Here’s the short version. In 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were stabbed to death. A criminal jury acquitted OJ; a civil jury then found him liable and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to the families. He spent the next decade using every legal trick available to make sure the Goldmans never collected a dime.

Then, in 2006, he decided to make money off the murders directly. He took $1 million from a publisher to write a “hypothetical” account of how he would have done it. The Goldman family shamed HarperCollins into pulping 400,000 copies — then discovered the manuscript was a strange kind of intellectual property they could seize in bankruptcy court. So they published it themselves, forewords and all.

I read that book last week. It’s one of the strangest documents I’ve ever come across.

In this week’s video I’m going to dissect what was in the book because I think it shows that OJ wasn’t chasing money. He was chasing attention. And the slavish way that the country ate up his story explains everything about the the machinery of the social media world we live in today. The lesson of OJ Simpson was never don’t get caught. It was never stop being interesting.

Can AI do my job better than I can? Variations of this question have been saturating the Internet since the mass adoption of LLM’s, and the debate has ben supercharged in the last month with the release of Substack’s new AI-detection feature. It just so happened that at the same time I was working on a new video about the existential threat posed by the rise of AI-powered drone warfare. I have been a little late getting onto the Claude bandwagon, but several friends of mine have told me that the output on the latest models is so good that it would be irresponsible for me to not at least give it a try. So, a few weeks before Hank Green admitted that he had a LLM problem, I gave the most advanced Claude model a shot at helping me out with a script that I had thoroughly outlined. Things did not go as I had hoped.

I am not an AI absolutest in any sense of the term. I see it as a tool that has some useful applications—and have heavily relied on AI transcripts for interviews for at least a year now. When ChatGPT first came out I asked it to write some sample scripts to me, but the output was so bad that I walked away and never looked back. However, I keep reading that models are getting better and better—and I have a slightly better idea of how to use them now—that I decided to give it my best shot.

I already had a detailed seven page outline, including specific quotes from tape that I had pulled, links to reference material and an idea for how the script should flow from one topic to another, and an idea for how to conclude the topic. Then I wrote a thorough prompt explaining how I wanted Claude to interpret the material and approach the script. I even included an AI-generated style guide where I fed previous scripts into Claude to train on. This is the exact prompt I put together (as well as the script that Claude actually wrote).

I’m telling you all of this because I want to show you that I gave it a good faith effort—the same sort of effort that I would put into training an actual human to do my job. The hope was that Claude would produce something truly brilliant. The LLM would extract the essence of my vision for the script and return with a close-to-finished product. I had no illusions that I wouldn’t have to make some tweaks to the final version, but going through all this process I had a reasonable expectation that it would return something useable.

Instead I got this.

You are welcome to read the whole thing at your leisure, but I would recommend not wasting your time because it goes off the rails in pretty much the first paragraph. If you looked at my original outline above you will immediately notice that I had helpfully written an intro that I know is right for my channel. Claude chose to ignore it entirely and skip to a later part of the outline. After that it more or less ran in circles—regurgitating the same basic ideas and only tangentially following the outline I’d given it. It was also filled with all of the normal AI cliches. At a stylistic level, it also had no idea where to put B-roll.

After seeing the output, I decided that the old ways of writing scripts were still the best. It took me another three days to get the draft to a place that I thought was pretty good, and another three or four to film and edit it. You can see the final human-made output here.

Then again, since this is a YouTube video, after all: why not just watch the final product?

I think it came out pretty well. It turns out that, at least for now, my job remains safe.

Meet Palmer Luckey, founder of the defense-tech startup Anduril, who gave a TED talk where he literally declared “I love killer robots.” At least part of the reason for that is because he’s making tens of billions selling autonomous arms. His first backer was Peter Thiel, whose company Palantir runs the surveillance that helps decide where strikes land. Anduril has raised at least $6.9 billion—though other estimates put the number upwards of $60 billion.

Luckey is not alone. Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO who championed the now abandoned company motto “Don’t Be Evil,” now runs a drone-warfare operation nested inside a Russian doll of shell companies that supplies the front lines of the Ukrainian war effort. Eric Trump is chief strategy adviser to a startup building humanoid killer robots that just landed a $24 million Pentagon contract. The Department of Defense is pouring tens of billions into overhauling America’s drone programs. For scale, compare the number of drone deaths in Ukraine (124,000/year) to the devastation of the opioid epidemic (33,000 deaths per year). Not only do drones carry a higher annual body count, but the Sackler made a comparable pittance for their effort: only $10 billion from two decades of drug dealing.

