Carney contributes stories on a variety of medical, technological and ethical issues to Wired, Mother Jones, Playboy, Foreign Policy, Men's Journal, and National Public Radio.

While local and international law enforcement have cracked down on the market, advances in science have increased the demand for human tissue—ligaments, kidneys, even rented space in women's wombs—leaving little room to consider the ethical dilemmas inherent in the flesh-and-blood trade.

The book uses Thorson's story as a springboard to understanding the path that Tibetan Buddhism took to get to the United States and analyzes the often conflicted relationship that Americans have with the concept of enlightenment.

[13] Thorson was a follower of the controversial Buddhist guru Michael Roach who teaches a version of Buddhism that closely aligns with the Christian Gospel of Prosperity.

[16][17] In 2011 Carney travelled to meet Dutch fitness guru Wim Hof in Poland on an assignment from Playboy with the intention of exposing him as a charlatan.

He interviews US Army scientists who are trying to find ways to make soldiers more effective in extreme environments, the founders of the outdoor workout movement the November Project, legendary surfer Laird Hamilton and endurance runner Brian MacKenzie.

[23][24] "The most comfortable way to think about the Wedge is that it's a choice to separate stimulus from response",[25] by which Carney means using the conscious action of the mind to interrupt the automatic physical reactions of the body.

Carney draws on the work of neuroscientist Andrew Huberman at Stanford to explain how fear and anxiety offer opportunities to use the Wedge and proceeds to put his own body under various sorts of environmental stresses—saunas, throwing kettlebells, MDMA therapy, flotation tanks, breathwork and ayahuasca—to test the concept for himself.

[8][26][27][28] In 1970 the Great Bhola Cyclone killed 500,000 people in East Pakistan and set off a series of cataclysmic events that almost culminated in nuclear war between the United States and USSR.

Scott Carney and Jason Miklian tell the story of The Vortex through the eyes of cyclone survivors, two genocidal presidents (Richard Nixon and Yahya Khan), a soccer star turned soldier and mutineer Hafiz Uddin Ahmad, and American aid worker and a weatherman from Miami who tried to avert disaster.