Mixed Mental Arts
Mixed Mental Arts
Bryan Callen, Hunter Maats
Ep214 - Mixed Mental Arts: Keeping it Simple isn't Necessarily Stupid
48 minutes Posted Aug 20, 2016 at 4:00 am.
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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 super simplistic solutions to voters that make sense but don't work in the real world, Mixed Mental Artists don't have that option. We are entering the octagon and struggling with problems until we find real world solutions. In practice, Bryan is the perfect person to do this with because, as of today, he's intellectually bipolar. One moment he's simplistic. The next moment things are too complicated to be understood. One of Bryan's great Mixed Mental Arts abilities is the ability to escape any train of thought but Hunter pins him down and trains him out of some old habits into some new more effective ones. Why? It's almost like Hunter is grooming Bryan for something…and in this episode we find out what it is.