Scott Carney's The Wedge: Investigative Journalism by One of the Best

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welcome to another episode of Living a Life in Full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout. Scott Carney is an author, anthropologist, investigative journalist. His works blend narrative nonfiction with ethnography. He attended Kenyon College and has a Master's degree in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Scott has worked in some of the most dangerous and unlikely corners of the world, spending extensive time in South Asia and he also speaks Hindi. Scott was a contributing editor at Wired for five years and and his writing has also appeared in Mother Jones, Men's Journal, Playboy, Foreign Policy, Discover, Outside, and Fast Company. His work has been the subject of a variety of radio and television programs including NPR and National Geographic TV. In 2010, he won the Paine Award for Ethics in Journalism for his story Meet the Parents, which tracked an international kidnapping to adoption ring. He's the author of four books and recently published the Wedge, which will be a large part of our conversation in this episode. His other books include the Red Market, the Enlightenment Trap, and what Doesn't Kill Us, which was also a New York Times bestseller. Scott it's great to have you on the show.

Great. Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here.

You know, I have to say from doing background on you and reading your books, your journalistic work, seems like you're sort of a bit of a cross between like George Plimpton and Tim Ferriss. You're quite the participant in the journalistic work you do. How did that approach come about?

Well, you know, I started as an anthropologist. I got to the PhD dissertation at university of Wisconsin Madison. And you know, anthropologists, what they're known for is participant ethnography. So you go in there and you sort of are part of the story as you go around doing your reporting and then you write for an academic audience. And what I realized after far too long in that program was that I'd much rather reach an audience of millions of people and apply an anthropological lens than write a dissertation that only 7 people read, then play the tenure game for the rest of my life.

Right. Gosh. Well, so let's start. I mean your, your work is each one of them, I think could be, you know, a docu series or a movie or two. But let's, let's start with Meet the Parents. How did that come about?

Oh yeah. From your lips to Netflix's ears, right? Yeah. So Meet the Parents was a story I did for Mother Jones that was then later included in my book the Red Market, where I had found. So I'd been working on organ trafficking. That was sort of my beat early on in my career where I was sort of looking at people who bought and sold kidneys, bought and sold human skeletons. I wanted to know how the human tissue was being commercialized. And with Meet the Parents, I had sort of extended my lens into buying and selling whole humans and particularly through the adoption industry. And I had found, I was living in India at that time, the south Indian city of Chennai, and I'd found this story of, of this orphanage called Malaysian Social Services who had, who had been kidnapping kids in the, from the slums and then selling them to the adoption industry in the United States and Australia and the Netherlands. Wow. So, I mean, yeah, what happens with adoption is pretty crazy because, you know, the adoption fees, you know, it costs anywhere between 20 and $100,000 to go through the whole adoption. And these adoption agencies have a lot incentive to sell, you know, to keep on pushing kids through that pipeline. And, and the problem however, is it's not like there's a shortage of orphans in a place like India, but, but they, there is a shortage of healthy, young, good looking Orphans, the most valuable ones. So what they'll do is, you know, in order to sort of keep their. Their orphanage running and then also support the lifestyles of the orphanage, they will actually have to kidnap kids from the slums, from sort of healthy families, and then sell them. So I. So in that book. Sorry, in that article, I tracked down a kid who'd been kidnapped in 2000. Sorry, in 1999. And he was sold to a family in Wisconsin through an orphanage. You know, they didn't think of it as buying a kid, although they were. And then I knocked on their door in Wisconsin. I was like, hi, you've got a kidnapped kid, and let's try to sort this out. And so that's the story. And it's not just for this one child, although I did sort of manage eventually to reconnect him with his family. But this is a problem throughout the entire adoption industry.

Gosh, I had no idea. I mean, I know the. You would think the supply and demand, you know, would still be kind of leaning towards the supply side of things, but in those kinds of instances, I guess, you know, it's. It's a. The. The selection process of wanting the. The, you know, children that appear all a. Okay. Versus some that maybe aren't, you know, have some kind of disabilities or things like that are the ones that have a harder time getting, you know, any kind of properly placed or. Or illegitimately placed. That's unbelievable.

So, I mean, yeah, you can think of the adoption industry as sort of like the. The market for bananas after you. If you don't move them quick, they sort of, you know, the orphanage will make them sick. Right. It will make them sort of developmentally disabled.

Yeah, Yeah. I had. In the nonprofit that I run, I had worked with some folks, we were trying to get a grant from USAID on working with some what were called internauts in Ukraine. And they were for. They're basically orphanages that were for individuals profoundly disabled, intellectually or psychologically or physically or combinations thereof. And no one would ever adopt them. I mean, they would just sort of like they had very short lifespans, which probably isn't a big surprise from the experiences that you saw and, you know, a horrible kind of circumstance. I mean, and even the workers there, it was a legitimate kind of thing, and there were legitimate houses and buildings and places where these orphans were and the staff that work with them, but the morale of those staff people and the social status of them in the context of their work was awful. And I mean, it was just a hot mess in a variety of different kinds of ways. So I think it's good to have the work like you do and to have it be recognized as it has been, to kind of pull the curtain back on those kinds of things. It sounds like a perfect combination between being the journalist and the participant anthropologist as well, too. So you seem quite well fitting for it.

Yeah, I don't really think that it's fair for journalists to pretend that we're objective. And this is actually a big thing in the media right now. People are like fake news because there's this ideal of news as an objective description of reality. And the truth is, nothing is objective. The entire world is built on lots and lots of interconnected subjective experiences. And if we don't acknowledge our position while we're talking about whatever is we're talking about, then what you're essentially doing is pretending to be objective. And my belief and the way I write is to say, look, here's who I am. Here are my flaws, here's where I'm coming from. And you can either like or not like that, but here's what I observe based on that. And I feel like that gets actually a little closer to objectivity because then the reader has a chance to decide whether or not I'm crazy.

Right. Well, that's a good point. I mean, it's sort of like full disclosure, so to speak, in the sense of informed consent. If you're. If someone is reading something that Scott's written and someone knows Scott's background and knows Scott's point of view, et cetera, then you get to read, understand it through that lens and through that perspective. I think that's a much more transparent and honest way of being able to communicate. I mean, I studied in graduate school from a wonderful book called how to Lie with Statistics. And it was, I think, written in the 50s.

Oh, yeah, it's a classic.

Yeah. And it's so wonderful. And a lot of the funny things that are kind of cartoonish but true in that book, you know, are still just as true today, you know. Does this kind of thinking. Is that what informed you? Recently posted in your blog, the Perils of Being on Brand, which I thought was great, but it sort of sounds a little reminiscent of this too. Like how you give the. You gave some links in there too, about, like the, you know, certain kinds of people in certain areas, movie stars or athletes or whatever, all of a sudden become, you know, coronavirus experts and things like that. So what spurred the perils of being on brand?

