Scott Carney Investigates

Today we're going to talk about some hard subjects--adultery, violence, power, and psychopathy. During the last few weeks I've been in touch with many amazing people from all around the internet who are trying to understand how deep the problems with Andrew Huberman really go. One of the people I met was the sex and relationship counselor Kate Balestreri and I'm so glad that we had some time to sit down together. Kate Balestrieri: https://www.threads.net/@drkatebalestrieri Modern Intimacy: https://www.modernintimacy.com

The science of ice bathing has been evolving a lot in the last few years. Brad Schoenfeld is a PhD in physiology and hypertrophy (literally building muscle) who just completed a metastudy analysis that showed that ice bathing after working out could kill the muscle gains. Read more on his blog post about it here: https://www.lookgreatnaked.com/blog/ #exercise #fitness #coldexposure #icebath

This week I spoke to Casey Fiesler, a tech ethicist, professor and rather famous TikTokker about the parallel universe of copyright litigation, fair use arguments, revenge pornography and so much more. Find more out about Fiesler's academic work here:

I'd never heard about Dahn Yoga until Chris Flanders reached out to me. When I started digging in I learned how seriously dangerous this organization really is.

What is an expert? For that matter, why don't we trust them? In this week's episiode I interview Jamie Carlin Watson, a bioethicist and professor with a whole host of academic credentials at the end of his name who also happens to be an expert on the very notion of expertise. We discuss the madness that gripped the world during the COVID-19 epidemic, the fall of credenitalism and why both of us have zoom backgrounds full of prestigious looking books to show how smart we are.

How does the barbaric history of medicine shed light on the future of artificial intelligence? How will computers transform the way doctors think? Will patients benefit from the placebo effect if they're talking to a robot?

Adam Rodman M.D.

In 2004 I was invited to join in sexual union with a room full of beautiful people in robes at the Osho compound in Pune. When I arrived there a few days earlier I saw hundreds of people speak in tongues together as they accessed their own spiritual truths. This was my first, by hardly my last, experience from the inside of cultic thinking and practices. This month a new TV show appeared Netflix staring Peter Dinklage called "How to Become a Cult Leader." It was a great show, but I thought they missed a few salient points. This EP is meant to fill in some of the gaps.

Do psychedelics actually make you a better person, or do they just make you feel like you're a better person. In this show I begin with the notion that spaceflight fundamentally transforms the consciousness of astronauts who blast off the surface of earth, the tendency for space tourists to snap selfies with the planet, and the marginal utility of getting 1% better every time you take a cup of ayahuasca.

Josiah Hesse memorized his bible, let the Holy Ghost into his heart, and tithed 10% of everything to his evangelical church. It was only later when he realized how wrong it all had been. Now a pioneer of the EXvangelical movement, Denver-Journalist Josiah Hesse explains how it all went down, and what it means for the rest of christian America.

More about Josiah Here:

What is it about being famous that turns people into shadows of their former-selves? And what does that mean for the rest of us who seek micro-levels of fame on social media platforms?

Joshua Kappel helped lead the effort to legalize psychadelic drugs in Colorado, and what happened here might be a model for what happens in the rest of the country. Are we ready for mail order MDMA?

This week I talk with Patrick Mckeown, the best selling author of The Oxygen Advantage and The Breathing Cure about looming problems in the broader breathwork community as the global movement gains in popularity. Mckeown has studied the Buteyko method for 21 years and worries that some of the more dramatic breathing practices that have gained popularity around the world can lead to serious consequences.

What does it mean to live in a simulation? Is it a simulated universe that lives on the silicone chips of an alien computer (or a future computer invented by humanity itself)? Is it a simulated universe that runs on the karmic seeds described in ancient Hindu and Buddhist texts? Or are we a Blotzman Brain floating through the ether long after the heat-death of the universe? I think those are all far-fetched ideas in their own ways, but one undeniable truth is that the neurology of our brains absolutely create unique simulations that we live in all of their owns.

Probabilistic math makes the same assumption that shamans, Catholics, Mormons, Hindus and every other faith all make--that there's a fundamental force in the world that makes the world what it is. In this podcast I examine the assumption that physicists make that randomness correctly describes the most basic structure of the universe. Some people won't like this.

Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna is the most important person in the history of North America that you probably know nothing about. If you have any impression at all about the "Napoleon of the West" it's that he executed all of the defenders of the Alamo and Goliad. You might think of him as a murderer and a traitor. Mexicans think of him as one of the most corrupt dictators in their country's history. But the true story of Santa Anna is much more complex--and much more interesting--than you would ever imagine. In this episode I'm going to try to convince you that we've gotten Santa Anna wrong all along.

This is the story of the convoluted path that Buddhism took form India Tibet, and Tibet into your yoga studio at home.

Otto Muzik is best known to me for his research papers on Wim Hof's abilities that connected the iceman's abilities to the mysterious power of the placebo effect. The Wim Hof method website frequently cites the study and there is another paper in the works. But Muzik has a lot to say about the science of brown fat and the organization around him called "InnerFire" that might make you think twice about what Muzik's endorsement really means about the Wim Hof Method.

The language that we use to discuss the role that DNA has in creating the proteins that make up our body is incredibly deterministic and not at all what actually happens at the cellular level. When you build a house a single centralized set of instructions makes a lot of sense. But when you consider that DNA exists in every single cell--we have to reassess what it means to build an organism where the parts are calling the shots.

Related reading:

What makes a good skeptic? Is it dismissing things that don't conform to your own beliefs about how the world should work from a scientific perspective? Or is there a more nuanced approach that allows you to -- occasionally-- change your mind? This episode is about how I think we should all take a step backward and realize that much of what we think we know about the world is probably wrong, anyway.

Book Reference:

Depending who you ask, the Wim Hof method either originated out of Hof's mind after he first jumped into ice water, or it's part of an ancient tradition of breathwork and ice bathing that goes back to human pre-history. I've decided to dig into the question to compare Wim's practices to existing Yogic practices as well as listening to Wim's own accounts of where this all started for him. The truth is not quite what you might expect.

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You've probably heard of the Law of Diminishing Returns where acquiring new skills ultimately tapers off until further gains are harder and harder to achieve. But what if you flipped that logic on its head? The flip side of the same phenomenon is what I call "The Law of Speedy Gains" where you can opt to harvest the easy-upside of taking on new things and then move on to other skills that you might what to develop once you hit the first stages of the plateau.

This is the story of the three times I've been cursed and the strange events that happened in their wake. Anthropologists have known that curses have real-world effects for more than a hundred years. E.E. Evans-Pritchard wrote about how curses form the world view of the Azande while Wade Davis demonstrated how the curse of the Zombi in Haiti produced real-world zombis. In 2014 I was cursed by a rogue Tibetan Buddhist group and a series of unfortunate events his me personally and professionally. I had to find a way to unwind the spell--even as I wasn't entirely convinced that curses were real.

Have you ever wondered about the skeletons that are hiding in your doctor's closet? I spent six years investigating the illegal world of organ trafficking and in this video I want to tell you about the anatomy riots that rocked European and American medical schools in the 1700 and 1800's and how the trade in human skeletons eventually migrated to India where the bone business eventually started exporting 60,000 human skeletons every single year.

In 2012, thirty-eight-year-old Ian Thorson's search for spiritual transcendence ended in tragedy on a remote Arizona mountaintop. His wife, a woman anointed as a goddess by an eccentric Buddhist community, held him in her arms as he slowly died from dehydration and dysentery. For Carney, a journalist and anthropologist who lived in India for six years, Thorson's death was just the most recent iteration of an unspoken epidemic that connected intensive meditation and mental instability.

The Enlightenment Trap explores how Tibetan Buddhism in the West morphed from its roots in the Himalayan foothills into a fundamentally new American religion. For Thorson the entry point into this new faith was Geshe Michael Roach, the supreme spiritual leader of Diamond Mountain University.

Carney unravels the cult-like practices of Diamond Mountain to illuminate the uniquely American tendency to mix and match Eastern religious traditions like LEGO pieces. The result is that for some, enlightenment is a synonym for almost god-like powers and achieving it can become more important than life itself.

Aided by Thorson’s private papers and cutting-edge neurological research, the book reveals the profound impact of intensive meditation on the brain. Carney exposes stories of miracles and black magic, sexualized rituals, and tantric rites from former Diamond Mountain acolytes. The Enlightenment Trap is a gripping work of investigative journalism that reveals how the path to enlightenment can be riddled with danger.