On the Sex Life of Yahya Khan: a Rebuttal the Reviewers

The Vortex launched in India about a month ago to overwhelmingly positive reviews. However, just about every esteemed diplomat and counselor officer agreed that while they loved the way we wrote it, they just couldn't believe that a dictator who killed an estimated three million people might also have had out of control sexual appetites.

You see three of the biggest publications in India--India Today, The Financial Express and the Business Standard all agreed that Jason Miklian and I must be making up details of how Yahya Khan snubbed the Shah of Iran because he was too busy getting fellatio from a prostitute. They wrote that we undermined our credibility when we reported that Yahya pulled a pistol on his son Ali after he discovered that Ali was sleeping with his mistress. Moreover, they said that we went over the top when we reported that right after he almost shot his son, Yahya ordered airstrikes against India and almost ignited World War 3. 

To some degree I can't blame the reviewers for furrowing brows at these sensational details. I mean, the story almost seems too good to be true. However, I think it's important to set the record straight and remind my readers that we have extensive sources for everything we wrote in the Vortex. More importantly, it's essential to point out that people's personal lives often influence their erratic actions.  After all: Yahya Khan and his coterie conducted a systematic rape campaign in East Pakistan with the express intent of diluting the Bengali gene pool. Given the well-established facts, I have to ask why so many reviewers are willing to give Yahya the benefit of the doubt when even Yahya himself never refuted these claims?  

In this week's video I explore the context of the criticisms of the Vortex, go over the credibility of our sources and remind them that world leaders often abuse the reins of power.

What do we say to drowning on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River?

Two weeks ago I was getting towards the end of a 100-mile rafting trip in the Idaho wilderness when I made a small mistake that almost cost me my life. Our small group of adventurers were aboard a flotilla of 18 foot rafts and three small inflatable kayaks. We were having an amazing time admiring the pristine wilderness at the river's steady rate of 4 miles per hour. I was in one of the kayaks playing around in the white water when hit a wave in the wrong way and got sucked under water and held down.  

The whole story is in this week's video. Suffice it to say: you're getting this email, so I didn't actually die, but the situation was a lot closer than anyone was comfortable with.  

I had a few things going for me, of course: years of training in ice-water and in breathwork helped me keep a level head while I got cycled through a hydraulic (a sort of horizontal whirlpool) over and over again. I bided my time for around a minute--a minute involuntarily under water feels like a lot more than just a minute--when an unexpected opportunity to save myself appeared out of the watery aether. I don't want to spoil the video for you. But I got a real world lesson in survival, grit and flow that I imagine I will be writing about again down the line. 

Aside from almost drowning, Laura and I had the time of our life.

But that wasn't my only take away from my week isolated in nature and astonishing beauty. It also just so happens that my birthday was this last weekend and on the occasion of my near death, and the realization that I only have so much time left on earth, I had a few intentions that I'd like to put out into the world.

First - In my early years I learned a lot of meditation and breath work which I honestly thought was common knowledge—but now realize is something I can pass on to others. Maybe I’d like to start a group in Denver where I could do some of that. Anyone interested?

Second - interacting with people face to face is a million times more fulfilling than through social media. The measure of success isn’t the number of interactions, it’s the depth of those relationships. I want to focus on meeting people in real life more.

Third - I’ve been fortunate enough to get to a comfortable financial place in my life. I’m not rich, but I have enough so that I can pick and choose what jobs I take on. I want to remember that having “enough” is so much more meaningful than wanting just “a little bit more”.

Fourth - Don’t sweat the small things. It’s easy to get caught up on details that aren’t working out right when the big picture is still on track. Thinking big is better than thinking small.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks so much to everyone at Boundary Expeditions and my fellow rafting adventurers who made this one of the most memorable trips of my life. I can't wait to see you all again. 

Why the Real Estate Market will Definitely Collapse

Why the Real Estate Market Will Definitely Collapse

America is on the precipice of an economic meltdown which is going to start with a collapse of the housing market. If we're lucky it will remain in that one sector. If we're even luckier that collapse will in reality be just a slow decline over a few years. If we're unlucky we will repeat the steep declines we saw in 2007, but lack the financial tools to dig ourselves out.  I know that it's generally a bad idea for a journalist to make predictions. After all the future is, by definition, uncertain.  But I feel that holding my tongue would be complacency.  

There is one key indicator in the real estate market that is so grim that I don't see any way that we're getting out of this unscathed. I'm talking about the ratio between the median American income ($75,000) and monthly payment on new mortgages, which now stands at a mind-boggling 41%.  The last time we saw numbers like this was in the stagflation crisis of 1982. And before that was the Great Depression.  

In this week's video I explore how that number has changed over the last 40 years and why there is no practical way for the Federal Reserve Board to intervene and stop the coming collapse in real estate prices. This is primarily because for the last 15 years we've benefitted from historically low interest rates that have radically over-inflated the value of US housing stock. When you adjust everything for the toll of inflation, it's patently obvious that there's no way that ordinary American buyers can enter into the real estate market without sacrificing their ability to spend money on anything else. 