Yeah, so that article Sort of came out because I've had, you know, I've just released this new book. It's called the Wedge. It's doing pretty well. But some people have written to me being like, scott, if only you were a little more coherent on your brand and, you know, just focused on the narrow, you know, the, you know, becoming a breathwork coach and talking about ice baths and dealing with stress and that, the topics of that book. And then, you know, they gave me sort of a game plan for how to, like, sort of accentuate that and hyper target who Scott Carney is online to become, you know, to grow my following and get super successful and sell a lot of books. And that's sort of an appealing idea. Like, who doesn't want to sell a ton of books?

Right.

But the thing is, is that we have this tendency. I wrote to him and like, thank you so much for the advice. I'm absolutely not going to take it. And the reason is, is because we all have this tendency in social media to present the very best face, right? You know, you don't go on Instagram and just take the first picture of you just waking up with drool all over your face, right. Even though, you know, honestly, we probably spend more time with drool on our face than not. And, and, and I sort of object to the idea of, of being a perfect person and, and, and trying to just narrow down to your most potent and most commercially successful whatever, because it's not. It's not pleasurable. Like, it's not, it's not honest. It's not human. And there's this risk of becoming isolated because, you know, the person who's wrong on the Internet who admits any sort of weakness gets jumped on by wolverines and the jackals of the, of the social media sphere. And that's really toxic. Right? That's just horrible. And, and I think that it's important to sort of, you know, one, you know, there are things that you want. May want to promote. Like, I want to promote my books. Like, I'll be honest about that, but I also don't want to just do that. I don't want to just be this sort of, like, myopically narrow version of myself because I think it's unhealthy. And I've got a lot of friends who have, you know, like, bajillions of followers on the Internet, right. In various forms. And what they often complain about to me is that they have to be that they're increasingly being driven towards perfection. Right. You know, one guy's this famous breathing coach, you know, and he tells me, he's like, look, I don't always want to be the super awesome guy who's always super awesome in every super awesome way, because that's not who I actually am. But that's what people want. And so that's. That's what I was sort of pushing against. There is that. Is that we should take ourselves. You know, we don't want to wag the dog. We don't want our social media profiles to wag the dog and become who we are, because then that starts affecting our actions, actions in everyday life. And we start thinking about the camera or whatever we're posting as more important than the life that we're living. And that's what I really want to sort of push against. You know, even though I do post a fair number of shirtless selfies on the Instagram.

Right.

That's also a thing that I do.

Yeah, well, it makes sense in the context of, you know, the. The book and some of the things that you've done as well, too. I mean, it's a. It's a very slippery black mirror kind of, you know, slope, I think, with that. That aspect of being all consumed by it and people carefully curating their content, but feeling like. And I felt too, from your blog, like the. The aspect of this demand and drive that may be a little tough and a little weird to be off brand when everybody's, like, worried about, you know, COVID 19 or something. So. Well, let's see. How can I make my, you know, my fashion travel pics of me in my bikini relevant to, you know, COVID 19 sor of thing, which really speaks back to what we mentioned earlier in the show about the person's perspective and point of view and maybe even in some levels, it's not journalism, it's Instagram, that you have ulterior motives, that you're there from a economically driven kind of way, not strictly informational, trying to be as either open or impartial as possible. I don't think anyone on Instagram would call themselves a journalist. So I think those kinds of things are fascinating to see the differences, and I think you outlined them quite well in your blog. We'll put links to that in the show notes. So I can't do it justice trying to summarize it, but I thought you really gave a very thoughtful and cogent perspective on that. I really enjoyed it.

Yeah. Thanks. The other thing is that there's this creep right now in Covid. Right. The whole world is talking About COVID That's all we want to do right now is when is this going to end? What's the epidemiology and whatever. And there's a lot of really smart people out there weighing in. But one of the problems that we have seen is that somebody who is an expert, say, you know, geneticist, right. At some really high prestige university might weigh in on the epidemiology of COVID with completely off base idea about what, what should be done because. And they think that their expertise sort of travels from one to the other and, and you know that this is the Dunning Kruger effect to some degree. Right. Which is the idea that you, you know, you're not really quite aware of your ignorance. Right, right. And then people double down on their ignorance and we're all ignorant of so much stuff, but it's a mess. So we, we could actually probably should avoid talking about COVID because that just goes down a long way. Exactly.

Yeah, well, it, yeah, it's kind of a meta aspect of the thing we're complaining about. So. Yeah, well, well, here's a good segue then. I. In your book what Doesn't Kill Us, which again would. Congratulations. New York Times bestseller. And part of it was I was kind of a Wim Hof wannabe and I've got the app on my phone and I've downloaded, you know, I don't know, it's sitting here on my desk with your book. One of his, one of his books which is like just humongous. And you know, I, I climbed kilimanjaro like Gosh, 1992. And I had every shred of fleece and Gore Tex and triple socks. And I put my water bottle inside my parka because if it was outside it would have frozen. And here you are with Wim Hof in your shorts doing that. So it was just sort of like fascinating to me. So I really, you know, enjoyed that book.

Not only shorts, but bare chested.

Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, yeah. You had no place to put your water bottle. So. Yeah. So that's sort of a thing. And then again, you think for folks who. I think there's probably a lot of listeners to the show that who know who Wim Hof is. I'll have you kind of do a little background on him in just a second. But to kind of see that sort of a thing again, my first impression is either it's baloney or it's, you know, it's an N of 1. He's, you know, there's. He's that's his, you know, X Men superpower strength. And he can do this stuff and no one else can, versus Whim's point to say, no, this is trainable. No, we can all these, you know, kind of, you know, crazy kinds of things. So, so take us back. Maybe we'll just start and then we'll work our way to the wedge. Take us back to what doesn't kill us. How did that get started? And you were, you were a skeptic of whim as well, too. Is that, is that the genesis of that book?

Yeah. So I had written a bunch of articles and was working on a book when I first met Wim Hof. And the book was about how meditation can kill you. Like how sort of this, especially the meditation where people are trying to get superpowers, like, you know, there's this whole genre of people who go into, like, Tantric yoga, tantric meditation, Tibetan Buddhism, who, who are trying to meditate to become like, sort of superhuman. And there's, in the Indic traditions, there's all sorts of descriptions of superhuman powers you can acquire if you wanted to. And, and I'd seen people go crazy, end up in mental institutions on this path. I'd seen several people die by committing suicide or, or, or meditating to death by dehydration. I mean, there's tragedy in the meditation world. And, and so I was documenting that and I was particularly worried about gurus who are being. Who are, who are selling this stuff. And, and so that was the trajectory of my life. I'd been sort of debunking these false gurus sort of all around the world. And then I heard about Wim Hof, who is this sort of Dutch guy, extreme athlete. You know, you see pictures of him, he's like basically nude on an iceberg and he's telling people that he can control his body temperature at will to survive extreme environments and also control his autonomic immune system. It's autonomic nervous system and his immune system with just the power of his mind, which sounded pretty close to a superpower.

