Until the 1980s America was mostly a nation of blue collar beer drinkers. Only a few high society and a few evangelists in California’s Napa valley were true wine aficionados. But that all changed when a winemaker at Sutter Home botched a batch of grapes and created an abomination: White Zinfandel. You probably know it by another name: Rosé. Sold at under $5 a bottle with notes of Jolly Rancher…
In 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision that laid the foundation for religious scammers to raise unfathomable fortunes through fraud. The ruling effectively gave religious leaders the legal right to sell miracle cures, supernatural services, and snake oil remedies under the protective umbrella of "sincerely held beliefs." Fast forward 80 years, and that same legal precedent has…
A few weeks ago Andrew Huberman announced that he had partnered with the sports and eyewear company Roka. Together they’ve put out a specially branded blue-blocking glasses that are designed to help you wind down and get better sleep at night. If that sounds weird to you, you’re not alone. Over the years Huberman, who is not actually a neuroscientist but a professor of neurobiology and…
For the last decade a potentially dangerous anti-cellulite device called the Fasciablaster convinced women that they can rub away cellulite (and just about every other medical ailment) with a $95 plastic wand. Restoring youthful vigor is as easy as scraping hard plastic prongs over problematic areas until you are covered with bruises. The self-flagellating cure all has been surprisingly profitable…
Is your sleep life stuck in a snooze cycle? Do you wake up feeling like you wrestled a thousand sheep all night, only to stumble through the day fueled by lukewarm coffee and blurry-eyed determination? Fear not, weary warriors of the night! I have a literary bounty of sleep-saving wisdom, ready to guide you from restless nights to restorative slumber. This is the list of sleep books that you’ve…
What is the difference between being “on the record,” “off the record”, “on background” and “not for attribution”?
A nobel prize winning treatment for syphilis might have a modern day use for treating lyme disease, too. But research stalled in the 1980s when the CDC updated its ethics protocols. Nonetheless, this fascinating deep dive into the history of “pyrotherapy” might give clues about what directions medicine could take should antibiotics stop working.
As a cat owner I've always heard the urban legend that felines are likely to eat their owners when they die, but how true are the stories? Well, it turns out that feline (and canine) depredation--the scientific word for scavenging human bodies--is much more common than you might think. This week I delved into the scientific journals to understand how long you have before your pets take matters…
Depending on when you ask him, Wim Hof claims to have between 21 and 26 Guinness World Records, but try as I might I've never been able to see any official accounting of what they were . . . until now. After years of trying, I FINALLY got Guinness to respond and now know the truth. The answer surprised me. See the official list of Wim's World Records that Guinness Sent me.
There have been two major updates about the 18 deaths related to the Wim Hof method in the last week. They first: the court in Long Beach, CA took issue with Wim Hof’s apparent perjury and denied his request to dismiss the case. Second: one of the largest newspapers in Holland just ran an important investigative story about Innerfire. Reporter Anneke Stoffelen found startling new information.
The one question that Emergency Room Doctors get more than any other is "what sorts of objects have you pulled out of people's rectums." I've known Dr. Rob Orman for several years now and he has stories galore: from the proper technique to remove rectal foreign bodies without damaging his patients, to how to keep up his bedside manner when operating on a known criminal with a horrible record. You…
Dan Ariely is the most famous cognitive behavioral scientist on the topic of lying and misbelief. Over the summer an organization named Data Colada accused him of making up some of the data that made his career. Soon The New Yorker, NPR, The Atlantic, New York Times and a dozen other publications picked up the story about how he, and Francesca Gino (a researcher at Harvard) were lying about their…
In 2004 I got invited to a spiritual orgy at the Osho compound in Pune. We were all wearing red or white robes and just about everyone was gorgeous. A few days earlier I saw hundreds of people speak in tongues together as they accessed their own spiritual truths. This was my first, but hardly my last, experience from the inside of cultic thinking and practices.
I wanted to clarify my position on this subject lest anyone get the wrong idea. In the broader culture, "Cult"" carries some pejorative, or even sinister, connotations--for instance, Jim Jones's People's Church and Heaven's Gate which both ended in a mass-suicides, or the Manson Family which committed mass murder. Other cults in this vein would be David Koresh's movement in Waco, or the…
This week I talk with Patrick Mckeown, the best selling author of The Oxygen Advantage and The Breathing Cure about looming problems in the broader breathwork community as the global movement gains in popularity.
On Labor Day in 2019, Andrew Encinas, a 27-year old social media entrepreneur shuttled back and forth between his new office to set up his desk with a fleet of new computer monitors and the party at his brother’s house in Anaheim Hills, California. Like his business idol Gary Vaynerchuck, Encinas thrived on the challenge of starting a new business and constantly looked for ways to optimize his…
In this week's explosive interview, a researcher at Wayne State university who helped me hone the idea of neural symbols in the The Wedge told me that he doesn't want to be involved with Wim Hof or Innerfire anymore because it's "become all about the money." And that's not all he told me.
Humans believe a lot of strange things. For example, I maintain the silly idea that sickness creeps into the body through the ears, and that wearing a hat can sometimes stop illness in its tracks. I also have some pretty unique ideas about the nature of human consciousness and the power of the placebo effect. Many of my books start with a basis in science before pushing past what we can verify…
Depending who you ask, the Wim Hof method either originated out of Hof's mind after he first jumped into ice water, or it's part of an ancient tradition of breathwork and ice bathing that goes back to human pre-history. I've decided to dig into the question to compare Wim's practices to existing Yogic practices as well as listening to Wim's own accounts of where this all started for him. The truth…
Remember the height of the barefoot running craze when just about everyone bought a pair of glove-shaped shoes called the "Vibram 5 Fingers" so they could get in touch with their ancestral roots during a trail run? Those pretty much died out once people realized that 1) they looked ridiculous and 2) other types of footwear did the job just as well. Every year new health fads capture the world's…