In 1982, the Fed was able to fight stagflation by raising the benchmark rate, which caused mortgage rates to skyrocket to 18%. That was a pretty hard hit to the real estate market, but ultimately it did lead us out of the mess. But times are different now. Back in '82 then the median home price was $65,000 ($195,000 in 2022 dollars after adjusting for inflation), which meant at least some people could afford to keep up with their home payments.

Unfortunately, in 2022 the median home price in the USA is $428,000 which is more than twice what it was in 1982. The Fed doesn't have the same leeway it did in 1982 to fix the inflation situation without destroying the real estate market. In other words the Fed can either protect the current bubble prices (by keeping rates at historical lows) or save the economy in general.  Either way we're headed for some serious pain.

I dive into these details a lot more in this week's video.  Suffice it to say, don't buy a house right now. It's a really really bad idea. . .

...which is why you should listen to . . .

If you want to know how we really got into this mess, you should check out David Sirota and Alex Gibney's amazing podcast Meltdown.  It's all about the roots of the 2007 financial crisis and how the Bush and Obama administrations botched their chance to regulate the big banks that now own our American soul. Because of them (and then four years of Trump's frankly-insane stewardship) it all but inevitable that we would run headlong into another financial crisis--the one that I'm predicting is coming in very short order. 

Sirota is another Denver-based journalist and was one of the screenwriters for the movie Don't Look Up.  You should definitely check out everything he does, including his political news website The Lever. 

Asking if whether or not "Google Made Sentient AI?" is the wrong question

Back in 2017, engineers at Google started working on a program  designed to perfectly mimc human speech and personality. It was called LaMDA–short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications. The process was straightforward, LaMDA would scan all the literature on the internet, from reddit forums, to newspaper articles, to product reviews on amazon and everything else so that when you asked it a question it could create a sort of collage of human babble that would look pretty darned real.  

By all accounts, it worked pretty well. Engineers could program LaMDA to imitate all sorts of personalities–from customer service representatives, to famous actors, philosophers and even irate teenage gamers. 

And then, in March 2022 something crazy happened.  A google engineer named Blake Lemoine booted up LaMDA and started asking it questions about the nature of the program’s own conscious experience. He asked it to explain how the program felt about being a chat bot. He taught it to meditate. It even wrote him a weird zen fable about its own role in the universe.

Within a month Lemoine was convinced LaMDA was conscious and he started raising a fuss with his bosses, who promptly placed him on administrative leave.  You've probably seen this story in the news already. It has been everywhere.  It basically set the internet on fire.

In this week's video I'm looking past the internet memes and wild speculation to try to understand what a conscious computer program means in terms of human consciousness. In it I draw on the neuroscience of split brains that I wrote about in The Wedge and speculate that the most important consideration in studying consciousness isn't what things are thinking, but the relationships that form during conscious interaction. 

Who will win the world's first social media war?

If you were the type who puts faith in the wisdom of internet forums then there wouldn't be any question about it: Russia is on the brink of collapse as the out-gunned Ukrainian resistance destroys one tank column after another. But how do we really know that is what is happening when most of our information comes through the social media accounts of resistance fighters and Ukrainian intelligence?

In this week's video I interview investigative journalist Geoffrey Cain about how the front lines on the internet are also changing the battlefront on the ground. He had just come back from meeting with Zelensky in person and posted this story in WIRED about his conversation with the Ukrainian leader. We talk about how Elon Musk's Star Link satellite system allows fighters to upload images of exploding tanks almost in real time, and how trusting billionaires to be on the right side of history is always a dicey affair. He also tells me about the foreign fighters he met who brought their own guns and ammo into the conflict and what his predictions are for how long the war is going to last.

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This High-Altitude Breathwork could Save Your Life

Back in 2016 I did something that was either really really stupid, incredibly brave...or both. I joined an expedition to climb up to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro with the express intention of ignoring mandatory safety stops in order to make the summit in just 30 hours. The army predicted that the majority of our group would come down with acute mountain sickness. The Dutch Mountaineering association said we were all going to die. Well, we didn't. Instead we made it to Gilman's Point (just below the summit) in just 28 hours. I get a lot of emails from mountaineers asking exactly what breathwork we did as we climbed ever upwards, so I figured I would put together a video that highlights two of the techniques that got us through safely. This first was the breathing protocols we kept up during the entire ascent. The second is a trick for fixing headaches that inevitably spring up as the air gets ever thinner. I hope this is useful for all of you mountaineers out there.

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Want to learn more about what really happened on this trip to the top of Africa? Check out my book What Doesn't Kill Us

What is the placebo effect, really?

The thing that most people fail to understand about medicine is that, for the most part, you take drugs and receive therapies from your doctors in order for your body to get to a place where it can manage to do the job on its own. We spend billions of dollars developing drugs that only work a tiny bit better than the healing power of the body. In this video I explain some of the underlying ways that the innate and adaptive immune system work as well as the curious way we talk about what it means to get better while under medical care.

What is Narrative Nonfiction?