Science fiction writers have predicted this exact situation for at least 80 years. In 1942, Isaac Asimov wrote the first law of robotics: a machine may never harm a human being. But the instant we actually had access to automated death machines we abandoned any effort of actually regulating their existence.

Now the cost of armageddon is plummeting.

Today there are two kinds of murderbots: the expensive American kind, and the DIY kind almost anyone can build. Think ISIS strapping grenades to hobby drones a decade ago. Meanwhile a moderately funded tourists state could do exponential levels of harm. AI Frontiers recently ran the numbers on cheap tactical drones: a single box truck could carry 40,000 of them at maybe $25 each. Every one could be given a mission to hunt the first person it sees. The war isn’t only on foreign shores any more. It’s coming to a city near you.

Take for instance the venture-backed anti-school-shooter drone company Campus Guardian Angel. It seems like a reasonable solution to an intractable problem—drones trump guns in almost every engagement. But the real issue is that what starts as a narrow use case has the tendency to expand to others. Do we want police to use lethal drones on American streets? And what happens when they kill the wrong person?

Ask Luckey and his answer mirrors theNRA’s: drones don’t kill people, people do. Convenient, for the guy getting rich off the drones.

Here’s the only good news in the whole story: none of this is settled. The UN set a 2026 deadline for a binding treaty on autonomous weapons, built around one rule — keep a human in the loop. 166 nations wanted it on the table. Three said no. The deadline passed with nothing, because the powers building these weapons didn’t want to be told no.

That law can still be written — but only from the bottom up. So ask your representatives one question and don’t let them dodge it: do you support a binding human-control standard for autonomous weapons — yes or no? Then follow the money to whoever wants the answer to stay no. For more information and an action plan of what you can do next, check out the Center for AI Safety.

The drone war isn’t coming. It’s here. The full investigation is up now on the channel.

Greetings! I am having an impromptu watch party for my investigative YouTube series about the crooked stem cell doctor Adeel Khan who has a habit of almost killing wellness influencers. We’re live now!

Journalism is often a thankless pursuit. A writer, producer or podcaster can spend years perfecting an elusive story, wait with baited breath for publication day, and then watch it get completely ignored by the world. The sad truth is that lots of very good writing—perhaps even the lions share of it—never finds an audience. Which is why so many writers, journalists, and creative people in general look for a second chance at acknowledgment from the pay-for-play award industry which will offer any writer a chance for a shiny trophy in exchange for a several hundred dollar entrance fee.

Take, for instance, the Signal Awards—a company that has relentlessly spammed me with 63 emails this year. I’ve unsubscribed to their pitch, I’ve marked their messages as spam, and even written to their executive director pleading for them to just go away. And yet, every few day’s there’s another email waiting for me declaring that it’s my “LAST CHANCE” to be a part of their accolade factory.

The Signal Awards are not the only culprit in this space, but because they have annoyed me personally and relentlessly, they are going to be my example of the problem.

Subscribe now

So I’m going to take a few minutes of your time to read about what the business model for this award show really is and why absolutely everyone should not only ignore their emails, but also the results of the contest.

There are three things that create a credible award competition: legacy prestige, the cash value of the award prize, and the fairness of the selection process itself.

The best-known awards in journalism are the Pulitzers, Peabody Awards and, most of all, The MacArthur Genius award (which, to be fair, isn’t only a journalism award). The first two have incredibly long histories (though I believe they DO have entry fees for applicants) and the third comes truly like a lightning bolt from the heavens: you are selected by panelists without ever applying and then are given an award prize of $1 million.

If you get one you can say that you are, legitimately, an “award winning journalist.” In the latter cases it might even make your career—giving you endless new reporting opportunities.

