#603： The Physical Keys to Human Resilience
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Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, Brett McKay sits down with Scott Carney, the author of The Wedge: Evolution, Consciousness, Stress, and the Key to Human Resilience. In this episode, we discuss how Scott s investigation into the breathing methods of Wim Hof, an extreme athlete, turned him from a skeptic into an intrigued believer who wanted to learn more about our ability to exercise control over our physiology.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Psychiatrist
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Viktor Frankl said that between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space
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is our power to choose our response. Frankl was talking about our ability to choose our
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mental responses to what we encounter in life. But what if we could also choose how
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our physiology responds to our environment so that we can perform and thrive on a higher
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level? My guest today explores that question in his latest book. His name is Scott Carney
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and he's the author of The Wedge, Evolution, Consciousness, Stress, and the Key to Human
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Resilience. We begin our conversation discussing how Scott's investigation into the breathing
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methods of Wim Hof, an extreme athlete, turned him from a skeptic into an intrigued believer
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who wanted to learn more about our ability to exercise control over our physiology. Scott
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then explains his idea of the wedge as the ability to consciously put a gap between an external
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stimulus and the otherwise automatic physiological response it elicits. Scott and I then discuss
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his trip around the world to talk to people who have found ways to create wedges in their
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lives in order to elevate their physical and mental states. We discuss how throwing kettlebells
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around can be used to overcome fear and experience flow, how lying in a float tank may recalibrate
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PTSD, how building up tolerance to CO2 can increase your physical performance, how saunas can boost
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resilience, and why the power of the placebo effect is greatly underrated. After the show's
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over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash wedge. Scott joins me now via clearcast.io.
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All right, Scott Carney, welcome back to the show.
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So we had you on the show a few years ago to talk about your book, What Doesn't Kill Us,
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and it was about your exploration, your journey with Wim Hof, the famous breath guy who can warm
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up his body and change his immunity system with his breath. We'll let people check that
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out. We'll put a link to the show on that one. You got a new book out that's sort of in a similar
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vein. It's called The Wedge, Evolution, Consciousness, Stress, and the Key to Human Resilience.
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So how did your experience and your work with Wim Hof lead to this book, The Wedge?
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Yeah, so when I met Wim, I had been writing this book about how meditation can kill you. And I read
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this article about this crazy Dutch dude in Holland, and this was in 2011 when Wim Hof was sort of an
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unknown. And it said that he could like sit in ice water for like crazy amounts of time and control
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his immune system and perform these superhuman feats of endurance through his like quirky meditation
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method that was like a breath protocol and like sitting in ice for a long time. And when I heard
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about him, I was like, this guy's crazy and he's going to get people killed. And so I went out with
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this commission from Playboy magazine to go essentially debunk him as this false guru character
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who was probably just in it for the money. And the shocking thing about my experience with Wim is that
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I get to his dilapidated training center in Poland and I sit down with him and he teaches me his
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breathing method and like almost instantaneously, I am getting the sort of effects out of it that
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he does. Like it's, you know, one of the things that happens is when you breathe, his breathing
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method is basically hyperventilation and then holding your breath and hyperventilating and holding your
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breath. And all of a sudden I was in like just an hour of doing this. I was holding my breath for
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three minutes at a time. And then he said, go do some pushups. And I do some pushups while holding my
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breath. And I do twice the number that I'd ever done before in my life at a go. And I was again,
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holding my breath. And so this was this eyeopening experience where I was like, well, I have to,
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instead of debunking this dude, write something that was about the science behind what he does.
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And I ended up repeating the same sort of crazy cold endurance stuff that he does. Like I run this
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obstacle course race in Northern England and basically just a bathing suit. I climb up Mount Kilimanjaro
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in a bathing suit and I do it really, really fast. I mean, it was this sort of like total
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transformative experience. And that book, What Doesn't Kill Us is, you know, a really,
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it's a fascinating read and it has gotten, you know, I get emails every day about how my journey
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and like has changed their life because, you know, people are now learning how to interact with harsh
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environments in a way that, that sort of changes their fundamental biology. And I think one of the,
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the things that we have to realize, like, it's not like I'm sucking down spiritual energy from heaven,
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right? And I'm using this to like power my body, but there's actually evolutionary reasons why these
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things work. If you think about where our ancestors came from 300,000 years ago, you know,
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Homo erectus was like running around the plains of Northern Africa, exposed to crazy amounts of,
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of physical stress, right? Things like, you know, temperatures going up and down, wild animals,
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they were, had to run, they had to intermittent starvation, and we just don't get those stresses
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anymore. So what the power of the Wim Hof method was, it was like, Hey, we're going to give your body
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some, some stress and, and, and, and some cold stress that you really, I mean, when was the last
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time you took a ice bath, right? When was the last time you, you, you jumped into water that had little
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ice cubes floating on it? Probably not recently, unless you're sort of into this, this stuff. And
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what happens, what we find out is that when we start exposing ourselves to these extreme environments,
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we find a way to channel anxiety and even autoimmune illnesses and sort of reverse them. I mean, if you
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think about it, if, if our archaic ancestors were always combating, you know, lions, tigers, bears,
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and starvation and all that stuff, every one of those things required a physical response, right? It
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required you to respond with like adrenaline, with cortisol, with these energy boosting things.
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And we don't have that anymore. Now I sit at my house and I think COVID-19 is coming to get me.
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I think about how I'm going to be in like quarantine and all of these things that are,
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that are, you know, running around the world, you know, I think of your political environment and
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the economy and none of these things require a physical response, right? These things require
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creative thinking and, and, and other stuff, but by not having a physical response, we've dumped this
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adrenaline, we've dumped this cortisol into our bloodstream and it turns against
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us. And the magic of what doesn't kill us. And the Wim Hof method was that I learned that by
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exposing myself to cold water and his specific type of breathing protocols is that I was able to
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find an outlet for those responses and become a much more resilient person overall.
