Richard Nisbett grew up in Texas. So when he was looking for a culture he could say potentially uncharitable things about as a white man, he turned his attention squarely to Southern culture. In his book, Culture of Honor, Professor Nisbett takes a look a

Alvaro Bedoya is the founding Executive Director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown. In this episode, Alvaro lays out for us the current state of privacy (or lack thereof) and the state of a Congress that either can't or won't keep up wit

Humans have always been pretty sure that they were special but we've never quite been sure why. Was it because we were made in God's image? Was it our opposable thumbs? Was it that we had bigger brains? Far be it for us to tell you what God does or does n

When Hunter went to Peru this summer, he naturally went looking for books to read in preparation. Universally, the consensus was that THE book on the Inca Empire was Kim MacQuarrie's Last Days of the Inca. It was amazing. And apparently, Hunter wasn't the

Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, Hari Seldon figures out how to create a mathematical model that can predict the future. Well, Wired magazine has described today's guest as a 'real-life Hari Seldon." Peter Turchin began his career as a biologist but is c

Growing up in Italy, Luigi Zingales got to experience firsthand something that looked a lot like capitalism but definitely wasn't. Government subsidies, regulations tailored to serve the interests of existing corporations and a system in which co

Geoffrey Miller studies the evolutionary psychology of sex and since sex is the cornerstone of evolution his work ends up having implications that affect pretty much everything. If you've wondered why women's evolutionary programming makes them s

In 1872, in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals Charles Darwin hypothesized that emotions were hard-wired into our biology. However, it wasn't until near a century later that Dr. Paul Ekman and his longtime collaborator Wallace Frie

If you listen to a random episode of The Bryan Callen Show, you can bet that Bryan and I will be talking about how amazing Republic, Lost and its author Lawrence Lessig are. Well, we got him!!! Ladies and gentlemen, it is our extreme pleasure to

Both Daron Acemoglu (MIT economist and co-author of Why Nations Fail) and Dacher Keltner (Berkeley psychologist and author of many books including Born to Be Good) have appeared on The Bryan Callen Show before. They both were amazing and that is...