Yeah, yeah.

So I decided.

Little Yuri Geller there, so.

Exactly. And so I decided to go debunk him and I got a commission from Playboy to go write sort of a feature article about him. And I was at the very first workshop that he ever taught. And this was actually, in some ways this was very lucky because he was just sort of rising on the scene. He was more or less a nobody at that point. I mean, there were a couple articles about him being like, Sort of a clown in various ways. He was somewhat known in Holland, but then, you know, I came there and he was just building this organization he calls Inner Fire, which is. And which is the sort of the business that operates underneath him. And, you know, I get off the plane and Wim is not an impressive person when you first meet him. You know, he's got a big bulge, red nose. He has history of alcoholism. He's, you know, emotionally all over the place. And he talks nonsense. You know, if you actually get him on the phone somewhere, it's just nonsense, like spurts out of his mouth. And I figured this was going to be a pretty easy job, But so I. So then I go, I fly out to Poland where he has his training center, and it's like this dilapidated building. And one of the first things I see after I get out of the car and stow my bags, and there's only three other people on this program with me. And I look out the window and there's this dude throwing ice on his body and there's steam coming off his body. And it's like, you know, this is the winter in Poland. It's the winter that stopped the Nazi army. And I'm like, wow, this is crazy. And the long and short of it. Sorry, the short of it, not the long. The short of it is that I tried his method, and lo and behold, it worked. You know, he's got this breathing technique he does, which is like hyperventilating and then exhaling and then holding your breath and then. Then repeating that cycle over and over again. You can hold your breath for, like, ridiculously long periods of time. You know, I think at his first workshop, I was holding my breath for between three and four minutes pretty easily. And then I was, like, sitting in ice water and controlling my shiver response in the ice water and. And eventually sitting in snow banks and melting the snow around me. And I was like, oh, my God, this is crazy. Oh. Oh. I ended up at the very end. I climbed up a mountain in Poland in my skivvies. It was about. What was it about 2 degrees Fahrenheit. And I was. I think I was on the mountain for eight hours, as I recall. But it's all in my book, what Doesn't Kill Us? Which sort of came out of this. And so this whole experience leads me to this one very important question. Was, was Wim Hof like some sort of angel? Right? Did he have some sort of like, prana from heaven that was giving you a superpower that was like, supernatural in some way or is there another explanation for why you're able to do this stuff? And so that's, that's, that's the initial question that sort of set me down as a nine year path to now trying to understand, you know, what is actually going on in the body. And, and lo and behold, I have a rational explanation. This is not a superpower. This is just an evolutionary power that we all have. And, and the actual truth is, while these things look really intense to most humans in the modern world, if you think back to where we came from, you know, Homo Sapiens is about 300,000 years old, depending on it's between 2 and 300,000 years old. And in that time we were dealing with all sorts of environmental changes, all sorts of threats all the time. The things that would make a modern person completely freaked out. You know, even on the plains of Africa, you're going up into the 90s and hundreds and in the day and then down to the 50s and 40s at night. So you needed a body that could make, could, could deal with those changes. And, and by going through those changes, they became resilient to a whole bunch of conditions. Fast forward to the modern era. We live at 72 degrees basically all year round, winter or summer. And, and we live in such a static environment that we are not giving our bodies the variations they need to actually thrive. So what looks like superpowers is actually just a human power that we can all pretty easily reinstate.

Gotcha. So it's really the aspect, because I like back in the day when we used to go to conferences and things like that, I would see people bring in their jacket, even though It's California is 80 degrees outside. They bring their jacket in because they know they're going to be cool for the first five minutes until the room equals out. It's just sort of like there's this, it seems like this concern about being so minorly uncomfortable in such picayune kinds of ways. So I totally get it where these kinds of things really sort of have gotten wrung out of, you know, modern people in industrialized countries. So is this, is that that concept and that perspective then is, is that what you call the wedge? And that's the focus of your newest book, you know.

Yeah, in a way. So what we are doing in the WIM HOF method, in both the breathing method and the, the ice method, right, is you're trying to resist your, your natural sort of automatic bodily responses to an external stimulus. So in the, in actually it could also be, it' internal stimulus. So in, in the case of ice water, you jump into ice water and your, your sensation is you want to clench up, right? You want to fight that stimulus that's coming in from the outside. And that's an innate reaction. You're just like, let's go do it. But you have the power, should you choose to, to say, no, I'm going to relax instead. I'm going to actually sit here and be like, this is fine, I can deal with it. A five minutes in an ice bath has killed zero people in the history of the planet. It's, it's not a fight or flight situation. This is a rest and digest situation moment where you're creating space between sort of the stimulus and response. That is what I'm calling the wedge. It's where you have a little bit of mental control over an innate reaction. And there's several ways you can work with the wedge. And I have discussions about, like inserting a wedge and also removing a wedge, depending on what it is we're doing. In his breathing method, you basically hyperventilate, which is a sympathetic response, right? So this is your adrenaline, your fight or flight responses, your cortisol, all that stuff while you're hyperventilating. It looks a little like a panic attack, actually. So your body's probably signaling panic. And so what you're doing in that moment is you're trying to resist the sensations of panic and just be like, no, we're here, we're just breathing really hard. And then you exhale and you hold your breath. And that initially at least, is a very parasympathetic response. And parasympathetic nerves are the rest and digest the garland, the other sort of resting low hormones that are pumping through your body. And at first it's very, very relaxing. And then after probably 40, 30 seconds to a minute and a half, depending on where you are, it'll start getting very urgent as you sort of, you know, as CO2 builds up in your lungs, you get sort of have the sensations of anxiety and you have this, this, this desire to gasp. And then you're actually sort of transferring back over into a sympathetic state. And now you're trying to resist your sensations to, to gasp. And then you find that you can sort of modulate those responses and hold your breath for a really long time. And, and by doing these two things, it's not just to become a better breath holder or become a better ice bather. Who cares about that stuff, but what it does is makes you more resilient to both internal and external stimuli. Right. It makes you. It gives you the ability to sort of like toggle your own internal state in response to something that you. That may be a little uncontrollable. So it would make you more resilient emotionally. You know, you won't freak out in the DMV as much or, you know, or get. Do an angry tweet or, you know, whatever else. You know, you're in a discussion with your spouse where something is. Is toggling you to make you a little angry. You might be able to sort of insert that space because all of those other contexts also give rise to sort of bodily responses. Right. There's sensations that go with that, and then you learn how to modulate and control those sensations to some degree.

That's great.