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And so after that experience, it led you down this trail of exploring other tactics that you've
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found people using where they're taking advantage of these, these evolutionary adaptations we have
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of adapting to physical stress and then just exploring this even more. And that's what this
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book, the wedge is all about. Yeah, absolutely. Like I was up at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro with
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Wim, right? We just sprinted up this mountain. It took us 28 hours to get to the top. And it usually
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takes about five days. So we were doing this in like sort of this blistering sort of even dangerous
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pace. And I realized at the top of the mountain that, that I was about to have the cheesiest thought
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that any human had ever had, which was, I had gotten to the top of this mountain because I am not
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on the mountain. I thought to myself, I am the mountain, right? This is like, should the six,
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like sort of that spiritual quote that should show up on like a yoga poster somewhere. But it was also
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this very profound moment because I realized that I didn't get there just by fighting my way up as like
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this sort of individual, but I was actually cooperating with the sensations from the
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environment. And through that cooperation, through that connection is why I was able to have this
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endurance. It wasn't fighting. It was getting into something like a flow state. So what do you mean by
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this? The book's called The Wedge. What do you mean by The Wedge? So there are two basic ideas,
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right? So I call, I, the book is called The Wedge and think about that as like a capital T and a capital
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W. And then there's like a lower case version, which is A Wedge. On a conceptual level, The Wedge
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with the capitals is, is that choice that we have to intercede between stimulus and response in the
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body. It's like a big picture idea is that when you feel something coming in through your sensory
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pathways, you, your body can react without you thinking, or you can be like, I'm going to take
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some time and put some space in between that stimulus and response. So it's like a, it's like
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this big picture idea and it applies to like everything. A Wedge, the lower case version is
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when I'm talking about specific techniques, like little things you can do to, to provide yourself
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that space. And let's just take the case of like a nice bath in, in cold exposure. The ice bath is
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a wedge, right? It's that technique to, to get in there. But the wedge, the capital wedge is that
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mental trick we use for that. When we go into the ice bath, that we are suppressing our urge to clench
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up and shiver. And you're trying to create space so that as that tension comes up in you, you will it
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to relax. And that's what the wedge is in that moment. All right. So the wedge is your, it's basically
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you're, you are taking what most people think are just automatic, reflexive, physiological responses
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and, and not making them automatic and reflexive and, and having a bit of control over that.
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Yeah, exactly. Like that is like the heart of it. And, and, you know, you probably should have
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written the subtitle to my book because that was beautiful.
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All right. So to understand what allows us to do this, like what allows you to not clench up
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whenever you submerge yourself in cold or what allows you not to have that reflexive fear response,
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which we'll talk about, we need to understand some, some neurology, some psychology, what goes
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on when we experience things. And you talk about, we're able to, you're able to insert a wedge into
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your existence or to your experience, because there are three parts of an experience. There's stress,
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sensation, and mindset. So walk us through this concept and how those things interact with one
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another. All right. So there's three basic ways that your body or that your mind experiences the
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world. Like to get information from that sort of brain tissue inside your skull, from the outside,
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the information has to first travel from your sensory organs through the neural pathways in your body,
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and then into your brain where the experience actually happens. And stress, sensation, or mindset
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are the three places where you can insert a wedge. But what this, by this, what I mean is stress.
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So you get to choose the type of stress that you have. If you never have gone into, say, ice water,
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you've never experienced that stress. So you sort of factored that out of your life, but you're always
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experiencing something because your nerves are always transferring information into your body.
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Sensation is the actual thing. After that stress, you know, occurs, let's say ice water, right? You jump
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into the ice water and between your fingertips that are first experiencing it and your brain,
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we have all these neural pathways that happen. And there's a certain flavor, I guess you could say,
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that your neural pathways imbue to any sort of experience. And if you're able to alter
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what information that sensation is going to transfer to your brain, you have the ability to change
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your experience of that thing. And usually this is like a chemical intervention or like a certain
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breathwork protocol that changes the actual transmission rate of information in your nerves.
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And then there's the third place where you can sort of wedge, which is the mindset you have.
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For instance, if you jump into ice water and you're thinking to yourself, this is the worst experience I'm
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ever going to have in my entire life, it's going to be the worst experience you've ever had in your
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entire life. If you go into it and say, I am so excited to be here, you have a lot better shot
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of feeling great about that experience. And so that's why I'm talking about three different places
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where you can use this lowercase wedge. And I want to dig down a little bit here because
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there's a really fundamental concept in this book that's going to help explain everything that we're
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going to talk about later in this interview, which is what I call neural symbols. And it's how
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your brain encodes information about the world. And, you know, we have those three places, right?
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Stress, sensation in your nerves and mindset. Well, how does your brain initially, the very first time
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it senses something, how does it get that information? Well, go from your peripheral nerves. And again,
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let's use the example of ice water. You jump in and what happens is your nerves send a really loud
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signal through your arms and into your spinal column and up into the very base of your brain,
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which is where consciousness starts. When it's there, it goes into the limbic system. And I think
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of the limbic system as something of a library. You know, think about this. There's a library and
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there's lots of books on it. And this librarian gets this signal and looks at this signal and says,
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huh, I've never felt ice water before. Let's say you're a child or is your first time in
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any sort of sensation. This signal comes in and she looks at it and says, well, have I felt the
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signal before? She looks at all of her books and she's never felt anything like this before.
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So she says, huh, I don't know what to make of this. So she kicks that sensation up to another
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part of the brain called the paralimbic system. It's only about a centimeter away. And here there is
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essentially a book binder who gets this new signal. It's like, hmm, what is this signal?