While I have never climbed to those eschelons of prestige, I have won a few awards over the years: notably the Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism which now comes with a $5000 prize and has no entry fee. I was also the finalist for the Livingston Award on two or three occasions (no entry fee, $10,000 award prize). In both cases I submitted an application to be considered and a panel of independent experts judged me against a pool of other applicants. I’ve also landed a Scripps fellowship at the University of Colorado Boulder for Environmental Journalism that now carries a $80,000 package. I’ve won some other awards too, but telegraphing my bonafides is not the point. All three awards are considered “prestigious” among journalists who know anything about the scene, but are largely unknown to the public.

Now let’s compare all of that to the Signal Awards. The entry cost ranges from $295 - $345 per category and a total of 218 categories. Each category had up to 3 winners (gold, silver and bronze) an there is an additional subset of listener choice awards which creates a truly astounding total of 810 possible winners. Originally I was planning to calculate the whole grift by hand, but it quickly got unmanageable as I had to scroll through 32 pages of categories on a PDF printout, with a seemingly endless number of overall permutations. So I set the task to AI and the results look roughly correct to me (check its work here).

While there is no way to know how many people will apply to every category—or, for that matter how many categories no one applies to at all—if we assume that the constant spam emails hit their marks then the competition will generate about $217,000 in application fees alone.

That’s the minimum. The total grift can rise as people pour money into popular categories that don’t have any available award spots. Which is pretty funny, because if you don’t win a Signal award the actual Signal that the world should take away from this event is that your work is so bad that you can’t even win one that you have to pay for.

Ok, sure, but maybe it’s really just a lottery, and winners still make out in the end.

And what, do you ask, do the awards pay to the winners? Even the very top winner? The best of the best?

Nothing.

All you get is a trophy, and a link to a downloadable jpeg that they urge you to include in your email signature that telegraphs to everyone you correspond with what a gullible and desperate dimwit you really are.

In other words, the Signal Awards is a pure and complete grift whose main role is to create the illusion of credibility within an industry that desperately craves it. Over its five year history many well-known podcasts have occupied its top spots. Scroll through them and you will see the familiar faces of Hasan Minaj, Michelle Obama and Conan O’Brien. All of them no doubt figured that the entry fee was an afterthought for the appearance of quality. Their famous faces, of course, also make the award look real to an ill-informed public. You will also notice a ton of podcasts that you’ve probably never heard of appearing again and again in their selection—proving only that the people behind them were willing to contribute thousands of dollars to the process.

The Signal Awards are a truly pathetic addition to the media ecosystem—not only because they play on the insecurities of content creators—but because their very existence ends up obscuring truly original content. Just like a video game where you pay for upgrades to beat your peers in a digital landscape, the Signal Awards and other competitions are attempting to monetize credibility itself. When the main barrier to entry is an application fee then the output suggests that a producer’s marketing budget is the same as their creative value. This completely inverts the entire idea of what an awards competition should be.

But wait, I’m not done. Because the fact is that it’s not only that the award show is a scam, but, I would argue that anyone who enters or wins a Signal Award is complicit in the duplicity. While I’m sure that some creators haven’t thought through the whole award process, the sad truth is that many of them have. The top creators whose faces and names stud the top honors know that an unwitting public can’t tell one award from another and will look at that email-signature JPEG as an honest expression of the value of their work. They use that facade of credibility to increase their advertising rates or provide a little extra nudge to the public to hit that like and subscribe button. Which is to say, they are ok deceiving their audiences.

I could probably say more on this topic, but I hope that this was enough to get my real message across. Dear Lauren Adkins, Sarah Storm, Jemma Brown and everyone else who is spamming me with your entry opportunities: Please take me off your list.

A few years ago Substack transformed away from being a niche newsletter-delivery system and into the main refuge for tens of thousands of journalists who were fleeing (or been kicked out) of the mainstream media. The value proposition was simple: writers could come here to build an audience that would actually pay directly for their writing. The platform recommended writers put paywalls on posts that would encourage readers to financially support their favorites. The tradeoff from other social media platforms was that the paywalls would inherently limit the reach of their best work. Nonetheless, with a thousand paid subscribers you could live the middle class dream of earning close to $100,000 a year (well, more like $80,000 after all the fees).

For a while it seemed like a reasonably good trade. No one wanted journalism to die, and the new influx of writers was doing pretty good work on the platform—albeit with lower budgets than traditional newsrooms.

But the model raised an obvious question: how many individual newsletters could the platform rationally expect readers to pay $8/month to access?