So it's a recognition, like literally recognizing that, you know, whatever the. The potential fight or flight circumstance, the stimuli is. But then also it seems like a reframe where people might have lost this evolutionarily to say, I have control over this. I can identify this, you know, through your book. This is. Oh, this is what Scott's talking about. I can now create this space where historically maybe I wouldn't have. And I would have, you know, popped somebody in the nose or would have freaked out or would have had a for real panic attack. And, you know, I've experimented. I did a polar plunge last year and kind of in preparation for it, I would do the, you know, the ice shower kinds of things, which is about the biggest baby step kind of way to go about doing that. And I have found now it's just. It's become part of my routine. Every time I take a shower, you know, I finish off with that and it's like, it does feel cold, but it also then like. And I maybe breathe a little bit differently at the start, but honestly, and maybe just again, practice and time that, you know, it feels very comfortable. It feels, I don't know, kind of cleansing. I mean, I think I've kind of psychologically reframed it as. This is not a bad thing. This is a good thing. This is how Chris's showers end. And my breathing is perfectly normal. And I probably, you know, I haven't really gotten too quant about it, but, you know, I'm sure I'm staying in there much longer than I did, you know, four months ago. So, you know, I like that.

How do you.

Just a quick little thing. We'll shift off of whim. But how is it part of this is the breath control And I know the exercising and all that breathing exercises before that, but how does that work when someone's like diving under? Doesn't he hold like a world record for like swimming underneath a sheet of ice kind of a thing? So he's certainly, you know, holding his breath. Is, is it just that there's enough oxygenation and stuff that the shivers don't happen and he doesn't have to breathe at all while he's pulling a stunt like that?

So, so I do need to point out that Wim does hold a record for swimming under Arctic ice with, with, you know, using his method and, and, and sort of doing that. However, it should never, ever be done the way he did it because he almost died, he almost killed. Very, very dangerous to mix the WIM HOF breathing in any sort of water because the way he works is you blow off all your CO2 and then he would have taken in that instance a very large breath of air and then dove. And you find if you do this on land, you can hold your breath a really long time. Because usually the WIM HOF method is an exhale breath hold, but with this sort of gives you sort of a boost to that. However, when you do that, you. Because there's a mixture of the way our biology works. We can only sense CO2, we don't sense oxygen in our body and we just detect sort of the buildup of the byproduct of respiration. And I don't know why the body chose to do that, but that's just the way we work. And so when you have taken a full lone breath of air for some reason, and some of the chemistry here is a little bit confusing to me, but the CO2 detection is a little off and you'll actually pass out before you know that you're getting close to passing out, right. The warning signals sort of go off. And so I think nine people have died doing the WIM HOF method in ice water, trying to follow whimsics, trying to follow Wim's incredibly stupid example.

All right, well, there's, there's that risk of the, A lot of people like Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose and stuff talk about, you know, shallow water blackouts and stuff and. Exactly there you don't need to be underneath a sheet of ice. You can do it in your splashy pool out in the front yard.

So yes, and, and that's the, the real thing because Whim's breath and breath method is basically a recipe for shallow water blackout. And, and actually the first time that Wim did this under the ice. He was actually rescued by a rescue diver. Wow. He actually passed out underwater and was actually rescued because his eyeballs froze underwater. So.

Oh man.

So, yeah, don't do that.

Yeah. Please don't try this at home.

But this actually raises a very important point and actually goes back to the sort of the isolation stuff that I was talking about before is that, well, Wim Hof is amazing and I wrote a whole book about him. He's changed my life. I love the dude. However, it's very, very important to realize that he is flawed, just like all of us are flawed. And there's this sort of cult of personality that has risen up around him where he is now becoming more and more sure of everything he says. And. And you know, I wonder, actually it would be very interesting if I could teleport Scott Carney from 2000 and when 2011 and fast forward him now. And if Scott Carney, that same Scott Carney went and met him now, he might get a little bit of a different review actually. Because even though the method is amazing and it's life changing and Wim has opened the door to this whole world, the madman side of him, you know, I often call him a prophet and a madman. That's a recurring phrase in my books. The madman part has been now reinforced over and over again by people who just love his crazy wild image and they sort of like believe a lot of what he says unquestioningly. And that's a real problem.

Yeah, yeah. He's kind of drinking, drinking his own Kool Aid, reading his own press releases. So. Well, he. He was very positive about your book, as were some other people. I want to shift gears and talk more about the wedge in particular and your experiences in doing that, but as a prelude to it for the uninitiated. First of all, I very much enjoyed it, Scott. That's terrific. And the other people that have more cred than I do to be able to applaud your work is Ben Greenfield. He's also a New York Times best selling author. He said, quote, prepare to enter an intriguing world of self improvement and physical and mental performance that you have never before discovered. Scott Carney once again has elegantly intertwined his ferocious style of immersive journalism with an entertaining educational approach that is sure to improve your life and longevity forever. And you also, you'll have to tell me off mic about this, but you got Dave Bulletproof Asprey and Amelia Queen of Pain Boone to do your forwards too. So that's Pretty impressive. I won't have any spoilers with what they've said in the forwards, but I just thought that was really pretty cool. So you've talked about this, the aspect of human evolution and migration and people being able to historically our ancestors manage what we would see today as being very uncomfortable or inhospitable kinds of environments. But you also then talk in the book about the concept of having this power of choice being equally as significant with regard to evolution and endurance. So let's maybe start with that, with that and the wedge and how you, you know, went about. I kind of want to deconstruct some of your, like chapter by chapter because I like how you, you built your book. But tell, tell us a little, a little about how the, the wedge actually started.

So the, the, the first time I came up with the concept was while staying in an ice bath with whim. Right. And I just want to freak out. You can just think about what an ice bath is like and they suck. They're still terrible.

Yeah.

And, and, and the, the, the natural inclination was to tense. And I said, no, I will relax. And so, so I actually introduced the concept for the first time in what doesn't kill us as here's this sort of mental ability that we have to sort of resist these external stimuli. And you don't need to do it in an ice bath. Another way I often describe it is, you know, think about a sneeze coming on like it's sort of wrinkling up in your nose and you, if you want, you can sort of slow down that sneeze and sometimes even stop that sneeze with just the power of the mind. You know, there's no real reason to do it.

Right.