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He looks at it and says, well, it doesn't have any meaning. It's just data. So I will apply your
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current emotional state. So whatever you're feeling emotionally at that moment, he binds it and connects
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it so that it can't be disjoined and kicks it back down to the librarian who looks at it and says,
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great, ice water means unmitigated terror and horror because that's what you're feeling when you
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get into the ice water and files that book away. Now here's the very, very important thing about
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neural symbols is to remember, which is the next time you jump into ice water, it comes in a straight
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data and the librarian realizes she's seen this book before and she pulls off the old neural symbol
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off the shelf and you re-experience the old emotional state. You re-experience that unmitigated
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terror and she never kicks it back up to the paralimbic system. It just goes on and that's
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what forms your experience. Now neural symbols are the bits and bites of all human experience.
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Since your brain is locked away in your skull, the only way it's ever gotten information at any time
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in its entire history is through your sensory pathways. And every one of those sensory pathways
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goes through the limbic library into the guy who makes the books and kicks it back down. And that
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forms all lower cognition and higher cognition. Like I couldn't be talking to you right now on this
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podcast without using billions of neural symbols. You just cannot think without them. So emotion,
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especially past emotion, is locked into your brain.
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So yeah, so it sounds like emotions, like every sensation we have is tied up with an emotion.
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Yes, everything. Every, you know, ennui and hate and love and the texture of light and you waking up
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in the morning under your covers. Every one of those sensations is bonded to an emotion and we experience
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the world through an emotional lens. And this idea of symbols can help explain anxiety or fears. And
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you actually went to a guy, this is what he studies, is phobias and extreme anxiety. Basically, there's
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an encoding problem there. Like they've encoded just a regular everyday experience with a super negative
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emotion. Totally. Like, so I went to Stanford University where I met Andrew Huberman, who's this
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really amazing neuroscientist there, who really wants to understand the basis of what fear is. And, you know,
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if you think about it, fear isn't about being in the moment. Like, you know, if you think about that lion,
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who's going to be chasing us throughout this entire podcast, right? This lion's like, you know, a hundred feet
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away or half a mile away. And you look at that lion and it's looking at you. And fear is the anticipation
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of that lion charging you and eating you. And you sort of like race your mind forward to the lion
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eating you, but it's not eating you. It's just like that prediction of the future. Now, if we go back
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to neural symbols, sometimes this sort of propensity to anticipate really, really bad events is actually
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hardwired into your brain. And people who get phobias, for instance, may have had an experience that
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somehow wired a really, really intense neural symbol for say lions on the savannah or stakes or whatever
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it is that scares you. And merely the appearance of a lion in the distance or appearance of that
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stimulus at a distance is enough to trigger that old neural symbol and make you super anxious right
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away. And what, so what Huberman does is he throws you into this, a virtual reality simulator where he
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has been hanging out. He wanted like a standard stimulus to study the fear response. And when you
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have fear, you have all these automatic reactions, right? You, you release adrenaline, you release
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cortisol, your eyes open up or shut closed. And so he puts you these VR goggles on you that are measuring
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the, the, the dilation and contraction of your, of your irises and your eye movements to see how you
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respond to the stimulus. So he put me into this virtual shark dive where I'm, I'm swimming with these
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great whites in order to trigger fear. And I figured that if I was in the stimulus of the fear, I could
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try to insert a wedge to create space between that stimulus of the shark and then my response, which
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that I would be able to choose response. So I thought this would be a great way to train my fear response,
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but I get into the, the shark dive and it turns out I'm not afraid of a virtual sharks, even if they're
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really realistically depicted. So in a way, what the, his, his setup is really good for is people who have
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like predisposed to anxiety, but I actually didn't find a way to insert my own wedge in his protocols.
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Well, how would you insert a wedge with that? Would it just be a matter of, you know, exposure therapy
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where you're just exposed to it over and over again, then you are rewiring a new emotion to that sensation?
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Yeah. That's that. I mean, so that's like the, the, the trick in general is like, if you want to,
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if you wanted to create a fear, for instance, you would, you would bond an event or a stress to a
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really, really bad emotional response. And if, if the event was really, really loud, you like,
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let's say you're a soldier in Afghanistan, you have a roadside bomb go off after you that that's
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going to wire all of the previous sensations you were having before that roadside bond into this like
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trauma and create this horrible anxiety of even generalized things that might, that are similar,
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like a, like a garbage truck or something similar like that. But alternately, you can try to minimize
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those fear responses by trying to create new associations with certain sounds and with certain
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stimuli to sort of like drown out and file new neural symbols that are sort of similar with different
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emotional valiances to them. So this experience here led you to another guy, I think it was in the,
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it was in the San, it was in the San Francisco area who was throwing kettlebells around, like tossing
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them around, dancing at the same time. And you found this, I mean, at first I feel like this is weird,
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but then you also discovered like this was a wedge you could do to use to basically affect, you know,
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hack what we, what people call flow. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, the funny thing was,
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is that I was actually walking out of Andrew Huberman's lab being sort of like bummed out that
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I wasn't having a great fear experience there. When I got this text from a friend of mine, which said,
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dude, Scott, you got to go throw kettlebells with my friend, Michael Castro Giovanni. He has a way to
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make you experience flow instantaneously with kettlebells. And when I saw this text, of course I'm
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using like sort of a voice with it. I thought it like, that sounds so lame. Cause I'm not a gym guy.
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Like I don't, kettlebells to me just sound like just weird, I guess. And, but I was in the mood to
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like, you know, try something. And I thought the word flow sounded sort of cool. So I met Michael
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up on this hill in San Francisco. I drove up from Palo Alto to meet him. And, you know, Michael is this
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just gorilla of a dude. Like if you, if you see him, like he sort of like hunched over these giant
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shoulders and these biceps that are as big as my legs, you know, like just a real big guy.
