Mind Meld 87 | The Wellness Cipher with Scott Carney

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Scott Carney is an author, journalist and anthropologist. His work blends narrative non-fiction with ethnography. He’s is a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism and a 2016-17 Scripps Fellow at the Center for Environmental Journalism. What Doesn’t Kill Us, his most recent book, is 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, Discover and more.

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The “secret” to self-betterment has been sold to us all, maybe in a bottle, a book or a makeup package. On some level, though, we know that’s not what it’s about. We know that to really iron out our existential wrinkles, to find real wellness, we must summon something from within. An alchemy of purpose, intention, sensation and experience.

Musings in this mind meld include – 

• Fasting and the incredible plasticity of the human diet
• The power of purposeful deprivation and exposure to discomfort 
• The importance of sensation, subjectivity and unquantifiable elements of the human experience
• How culture and our inherited behaviors trick us into thinking we need constant comfort
• Bitcoin and cryptocurrency talk – risks, rewards and why we need it now more than ever
• Scott’s experience with MDMA couples therapy and his plans to explore Ayahuasca