Early adopters on the platform did the best. Writers like and arrived early and earned millions. But as more writers showed up the subscription revenue pie didn’t grow commensurately. Even with Substack’s discoverability mechanism (something that is missing on places like Ghost and Beehiv) it was getting more difficult to establish a real career here.

So Substack tried to solve the problem by adopting a strategy that every other tech company had already worn thin. They pivoted to adding a twitter-like function called “Notes” (which created a distinction between "“subscribers” and “followers”). Soon they incorporated video and live-streaming and encouraged posters to clip shorts into their feeds with an AI-generated clipping program.

In other words: Substack’s growth strategy was to offer almost the exact same things as every other social media network. They pushed the idea that the subscription revenues would keep the best creators on this platform and the new engagement opportunities would grow truly massive audiences. The stated plan was to make Substack the go-to-place for everything internet in a winner-take-all contest.

At first the strategy even sort of worked. A lot of new users DID join the platform and engaged with all this new free content—increasing the overall number of eyeballs that were here. These new “engaged users” helped skyrocket the VC-backed valuation , but, notably, didn’t do much to help the flood of new creators who came here to actually earn more money.

In fact, they started earning a lot less.

Take for instance this note from from just yesterday.

I don’t have anywhere near Lorenz’s following, but my numbers look surprisingly similar. Here’s a peek at my own back end:

I suspect that this is a platform-wide problem and it all comes back to the central issue of subscription fatigue. As the platform promotes more and more free content, users have less and less incentive (and time) to engage with the more thoughtful higher quality content that lives behind paywalls.

On a good day my brain can only keep up with about 5 newsletters. Meanwhile my wallet is skeptical of the value of even paying for that number.

Add to that subscriptions for YouTube Premium, HBO, Netflix, The Economist, AppleTV, Amazon Prime, Hulu and so many more things, it’s just not rational to expect large audiences to subsidize the salaries of a growing number of independent writers on a monthly basis.

I can’t make a rational argument for why my own work here on Substack or on YouTube is more valuable than, say, HBO which drops whole seasons of new TV shows every week.

Without a bigger pie individual Substack creators are instead forced into direct competition with one another. The only way to grow is to pillage the paid subscribers from other creators. And this only works if you assume that when people cancel their subscriptions and then allocate that money to another writer—which I doubt happens all that frequently. Instead I think users of this platform probably pay for a few subscriptions to their favorites and, when they get tired of it, cancel and move on to scrolling an endless feed of free content.

It’s interesting to me that the higher-ups at Substack didn’t see this coming a long time ago and head it off before we reached a crisis point. One obvious thing they could have tried would be to allow creators to team up and pool their creative resources into something akin to the role previously held by newspapers.

They could have instituted some sort of curated subscription bundle that allowed me to team up with 20 or so other similar writers and share a pool of money. Perhaps readers would be open to paying $15/month to access a bunch of writers at once so that writers could share helpings of an overall larger pie. I’m not sure this would work, I assume that there would be squabbles between writers about what percentage of the bundles that they actually deserve, but I would certainly give it a go.

All of this was described very clearly by Cory Doctorow many years ago as “Enshittification.” The only real question is whether or not this platform will figure out a way to reverse course before another one comes along to try a new course.

Watching the decay of my own business on this platform has made me reassess my overall economic strategy. Fortunately I’m no stranger to adapting to ever-changing whims of the media environment. I survived staff positions, as a freelancer for mainstream magazines, through traditional book publishing, self publishing, and surviving on revenue from Patreon, Substack and YouTube. Every paradigm shift has come with advantages and disadvantages and I have faith that I will be able to ride out this wave as well.

On thing that I am coming to terms with is that while I desperately want my work to survive solely through reader support the current setup just does not pay the bills. For it to work I really would need 1000 people paying $8/month, but despite doing what I believe is consistently better work, the subscriber trends are not moving in that direction. I don’t blame my subscribers for this. I blame the macroeconomic situation.