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Okay. And picture this, you're standing, I'm standing right across from him and he's got this
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freaking iron ball in his hand and he's going to throw it at me. And he says, I want you to catch
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it. And in just about any instance where two men are facing off against each other and they're going
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to throw essentially a weapon at each other, this is an adversarial position. And honestly, it's scary.
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Like probably everyone who just heard that there's going to be, you're going to be throwing
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kettlebells like, well, you're going to land, that's going to land on your foot. And that's
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really bad. But what is amazing is that he throws it and you're supposed to do this like, like ritual
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in the beginning where you're looking at each other's eyes as he swings the bell. And then you
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look at the bell. And as you transferred your attention to the bell, he releases it and then you
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catch it. And when you do this, the really fascinating thing is that instead of being adversaries,
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you realize that you have to cooperate in order to bother, to, to, to get anything out of this
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thing, you're going to hurt each other. So the real presence of the danger in the kettlebell is what
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forces both people to, to coordinate their movements. And, and instead of being sort of like a,
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like a bro-y workout on this mountain, we are suddenly dancing and our movements are totally
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coordinated because of the danger of throwing this. And, and so I found my wedge instead of the
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sharks, which were virtual and didn't do anything to me, just the thought of possibly breaking my foot
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becomes this thing where I can move so easily. And, and, and what kettlebell throwing is about at its
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heart is about connection and developing trust with another person. And I did it almost instantaneously
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with this guy named Michael, just by sort of giving into this experience and, and, and flowing with
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it. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show.
00:23:21.420
Well, that section really stood out to me because, you know, I've read the books about flow and how you
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can access flow. But in my experience, when I, when I read that, I started thinking all the experience
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where I, where I can remember experiencing that flow state, there was always that element of danger.
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Like there's some sort of risk involved. I mean, I, it's hard to get flow when you're,
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when I'm writing or doing some sort of, you know, pedestrian sedentary thing, but whenever I'm doing
00:23:44.300
something, whether it's like working construction where you're, you're using tools that are, you know,
00:23:49.020
could kill you or maim you. It's, I can, it's more, it's easier to get in that flow state when you're
00:23:54.620
doing that. Yeah. I mean, like, isn't that so fascinating that in order to connect to that thing,
00:24:00.600
because it, because flow feels amazing, right? Flow feels like everything's just working out
00:24:05.120
so perfectly, but in order to get to that, there have to be stakes, right? You have to,
00:24:10.660
you have to have actually something to push up against, even if it's something as minor as
00:24:16.740
possibly getting your foot slammed with a kettlebell and breaking your foot. I guess that's not that
00:24:21.200
minor, is it? But, but it's, it's more minor than a great white shark. And, but you need something
00:24:27.020
to push against or else you cannot get there. Yeah. How have you, have you been able to like,
00:24:33.700
you know, transfer this idea to other aspects of your life of like adding an element of danger
00:24:37.720
to enter the flow state with your other activities you do? That's a really, really good question.
00:24:43.560
Ultimately, what usually happens sort of the opposite is where you start to engage in things
00:24:49.100
that are dangerous or stressful as what I talk about in, in, in the wedge. And you find that you can
00:24:54.480
actually function in more areas than you could before. You find that you can gain mastery of
00:25:01.840
things that are dangerous. And it's just like, you know, we just talked about construction,
00:25:04.600
you're, you're hanging with these dangerous tools. And the first time you use a chainsaw or a,
00:25:08.960
you know, any sort of thing that could cut your hand off, it's, it's, it's terrifying, right? But then
00:25:14.960
you get over it because you realize how the tool works and how it uses, and you become a more
00:25:20.640
capable and overall competent person. And that's really what I see more, I guess though,
00:25:27.600
once you start doing some dangerous stuff, you realize that you can gain competence in other
00:25:32.560
areas too. So there is that element. It's like, it's like you can find that you can take on more
00:25:38.460
difficult challenges because you're not going to be overruled by your anxiety.
00:25:43.120
So as you discovered in your book, what doesn't kill us, breath is a very powerful tool
00:25:48.480
to access the wedge or to put a wedge. So we talked about Wim Hof and his method,
00:25:52.820
but then you found a guy who, who had used Wim Hof's method with his athletes, trains runners,
00:25:58.160
but then he discovered if you follow that method exactly, it actually gives you like the results
00:26:04.380
you're not looking for. So he, he modified it a bit. So talk about how this guy used breath
00:26:11.160
Yeah. So this is Brian McKenzie and, and I wrote about it. He has a whole chapter in what doesn't kill us
00:26:16.160
where he was using the Wim Hof method. Now, remember how I said,
00:26:20.040
I did Wim's hyperventilation technique where you're breathing really, really fast and holding your
00:26:24.780
breath. And then you do a bunch of pushups and I blew out my pushup record. That's sort of a well
00:26:29.940
known anaerobic boost that happens when you're doing the Wim Hof method. And what McKenzie was
00:26:35.800
thinking, because he trains athletes, he trains Olympians. He was like, well, I, what if I could use that on the
00:26:40.980
field? Like if you get this boost, if I have these hyperventilating athletes, maybe I'm going to see
00:26:46.720
like, and I, and I use their hyperventilation and training, maybe I'm going to see a huge boost in
00:26:51.200
their athletic performance in general. Well, at that point he was in what doesn't kill us. He was
00:26:57.240
sort of experimenting with this idea. And I, and I wrote in that book, I was like, isn't this great?
