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The Wedge: The Key To Human Resilience with Scott Carney

Apr 26, 2020

#123 My awesome guest this week is Scott Carney, an investigative journalist, anthropologist and New York Times bestselling author of 'What Doesn't Kill Us'.
 
I invited Scott on to the show to talk about his new book 'The Wedge:  Evolution, Consciousness, Stress, and the Key to Human Resilience'. And with everything that is going on in the world right now, there couldn't be a better time than now to have this conversation. 
 
In Scott's own words: In 2011 I wrote an article for Playboy about the dare-devil ice guru Wim Hof with the intention of showing the world that he was a charlatan. But it didn’t work out the way I had expected. I tried his training and was surprised that the method worked. So instead of debunking him, I became the first journalist to take Hof seriously. I was something of an evangelist for Hof’s method of ice baths and breathing techniques and did some pretty crazy things--like walking up Mt. Kilimanjaro without a shirt at a pace that the U.S. Army predicted would kill me. What Doesn’t Kill Us told the story of my journey.

As Hof became an international superstar, I began to wonder how much further I could push the lessons I learned with him. I wanted to do more than see how our bodies reacted to the cold, but in every environment. The sensations that we feel under stress—in heat, cold, sensory deprivation, while we're afraid—mirror physiological changes in hormones, metabolic function, and memory formation. Those reactions usually all considered autonomic functions, meaning we don't have conscious control over them. However, since we can decide what environments we inhabit, we actually have the power to change our underlying programming.  The key is to paying attention to physical sensations and then modulating our emotional responses. The result is a concept that I call “The Wedge.”  You can think of The Wedge as a way of creating a little space between stimulus from the response.

Over the course of two years I started to develop new environmental training techniques. I confronted fear at a cutting-edge neuroscience laboratory at Stanford and learned a dance that involved throwing kettlebells between partners where one false move could either break a bone. I met masters of mental misdirection in Latvia who took me through a five-hour sauna, based on their traditional medicine system. I experimented with breathing techniques that took me to the cusp of transcendence; I floated in sensory deprivation tanks, and ultimately ended up in the Amazon jungle with a shaman who promised me either madness or universal truth.

About Scott Carney: Scott Carney is an investigative journalist and anthropologist Scott Carney has worked in some of the most dangerous and unlikely corners of the world. His work blends narrative non-fiction with ethnography. What Doesn’t Kill Us was a New York Times bestseller; other works include The Red Market and A Death on Diamond Mountain.
 
Carney was a contributing editor at Wired for five years and his writing also appears 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 on NPR and National Geographic TV.

Learn more about Scott Carney:
 
 
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