I mean, sneezing one way or the other is not ideal, but, but we have that power. And I think that's what, that's really what the important thing is here. And, and we have that sort of snakes, that same anti sneeze power. The wedge in anything that we feel, anything that's coming in from the outside or welling up from the inside, you have sensations that go along with that. And, and the reason you have sensations, right. The whole reason those even exist is because they give us the, the, our minds or our consciousness the ability to make decisions about our actions. Right. You know, think about it from a really, really big perspective is why does consciousness evolve in the first place? Why is it here? And, and the thing is, is that that a lot of our programming, the bulk of the things that our body does is Autonomic. It's just sort of stuff that just happens. Like you, you don't think about your blood flow, right? You don't think about that. Your, you know, how you move carbon dioxide around your body. You don't think about any of that stuff, right? You just think about, hey, there's a lion over there, I better run away from it. And then your body says, okay, here you need some adrenaline. And so, but the sense. So those sensations are really important. You see the lion and then you drop the adrenaline. But what if you saw the lion? Because the lion doesn't cause the adrenaline, right? It's your response to the lion that causes the adrenaline. If the lion was, say, my house catch, you might, you know, go over and want to pet the cat's belly and. Or if there was a tame lion, I mean, I don't know if there are. I've seen Tiger King. There's tame lions out there, right? You might have a different response there. So the very fundamental nature of the mind body relationship is subjectivity, okay? And that's super, super important because once something that is stressful to you, emotionally stressful or even physically stressful will not have the same stress response for another person. So it's not like the world is objective and our body has objective responses to it. The world, yeah, I guess, you know, the world is objective. But, but our responses are always going to be subjective and dependent on the individual who's out there. And, and this is very important when we talk about things like resilience, right? When we talk about emotional resilience in general is like if somebody, a loud noise puts somebody into a panic attack and the other person, it's like a firework and it makes them feel like they're connected to the community. Don't we want to be more in the person who experiences stimuli with a joy response versus in a fear response. And that's really what the wedge is trying to do. And the way I do it is I put myself in strong stimulations. And now this could be a stress like an ice bath, or it could be an intensely pleasurable experience, such as at one point I do mdma, which is the street drug, excellence, ecstasy, right? Where it's a very pleasureless. Either way, these are very strong stimuli coming in. And then I can use those sensations to create enduring relationships to stressful situations that sort of affect me in the future. Now again, that's still a little opaque, I think, the way I've described this. So I want to break this down to a really important Concept that I think people can sort of take away with them. And it's what I call neural symbols. You know, think about the very first time you experienced anything. You know, when you're born into the world, right, Consciousness for the most part hangs out in the brain, right? That's where most of our processing power happens. And the brain is sitting in a salt water tank, you know, spinal fluid in your skull. And so for it to understand what's going on in the world, it doesn't get signals directly from the world. It comes through your nerves or it comes through your eyes, which then transfer to the optic nerve or your, the sensations on your skin, right? It's essentially disconnected from the world and has to make sense of everything. And that disconnect, let's look at how that happens, right? Because when you're born, you don't have anything. You have no real, some instincts, but not a ton of them, but some. And so let's say this is the first time you've ever experienced cold, right? You've ever experienced an ice bath. Now, this is a hypothetical because that actually can't happen. You will have experienced cold right at birth. But let's say this is your very first ice bath. You jump in there, you get into the water, and immediately your peripheral nerves detect ice bath and rocket this signal up through your peripheral nerves into the spinal cord, up into the very, very bottom of the brain, the brain stem, the limbic system, where, and I like to think I use this metaphor of the limbic system is. I think of it as a library, right? So this signal comes into the library and there's a librarian in the library, and she looks at this signal and she sees that it's really loud and she knows it's ice water, right? Because there's other sensations going on. So this is, this is a specific stimulus, but she has no idea what it is because she's never felt ice water before. So what she does and she looks, she has like a library of other sensations she's felt, right? And there's no ice water on those shelves. So she kicks it over to the Paralympic system, which is like a centimeter away. And the Paralympic system is essentially the emotional center of your brain. And here there's a book binder. And he says, okay, thanks, librarian, you gave me something. And what this is, he links it to your current emotional state. And that's super important, right? And he kicks it back down to the librarian and she. And your, and your current emotional state in ice water is abject terror and horror. Especially if you're not prepared for it. And the reason for that probably actually goes back to an earlier neural symbol when you were first born, because you're going from hot to cold there. So anyway, abject terror and horror kicks it back down to the. To the lady who runs the library, and she says, cool, ice baths are terrible. And she files away under this terrible symbol. Now, that's the basic way that we form sensations and symbols. And here's the really important part of this process, this is the key thing, is that the very next time you experience the ice water, you go in, the signal rockets through your peripheral nerves, through your spinal column, goes up to the librarian, and she says, oh, look, ice water. I have this book. And then she tells the brain to go rely on that earlier book, which means that no matter what your sensation you're feeling, you're always living in your emotional past. And when we build up the whole brain this way, you know, this is just one byte of information. If you think about the brain as a computer, these are the bits and bytes that make up software. And when you have billions and billions of ones and zeros, you get a, you know, you get Microsoft Word. And when you have billions and billions of neural symbols, you get human consciousness the way we experience it. So what we're doing in the wedge is trying to change that process of, of. Of the emotional associations we have with external stimuli. And, and, and we can do that in a number of different ways. And the easiest one to think about is like the. The old classic power of positive thinking, right? If you're going to jump in the ice bath, you can be like, no, this is. That sensation is the sensation of joy. So you basically force your brain to say, no, there's a different emotional symbol. And there's this confusion between what the librarian pulls off and what the Paralympic system is saying, so that they actually create a new neural symbol. And now there's more books on that shelf, and then you could experience that differently. And when you experience that differently, it's not just about that lion. Let's go back to that lion on the savannah. You could release adrenaline and cortisol when you see it to get your energy boost. But let's say that lion was a tabby cat, was a friendly lion. You could instead have a different response, which means when you emotionally say, no, that lion's okay, and hopefully the lion is okay, right? The danger should not be there. You will then actually transform the way your body responds, because those emotions, those sensations, those cognition things, actually alter physiological Processes that you didn't know you had control over. And now you can have some control over your stress responses in general, your body.

That's very interesting. It makes me think as a psychologist, around dealing with people with, you know, triggering events sometimes with addictions. There's certain kinds of circumstances or whatever that, you know, paired with, with abuse, also post traumatic stress, also triggering events that might be around, you know, stimulating anxiety. You know, simple things like, you know, fear of flying to something that's, you know, much more deeply rooted in someone's past. Then that is fascinating. I mean, there's also, I think, a growing, from the neuroscience side of things, a growing perspective also on neuroplasticity. And I'm thinking about that 1cm difference that you were talking about in the library that those kinds of things. I wonder if there could almost be different neuronal pathways developed over time through repetition and practice of the rejiggering of the, the fight or flight response or the fear response or the adrenaline to other kinds of circumstances. Because, I mean, if you think about it too, there's got to be a difference with someone that's a fighter pilot versus someone that's afraid to fly. You know, they still, they're both Homo sapiens. They both, you know, have. Have probably a lot more in common than difference. But how they manage things and what their interpretation of something is, is, you know, something exhilarating, something exciting, can't wait to hop in the plane. And the other is terrifying. They'd rather go have a root canal. And there's of a lot nothing worse that could happen. So I know you talk a lot about in the beginning about neuroscience in the context of Stanford and their kind of virtual shark tank. Was that some of the things that helped inform your thinking about this space in the wedge?

Of course, yeah. So I start off meeting Andrew Huberman at Stanford Neuroscience Lab, where he dumps you into tanks of a virtual. Sorry, a virtual tank, A VR simulator of great white sharks. And for people who are especially sensitive to great white sharks, you know, they have anxiety disorders that are sort of already established. This can actually trigger sort of panic attacks or at least intense feelings of anxiety.