00:27:02.440
Aren't we going to see, see these great results in a few years? Well, fast forward a few years and I
00:27:06.780
meet McKenzie again. He's like, yeah, that didn't really work out. It turns out that that fast
00:27:12.640
breathing where you blow off all this carbon dioxide gives you a really, really strong boost
00:27:17.780
in a moment, but it doesn't translate to training benefits. So if you were going to sprint,
00:27:24.520
if you hyperventilate in your sprint, you're actually sprint really much better than you do
00:27:28.640
normally. But if you're trying to look for long lasting changes, it doesn't work. And, and so what
00:27:34.440
McKenzie did is flipped the script instead of hyperventilating, he tries to make, get people to
00:27:40.620
build up the CO2 in their lungs. Now, when you breathe air, air comes in as mostly oxygen, that
00:27:48.240
oxygen goes around your body and it releases as carbon dioxide or CO2. And CO2 is the waste product
00:27:54.280
of respiration. And, and for whatever weird biological reason, our body cannot detect oxygen.
00:28:02.040
It only detects the, the, the poisonous by-product of respiration, which is CO2. And in the Wim Hof
00:28:10.040
method, when you blow off all your CO2, you're able to hold your breath for a really long period of
00:28:13.900
time because you have to rebuild back that level. And what McKenzie says is this is like blowing off
00:28:19.440
the roof of your athletic training. But what he wants to do instead is instead of blowing off the roof,
00:28:25.120
he wants to build up your tolerance to CO2 so that you can breathe really slowly instead of really
00:28:32.860
deeply and fast so that you build up more CO2. And over time, you expose yourself to enough CO2
00:28:38.720
that you're able to function in a high CO2 environment. And this is what he calls blowing
00:28:43.040
off the floor. And what is remarkable about this is that over time, and the way he does it is you can
00:28:49.140
use like oxygen restriction. He, the other thing he says is just so useful and so hard is to do a
00:28:55.680
workout, but instead of breathing through your mouth, like we all do all the time, breathe just
00:29:00.800
through your nose and it kicks your ass. But at the end of it, you start learning that you're training
00:29:07.760
your body to develop really high CO2 so that when you do switch to mouth breathing, you are like a
00:29:13.640
rocket. And this is where he has seen this huge performance boost to his athletes. It also has
00:29:20.120
this really interesting anxiety connection is that with CO2, as you build up more CO2 in your body,
00:29:28.040
you feel more panicked and anxious. And actually you'll see cognitive behavioral therapists give people
00:29:35.280
masks that dose them with like 30% CO2, which is a high, high dosage of CO2. And when you do that,
00:29:41.840
you'll have a panic attack. You'll start breathing really heavily. You'll feel claustrophobic. It'll
00:29:45.800
feel horrible. And the CBT therapists use this to give you a panic attack in a clinical setting where
00:29:53.080
you are safe so that you get used to the sensations and you can be then less anxious of panic attacks in
00:29:59.320
the future. Well, the amazing thing here is that as you build CO2 tolerance, your anxiety levels drop and
00:30:08.040
go, and I mean, they don't go away entirely, but you have much more control over your sensations
00:30:13.720
with anxiety. And that's the other thing that Brian McKenzie found that was so amazing.
00:30:17.980
And he has this protocol that he calls apnea breathing. And like, this is what deep sea
00:30:21.420
divers, like those guys who are crazy and they use no oxygen, they actually do this too. Like they
00:30:26.780
have to develop their tolerance to CO2 and they do this breathing method where they just build up CO2
00:30:32.760
progressively in their system. So their body gets used to having that much CO2 in it.
00:30:38.520
Totally. And like when, when I was meeting Brian, he actually gave me, he said, download this app.
00:30:42.980
It's called like apnea trainer, which is the free divers app to build up CO2 tolerance. I mean,
00:30:48.920
they are, they are basically the same exact technique.
00:30:51.780
And it's interesting that, that CO2 buildup is connected to anxiety. Cause like whenever you have
00:30:57.560
like, you know, tactical guys, like army guys, police officers, like one of the things they talk
00:31:02.900
about whenever you are in that stressful situations is to breathe. And that's probably just to calm you
00:31:08.060
down, to get that CO2 out of your, or yeah, I mean, is it getting the CO2 out of your system or are you,
00:31:13.320
what are you doing when you're breathing that causes you to have less like anxiety or stress?
00:31:18.720
Oh man, you are doing like breathing does a lot. Um, and to say it's just one thing would be really,
00:31:23.980
really, um, um, mean to breathing. But one of the things you do, like if you're about,
00:31:30.120
let's say you're in a stressful situation, you're a cop with a gun facing down a potentially dangerous,
00:31:36.140
but you're not totally sure how dangerous criminal, right? That, that, that deep breath,
00:31:41.500
taking a deep breath in will fill your lungs with oxygen. And then more importantly, when you exhale,
00:31:46.480
you exhale the CO2, which gives you at least a little bit more space, a little bit more of,
00:31:53.520
a wedge, um, into taking control and separating that stimulus from response. But breathing is one
00:32:02.520
of these things that just alt it's like, it's this automatic process in your body. Like you're
00:32:08.040
just breathing right now and you're not thinking about it. And then you think about it and then you
00:32:11.820
can do, you can hold your breath, you can exhale, you can do anything. And it's this really interesting
00:32:16.540
liminal point between your autonomic physical processes and where your consciousness comes in.
00:32:22.360
And you find that if you can alter your breathing in multiple ways, breathing fast, breathing slow,
00:32:28.020
holding your breath and using your breath with your movement and lots of things like that,
00:32:32.060
you find that you're able to control the automatic things in your body. So you could, you could slow
00:32:37.880
your adrenal release, or you could ramp up your adrenal release depending on the situation.
00:32:44.300
All right. So another tool, another wedge tool that you found that you can access the wedge
00:32:49.660
are float tanks. Now these have gotten a lot of press, Joe Rogan, Navy SEALs, like they've made them
00:32:55.880
popular. I didn't know this until you emailed me that, but like some of the best research about
00:33:00.800
float tanks is happening here in my hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. So tell us about that. How does that,
00:33:05.540
how can float tanks insert a wedge into our experience?
