Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna is the most important person in the history of North America that you probably know nothing about. If you have any impression at all about the "Napoleon of the West" it's that he executed all of the defenders of the Alamo and Goliad. You might think of him as a murderer and a traitor. Mexicans think of him as one of the most corrupt dictators in their country's history. But the true story of Santa Anna is much more complex--and much more interesting--than you would ever imagine. In this episode I'm going to try to convince you that we've gotten Santa Anna wrong all along.

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#history #alamo #mexico #santaanna

This is the story of the convoluted path that Buddhism took form India Tibet, and Tibet into your yoga studio at home.

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The Enlightenment Trap

Theos Bernard, The White Lama of Tibet

Drukpa Kunley

#buddhism #history #spirituality #tibet

Otto Muzik is best known to me for his research papers on Wim Hof's abilities that connected the iceman's abilities to the mysterious power of the placebo effect. The Wim Hof method website frequently cites the study and there is another paper in the works. But Muzik has a lot to say about the science of brown fat and the organization around him called "InnerFire" that might make you think twice about what Muzik's endorsement really means about the Wim Hof Method.

The Wedge

Otto Muzik's Website

Paper on Wim Hof's BAT

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29438845/

The Dawn of Everything

https://amzn.to/3WnZNZs

#wimhofmethod #Innerfire #brownfat #neruoscience #hubermanlab #tonyrobbins

The language that we use to discuss the role that DNA has in creating the proteins that make up our body is incredibly deterministic and not at all what actually happens at the cellular level. When you build a house a single centralized set of instructions makes a lot of sense. But when you consider that DNA exists in every single cell--we have to reassess what it means to build an organism where the parts are calling the shots.

Related reading:

DNA is not a Blueprint by Sergio Pistoi

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/dna-is-not-a-blueprint/

Braiding Sweetgrass

#genetics #DNA #superorganism

What makes a good skeptic? Is it dismissing things that don't conform to your own beliefs about how the world should work from a scientific perspective? Or is there a more nuanced approach that allows you to -- occasionally-- change your mind? This episode is about how I think we should all take a step backward and realize that much of what we think we know about the world is probably wrong, anyway.

Book Reference:

Carl Sagan (1996) "The Demon-Haunted World"

#beliefs #science #humility

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 is not quite what you might expect.

References:

Videos:

How Wim Hof Lost his Method

Wim Hof's Yoga Manuscript and the Meaning Behind it

Books:

The Wedge

What Doesn't Kill Us

The Enlightenment Trap

#wimhof #breathwork #yoga

You've probably heard of the Law of Diminishing Returns where acquiring new skills ultimately tapers off until further gains are harder and harder to achieve. But what if you flipped that logic on its head? The flip side of the same phenomenon is what I call "The Law of Speedy Gains" where you can opt to harvest the easy-upside of taking on new things and then move on to other skills that you might what to develop once you hit the first stages of the plateau.

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Books:

⁠The Wedge⁠ 

⁠What Doesn't Kill Us⁠

⁠The Enlightenment Trap⁠

The Vortex

The Red Market

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Western medicine and alternative approaches are a lot more similar than you might think. In fact, every disease state that a person subjectively feels initiates a process of seeking out care, presenting symptoms, identifying signs and leading to diagnosis that is more or less identical whether or not you're going to a start of the art medical facility in Boston or visiting a shaman in a tent in the northern most reaches of Siberia. Patients, no matter where they are, want relief from their symptoms. The truly fascinating thing is that when one treatment doesn't work, the very act of seeking out another treatment itself has healing properties.

This is the story of the three times I've been cursed and the strange events that happened in their wake. Anthropologists have known that curses have real-world effects for more than a hundred years. E.E. Evans-Pritchard wrote about how curses form the world view of the Azande while Wade Davis demonstrated how the curse of the Zombi in Haiti produced real-world zombis. In 2014 I was cursed by a rogue Tibetan Buddhist group and a series of unfortunate events his me personally and professionally. I had to find a way to unwind the spell--even as I wasn't entirely convinced that curses were real.

Learn more about it in my book The Enlightenment Trap (available on audio)

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#curses #anthropology #spells

Have you ever wondered about the skeletons that are hiding in your doctor's closet? I spent six years investigating the illegal world of organ trafficking and in this video I want to tell you about the anatomy riots that rocked European and American medical schools in the 1700 and 1800's and how the trade in human skeletons eventually migrated to India where the bone business eventually started exporting 60,000 human skeletons every single year.

Listen to the Red Market Audiobook

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