What is narrative nonfiction? How real is gonzo journalism? And how the heck did we come up with a word like "nonfiction" to describe books that are supposed to be true to reality? 

A few years ago I heard a talk by the author and war correspondent Sebastian Junger that gave me a clue about why every book is first, and foremost, a complete invention of whomever was holding a pen. He said that no matter how talented you might be, "your words will never match the majesty of reality."

Today I posted a video that follows from this insight  where I describe how closely different genres of literature come to reflecting the real world. 

I also made a fancy chart that maps out most of the major genres from total make believe all the way over to as objectively real as possible that I call the  "Literature Continuum."

Below that I've made links to all of the books that I mention in the video in case you are looking for your next great read. 

Books by Genre

Tribe by Sebastian Junger 
The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger 

HISTORY
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond 

MEMOIR & BIOGRAPHY
Becoming by Michelle Obama

NARRATIVE NONFICTION
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand 
The Vortex by Scott Carney & Jason Miklian 
What Doesn't Kill Us by Scott Carney 

GONZO:
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson 
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail of '72 by Hunter S Thompson

HISTORICAL FICTION
The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara 
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett 

NOVELS
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger 
Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway 
Black Boy by Richard Wright 

MAGICAL REALISM
Dracula by Bram Stoker 

SCIENCE FICTION
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovksy 
Dune by Frank Herbert 

FANTASY
Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfus 
The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin 

MYTH
The Epic of Gilgamesh by Ancient Sumeria 
The Marvel Encyclopedia by Stan Lee 


Lastly, thanks as always to video editor Ron Perron! 

Does the Wim Hof Method Cause Tinnitus?

It's perfectly normal for the Wim Hof Method to make your ears ring for a few minutes after some intense breathwork. But a few years ago people started emailing me, asking why the ringing never went away for them. Then over the last year I noticed that my own ears were ringing. Tinnitus isn't just annoying--for some people it can lead to depression, anxiety and even suicide. So, I was hoping that some clinical information would come out on the Hof website, or in the scientific literature. When none did, I decided to investigate myself. In this week's video I talk to renowned breath worker Brian Mackenzie, Craig Kasper, a famous audiologist, and Wim Hof himself to answer this ringing question.  

Spoiler alert: The Wim Hof Method can make tinnitus worse, but there are ways to get it under control.  This one was a lot of fun to report--with tons of parallels to the underlying physiology that I wrote about in The Wedge. 

Our Atomic Pickle

The other day Vladimir Putin's cronies said that they would consider starting World War 3 if they felt that Russia was under an "existential threat".  While that might just be the usual chest thumping insanity of a nuclear-armed nation, I started to wonder what would really happen in the event that one nation or another decided to solve their military problems with the power of the atom.  

Of course, this isn't the first time that we have been on the edge of global destruction (if you have dug into my new book The Vortex, already, you will remember how the Soviet and American fleets almost vaporized one another in 1972 during the liberation war for Bangladesh). 

It turns out that there has been a fair amount of academic modeling about what would happen in the aftermath of both small and large nuclear exchanges.  While you might worry about the millions that would die in the explosions themselves, and the radioactive fallout, the real threat is the immense amount of dust that nuclear weapons will launch into the atmosphere—causing nuclear winter.  Suffice it to say, once the nukes start going off, it's pretty certain that we will all starve in short order afterwards. 

So, we all get it: nukes are bad.   But what's even worse is how easy it is for one insane leader or another to start launching them. If we don't find a new system for deploying nuclear weapons, we are really just playing dice with humanity's future. Eventually the dice are going to stop coming up in our favor. 

Putin is pretty scary and unstable--but he's not the first global leader with an itchy trigger finger.  And this led me to an idea for how we could change the way that America secures the proverbial-button that I think could save the world. In this week's YouTube video I outline an easy political change up that won't require complete disarmament (which is almost impossible to implement) but will protect us from an insane president who thinks nuclear weapons will solve his or her political problems.   I'd love to you give it a watch and let me know what you think. 

So . . . how's the book launch going?

In other news: The Vortex isn't the out of the box New York Times bestseller that every writer hopes their new book will be on launch week, but we have had really great reviews and a lot more press coverage coming up soon.  I'm sure I'll mention it in a future email, but word on the street is that The Washington Post will have something out this week.  There's no news over at the NYT itself, but if you want to pester all your friends in those esteemed offices for me please do!

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Why YouTube is the best social media platform

Remember when you could have a great idea that you wanted to share with the world and you could simply post it onto any one of a half-dozen social media platforms and expect some sort of conversation to organically sprout out into the world?  Maybe there would be some likes. Maybe some comments and genuine conversation?

Yeah, well, those times are dead. 

If you're like me you've noticed that social media is pretty terrible now. Our feeds aren't only inundated by ads, but posting isn't nearly as powerful as it was only a few months ago.  What happened, you ask? 