00:33:08.020
Tulsa, there's the Laureate Institute for Brain Research where this guy named Justin Feinstein is
00:33:15.260
the only neuroscientist in America who is really doing clinical studies on floatation. And what
00:33:23.320
he's doing is he's taking people with PTSD, major depression and anxiety, and putting them into float
00:33:31.080
tanks as a treatment protocol. The thing that I've been studying so far in this conversation is like,
00:33:36.560
what do you do in the presence of a really, really intense stress? And then how can you control
00:33:41.720
yourself in the stress? But the float tank is the opposite of that, right? The float tank is, let's say
00:33:47.520
we take out all of the external world. We remove that external sensory stimulus of those three parts
00:33:53.840
that I was talking about earlier. What happens now? What is just your body? What Justin Feinstein
00:34:01.040
at the, at the, at the Lord Institute discovered is that our sensations of our body also carry with them
00:34:09.300
all sorts of neural symbols that reinforce every sensation that we, that we have. And what is so
00:34:16.300
amazing about flotation tanks is that they can actually really, really help with anxiety and
00:34:21.720
depression. To explain this, let's go back to that proverbial soldier, right? Who's in Afghanistan,
00:34:27.940
who just had this, like, he was walking down the street. He, there was a certain quality of sunlight
00:34:33.140
on him. There were some children playing, a tea cellar, some flowers around him. And then boom,
00:34:38.800
all of a sudden there's an explosion and it's really traumatic and horrible. And maybe some people die.
00:34:43.760
And it wires that entire event into his head as in the language of neural symbols. So that,
00:34:52.100
that when he's on the ground, his heart is pounding. He's feeling that like full body sensation
00:34:57.600
of adrenaline, cortisol, and also the damage on his body. And it's all gets wired up and connected
00:35:03.020
when he comes back home, you know, this apocryphal soldier gets PTSD when he's walking around and that
00:35:09.280
certain quality of light happens, or he smells flowers, or there's a, you know, the children's
00:35:14.240
voices in some way. And these can actually all trigger post-traumatic stress. And even more
00:35:20.940
interestingly, the first time a lot of people really, really become aware of their heartbeat
00:35:26.900
and their blood pressure is in a very traumatic event because that stuff goes haywire because
00:35:31.920
you've dumped all this adrenaline into your body and that wires neural symbols too. What happens
00:35:36.820
with Feinstein is he says that when you put your yourself into a flotation tank, you've drowned out
00:35:43.880
all of the external symbols so that you become aware of your body again. And when you're aware of your
00:35:50.420
body, it's so quiet that you can hear your heartbeat and you're able to form a new neural symbol with
00:35:57.340
your heartbeat so that when you experience it again, even sub-perceptually, because we're always
00:36:02.680
sub-perceptually experiencing our heartbeat, you don't have that constant reinforcement and you're able
00:36:08.240
to break those loops that cause PTSD. Now, his study that he did was amazing because he found that,
00:36:17.400
I think he's tested about 25 people in float tanks, he made them, he had them float for an hour
00:36:22.000
sensing their heartbeat. And he did questionnaires before and after to sort of sense their protocols
00:36:28.080
and then a month after. And he found that 100% of people who floated for just one hour had
00:36:34.720
significant decreases in their anxiety symptoms and depression symptoms that lasted and persisted for
00:36:42.200
over a month. That's crazy. And for those who aren't familiar with what floating is, it's like
00:36:46.620
you're basically in this warm bathtub. It's about the same temperature as your body. It's filled with
00:36:52.580
salt, so you float. It's completely dark usually, and there's no sound. So it feels like you're literally
00:36:59.460
floating on air sometimes. Yeah. It is as close as you can get to isolating your body and your mind from
00:37:07.700
the west of the world as is possible right now. Did you have a good experience floating?
00:37:12.860
I generally did. So I floated quite a few times, maybe about 10 or 15 times in total. And I would
00:37:20.540
say all but one of them was a great experience. But there was this one experience that was pretty bad.
00:37:27.200
And I can tell you about it, where my wife and I, and my wife is like actually the hero of this book.
00:37:33.600
It's not really me. She has accompanied me on almost all of these things that I get up to.
00:37:38.780
And I say, hey, why don't we go and float at this float center that's right near my house? And as we
00:37:43.880
were getting there to the float center, we got in this like argument, just like a marital argument that
00:37:50.040
you maybe had before that like happened up until we got to the door of the float center. And it wasn't
00:37:56.840
a very important argument. But then we get into the float tank. And almost immediately after having
00:38:02.920
that sort of negative experience, we jumped into the float tank. And all we did in this sort of like
00:38:08.540
echo chamber was roll on that horrible thought. And it rolled and rolled in our mind. So that was
00:38:15.440
like a mean experience. And we got out, our fight erupted again. And we were sort of grumpy with each
00:38:20.540
other for like a week afterwards. And I think this is a very, very important thing to note is that all
00:38:26.620
of these things with the wedge, your intentions and your mindset as you get in there is super important
00:38:32.580
to the results that you're going to get as you come out. So we brought our argument into the float, and
00:38:39.700
I was telling you before the show, I floated, I floated twice. Both times, I just had to pee really bad
00:38:44.080
while I was floating. That's all I thought about. So it wasn't, I didn't, I didn't.
00:38:50.380
Well, no, I didn't want to see, I, it stressed me out because I didn't want to be the guy that peed in the
00:38:54.400
float tanks. You know, if someone else is going to use it afterwards, you can't do that. So
00:38:58.560
I'm glad it was out of altruism that you're thinking, like, think about the next man.
00:39:04.960
I wouldn't mind that. It's my, okay, whatever. It's like peeing in the pool. It's just me,
00:39:09.700
but I didn't want to, I didn't want to have, I didn't want to be that guy. All right.
