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You might be listening and thinking that it sounds a teensy well, you probably had enough time to determine this, but by now you're picking up that it sounds a teensy bit different than normal because we're not in our normal studio and we're not with our normal stuff.
We're in Colorado.
That doesn't that doesn't matter so much as we're in someone's kitchen recording with best selling author Scott Carney. How's it going, Scott damn Man, Nice to see you again.
Uh.
The reason we're here it is we're out on we've been out on a book tour and I'm here with Brody and we've been going around, uh, promoting the new book Catch Crayfish, count Stars and bouncing around from city to city as they're working on stuff and doing events in collaboration with Shields, who's been phenomenal group of people
to work with. As we've gone from city to city, the main thing we've talked about I've become a student of this is, Uh, anytime you're in like a large city by a airport, the ambulance chaser lawyers, they're billboards.
Frank Azar here in Denver.
We saw one the other day. It's the lawyer on the billboard holding a sledgehammer.
There's one called jungle law.
Uh.
There's one where the lawyer is on a Harley.
And I think the thinking is that people are like, what do I think of When I think of a tough person, I think of a biker. So when I think of a tough lawyer, it'll be a lawyer on a bike. There's a put the woomack on him as a law as a lawyer slogan.
So we've been checking out, uh, checking out that a whole bunch. Also.
Uh, it was funny going around cause we did a show and or did a book signing in Texas where we signed and all the events we've gone to. I signed two guns in Texas where you just wait in line with your gun. It's so funny. A dude comes out to me too and he got. A dude comes out to me and he's showed me a turkey he killed. So this guy comes up with his wife's like ten feet away. His wife's ten feet behind him, so like waiting for him to like obviously ready to leave.
And he's shown me a picture he killed.
A wild turkey that had four spurs.
So I had two spurs on each leg.
So I said, I hope you saved it, and he said, yeah, man, I got a full mount. And I says, his wife's like ten feet away and she looks at me and goes full mount. It so funny, man, A quick follow up on something. Where's this thing we're gonna talk about. We're not gonna talk about too much.
We're gon we're gonna get in it.
We're talking about This might not be a like totally normally show, but so so turn it off unless you might hear about something super interesting. This is the interesting part. We're gonna get to that. We're gonna get something super interesting in a minute. But we covered, meaning, talked about, laughed about this. The latest Yellowstone National Park scandal where a gentleman gentleman or a gentleman he okay, so a bunch of buffalo go across the river. I came in
with the hell river. Do you remember what river? A bunch of bikes across the river sounds like they became of a joke, and and a calf doesn't join him. Well, it's too chicken ship to swim the river. So this gentleman goes down and they just take off is leave it sitting on the bank of the river.
This guy goes down and he.
Like for whatever reason, kind of grabs it and scurries it up to the road, thinking he's gonna save it.
So he gets in.
All kind of trouble and find for all this, and then it becomes in the news. How since he touched it, they it was abandoned by its mother.
Wait what so he got his human smell on it, and now.
He's caused it and had to be euthanized and the blood is on his hands.
Okay. A couple of people wrote into this. A person that raises.
A person that raises bison wrote in to say, this is the stupidest thing he's ever heard. Basically, they handle them cabs all the time, and the mothers are fine to pick them back up. But most convincingly, Jim Heffelfinger, our resident biologist from Arizona State Fishing Game Agency. He's been on the show a number of times. Rights in he heard this story too. He says, I heard this story, but this is the first I heard the NPS say
it was because someone touched it. Total bullshit, he says, if that was true, Kevin Monteeth, Randall Kaufman, Randy Larson, Brock McCollen, And he's naming all these researchers who do a lot of studies by putting GPS collars on ungulates. Goes say, they handle ungulate calves all the time. They tranquilize them, catch them, handle them, put collars on them. They stand back up and go right back to their mother,
he said. Had He goes on to point out that if this was true, none of their research would be of any value because they would all be abandoned, when in fact, they're not abandoned. He's all for getting people to respect wildlife and not pick up bison calves, but come on, you don't need to lie to do it.
He had a good joke.
The mother simply crossed the river and then looked back at her young male calf that couldn't make it across a strong current and said Bison, huh.
Good one tuple fingers. Yeah, he's good. If you made If you made that up, that's good. Another craction from a past show.
I Okay, I feel like I'm wrong anytime I see that someone has like a math formula to crack to me, I'm like, maybe I was wrong, But I don't know. Maybe his math is wrong, he said. I wanted to point out an inaccuracy in me Eater podcast four four four, where a pair of ink and mummies are described as having been freeze dried in the same sense as a freeze dried meal, meaning that they were frozen solid in an environment where the pressure was low enough for sublimation
phase change from solid directory to vapor. He goes on to say, these mummies were found at twenty thousand feet, where the atmospheric pressure is about forty one.
I don't know what kPa is, Okay.