Right.

For me, when I did it, I was like, oh, cool, sharks. But, you know, for other people, it's a great stimulus to put them in then sort of control because it's a safe setting. Right. You put on your VR goggles and it's not a real shark. Right.

And.

But you know, it's triggering something and aiding them. So you're trying to pair the safeness with the danger in order to eventually get that danger response to go away. And, you know, you talked about neuroplasticity, which I was very tempted to go down the strict neuroscience route. Right. These nerves are changing in these ways and blah, blah, blah, blah, and, like, really sort of digging into that because we can make a very biological explanation. However, I generally reject that idea. One, because we. There's a.

Not.

There's a lot that we don't know about the brain. The brain has a lot of connections, and we don't really know how they all interact. Right. We've. We've never made what they call a connectome, which. A connectome is like a map of all the connections and how they affect one another. We're still trying to do a. With fruit flies, but I think we're still several years away from getting anywhere with the fruit flies. So, for me, the object that I'm most interested in is sensation. I, you know, I am a sensational writer. You could say I am, but I'm pumped. I'm very interested in what you feel and then how you can modulate those feelings. And I don't really care what's going on underneath the hood. I'm glad that there is something going on underneath the hood. But I think that we work actually really well from a psychological perspective by using concepts. And. And we know that the concepts have these outputs. So let's just. For some of the time, let's leave the underlying biology a little bit alone, because, honestly, in five years, we're gonna have a totally different explanation. What's going on. I believe that.

Yeah.

And you mentioned ptsd, and I wanted to actually go back to that, because that's super interesting. Is, you know, let's. And this goes into neural symbols in a really sort of useful way. Let's imagine that we have a. A patient with PTSD and let. They were a soldier in the apocryphal battles in Afghanistan that always give people ptsd, Right. The instigating trauma. The soldier is walking down the street, and it was a beautiful summer day, and there's, you know, he's walking through a town, and there's some kids playing, and there's a certain quality of sunlight and, you know, traffic noise. And then, bang, the IED goes off. His buddy's killed. He's thrown to the ground, and then he looks up, and then his heart is pounding, and he can hear his breathing, and he's all confused. It's a bad. It's a bad day, right? Fast forward later. You know, his brain, sorry, in. In the present moment, his brain is connecting all of those sensations that he was feeling, because we're always wiring neural symbols. It's a constant process. It was always sort of like trying to make sense of the emotions and the. The feelings of that moment. He was feeling normal. And then there was a big trauma that occurred. And there was light and these flowers and smells and all that stuff. Fast forward to him in the grocery store at home. A certain quality of light filters through the window. Panic attack. And he's right back there in his emotional past. He's right back there in that horrible moment. Now, one of the ways this experience can revive actually has to do with sensing your own body, understanding where your own body is. And so I went out to Oklahoma to meet a guy named Justin Feinstein, who runs who's at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research, where he is putting people into flotation tanks, which is basically a saltwater bath. It's sensory deprivation. That's the way you can think of it, where you're trying to minimize all of the external stimuli so that you can look inside. And when you go into a float tank, you hear your breath. Your breath is super loud. I'm 42. My joints are super creaky. You know, my heart, I can hear it. I can feel my blood pressure. And the world sort of like falls into the background. And it's a very, very quiet, and it should be, in most cases, a very calming space. So Feinstein put all these people with PTSD and major depression and anxiety into float tanks. And he measured them before, after, and then a month after. And he found that these people had wired in their traumatic events frequently. Things like their breath, breathing, their heartbeats. And this is the first time, the last time they'd heard their heartbeat was when they were blown by the roadside bomb. And so their heartbeat was actually giving them anxiety. So what the float tank does is give them a new library book. Say, look, heartbeat is also float tank. Right. And. And These people reported 100% of his 32, 34 patients had significant improvements on their anxiety scores from before to after to a month after, and even better than. Than SSRIs.

Wow.

So this is super amazing, right? We can just play with your sensations. And, you know, you put more and more. You can't ever get rid of the trauma. You know, that doesn't. I mean, not that I'm aware of. Maybe, you know, of some techniques to get rid of the trauma in your brain. It's not. But but what you can do is load up that shelf with more and more books so that. So that the things that trigger the trauma sort of fall into the background.

That is. That is fascinating. Well, what about the trauma of someone tossing a kettlebell at you, Scott?

Oh, I love it. So here's, here's the problem with the sharks is that they were boring to me. They were a great tool. They were a great tool to understand how my brain wires fear. But what I wanted was to be. To feel fear and then, you know, control my fear response and then become a better person. That was like the wedge concept there, but the stimulus wasn't strong enough. So I was leaving Huberman's lab and I got a text message from my. My friend Tony. And Tony said, and it was just more or less read it back to you. It was like, scott, you gotta go meet my friend Michael. He'll throw a kettlebell at you and put you into an instantaneous flow state, which I thought was like the douchiest text message. Now it's sort of up, way up

there or instantaneous unconsciousness, maybe.

So, yeah, so. So I heard this, and I was like, that's weird. But I have this sort of policy when I'm reporting is I generally say yes to everything if I possibly can. So, so I did. And I go. I met Michael, who's. Michael is a very large man. You know, think it. Think of a gorilla. And then you got Michael Castro Giovanni. You know, he's. He's got these really long arms. His. His biceps are like my thighs. I mean, he's just a little shorter than me. And you might as well imagine his knuckles dragging on the ground. They don't. And. And the game here is he's going to take a kettlebell. And I think it was about 25 pound kettlebell, you know, lump of iron. Essentially. We're facing off against each other. Cannonball, right? And what happens. What is when two men face off against each other and one of them who's bigger than the other person is about to throw a cannonball at the other one. The natural reaction is to have your butt pucker into the. To the point where crush it. A piece of coal into a diamond, right? It's scary, right? It's a really scary thing. And, and I know he's going to throw it at me. He's not like making aggressive movements at me. But. But this is what we're doing. And so there's this ritual where it starts. And I think this is important to discuss, which is so a Kettlebell swing, you know, swing between your legs and you, you bring it up to about halfway through your chest and you just swing like that back and forth. But, but this game is, there's three swings and on the third swing, he's going to throw it. And at first, first we're looking in each other's eyes. We're sort of understanding that, you know, what could be a very aggressive situation. I now know exactly where he is in space, and I can sort of see what he's looking at and therefore something about what he's thinking about. And then the second time he swings, you switch your gaze from each other to the kettlebell. So it's from the person who is the potential danger to the thing that is actually going to cause the damage. Okay. And because, because everyone's thinking you're going to drop it on your foot, right? That's, that's the threat. And the third time he lets it go, it flips through the air. My butt is super puckered and my, my hands grasp the kettlebell because he throws it really well and I throw it back to him. And all of a sudden it goes from a threat situation into dancing with another man.