00:39:14.800
I do. And I, I, I don't pee in the pool. Remind you not to come to my house and pee. All right.
00:39:22.780
Or swim. So another wedge tool you discovered were saunas. So how can exposing ourself to heat
00:39:33.460
Right. So heat is the opposite of the cold, obviously. When we think, talk about the cold,
00:39:38.120
you're, you're controlling your sympathetic responses, which is basically you jump in the
00:39:43.100
cold and then you are, it's like your fight or flight just comes on immediately. You release
00:39:47.860
adrenaline, you release cortisol. And what you're doing, the technique in cold water is to
00:39:52.000
relax in that cold water. And then you are, you start to learn the tools and the sensations to
00:39:57.860
focus on, to control your stress responses. The heat is the opposite. It's the parasympathetic
00:40:02.820
responses where your natural reaction is to, to calm down and cool and cool yourself off. And you're,
00:40:11.260
what we're doing in the heat is trying to train. Well, we can actually train two things. One,
00:40:16.280
you could get into the heat and then like have a really intense workout. This is the idea between hot
00:40:20.660
yoga, for instance, and that is super beneficial. But what we're doing in a sauna is we're trying
00:40:26.420
to relax and feel those sensations and control ourselves against the sensation of claustrophobia,
00:40:35.600
because the, the, the sign of your overheating is the sense of the world closing in. And it's,
00:40:41.240
it's this, it's this feeling that you have to just go run and get out of there.
00:40:44.820
And so I flew to Latvia to a traditional sauna called a pierce with my wife. And we did a five
00:40:54.960
hour sauna with two shamans. They call them pierfniks, but it's basically, think about these
00:41:00.820
people as like druids. They show up and they are in green felt hats. There is like all of these ritual
00:41:07.580
brews and teas that they're giving us. And they, they put us in the sauna for five hours. And it's
00:41:15.080
about 180 to 220 degrees in that sauna at various points. And what they're doing and what a shaman,
00:41:22.100
this type of shaman really is, is somebody who can sense your sensations. And I don't mean that in some
00:41:31.320
sort of like telepathic way. I mean, like a sort of a more mechanical way. You're, we're lying on these
00:41:36.460
benches. We're nude and, and they're, they're standing over us. And as we're getting to the
00:41:42.160
point where we can't take it anymore, where we're like, you know, getting that, that really hard
00:41:47.860
place, they take a sprig of cold water and douse it in our feet and give us and keep us just below
00:41:54.920
the red line. And in this way, we're able to spend five hours in this crazy hot sauna. And they're,
00:42:01.560
you know, they're, they're sensing us by like literally putting their hand on our, on various parts of
00:42:05.820
our body, like our feet or our head or whatever. And if we feel hot to their touch, they know that,
00:42:12.460
that we must be having a more intense experience than they're having. So they're able to sort of
00:42:16.580
use these, their sensations to sense our sensations. It was fascinating. But the weirdest thing that
00:42:23.180
happened in the sauna was as we're lying on these benches, they also have this ritual where they feed us
00:42:29.360
weird things that are oddly familiar. Like at the beginning of the ritual, we're eat bread that is
00:42:35.420
like pine needles into it. And we drink tea that has wormwood into it. And these are like familiar
00:42:41.640
scents, but they're sort of in weird contexts, contexts. And then we go into the sauna and we're
00:42:47.820
in this really stressful area. And we experienced those things again, they start hitting us with pine
00:42:53.320
needles and rubbing wormwood on our skin. And we're in this like super stressful place. And as they do that,
00:42:59.780
for some reason, my brain starts connecting senses, like a synesthetics, I have synesthesia,
00:43:08.760
which when, and what that means is that I start hearing pressure on my skin, I start smelling sounds
00:43:15.220
and, and, and tasting noise. It is this totally bizarre experience because they're, they're using
00:43:22.880
the, the same stimulus, which was the bread or whatever, in a totally new context. My brain gets
00:43:29.000
super confused. And at the end of this whole ritual, I feel so refreshed, so renewed. It's like,
00:43:37.140
it's like you're, you're, you're tasting things new again for the same time, but that taste is like
00:43:41.680
the world around you. It was amazing. So I mean, what do you think the benefit of that is, except,
00:43:46.380
you know, besides experiencing weird taste or whatever?
