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 into their own hands.

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 research on lying. Ariely never gave a recorded interview on the topic, instead submitting his answers to reporters over email.

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.

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 through experimentation and into more speculative terrain.

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.

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 consciousness and take off before the science has a chance to catch up. Inevitably most of those fads die out.

In this week's YouTube video I tackle the top questions that have been submitted to the r/becomingtheiceman subreddit over the last month. 

In case you missed it, last week I put out a video about how a new social media platform founded by Jack Dorsey (the guy who originally founded Twitter) stands a good chance at changing the nature of social media altogether.  One common problem with social media since the inception of Facebook is that once you build up a community, the platform owns your social connections. If you stop liking the platforms there's no way for you to take all of your friends with you somewhere else. This leads to what Cory Doctorow calls the "enshittification" of the internet--where after an initial honeymoon phase, social media platforms get worse every subsequent month.