What I have found success in has been working directly with sponsors on YouTube videos. A few years ago I was dead-set against taking outside money to support my journalism. I wanted to be truly independent and completely reader-supported. Navigating this new paradigm is tricky. There is always the temptation to lower editorial standards to court ever-more lucrative sponsors. I’ve reported on this specific problem quite a bit over the years. I am trying to do it responsibly. I have whole categories of products that I refuse to take money from—supplements, crypto schemes, banking, gambling, wellness products in general. So far I’ve found sponsors that align with me personally. Let’s hope it stays that way.

You may have heard the old saying “If you’re not paying for something you’re the product, not the customer.”

Substack offered the dream to creators that their readers really would be their customers instead of just eyeballs that they sell to third parties. It’s too bad that the architecture of the platform itself has ripped that dream away.

But the old ways are dying. The new American dream is stranger, more subversive, and depending on your perspective maybe more troubling, than the old one. In some versions it looks like this: a 50 foot woman played by a legitimate celebrity depicting an only fans star while terrorizing an urban area in revealing clothing.

I kid you not. This same scene appears in two different hit shows featuring the DIY porn industry.

No one exemplifies the new celebrity economy better than Sophie Rain. She grew up on food stamps, joined OnlyFans and made ninety-five million dollars. Not from a long standing career. Not with a record deal or a film franchise. Ninety-five million dollars, from her bedroom, talking directly to the people who believed they could gain a sliver of her personal attention. No power broker decided she was worth taking a risk on. It was just her, and the audience, and a platform that takes twenty cents on the dollar. And, yeah, I know we’re talking about pornography here, but we are also talking about fame itself because technological adaptations that happen in that space eventually get adopted everywhere else, too. And something strange is happening on Only Fans.

The new dream is so culturally potent that actual Hollywood has taken notice. This spring, Sydney Sweeney plays an OnlyFans star in Euphoria. Elle Fanning plays one in Margo’s Got Money Troubles. In HBO’s Industry a young financier Sweetpea Golightly (Miriam Petche) runs an OnlyFans-inspired side hustle alongside her corporate finance career.

Think about that–these are A-list celebrities paying tribute to a dream that explicitly cuts out the path that propelled their own fame. So what exactly is happening?

Traditional Hollywood fame is a one-way street that moves from the film studio to your screen. But the social media dream flips the script.

The whole thing — every dollar of it — runs on something fragile and rare. It runs on parasociality. The carefully cultivated and endlessly maintained idea that what’s happening between creator and subscriber is personal. That she knows you. That she’s thinking about you. That when she sends that message, she means it for you specifically, and not for the ten thousand other men who got the same one.

Social Media created the pretense and put a price on incremental degree of closeness. Now Only Fans has almost replaced the whole porn industry in the middle of a loneliness epidemic, in a dating recession, in a moment when genuine human connection feels increasingly hard to find, that product — the feeling of being seen — turns out to be worth billions.

Which is also where the dream curdles. Because intimacy doesn’t scale. It’s valuable BECAUSE it’s rare. When a creator gets big enough to earn real money, she can no longer actually talk to everyone who believes she’s talking to them. So the industry built a solution: chatters. Professional impersonators, paid to be her in the DMs. And beyond the chatters, there are the operations — rooms full of women, managed by agencies in Romania and elsewhere, running what can only be described as emotional labor factories. Epimps. Selling the feeling of a real woman to men who believe, genuinely believe, that she’s there.

Those farms are now giving way to a whole new intimacy arms race with AI arriving to finish the argument — threatening to manufacture parasocial intimacy at an infinite scale, with no human on the other end at all.

Which brings me to today’s guest.

Gracie Canaan has a comedian’s eye for all of this, and a creator’s firsthand knowledge of it. She built a six-figure business on OnlyFans selling what she calls the girlfriend experience. And then she spent a year co-hosting OnlyFantasy — a new Audible podcast from the team behind Fiasco — reporting the full architecture of this world: the money, the loneliness, the chatters, the believers, and the question the whole thing keeps asking. Whether what’s being sold here — the connection, the attention, the feeling of being known — is real. And what it portends for everything else in the world outside of the stories we tell ourselves about our screens.

Durek Verrett takes that pattern somewhere else entirely.

A few weeks ago, — who writes the criminally underread Substack The Healing Delusion — told me I had to look into him. She knew more than I did, so we wrote this week’s video together.