00:43:49.620
I mean, the, the saunas are like really traditional medicine. Like they are a, a,
00:43:58.480
every circumpolar, um, indigenous group around the world uses sweat lodges. They use saunas. They use
00:44:05.400
these things as ways of forming community as forming bonds with each other. They use it to fight
00:44:11.920
depression. And there was this really interesting guy that I met named Charles Rezon, who shows that
00:44:18.280
by exposing people to heat therapy, they actually severely reduce anxiety symptoms. They severely
00:44:24.960
reduce major depression. And I have noticed this over and over again when I, cause like literally
00:44:30.300
right after I went back from Latvia, I bought a sauna and I sauna all the time. And it is, it is more
00:44:36.620
effective clinically in Charles Rezon's research than taking a SSRI, taking like Prozac or Valium or any of
00:44:45.620
these, I guess Valium's of Benzo, but it's better than those, these antidepressants at relieving
00:44:52.080
Yeah. We had Charles on the podcast a couple weeks ago. He was saying that what the sauna does,
00:44:58.400
it increases. So like his interesting theory about depression is that it's more, it's also an
00:45:03.640
inflammatory condition. It's not neurochemical. Your body is basically inflamed and your mind is
00:45:10.080
inflamed. And what the sauna does is it helps, it increases inflammation. And in the process of doing
00:45:16.340
that, you decrease systematic inflammation. And then you have this whole chapter about that,
00:45:21.600
about inflammation and macrophages and, and how a lot of things that we do for treatment,
00:45:28.340
medical treatment is often can be let up, can be attributed to placebo. And this was an interesting
00:45:35.160
Sure. So the placebo effect is like the most derided thing in medicine, right? Like how often
00:45:42.560
have you heard someone takes, does any sort of alternative medicine thing and they, and they say,
00:45:48.600
oh, that's just the placebo effect that made them better. And the question is, is if, if someone is
00:45:56.560
getting better, is that not medicine? And one of the things I look at, and I look at many things in
00:46:01.580
this chapter, but is if you see a standard clinical trial of just about any drug they do,
00:46:09.360
they test the chemical against a group of people who are not taking the chemical,
00:46:14.360
but they're getting sort of like a treatment. And they say that if the chemical performs better than
00:46:19.120
the, than the placebo, then the chemical must be good. And then, and then that is in medicine and
00:46:24.120
that gets approved by the FDA. But if you actually start looking at these trials,
00:46:28.040
many medicines and not all, there are certain classes of medicines such as antibiotics where
00:46:34.280
you, the placebo is, is radically not useful compared to the active drug. But in many,
00:46:42.520
many drug trials, you'll have approved drugs that are like one or 2% better than the placebo,
00:46:48.200
where a drug is like 30% effective, but the placebo is like 28% effective. And, you know,
00:46:55.540
one of these that I like to write about a lot, because I think it's absurd is Rogaine, the hair
00:47:01.040
club for men thing that grows hair on your head is like 28% effective. If you take this topical
00:47:07.040
solution and put on your head, but if you just put any solution and think it should get good vibes,
00:47:12.680
that will also regrow hair at like a 25 or 21% rate. So one of the questions is like, why are we
00:47:18.840
just looking at medicine from this sort of very myopic perspective of a chemical intervention?
00:47:25.540
When that placebo effect is actually incredibly powerful and we can manipulate it in various
00:47:33.100
ways. And so in this chapter, I'm looking at a number of ways to sort of communicate with various
00:47:39.260
parts of your body. And again, I don't mean telepathically, I mean like physically to try
00:47:44.160
to make them better and try to make them more effective. And honestly, a lot of it comes through
00:47:50.280
emotions. Like I was talking to this cardiologist the other day who said he will always try to use
00:47:58.220
the placebo effect when he's healing patients. And he does it very consciously. So let's think
00:48:04.140
about a person who's about to go through open heart surgery. He will show them a picture of the clogged
00:48:09.940
thing that he's about to fix with plaque around the walls. And we say, look, this is how bad your heart
00:48:16.060
is or your atria or whatever. And he shows them the scan and says, I'm going to clean all that out.
00:48:22.240
And then he goes through the surgery and shows them an after photo and say, look, I cleaned all
00:48:27.580
that out. Think of how much more blood we're pumping through your system. Now showing the picture is not
00:48:32.580
like a physical intervention, but he sees really, really significant improvements in the people he
00:48:38.480
showed the picture to before and after versus the people who didn't get the before and after photo.
00:48:43.200
It wasn't just the physical thing that he did in heart, which was probably essential,
00:48:47.700
but it was also that all the things that go into thinking about getting yourself better.
00:48:53.480
Well, they've done that with surgeries too. They found that back surgery to alleviate back pain or
00:48:57.500
even surgery on your shoulder. They found that if you could just cut the person open and then stitch
00:49:03.100
them back up and said, yeah, we fixed your back, they report their back feels better.
00:49:07.460
So many people. Honestly, you see this again and again and again in medicine where if you think
00:49:15.140
about it, and I'm not against the medical industry, people can oftentimes listen to me and think that
00:49:20.860
I'm like, screw Western medicine. That is not my position whatsoever. But there is a lot of money
00:49:27.140
to creating drugs that you can sell over and over again to treat chronic conditions. And there is not
00:49:32.720
a lot of money in giving people placebos. And we've created sort of evidence paradigms around
00:49:39.080
chemicals and things that we can sell that costs a billion dollars to get a drug onto the market
00:49:44.800
at the end of the day. There's no clinical setting where you can sell someone ice water or positive
00:49:52.660
juju that would generate a similar amount of vibes. And I think it's very, very important not to throw
00:49:59.440
away the benefits of Western medicine, not to throw away antibiotics, not to ignore clinical
00:50:04.780
interventions that work, but also accentuate what is available out there in the healing through
00:50:09.940
sensation, through all of the things that I'm looking at at the wedge. A lot of these things
00:50:14.140
work probably along the same pathways as placebos. And that shouldn't mean that they're bad. It means
00:50:20.500
it's another way to access the healing power of your body.
00:50:24.380
It's another tool. Well, Scott, there's a lot more we can talk about. You delve into psychedelics,
00:50:28.980
you went on two psychedelic journeys and we'll let people check that out, but where can people go
00:50:33.120
to learn more about the book and your work? So you can get a free chapter of the wedge right now
00:50:37.860
at my website, scottcarney.com and just go there and you subscribe to the mailing list and then you
00:50:44.280
can read the first chapter, but it'll also be like everywhere. It'll be on audible. If you like the
00:50:49.520
sounds of my voice, you can, I will read it to you. EBooks, absolutely everywhere. I'm also on all
00:50:54.700
the social media platforms, but I would love you to go to my website and read the chapter first. So
00:50:59.480
sign up for the mailing list and let's get going. Well, Scott Carney, thanks for your time. It's
00:51:04.060
been a pleasure. This has been awesome. Thank you so much. My guest today was Scott Carney. He's the
00:51:09.480
author of the book, The Wedge. It's available on amazon.com. You can also find out more information
00:51:13.280
about his work at his website, scottcarney.com. Also check out our show notes at
00:51:17.360
aom.is slash wedge. We're going to find links to resources. We're going to delve deeper into this
00:51:21.180
topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
00:51:32.080
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00:51:35.540
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00:52:04.260
Remind you not only to listen to AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.