Well, a few things: Facebook stopped being able to track your every move when Apple cut off their automatic tracking portals, forcing them to dilute the feeds on Facebook and Instagram with ads. TikTok stopped promoting new users, and retrenched. Meanwhile Twitter started diversifying its product with clubhouse knockoffs, rooms and other things that I don't quite understand.

The only social media service that is even a semblance of its former-self is YouTube.  So that's where I'm going to be putting my efforts going forward.  Check out my video to understand why. 

What do slime molds and COVID-19 have in common?

There’s a type of intelligence that doesn’t require a brain or any sort of central organizing principle.  It’s a type of intelligence that only emerges when lots of individual organisms act together in ways that are far greater than any individual parts.  It’s called a superorganism where lots of individual organisms work together to solve problems and make decisions that have almost nothing to do with the conditions that any one individual experiences. Instead, those individual actions add up to a collective intelligence. A hive mind, if you will.  Take, for instance, the humble slime mold.

When you put it under a microscope it’s clear that you can’t think of a slime mold in the same way as you do a plant. It isn’t one cohesive blob of goop, rather it’s a colony of hundreds of millions of individual mold particles that replicate and grow as a population. Every cell is its own autonomous creature.  However, the colony acts in concert together in a way that forms intricate shapes and what, from a macro level, is a discrete super organism.  That super organism can do some pretty amazing things. Like, for instance, solving mazes.

See here: 

A slime mold colony spreading out in a natural environment (left) a slime mold completing a maze (right)

On the left you see a slime mold growing on a tree stump as the tendrils of the colony reach out, absorb nutrients and grow.  A few decades ago researchers began to wonder how intelligent that search for food could get...so they put a slime mold colony into the maze which you can see on the right.   The maze held a nutrient stash on either side, and it was the colony’s task to spread through the maze and eat up the food as efficiently as possible.  Lo and behold, the slime mold colony found a path through the twists and turns of the maze, so that all its individual slime organisms would thrive together and stay out of areas that didn’t offer a path to the food source. The researchers concluded that the slime mold colony was intelligent in and of itself. 

Ant colonies, bees and coral reefs display similar miraculous abilities.  As far back as 1789 the first geologist James Hutton began to think about the entire earth acting in concert as a single intelligent entity.  In the 1970s other philosophers refined the idea until it became the Gaia hypothesis.  

I’ve been thinking a lot about the smarts of slime molds as they relate to what we’ve all lived through with COVID-19, or for that matter, pandemics in general.  When you see an illustration in the media of the virus it usually looks something like this: 

A typical representation of what the corona virus looks like.

In other words, a bunch of individual spiky proteins that invade the human host, pierce our cellular defenses, replicate in our cells, and then spread to other vulnerable parts of our bodies. From the strict reductionist perspective the corona virus is an individual organism. Most scientists aren’t even sure viruses are alive. The coronavirus, and all its strains only really exist as individual units on a microscopic scale--the disease is merely the unthinking result. Thus, in this line of thinking, when the virus mutates and changes, these new variants are entirely new evolutionary lines that descend from a single viral particle and out-compete older variants. There’s nothing collective about the virus--which is one reason our vaccines target the virus on the particle level. The language of modern science only sees the individual viruses.

On the other hand, when most people actually speak about the disease COVID-19 we are really talking about how all those virus particles act in concert.  This is the field of epidemiology. It’s also the realm of lived experience, newspaper articles and social media posts.  When a person gets sick from COVID, their symptoms only emerge after hundreds of millions of viral particles act in concert together and cause the illness, or even death. 

At an even larger level, the spread of COVID 19 looks like what you see in this Washington Post timeline of the first year of the covid spread.   

The spread of the COVID-19 virus over the course of 2019 where each pixel represents a death and each color a different month.

When you look at a map like this of COVID-19 deaths over the course of 2020, it’s clear that we’re not talking about the path of individual viral particles. We’re instead visualizing all those viral particles acting together on millions of human bodies. The virus flows through urban areas like slime mold sucking up food. These maps illustrate the spread of the superorganism COVID-19 itself. Over the course of this pandemic humans have tried to throw up roadblocks against the pandemic--from social distancing and mask wearing, to vaccines and the political discord that we’ve all grown to accept as normal.   

COVID-19 responds to the conditions on the surface of the earth by evolving new strains of virus and spreading out across the world into vulnerable pockets in the same way that slime molds gobble up nutrients. When we look at the COVID pandemic from this lens, the individual virus particles are a lot less interesting than their collective action.  

The pandemic we have been living through for the last two years has an alien intelligence all of its own. It solves problems, overcomes obstacles and uses the natural process of evolution to adapt to its host. In The Wedge I wrote how humanity is also a super organism where the collective action of all humans together is far greater--and weirder--than any individual’s intelligence. Taken from this perspective, the question of whether viruses are alive or not is no longer important. Instead we should consider a more profound question: is the virus conscious?

Hammers. Anvils. Heat. And the Wedge

Right now as riots crisscross the United States there is a tendency for some people to decry acts of looting and open expressions of anger as somehow illegitimate--or that they cannot possibly be part of a path that forges a better society. And, while I personally abhor violence, to say that there is no place for violence in social change ignores history. 