Verrett calls himself a sixth-generation shaman (he used to say third-generation) from Sacramento. He claims his powers can reverse aging and “turn atoms.” His mother says there’s no shaman anywhere in the family tree, and he’s threatened to sue her over it. His actual biography includes a felony arson conviction at sixteen and several subsequent arrests. His resurrection story — kidneys failing, dying, returning with mystical powers — keeps changing shape depending on which interview you watch, though the one verifiable fact is years of dialysis and a kidney transplant from his sister that his body later rejected.

None of that stopped him from becoming one of the most sought-after spiritual healers in Hollywood. Gwyneth Paltrow called him her “light in shining armor” and gave him a platform on Goop. From there his client list exploded: Selma Blair, Chris Pine, Rosario Dawson, Dave Asprey. Once a roster looks like that, nobody checks credentials.

And then it got stranger. In 2022, Verrett got engaged to Princess Märtha Louise of Norway. They married in 2024 in a four-day ceremony at a fjord, photo rights sold to Hello! magazine, Netflix cameras rolling. Norwegian media started calling him Rasputin. The princess called the coverage a smear campaign and eventually stepped back from her royal duties to focus on their “alternative medicine business” together.

The relationship history is its own saga — a sham marriage he later reported to immigration authorities, an eight-year relationship with a man he met in a support group, a sudden reframing of his sexuality once Märtha entered the picture.

Then come the allegations. In 2024, a Norwegian magazine reported that Verrett had touched a client’s genitals without consent during a session. Leaked voicemails have him admitting he “crossed the line.” His team’s response was that his healing work sometimes involves the lymphatic system “around the armpits and groin,” and that clients now sign waivers consenting to genital contact “as determined by him.”

If your spiritual healer requires a legal waiver before laying hands on you, that’s usually the signal to leave.

What strikes me most isn’t that Verrett found marks in Hollywood — that’s almost expected at this point. It’s that the same act, dressed in slightly different language, was enough to talk his way into European royalty. The con didn’t get more sophisticated. The marks just got bigger.

Massive thanks to Kati Rae for digging into this one with me — go read The Healing Delusion if medical grifters are your thing too.

Today, over 75% of American industries are more consolidated than they were just a few decades ago. We’re talking search engines, airlines, pharmaceuticals, cheerleading — yes, cheerleading — all quietly cornered by a handful of players. And the result, according to my guest, isn’t just higher prices. It’s a slow-motion transfer of political power from citizens to corporations. From democracy to oligarchy.

has been sounding this alarm for years, and doing it in a way that is equal parts historian, policy wonk, and muckraker. He’s a former policy advisor to the Senate Budget Committee and worked on Dodd-Frank in the House. He’s the Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project. And he’s the author of Goliath: The Hundred-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy — which traces how America built a robust anti-monopoly tradition, dismantled it, and is now paying the price.

His Substack, BIG, has become one of the most widely read newsletters on the politics of market power, with Elizabeth Warren calling him “a brilliant thinker” who sheds light on “the dangers monopolies pose to our democracy.”

In other words, he’s the guy corporations really wish would just stop talking.

Matt, thanks so much for being here.

The short version: Feel Free is made by Botanic Tonics, founded by a man calling himself Jerry Cash — real name JW Ross, a convicted fraudster who served nine years for a money-laundering scheme before launching a “wellness” empire. People recovering from alcoholism, drawn in by marketing that promised “all the buzz without the booze,” ended up with ten-bottle-a-day habits. One Reddit post I traced back to a real family describes a daughter who died of cardiac arrest after a seizure, 40 pounds underweight, hooked on a product she thought was a harmless kava drink.

Here’s the new part. Secretary of Homeland Security Markway Mullen stood at a press conference warning that this $9 billion industry is “ruining lives” and “truly killing people.” What he didn’t mention: his own financial disclosure shows a $500,000 to $1 million stake in Botanic Tonics.

Around the time my original report came out, the DOJ raided a Botanic Tonics warehouse and seized 250,000 bottles. Then, in December 2025, the DOJ quietly dropped its lawsuit against the company. A few months later, Botanic Tonics gave RFK Jr.’s super-PAC $500,000 — on top of the $300,000 Jerry Ross had already donated during the 2024–2025 campaign. Kennedy, who founded MAHA on the premise of breaking up cozy ties between industry and health policy, has himself called these products “a sinister, sinister industry” — while the company funding his political operation keeps selling them.