Wow.

And, and that transition is amazing. It takes a threat and turns. It transforms it immediately into joy. And because our attention, our focus has gone from each other and onto the thing between us, that's dangerous. Your attention sort of has to lock onto it. If it doesn't, you're an idiot, because it can hurt you. And it forces your movements to coordinate, coordinate by proxy, which is essentially what a flow state is, is like we're both acting in relation to each other by not looking, by not thinking about each other, but by looking at the situation that we're in. And this experience becomes about bonding, it becomes about trust. It becomes about all of these feel good emotions because. And, and it could not happen without a real threat.

Right.

A virtual shark will not cut it. You need a thing that can flatten you yet, something that is controllable enough. You know, it's sort of difficult because with the wedge, you know, you jump in ice water, but you don't stay in ice water for three hours where you'll die. Right? You, you, you stay in ice water until it's not dangerous. And, and you need to be careful with the kettlebell. But the movements are not actually that hard. I think most people can handle them. Even though everyone's probably thinking, this guy's crazy, I'm not going to do that.

Wow. And it's called like He's. Has he coined the term, like, kettlebell partner passing? Is that's. Is that what it's known as?

That's his. That's his term.

And you talk about in the tail end of your book, you've got a number of exercises which I think are really. That's cool. It's nice that you kind of catalog them there. But there's also like, just. Even a juggling of a. Like, just if you're by yourself, to be able to learn how to do that as well. And that's. That sounds. It's sort of like the. If you can't talk somebody into, say, hey, I got this idea. Idea of being able to do that as well. I mean, I. I'm a big kettlebell fan and, you know, I just. The. The rhythmic aspect of it and, you know, certain exercises and things of, like, where I pass from one myself, just not juggling, but just one hand to the other. There's such a rhythmic, you know, flow. And it's sort of like I. I find myself. Yeah, I do counts, obviously, to keep track, but it's like all of a sudden I met, you know, at the end of my count, it's like, wow, what happened? You know, And I think that's similar to the, you know, Csiksimi high flow state, you know, kind of thing that I don't experience in a whole lot of other exercises and things. It must be something with the focus, the rhythm, the, you know, the concentration

aspect, and some element of stakes. Right. You need, I think. Yeah, I think stakes are important for flow, whether or not it's actual danger, but it needs to be something where you're pushing against. And that's really what the wedge is all about. We need to find the things to push against that we can control ourselves in. You know, I often say that the measure of who we are as people people is not who we are when we're comfortable on the couch. Right. But it's who we are when we're under stress. And stress is essentially about expanding who you are. It's expanding experiences. And the problem with the modern world is we tend to stay safe. We tend towards numbness and not expansion. And there's certainly a place for, you know, being quiet. Right. That's important. Right. But we also need the contrast. And the contrast between high and low is really where we start to grow and gain resilience. Because if you think about the person who's just on the couch, the more isolated you are, the more that external stress sounds louder and louder and Louder to you. To the point where someone's an agoraphobic and they're looking outside and they're like, oh my God, I would never go. Going to jog. A jog is the worst thing in the world. I would die if I was on a jog. And, and, and, and so I see comfort actually as a non. Thing like it doesn't really exist. There's only the, the, the, your boundaries. And are you going to push your boundaries so that you're comfortable in a larger range or you're going to let that range steadily decrease until we're in a point where there's, you're not comfortable anywhere?

That's a good point. I think, you know, there's probably, you know, friends that you and I have that, you know, we kind of say that, you know, this teeny weeny little thing would just set them off, you know, and it's sort of like perhaps to you and I, if we're similar, you know, it's a triviality. It's like a no big deal. It's just, you know, you kind of go along with it and it's a, it's a hiccup in the road, not a, not a wall. So I think it's that aspect of it, of people that have such low tolerances to stress. But the fact that, you know, like what you talk about is that there's a variety of different kinds of ways to, to, you know, sometimes with a challenge and with, you know, with stakes in the game like kettlebell tossing, to be able to do that. So your book, you go through. I like your format. It's. I had Alex Hutchinson on the show a while back with, on his book Endurance and he. Both of you use a similar kind of format for your chapter layouts where they're very focal on a topic at hand, like sensory deprivation tanks or placebo paradox, et cetera. But then there's the wedge that's sort of like this uniting thread and concept that draws the whole book together in a very nice cohesive way. But I want to spend a little bit of time. I know we're kind of running low and I know you've got other things on your book on your calendar today, but I want to maybe kind of combine these. You, you, you've done experiments with the breathing routines and all with Wim Hof, but you've also, you talk about in the book DMT breathing, you've done ayahuasca and in Peruvian Amazon with a shaman. And you and your wife went to go See doctors Kent and Lane and had a MDMA augmented couples therapy. So all of those might be more along the lines of the altered state of the flotation tank kind of thing where there's an augmentation in a different kind of way. Could you pick one of those out or talk about those in the concepts of then the augmenting aspect of bringing in a substance and how that played out.

So I think of the wedge as you can insert a wedge in three places, right? The first place is in the external environment. An ice bath and flotation tank are great examples of this, right? You change your external environment, and therefore that changes everything else. There's no consciousness involved. You jump into an ice bath and there will be a change. So consciousness, the consciousness in general making decisions about the environment, has a change in your automatic programming just simply because of the way we're wired. Another place you can change is in the mind, right? You can say, so this is very. In the brain, you can be like, look, that ice bath is fantastic, right? It's joy, right? It's the power of positive thinking. And so then you're forcing it the other way, and you're trying to, like, sort of meet the. That stimulus from your brain. You think happy thoughts. You'll be a happier person. You heard these concepts before. There's some limitations to those concepts, but nonetheless, we understand how roughly that works. Now, the third place, which is so interesting is in between the external world coming in and your brain, which is your chemical environment in your body, particularly your nerves. And so in this, in the book, I look at two. One is ecstasy, mdma, and the other is ayahuasca. And I think I'm going to look at mdma because the ayahuasca experience is there is a chemical involved. It's a hallucinogen that they call it entheogen. Makes you think divine thoughts. It's pretty intense. But the other thing that's going on there is like intense isolation. You're in darkness. There's sound, there's music. It's sort of like the. Like, there's like 20 wedges all working at once. And so let's just look at MDMA instead. And in this, what I did is I took two doctors, I call them Doctors Kent and Doctors Lane, who are couples therapists, if somewhere in America. And they came over to my house and, you know, we had sort of a pretty discussion, and then they met us and they wanted to see. They had never actually seen people on MDMA before, but they'd seen Hundreds of couples and all sorts of different issues. And my wife and I. And honestly, my wife is the hero of this book. You may have not gotten this.

She keeps coming up in each chapter in the saunas and all this stuff. I'm going, holy moly. So bless her heart. Add a girl.