If you want to forge metal, you need three things: heat, a hammer and an anvil.  The four men pictured above are the hammers and anvils of social change. We like to credit Martin Luther King with the advances of the civil rights movement. But who would his message have rang as clear without riots across the country? Would he have resonated with the masses if Malcolm X wasn’t offering a more violent alternative?  

In India we like to credit Gandhi’s nonviolent movement for freeing South Asia from the bonds of colonial rule. We talk about how he salt-marched to the sea, tolerated British jails and after all that nonviolent action the British just left.  Well, everyone from India knows that the change wasn’t so easy. The guy with the hat in the picture above is Bhagat Singh, a freedom fighter who killed a British officer and threw a bomb into the legislature. There were other armed insurrections across the British Raj that put the British into an impossible situation. On one hand they had to fight an insurgency, while on the other, the rest of the world saw them putting Gandhi in jail. In 1947, the British left India.     

In both cases social change happened only because of the contrast between violence and the nonviolent alternative. We may valorize the people who turn the other cheek. But we should not forget that it was the contrast between the two different approaches that ultimately altered the political and social landscapes.

Since I released The Wedge many people have asked me about how the concept operates on the societal level. After all, one of the main themes of the book is that consciousness operates at different levels as a superorganism--that the sum of human actions organizes systems that have their own rules. Seen from this perspective both COVID and the riots across America are the stresses that we need to learn to respond to. They test our social nervous system precisely because they offer a threat that could destabilize the fundamental structure of society. It’s the social equivalent of a threat of death.  At the same time, these macro level threats demand some sort of psychological or physical response. 

In the last few decades there have been thousands of non-violent protests against police brutality in America. People have held picket signs and shouted into the halls of power. But not much has changed. More people have died by the bullets and under the knees of murderous cops.  Most of those officers never saw a day of jail time. The situation undermines the rule of law and makes the job so much more difficult for the good officers who entered law enforcement for the most noble reasons.  But in the absence of a political mechanism that addresses the injustice, it is no surprise in the least that we have violence on our streets. 

The question now is whether this conflagration of protest and violence will congeal into the right mix of hammer, heat and anvil. If there’s too much violence we end up in revolution--in a place where opportunists turn the message to whatever direction suits them the best. We saw this most recently in the Arab Spring which grew out of liberal ideals and descended into something much more violent and cynical. If there is only non-violence then the state has no reason to pay attention, and the situation is more reminiscent of the plight of the Tibetan people living in exile--the Dalai Lama is a charismatic leader with a message of peace that resonates around the globe, but there’s no pressure internally in China to hammer out change.    And finally, if there is only heat--protests around the country, broken windows and anger all around--what could have been a movement will eventually cool off and we will return to the status quo. 

The Perils of Being “On-Brand”

The other day I got a very nice email from someone I met on Reddit about how I could change my image online to sell more books. His advice was very sensible.  The short of it was that I needed to craft my online persona to be the expert on the world of breathing, the mind body connection and human performance. I should provide a constant drip of analysis, encourage my customers to think, interview other experts, post regular informative blog posts, retweet more, and most of all keep my political and personal opinions as far away from social media as possible.  This, he predicted, would make brand Scott Carney skyrocket with more followers, subscribers to my email list, and most importantly, lots and lots of book sales. It’s an appealing promise. What author wouldn’t want those things? 

I thanked him for the advice. Then I told him that I most likely wouldn't be following it.  

Here’s the thing: I’m not a brand. Neither are you. And while we all craft our images online to some degree with filters, cool selfies and whitty rapporte, who we are online shouldn’t eclipse who we are as real flesh-and-blood humans. 

COVID has done a lot of damage to the world, but one thing it has revealed is how shallow our online lives had been. Just 8 weeks ago my newsfeed overflowed with vacation selfies, bro-science, super positive people, bio hacks, yoga poses and a non-stop churn of impenetrable positivity.  Everyone was building their personal brand and monetizing the hell out of it.  Or, at least trying to monetize it. But then, a stint in quarantine, and 80,000 deaths later, the backlogs of awesome photos has run out.  Online advertising declined and at least a few professional influencers are actual people again. And it’s a little refreshing.

Strange things happen when a person becomes a brand. Yes, they might make a little more money. But over time the constant pressure to always be the smartest person in a discussion, show the awesomest yoga pose, six pack or fashion sense, can get isolating.  It’s the same problem that I wrote about in The Enlightenment Trap where spiritual gurus at first start amassing a following with their honest insights, and eventually wind up on a pedestal.  Once the guru presents a perfect image of themselves to the world (or even declares that they are some form of enlightened) they lose the ability to show weakness in any form. They’re isolated. And they often even start to believe that anything they think or feel is, by definition, the truth simply because so many people have faith in their proclamations. 