I spent over a hundred hours on this: interviews with the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service, a clinical addiction psychiatrist, Ben Greenfield (who walked back his early endorsement), and dozens of messages with Ross himself, who at one point claimed he was in witness protection and threatened to have me jailed for reporting his criminal history. The Marshals Service told me flatly: anyone in protection who goes public, as he repeatedly has, forfeits that protection.

I don’t think Feel Free should be illegal — banning things tends to just create black markets. But I do think people deserve to know what’s actually in the bottle, and who’s profiting from keeping that information vague. Right now, that list includes a fraudster turned wellness founder, a sitting cabinet official, and the man who built his political brand on fighting exactly this kind of grift.

Full video and sourcing are up now for paid subscribers.

Sofia — who, I’m fairly confident does not actually exist, as her photo was clearly AI slop — wanted to offer me a deal. Her peptide company was looking for influencers to promote their research chemicals. In exchange: a $500 product kit, and a 25% commission on every order placed through my personal link.

They had no idea what they were getting into.

I wrote back saying I’d give them an “honest review.” They said that was fine. So I got on a Zoom with their real point of contact — a guy named Abe, who joined 15 minutes late from somewhere in Uruguay, in front of a digital background of San Francisco, representing a company whose website says it’s based in the midwest. When I pointed this out, Abe acknowledged their distribution facility is in California, their business is incorporated in Indiana, and basically everyone involved lives abroad.

It only got weirder from there.

In this week’s video I expose the seamy underbelly of the peptide business. I trace their supply chains across the world, sit in on marketing meetings, and document a seemingly endless stream of lies.

And you will never believe what happens when I get the results back from the lab. . .

Special thanks to the sponsor of today’s video: Plaud AI.

SPONSOR LINK: PlaudAI 10% code code: CARNEY Notepro Amazon

Which is why today I’m talking with Dan McClellan, who does something that most Bible-thumpers don’t. He actually has read the Bible. And I’m not talking about the King James or the Revised Standard Version you might have collecting dust on a shelf, but the original texts that make up the Bible in their original languages. Dan has a PhD from the University of Exeter in cognitive science of religion. Master’s from Oxford in Jewish studies. And a Bachelor’s from BYU in ancient Near Eastern studies. He spent ten years as scripture translation supervisor for the Church of Later Day Saints.

In other words he’s sort of a Biblical badass.

Which also makes him pretty controversial among the people who prefer to thump on their Bibles and spin its messages for their own ends. Indeed, his twitter takedowns of his critics are things of beauty. Today he’s all over social media with popular pages on Tiktok and YouTube. His new book “The Bible Says So: What we Get Right (And Wrong) about Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues” is a New York Times bestseller.

On today’s show I have the great pleasure of welcoming a recent Stanford graduate who has been reporting from inside the university for the last four years. is the youngest-ever recipient of the Polk Award for Investigative Journalism. In his first semester he exposed how Stanford’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had published research containing fabricated data. He connected the dots between pharmaceutical giant Genentech and Tessier-Lavigne’s earlier career, and his work ultimately forced the president to resign. Along the way, he was threatened by Stanford’s legal team and faced the wrath of social media commentators — all while struggling to complete the most grueling computer science course in America.

His book, How to Rule the World, has just been released and appears likely to land on the New York Times bestseller list. Fellow investigative journalists have called him a “fucking menace,” which is high praise on this channel.

Backed by $370 million from Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, Christian Angermayer, and — yes — a Donald Trump investment fund, the event promised to shatter world records and usher in a new era of chemically-optimized human performance. They called it “unleashing evolution.”

What they got instead was a Texas high school track meet.

When the results came in this May, the Enhanced athletes — loaded up with steroids, peptides, and God knows what else, under expert medical supervision — couldn’t break world records. Many couldn’t even beat their own personal bests. Sports scientist noted that on average, the 100-meter sprinters ran about a half-second slower than their personal bests. In sprinting, that’s not a rounding error — that’s a lifetime. Some ran slower than they did in high school.

Meanwhile, Fred Kerley — a clean athlete — won the 100 meters and offered the competitors some helpful advice: they need to train a little harder.

