Scott Carney Investigates

In 2015 Netflix aired a documentary about the seedy underbelly of the Miami porn industry called Hot Girls Wanted. Two filmmakers and executive producer Rashida Jones followed the stories of three 18 and 19 year olds who answered craigslist ads to have sex on camera. Over the course of the next three months the women were pulled ever-deeper into disturbing and even violent scenes in what is known as “abuse porn.” I was horrified. Statistics they showed by the Kinsey Institute showed that 40% of online pornography features violence against women. The average porn star barely lasts three months in the industry. The end credits reported that all three women left the business shortly after the documentary wrapped up. Since principle photography began about ten years ago, and I wanted to know where the women from the film ended up. I reached out to all three filmmakers and never got a response. But I did manage to connect with Rachel Bernard the woman featured in the film poster who went by “Ava Taylor” at the time. She recounted how the filmmakers had a very specific agenda behind their project that required her to look like a victim, when the reality was much more complicated. After the film’s release they flew her out to a university campus to talk about the horrors that she experienced, but unlike what the film reported, Bernard was still actively performing, and according to her, thriving. During the meeting Rashida Jones asked her if she was “going to quit the industry” now, and offered to pay for Bernard to pursue her dream of becoming a photographer at the Art Institute of Chicago. Bernard was excited by the generous offer and accepted it on the spot. But once she began tweeting about her complex feelings about the film the tuition payments dried up. In our interview, Bernard tells me how while the filmmakers Ronna Gradus and Jill Bauer ostensibly wanted to expose the dark side of the porn industry, they also ended up exploiting the 18-year-old women who they were covering. In one jarring irony as the filmmakers were taking the cover shot for movie poster (and thumbnail in Netflix’s queue) the session followed the same scripted playbook of the actual pornography shoots she did for her day job. “They told me to ‘pose a little more sexy’ and now look ‘sad’ while she sat in her own bedroom in in her underwear. The net effect was a series of compounding exploitations. Not only were the women being pressured to perform increasingly violent acts on camera for actual pornographers, but the Bauer, Gradus and Jones used Bernard’s story to sell multi-million dollar film production deals at Netflix. In this interview with Bernard we talk about how her life has moved on over the course of ten years, her thoughts on ethical porn consumption, the good and bad parts of the industry and the rise of OnlyFans where girls like her have more control over how they appear online. And what she told me made me reconsider almost everything about my initial reaction to the show when I first watched it. Bernard speculates that Jone’s offer was really a ploy for the documentary crew to sell a follow-up TV series to Netflix that eventually aired under the title Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On. Bernard had to drop out of school and take a minimum wage job to cover her expenses.

It’s easy to get disillusioned with American politics. There’s a two party system that makes everything seem intractable, a general lack or transparency, and an overwhelming sense that corporate greed somehow controls everything. But it didn’t have to be that way. This week I had the great privilege to interview investigative journalist David Sirota about his brand new limited series podcast Master Plan. In it he traces the roots of our current political deadlock back more than 50 years to Nixon administration where the destined-to-be-impeached president took a bribe on tape from the Milk lobby. When the news came out that dairy farmers were funneling vast sums of cash into the Nixon campaign American politicians did something almost unheard of: they passed new laws on campaign finance that made this exact thing illegal. What could have been the beginning of a new era of transparency in government ultimately had the opposite effect. Frightened by the possibility of clean politics a soon-to-be supreme court justice named Lewis Powell cooked up a document that became the vision of corporate oligarchs to legalize corruption. Sirota and his team of talented journalists (which includes my wife Laura Krantz) follow the story from the infamous Powell Memo through a series of backroom deals, pivotal supreme court decisions and bad faith efforts all the way to the penning of the Republican manifesto “Project 2025” in this year’s election. I don’t want to give too much away, except to say that the show elegantly covers a huge breath of American history and will make you think about politics in an entirely new way.

The Harvard geneticist sold a fake miracle pill to GlaxoSmithKline for $720,000,000, and now wants the world to believe that he has discovered a new immortality molecule. Everyone wants to live a long and healthy life. No one wants to die. The oldest scam in history is the longevity lie. The first writing recorded on Sumerian clay tablets recounts the story of Gilgamesh’s failed quest to bring his friend back from the dead. The immutable fact of mortality has dogged human kind since its very beginning. And yet every age has brought with it its own crop of magicians, alchemists and scientists promising eternal life. Their pitch is always the same: everyone who came before them was a charlatan, but they have the secret sauce. The most famous longevity grifter of our age is no different. If you’ve ever heard a news story that a glass of red wine might make you live longer, it was because of his groundbreaking research. Harvard geneticist David Sinclair is one of the most decorated scientists on the planet. He’s listed as an author on more than 500 papers, his work has been cited more than 96,000 times and he holds 50 patents. He was the editor of the journal Aging. Resume aside, David Sinclair is no different than any other health grifter throughout the ages, and great fortunes have been squandered in pursuit of his “science.” In this week’s video I dive into his 25 year history of scientific mistakes, lies and fraud. I show how he used disproven research on the chemical “resveratrol” to sell a best selling book and, ultimately, a company to the pharmaceutical drug maker GlaxoSmithKlein for $720,000,000. Two years after the sale, the research was proven to not work, and Sinclair became one of the richest scientists in America. Now, ten years after that work fell apart, Sinclair is at it again selling the idea of a new immortality molecule called NMN. This video took me three weeks to put together, but it was worth the wait.

A recent lawsuit by Peter Attia against his former sponsor OURA ring is a total bombshell--not because the outcome matters much one way or another, but because it outlines exactly how health influencers get paid to alter their messaging on behalf of companies and even alter the direction of scientific studies. Through the court filings I found out that he is sponsored by at least ten companies and is somehow also involved in a $200 Million "blank check company" in the Cayman Islands which does...well...who know's what? The most important part of this lawsuit is that it's likely a blueprint for how every other health influencer out there ALSO gets paid. The same basic contracts likely fill the bank accounts of Andrew Huberman, David Sinclair, Andy Galpin, Lex Friedman, Dave Asprey, Mark Hyman, Rangan Chatterjee, Tim Ferris, Matthew Walker and so many more. Get Early Access and Support this Channel on Substack Follow along by reading the legal complaint with me here: Attia's Blank Check Company in the Cayman Islands: #peterAttia #hubermanlab #darkmoney