This is the trap that Geshe Michael Roach and Lama Christie McNally wound up in Arizona that prompted me to spend a few years documenting their descent into madness. In their case it ended with the entirely preventable death of Ian Thorson on a mountain side. But, to a lesser extent, it’s the trap that anyone can fall into once they present themselves as an authority for too long.  It’s the same sort of hubris is also killing people during the COVID pandemic where armchair experts who might be accomplished in a particular field, proclaim solutions to the illness that stretch beyond their actual knowledge. Actual expert Rohin Francis nicely showed how dangerous it could be in this recent youtube video.

But it’s not only the danger of spreading false knowledge. At least for me, it’s the danger of becoming a less real person in general. If being a brand means altering every aspect of your public life to generate an image of success then I don’t want any part of it. I want to be able to fail. I want to be able to post my thoughts and not worry if it might alienate a few readers because it doesn’t live up to an image crafter by marketers. Those aren’t the metrics that I want to live my life by. After all, how many people do I know who have extensive online followings who express privately to me that they’re sort of miserable?  Tim Ferris has talked about it (before resuming the image of being awesome). It also affects people who are much, much less famous when they compare themselves to others.

I guess my purpose of writing this screed is to say that don’t expect me to be On Brand in any particular platform. Sure, you’ll see me write about the Wedge here, and post a few shirtless selfies now and again on Instagram. But there is going to be a time when you get nothing but cat photos, and idle musings that may, or may not lead to any new and interesting thoughts.  This policy isn’t going to win me an enormous following.  I’ll sell fewer books. But I’ll be a happier person.  And that’s enough for me.    

Finding a Wedge for Anxiety in the Time of Social Distancing

Many of us are struggling to find our bearings in a world that feels out of control. While we can't change the events of the moment, we DO have a measure of control over how our bodies deal with the stress.

These are scary times and it's completely normal to feel anxious and upset. I spent pretty much all of yesterday staring at the endless feed of bad news. It made me feel worse, not better. While we don’t have any power to alter politics, economics or public health precautions. We do have control over how we let that stress affect our bodies.

The nervous system we inherited from our ancestors isn’t well adapted to dealing with dangers that aren’t right in front of us. No homoerectus contemplated quarantine. Instead they saw a dangerous animal on the horizon and their bodies responded by pumping adrenaline and cortisol into their blood streams to give them the energy boost that might save their lives. Our ancestors' problems required physical responses. While we denizens of the modern world have remarkably similar bodies as our greatest grandparents the threats are different. When we contemplate social distancing our bodies still respond with the same hormonal cocktails that we did hundreds of thousands of years ago. Without an outlet for that energy, the havoc turns inwards, makes us feel anxious, and compromises our immune systems. 

The solution to this conundrum isn’t to surf the internet and bombard ourselves with more stressful inputs that we can’t solve. Instead, we need to find physical outlets that make use of those stress cocktails and which will bring our internal chaos under control. 

Right now is the time to double down on a physical practice that you can do on your own. There are tons of free and cheap yoga classes online. You can still go cycling or running outdoors. And you can work out in your front yard. If you know anything about my own journey over the last decade, then you know that I am a huge advocate of the Wim Hof method.  The breathing method just takes a few minutes to learn. And it’s an extremely quick way to bring your stress hormones under control. 

We also need to do everything we can to keep our immune systems healthy. We know that COVID-19 affects elderly and immunocompromised people much more than the general population. The Wim Hof method can’t do anything about transmission--you still need to keep up social distancing, washing your hands, and follow all the public health protocols in place. However, clinical trials in Holland back in 2014 showed that Wim Hof breathing can help suppress out of control immune responses. Since the worst damage from COVID-19 comes from an out of control immune reaction to the virus (not the virus itself) it at least stands to reason that it should help you if you get infected. I did a video about this about a week ago (see below). 

I dig into all of this a lot more in The Wedge. I offer up ten techniques that have worked for me to help control my autonomic nervous system in the face of all sorts of different stresses.  Some of those things are probably not going to be practical in the era of social distancing (sorry, I don’t think anyone is going to be able to head down to Peru to try shamanic plant medicine in the next few months). However at least half the book includes techniques you can adopt right now.  More importantly, it should help you adapt and get more out of just about any practice that you’re already doing.

I really wish I had the ability to release the book right now, but I’m stuck with an April 13, 2020 release date. However, I do have a few books on hand that I can sign and send to people in the United States through the post (assuming the post office remains open).  This is a link for how to get one. 

More important than that, please stay healthy. Wash your hands. And keep breathing. We might not be able to change the world right now, but we can help how we respond to it. 

Get Your Signed Copy of The Wedge

For a limited time only I’m offering early readers of The Wedge a chance for a personalized signed copy of the before its official release date on April 13, 2020. These are collectors editions of the paperback and they will run a little more expensive than you will be able to find them on Amazon or other retailers—$30 with $5 for shipping. (On Amazon it’s $17.99 shipping usually included). I’ll mail them out from Foxtopus HQ in Denver in early April with a personalized note and a signature so you can be one of the first people to see a finished copy of the Wedge in print. The first 20 people will also receive an ebook-copy of the Wedge on for free.

Order your copy today at the Foxtoshop.

