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 things and just how opposite these things are tells you that clearly our species isn't very good at figuring out why things happen in the world. So, that Hunter's mom wants a little help understanding Black Lives Matter is simply a recognition of a hole in every human's mental game.

Fortunately, there's a group of people who stake their reputations and their lives on figuring out why things happen. They will do anything to be right. And careers are made and broken on taking down current World Champions of explaining the world. And after generations and generations of entering the intellectual octagon, they've gotten some pretty darn good explanations for why things happen. They're scientists. Like all other humans, they're individually crappy at figuring things out but collectively their explanations are pretty good. (PS This whole blurb up until now is partly here because this topic is so emotional that there's a good chance that some of the things said in this podcast will be massively misunderstood. There's always a disaster scenario for even the best intentioned well thought out response to a situation that is then posted on the internet and so we've got to plan for that.)

So, we're going to introduce a couple of key concepts that are going to be vital not just to understanding Black Lives Matter but that are going to be real fundamentals we use again and again in Mixed Mental Arts:

1) The Dunbar Number: Humans can only have a limited number of relationships to other humans in their head. Hint: It's not 7 billion people. Stereotyping is necessary. The issue is that we often form our stereotypes around the worst-behaved people in another group. Terrorists explicitly use that psychological quirk to set people against each other. The problem is that we tend to massively underestimate the importance of bad behavior in our own group on others. So, some dude flushes a Koran down the toilet and posts it on social media. Americans don't see the big deal because it isn't their holy book. However, that one dude has a huge impact on how Muslims perceive Americans. Ted Cruz says he wants to bomb the middle east to see if sand glows to get elected in the US but, in practice, he's handing a huge propaganda tool to ISIS that actually makes the US less safe. Lena Dunham says dining hall sushi is cultural appropriation and liberals brush that off as dumb but it gets played on Fox News again and again and is exactly why conservatives think liberals are entitled, spoiled and out of touch with the real world. Lena Dunham gives all liberals a bad name. Just as companies have to protect their brand so do groups. It doesn't matter what the facts are. It is the perception. And when there's money on the line people take those perceptions very seriously. With black lives matter and terrorism, we're not talking about money; we're talking about lives. The lives of cops, African-American men, innocent Europeans and Americans and the majority