The internet reacted with undisguised glee.

But here’s what made the Enhanced Games more than just a sports story: the athletic event was never really the product. It was the ad.

The actual business was a consumer platform selling supplements and testosterone therapy, launched right as the games approached. Commentator Bryan Johnson — the wellness influencer who charges clients a million dollars a year for his longevity protocols — was there not to analyze athletics, but to tout the golden age of peptides and concierge medicine. When the records didn’t fall, his job shifted to explaining why that wasn’t actually a defeat.

This is the grift in miniature. Impressive-sounding terminology that optimized for mTOR pathways, mitochondrial optimization, testosterone stacking wrapped around products that, when put to the ultimate real-world test, didn’t work. The Enhanced Games were supposed to be the proof of concept that would legitimize the entire biohacking supplement industry. Instead they became the most expensive debunking in sports history.

After the results, shares in the Enhanced Games collapsed from $10 to $2.35, wiping out $800 million in market capitalization almost overnight.

The boring truth, as always, is the real one: sleep, community, consistent exercise, and rational nutrition are what actually make people healthy and long-lived. They’re just not particularly profitable. You can’t put them in a subscription box.

If unlimited performance enhancement couldn’t help elite athletes beat their own high school times, what exactly is it going to do for the rest of us?

Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is just train harder.

Graeber wasn’t the first to notice the problem. Back in 1930 the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that ever-increasing industrial output from factories would make it possible for everyone on earth to work 15 hours a week. Within a few decades the economy met his expectations, but people’s workloads didn’t get lighter.

Fast forward to today, and the question of Bullshit jobs is once again on everyone’s lips. Everyone from Bill Gates to Sam Altman and Elon Musk have heralded AI as the new harbinger of the 15 hour work week. After all, the very things that AI is supposedly good at—getting rid of menial intellectual labor and automating digital tasks—are exactly the sorts of things that will get automated away.

But here’s the thing, what if bullshit work isn’t a bug in industrial captialsim? But that it is it’s key feature?

In this week’s video I dig into why Bullshit work is almost definitely here to stay despite the promises of tech barons.

In my latest video, Peter Thiel’s (Idiotic) Plan to Destroy the Free Press, I break down why Objection AI isn’t just a fact-checking tool—it’s a sophisticated legal trap. The real goal isn’t just to issue a “bad review.” It is to lure journalists into binding arbitration agreements where they can be hit with limitless financial damages and have no room for appeal. Despite claiming to hire the “best of the best” from the CIA and FBI, the reality of their investigation team is far less elite than they claim. This is a system where a billionaire can write the rules, act as the judge, and effectively bankrupt anyone who publishes a narrative they don’t like.

The most surreal part of this investigation happened while I was actually filming the report. Objection AI not only altered their site in real time as I honed in on their investigators, but they also might have blocked my IP address, proving that they aren’t quite as fond of “transparency” when the investigator is looking back at them. Independent journalism is under a lot of pressure right now—not just from legal threats, but from technofascist attempts to control the narrative.

If you want to help me stay on the air and keep fighting these “techno oligarchs,” please consider supporting the channel on Substack or Patreon. It means the world to me and keeps these investigations possible.

Thank you so much for being part of what happens here at Scott Carney Investigates. Today I made a huge change in how this awesome group of dedicated readers and investigators can come together by launching a Discord Community. Discord is something like a cross between an old-school message board and a whatsapp group.

As a premium member on substack y…

Read more

In 2011, it looked like we finally found it. Researchers began focusing on a drug called Rapamycin (originally an antifungal and transplant medication) could extend the lives of worms, flies, and mice. Naturally, the longevity community went wild. Influencers began taking it off-label, convinced they had found the “holy grail” of anti-aging.

But there was a glaring problem: Nobody had actually run a clinical trial on healthy humans.

That changed when Dr. Brad Stanfield, a primary care physician from New Zealand and friend of this channel, did something heroic. He crowdfunded over $720,000 to put the “miracle drug” to the test.

The results are finally in, and they aren’t what anyone expected. I brought Stanfield onto the show to talk about what they mean.

You can watch my full conversation with Dr. Brad Stanfield here for premium members and on YouTube on Tuesday: Did The Most Promising Longevity Drug Fail? | Brad Stanfield.