Unfortunately, this offer is only valid for people who live in the United States. Postage rate everywhere else in the world is an additional $25 (which, frankly, I think is crazy and I recommend simply forging my signature). However, if you DO live abroad and really want a copy send me an email and we can work it out.

ACX: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

I’m going to have to get into the weeds about audiobooks for a moment because they’re one of the most important tools that a writer has to make a steady living. And, unfortunately, in the last week some changes in the marketplace make it seem that some of the potential profits are going to get sucked away.

First the good.

When What Doesn’t Kill Us came out I made a sort of radical decision to skip the mainstream audio publishers to record and self-produce my own audiobook.  It turned out to be one of the smartest decisions that I ever made. I listed the book through ACX.com, a subdivision of Audible.com that caters to self-published authors. The advantage of self-publishing  was that I would earn a lot better royalty rate–40% where most mainstream publishing contracts are 12.5%.  ACX sends me checks every month, not every quarter, or every six months like most publishers do. It hasn’t made me rich, but audiobooks account for about 50% of what I make today.Not only that, but ACX had an offer that sweetened the deal. It was something called “Bounties”.  Bounties are essentially a reward for bringing new customers into Audible and they are a big part to why Audible has been able to corner the audiobook market.  The way it worked was that for every customer who downloaded my book first on Audible, and then maintained their subscription for 61 days, they would give me $50.Over the last year and a half I’ve earned 533 bounties for a total of $26,650. Yeah. That’s pretty good money.Overall I’ve been ecstatic about my experience with ACX.com. It’s given me real access to publishing profits, a steady income and allows me to reach an audience who print doesn’t appeal to.  Not only that, but I got to read the audiobook myself. ACX also ran a few promotions on behalf of “What Doesn’t Kill Us” that made it the number one book on the planet for two days.

Because they’ve been so awesome, I’ve gone to the mat for ACX. I’ve told all of my friends who are writing books to do everything they can to hold onto their audio rights and self publish through ACX. I’ve told them to turn down large advances if the publisher wanted to keep them. I’ve been annoying. The audiobook market is that good. But ACX just announce a change to its policies that is going to make it a little worse for authors.

And now the bad

A few days ago ACX sent me an email that they were going altering the Bounty program by increasing the payment to $75 for each new customer.  More money. Yay. That sounded great at first.

But then I read the fine print

.The new terms make it so that instead of earning a bounty if your book is the first one a new customer listens to, you will only earn the money if they use a referral link that you supply and market on social media separately from your main marketing push.

What’s worse?  If you go to your Amazon page audiobooks are still listed as “$0.00” for a free trial. That’s the same exact offer that writers are being asked to push through separate channels.  So you’re now in competition against your main book page to earn a bounty.Look at it this way: let’s say you score a major media spot on NPR, or a hit podcast, on TV or a viral YouTube video. I always mention on air that I have a great audiobook that I recorded myself–which drives people right to my Amazon page. I would say something along the lines of “If you like the dulcet sounds of my voice, you can pick up the Audiobook on Amazon”.With the old system, you’d earn a $50 Bounty if some of those listeners got excited enough to start up subscriptions to Audible because of your interview.  Now, those same listeners will go right to the Amazon page and the author gets cut out. Same goes for word of mouth. If someone tells their friends that you audiobook was amazing and subscribes to audible because of that you still get zero dollars.You only earn the bounty if someone types in a URL that looks like this:

https://www.audible.com/pd/B01N5NNZF8/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-077506&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_077506_rh_us

And even IF they do that, there’s no tangible advantage to the customer.  They don’t get a discount that is unique to your media appearance. They don’t get a couple extra free months. Nothing.Instead of playing towards the strengths of authors, the new Bounty program plays to the strengths of people with huge social media followings only.  So if you’re a person with a 100,000 Twitter followers and another 50,000 people on Instagram, then you might come out ahead–but not necessarily because they still lose out on people who come through amazon.com.If you’re not a social media expert, who understands the ins and outs of A/B testing campaigns, and constantly produces clickbait posts to increase your following, you’re definitely going to lose out.

…and the Ugly

Here’s the thing about ACX. When they started out they positioned themselves as allies to authors–democratizing they way that people access and listen to audiobooks.  In the first few years they offered 70% royalties to their self-published authors.Of course it was risky in the beginning–and authors had to do most of the heavy lifting. Authors have to self-produce the audiobook, which takes time and in many cases around $6500 to record. Still, it was an amazing opportunity and authors around the country helped Audible corner the market for Audiobooks. Now, when you think “audiobook” you think “audible”.   There aren’t a lot of other places that people go to pick them up.Once they had market dominance ACX and Audible started changing their terms.  A few years ago they brought the 70% royalty rate down to 50%. A couple years later they brought that number down to 40%.   Mind you, Audible isn’t doing more work here, they’re just giving authors a worse deal because they’re the biggest player in the market. Authors are giving up 60% of their money simply to access distribution.Now they’re also taking out the rewards from the bounty system.This is a pretty classic story of what happens with monopolies. At first a tech giant woos creative people to adopt and start using their platform with good terms for everyone. They look like heroes and disruptors, and they tell the people who build them up to trust them to steward a bright future. Then, one day, it turns out that all those people who helped build up that company are now just cogs in a machine that the company controls.  The profits stay at the top and the people who made that company great are just grist for the mill.So now I’m on the lookout for other opportunities. It’s clear that Audible shouldn’t be the only marketplace for self-published books. Eventually a new player will have to enter into the market with offers that woo people like me back to a more equitable service.__

This, of course is pretty bad news for freelancers, but there are a few ways to fight back. I recently started offering an online video course teaching some of the tricks that I use to negotiate better contracts, and grow my freelancing business from nothing to becoming a New York Times bestselling author.  It might be useful for you.

