Apr 14, 2017
Cate Fogarty and I met a few months ago when I gave a talk at Second City about how to communicate across America's red/blue cultural divide. Why did Cate and I connect after that talk? Because
Cate is a Cultural Mutt. She has moved between enough cultures in her life to know how powerfully culture shapes our thinking and how it both binds us into groups and blinds us to the fact that we don't always see the world so clearly. Cate also came up with the idea of the cultural confession so it's only fitting that Cate should be the first person to officially give her cultural confession on the podcast.
In the evolving improv game that is Mixed Mental Arts, Cate and I have now been feeding off each other for a couple of months. As we move this from being the Bryan Callen (and Hunter Maats show), I thought it was important to introduce the other people who are getting involved and to make it clear why their contributions are so vital.
And here is where Cate's strengths come to the fore. She has been taking my 5000-word blogposts, extracting the core concepts and then rewriting the idea in her own words into under 500-word #knowledgebombs. She's now got a team of people helping her do that. If you want in on that, you should tweet her at @cateclysmic or you can find her at the Mixed Mental Arts FB group.
You can read her #TheDunbarNumber #knowledgebomb here: http://mixedmentalarts.co/thedunbarnumber/
And you can read her #GrowthMindset #knowledgebomb here: http://mixedmentalarts.co/growthmindset/
However, there's at least one more way in which Cate's voice is essential. We're aware that until now Mixed Mental Arts has been a bit of a sausage party. Not only that, it has been a white sausage party. There's nothing wrong with weisswurst (German white sausages) but we need some variety. That's what makes idea sex great. Lots of different ideas being thrown into the mix and we let those ideas make looooooove and see what comes out.
There's a topic that Cate and Katie O and I have been talking about for months behind the scenes: sexism. Uh oh! Just the word gets everyone breaking out in hives. Even as Cate explained to me many of her female friends. Still, Mixed Mental Arts is about talking about the elephants in the room. So, we do that. There's nothing humans (especially a #basketofreasonables) can't figure out when we talk it out. So, consider this the first step of many into that conversation and towards diversity of perspective in every sense in the dojo. That will be the real mark of what makes Mixed Mental Arts different. When we can talk anything out productively and make progress, that will really set us apart from the crowd.
You can share your own cultural confession here (http://mixedmentalarts.co/submit-your-cultural-confession/).