless wisdom about human affairs but none of them is ideally suited to navigating the ever-changing environment in which we find ourselves.The goal of Mixed Mental Arts is to steal the best cultural software from everywhere and apply the core principle of Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do "Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own." Welcome to the dojo! We're excited to learn from you.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Mixed Mental Arts makes intellectual revision lively by letting expert precision collide with jokes, interruptions, and the hosts' willingness to question inherited ideas.
Mixed Mental Arts turns interviews with academics and authors into unruly conversations about how people form beliefs, inherit assumptions, and revise them. The hosts keep abstract material moving with self-mockery and interruptions, then press guests for practical explanations.
A replication crisis walks into a comedy club, and your certainties leave with a few dents.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Caroline Criado Perez examines how male-centered assumptions and funding patterns shape products, stories, and everyday bias.
Caroline Criado Perez steers this single-episode review toward the blind spots that appear when products and public stories are built around men's experiences.
Mark Manson and the hosts put inherited beliefs through a funny, unruly test of how to live.
Mark Manson joins the hosts for a loose, searching conversation about politics, masculinity, morality and the stories people inherit. An emotional reaction to socialism opens into a harder question: which choices would someone be proud to make again and again?
A sharp, lively look at why sticky ideas often outrun sturdy evidence.
Mixed Mental Arts frames misinformation as a question of appetite: who gets to shape a story, and why certain ideas lodge so easily in people's heads.
Jonathan Haidt and the hosts turn a loose conversation about evidence into a spirited test of science's limits.
Jonathan Haidt enters as a useful disruption to the hosts' assumptions. He corrects his university affiliation to New York University's Stern School of Business, and the conversation quickly becomes less about labeling him than about what evidence can really carry.
Meditation, telomeres, and a Buddha with abs shape a lively conversation about presence.
Meditation lands as both a practice of presence and a comic pressure test. Brian Callen asks Dr. Dan Siegel about the shift from doing mode into a state of being, and the discussion soon opens into attachment, childhood nicknames, and the ways memory can make theory feel less…
A loose, lively conversation turns tensegrity, posture, and a young spine into a memorable reason to examine movement.
Movement specialist Aaron Alexander gives this Mixed Mental Arts episode a clear physical center, with the discussion circling movement, decompression, and the body's connected structure.
Callen and Motz recast their show around books, cultural accumulation and the risk of mistaking one story for the whole.
Brian Callen and Hunter Motz recast the show around a big question: what makes humans successful? Rather than regularly interviewing authors, they plan to discuss great books and use them to examine cultural accumulation, the institutions, technologies, beliefs and values handed…
Bayesian thinking where uncertainty meets decisions.
Behavior analysis, poured into real practice.
One zombie metaphor, stretched from parasites to school.
Movement specialist Aaron Alexander joins Brian Callen and Hunter Maats on Mixed Mental Arts to explore how culture shapes our bodies and minds.
Brian Callen and Hunter Maats introduce a new format for their podcast, Mixed Mental Arts, focusing on discussing books rather than interviewing authors.
The host jokes about Patreon donations and introduces a famous screenwriter guest in a humorous, informal style.
Thaddeus Russell discusses the distinction between eugenics and racism, arguing that early eugenics focused on class and family rather than race.
Caroline Criado Perez discusses *Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men* with the *Mixed Mental Arts* host, and the conversation centers on male-default assumptions in medicine, design, and business.
Mark Manson says the new book argues that "you can't just science everything" and still need value-based narratives.
["Mixed Mental Arts Episode 363 with Cailin O'Connor centers on The Misinformation Age and the social spread of false belief.", "O'Connor says she and James Owen Weatherall wrote the book after the 2016 election and the Brexit vote, when individual-psychology explanations felt too narrow.", "Brian Callen pushes the discussion through Edward Bernays, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and modern anti-vaccine clusters to show how reputation and conformity move ideas.", "The episode ends on Russian social-media influence, Merchants of Doubt, and O'Connor's case that the \"marketplace of ideas\" needs active guardrails."]
Jonathan Haidt uses Mixed Mental Arts to argue that moral judgment starts with intuition, not a single rational rule, and he anchors that claim in David Hume's line that reason serves the passions.
Mixed Mental Arts centers on Brian Callen and Dr.
Hosts engage in humorous banter about Corgis, fantasies of being an older gay husband, and relationship dynamics.
A humorous conversation with Big Mike Callen about life, aging, and personal vices.
The hosts discuss their Patreon funding and introduce guest Ed Solomon, a writer known for Men in Black and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.
A special co-release where Hunter Mott interviews Eric Hundley, host of the Unstructured Podcast, exploring his background and motivations.
The hosts introduce a professor discussing his book on the middle class and the U.S.
The host promotes the Patreon and introduces an interview with behavioral scientist Eldar Shafir about his book on scarcity.