 Check it out.

TEDx-CU: How the Environment Shapes Human Blology

In May 2017, I took the stage at TEDx-CU and asked whether the comforts of the modern age  have made us weaker? Watch the video by clicking the link above.   Or

click here

to see it on YouTube.

Listen to the "What Doesn't Kill US" audiobook

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What Doesn’t Kill Us: How Freezing water, Extreme Altitude and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength

is officially out as an audiobook on Audible, Amazon, iBooks. It has been featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday and in Men’s Journal and debuted at the #112 spot on Amazon in January 2017.  I recorded the audiobook myself with the help of Marcello Lessa, one of the top audio engineers in the Denver area.  It runs just shy of 10 hours and is exactly the sort of inspiration that you need to reach your highest potential.  Come with me on an evolutionary journey to understand how the comforts of the modern age are making us weak, and what we can do to get a little of our ancestral strength back. Download your copy today: Audible iBooks Amazon

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Here is what some of the early reviewers are saying:Climbing a mountain in nothing but a pair of shorts seems idiotic to most, but for Wim Hof and his companions, it’s just another day. When investigative journalist and anthropologist Carney heard about Hof’s mind boggling methods and claims that he could “hack” the human body, he knew he had to venture to Poland to expose this fraud. But in just a few days, Hof changed Carney’s mind, and so began a friendship and a new adventure. Carney now chronicles his journey to push himself mentally and physically using Wim Hof’s method of cold exposure, breath-holding, and meditation to tap into our primal selves. Our ancestors survived harsh conditions without modern technology, while we live in comfortable bubbles with little to struggle against and wonder how they survived.The question is,

What happens when we push our bodies to the limit?

Carney calls on evolutionary biology and other modern scientific disciplines to explore and explain Hof’s unconventional methods. Fresh and exciting, this book has wide appeal for readers interested in health, sports, self-improvement, and extreme challenges.―

Booklist

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“Damn fun and extremely well-researched,

What Doesn’t Kill Us

is a great addition to the canon of high performance literature!”―

Steven Kotler, New York Times bestselling author of Abundance and The Rise of Superman

“As a Navy SEAL, you live by the mantra, ‘what doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger.’ We would hear this phrase and repeat it, but we never had any proof that it was factual. Yet through comprehensive study, ScottCarney has brilliantly documented how engaging in environmental conditioning, breathing, meditation, and other techniques can actually make us physically and mentally stronger.

What Doesn’t Kill Us

is a fascinating book that will captivate all who read it and that will be of immense value to those in the military, those who are active in sports, and those who seek an alternate means of developing greater mental and physical strength.”

―Don D. Mann, New York Times bestselling author, Inside SEAL Team SIX

What Doesn't Kill Us: the Trailer

For the last four years I’ve been investigating the limits of human endurance in harsh environments. After all, our ancestors crossed frozen mountain ranges and endless ocean miles without a whisper of modern technology. So why can’t you? This trailer is just a taste of the incredible journey that took me to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro without a shirt, meditating on the banks of snowy rivers in Poland and into the training gyms of top athletes, all to understand what makes us human. Available everywhere January 17, 2017.

Find your copy at Amazon

Here’s what early readers are saying:

“The further we get from the harsh environmental conditions that once threatened our existence, the more we need them. I see this every weekend at a Spartan Race somewhere in the world. Millions of otherwise sane people line up to suffer and push themselves to their physical limits, and it feels good. What Doesn’t Kill Us is a fascinating investigation into the innate urge that drives people like these, and reveals how some have managed to use environmental conditioning to accomplish truly extraordinary things.”

— Joe DeSena, founder, Spartan Race 

“As a Navy SEAL, you live by the mantra, ‘what doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger.’ We would hear this phrase and repeat it, but we never had any proof that it was factual. Yet through comprehensive study, Scott Carney has brilliantly documented how engaging in environmental conditioning, breathing, meditation, and other techniques can actually make us physically and mentally stronger. What Doesn’t Kill Us is a fascinating book that will captivate all who read it and that will be of immense value to those in the military, those who are active in sports, and those who seek an alternate means of developing greater mental and physical strength.”— Don D. Mann, New York Times bestselling author of Inside SEAL Team SIX

Amazon –Barnes & Noble–Books-a-million–IndieBound–iBooks