And it's great to see how we actually respond to the same stimulus, whatever it is we're doing in slightly different ways. We both got a lot out of it, but what we got out of it was different in some cases. And that's super important to remember. And so what MDMA does, the short of it is essentially makes it almost chemically impossible to have a negative reaction. You know, there are some outlying cases, of course, but in general, everything feels awesome. This is why people at nightclubs are just like, touch each other the whole time. Because, like, that feels amazing, right? But in a therapeutic setting, what this does is if you have this intention to like, let's work on our relationship. Let's talk about difficult things in the relationship. You can actually talk about just about anything. And because you're releasing the love chemicals, you know, oxytocin and, you know, several others, you just react innately in the most positive possible way. So for instance, I could say to my wife, I hate your mother, right? Which would usually get a rise out of somebody. Respond, no, I hate your mother. And then you're gonna have an unproductive discussion. But on ecstasy, on mdma, you have this innate reaction to be like, oh, I'm so sorry to hear that, or I understand, tell me about this. And then it's sort of automatically, because you're so open and empathetic, you just immediately talk about the roots of those questions. And, you know, at the end of the session, it was three hour session, I think the doctors were like, it was like watching six to eight months of therapy happen in three hours. Just because you could just. You weren't reactive. And you know, it is a drug, right? It's. But that doesn't mean the experience isn't real. Because remember, we're wiring these neural symbols all the time, and when she or I hear something negative, and then I have this positive association with it that carries four afterwards. Not like your brain is like, well, that was on drugs. That didn't count. That's not the way our brains work. Hello?

Yep, I lost you there just for a second. I think we had a little sky pickup. So you're saying it's not the way our brains work?

Oh, yeah. I mean, that's not the way our brains work. And you know, I would say at the end of it, you know, you know, my wife and I relationship is already pretty good. You know, it wasn't like a sea change, but I, I'd say it probably made us like 10% more functional in the months afterwards. So it's a really useful tool in a therapeutic setting and it's not just something that should be written off because people do misuse these drugs in sort of party settings.

Right, right. Well, and there's a whole growing body of literature. I think Tim Ferriss talks about it a lot. I think he's funded a lot of it at Johns Hopkins Hopkins. There's, you know, specific areas looking at the therapeutic use of psilocybin and lysergic acid and a variety of other kinds of more on the spectrum of the mdma. And I don't know, I don't know my psychopharmacology well enough, but perhaps also dmt, I'm not sure about that. So in that kind of sense, it also, like we talk about augmenting or accelerating rating and it's kind of this whole process of being able to see what's taken tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years to evolve to and then maybe even a shorter time to devolve from in terms of our desire to have comfort or maybe our desire to be more closed off from one another in the context of your couples therapy experience. So it seems like the wedge is, is one of those kinds of things that has a generalizability in a variety of different kinds of contexts and situations and circumstances. So, like, how would you recommend for someone to start if they're interested in doing their own personal exploration? Do they go buy a set of kettlebells? Do they get an airline ticket once they can fly and go to Peru or. Besides, your book is a good guidebook, honestly. And. And again, shout out for the appendix in the back with the techniques and things. But where would someone start this journey?

Well, I would say the first place is to do things that you're already doing. Right. I mean, if you're a big jogger or a big yogi or whatever it is that you do, I think that's a good place to begin. But we want to add an emotional component to it. We want to, because it's not just the sensation that comes in, it's the emotion that meets it. And you already have these established emotions with something that you do. And I would try to accentuate that. Go in there with a more positive attitude, for instance, and that's an easy way to do it. And another thing you can do is, and I don't want to think of my book as like the 10 super awesome techniques to make you super awesome. That's not the goal. The goal is to show you that this exists in anything. And, and you want stakes. Like no matter what you're doing, you need something to press against. So you shouldn't just be in your routine. You should do things that make you scared a little bit, make you, you know, one, one super easy thing to do is if you're a jogger, try jogging while only breathing through your nose. And I know that sounds pretty small, but I'm going to tell you this is an emotional trial and you are going to to be in. So because you're building up CO2, CO2 triggers anxiety and you're going to feel like you're suffocating. So try that.

That's good.

And your jog's going to suck. It's going to be really bad. But over time, what's going to happen is that you're going to get used to the anxiety of that jogging and then you're going to have several other benefits that come out of that. Any cardio exercise will do. I go bike riding all the time. And, and the more you do it, the more you are actually able to train yourself to be resilient to the anxiety that comes and you become more resilient to the CO2 buildup. And that's a really good thing. I think throwing kettlebells is great. I think throwing kettlebells, particularly for couples, is fantastic because there's a danger there, right? I don't want to break my wife's foot. I certainly don't want her to break my foot either. And so you get into this place where you have to learn how to trust each other in a new non linguistic way. And that's, I think, really great. Because, you know, usually when couples first start throwing kettlebells, they suck at it like they're dropping kettlebells. Have a wide stance while you're doing this and use a kettlebell that's light enough for both of you to manage it. I mean, it's not, it's not trying to show stronger, right? But you throw the kettlebell and initially you're going to be bad at it. Because we always, always build up these little islands of distrust in relationships. Even healthy relationships have those places you don't want to go. And, and at first those things actually play out initially because, you know, if I go to my wife And I'm like, you want to throw a kettlebell? If you're like, yeah, I don't trust this guy. He's going to break my. Right, right. And, and I. And that's a really fun thing to get over very quickly because you realize that you can both do this, you can both excel at this, this, and it's pretty easy. And. And it becomes therapy in a way that you don't have to talk.

Yeah. Yeah, I like that. I like that whole process and I like how you say it in the context of, you know, start with something that's not threatening. Start with something that you already have a, you know, level of comfort and confidence with. I think that's, that's very good advice. So, Scott, this has been fascinating. I appreciate so much you giving me the time. I don't want to, you know, mess up, up your schedule, but I would like to end with people want to know more about connecting with you or learn more about this book and some of your other works to be able to access your blog. What are some of the best ways for people to reach out and do that?

So the home for all of that stuff is ScottCarney.com S C-O-T-T C A R N E Y.com and, you know, you can get like a sample chapter of the Wedge on there. I have an email list with occasionally smart things, sometimes dumb things on it. And there's also the Instagrams and the Twitters and the, you know, the whole universe of stuff. And the books are available wherever you buy books.

Well, and I will put all that in the show notes for folks that may not be able to jot all that down. And I also have to give a shout out your book trailer. The video is amazing. So that I think it really also speaks well if you, if anybody's on the fence about grabbing a copy of your book, it really, I think, does it justice. And that's a very hard thing to do to be able to kind of bring a book alive in it. And I think it does a great job.

Well, yeah, post that on your LinkedIn page. We'll follow you there.

We will, we will do that. So, Scott, again, it's great to be in touch like this. Looking forward to what comes next and gotta go polish up my kettlebells and have a conversation with my wife. So thanks. Thanks for everything. Thanks for being on the show. I appreciate, appreciate it, my friend.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

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