Atmospheric pressure is about forty percent of sea level, the triple point for water see attached phase diagram that intimidates the shit out of me too. I didn't even look at that phase diagram. The point where the pressure is low enough for sublimation to occur is roughly a sixty seven times higher vacuum than the atmosphere where the mummies were found. Therefore, he goes on to say, that's not
what happened. They were not sublimating that. I was equating it to your freeze dry meal that you eat when you're backpacking.
Um.
He's like other sources have attributed the preservation of these mummies to the extreme cold and dry air. He says, also, I believe that they were not entirely desiccated. But he does goes on to point this out. Here's a quote. The mummies were an exceptional condition when found. Reinhardt said that the mummies appear to be the best preserved Inca
mummies ever found. For context, I went to see one of these mummies in Salta, Argentina, also saying that the arms were perfectly preserved, even down to the individual hairs, The internal organs were still intact, and one of the hearts still contained frozen blood. Because the mummies froze before dehydration could occur, the desiccation and shriveling of the organs that is typical of exposed human remains never took place.
He ends an undercomment, Well.
A little educational b bit.
The kPa is a kilo uh, pardon me, a kilo pascal, which is a unit of pressure, and it's used basically in countries where the metric system is followed, so it replaces pounds per square inch.
Oh got it, Steeve.
I feel like, you know, just hearing you you say this now, I feel like you should have gotten that right the first time.
It's not so simple as it's embarrassing. No, he's a nice guy.
I'm sure he's a nice guy, he says, thanks for all the great content, John, Thank you.
John.
All right, So Scott, let's walk through the I want to touch on the books you'd done, because the books you've done have a big bearing on what we're going to talk today.
So want me through your titles. You did went on organ trafficking. M hmmm. Yeah.
I was called the red Market on the trail of the world's organ brokers, bone thieves, blood farmers, and child traffickers. I invented clickbait.
It was.
Maybe not, but yeah, so I you know, I spent six years wandering around the world looking for uh, you know, interviewing people involved in buying and selling him and body parts, not mummy body parts, but like you know, kidneys, bones, hair, surrogate wombs. I was tracking down kidnapped children from India to the United States and that's sort of the where I made.
My bones as a journalist. So that was my first book. Well, you know that, I don't know if I feel like it's is it ever true? Like you know, like the myth of like that you wake up in a hotel room and a total bullshit, your kidney's gone, that never missed.
Start with one of those guys.
No, what usually happens, like the law of organ trafficking, is that you find like a world class medical institution located next to abject poverty, and you and organ brokers appear out of the ether to harvest organs. You know, usually with payments. It's way easier to pay someone like fifty bucks or five hundred bucks for a kidney than it is to kidnap them and cause a police case.
But what I do, so you're saying, so this is people. When you were focused on this, you were looking at people who.
Were buying.
Sort of like illicitly buying organs for people waiting for transplants.
Yeah, that's one of them, but I was also looking at you know, so for for kidneys. Yeah, I was looking at the organ brokers, so the criminal side of that. I was interviewing the criminals and I was interviewing the victims. So you know, we had like national geographic cameras come in and get like eighty women all line up, where every woman in a village had sold their kidneys to the hospitals. And these would go mostly to the domestic markets in India, but also abroad as.
Well, So this was most common in witch countries.
Oh, it's all over the place. I mean I focused primarily in India, but if you're talking about kidneys, you're talking in the Philippines, India, Egypt, Brazil, a little bit of Mexico, South Africa, Indonesia. I mean, it's a giant trade. And what I was trying to understand was not only how the illegal market works, but the patterns in all the organs, in all the body parts that are sold. And I was also looking at blood and how people
have their blood like this was messed up. I went onto the border of India Nepal where there's a blood shortage, and I met this guy who used to be a dairy farmer who would go to the bus station find someone who was like addicted to heroin or something like that offered them like a thousand rupees fifteen hundred rupees. It's about thirty bucks for a pint of blood. But he drained four pints of blood, so they were minially conscious.
And he kept him there for six months, eight months at a time until they died or were about to die.
Only like harvesting now.
Seriously seriously, like it was. It's a I mean, the rule of organ trafficking is once you start thinking about the body as a commodity, like it's the same rules as Nike shoes. At the end of the rules, well, you know it's going to be you try to buy low and sell high and you minimize your risk. And you know, the more you think about body parts as just things, the more you treat them like things.
M okay, then your next one.
That you know the problem with that is that makes me not want to read that book because because I feel like, like if someone tells me that they like, if you told me right now, I've thought what was before, but if you told me right now that your kidney was failing, I would think my kidney was failing, my kidney would start to hurt me. Oh man, So that like when someone's like, I got poison IVY, I instantly.
Is sympathetic sympathetic disease.
Yeah, Like if you said, man, I got a bad poison ivy case, my waistline would start to it. Yeah right, I'd like reading that book made my kidney ache.
Yeah, that's the nocebo effect. And I write about that in my book The Wedge. But yeah, my second book was called The Enlightenment Trap. And that's in a way how this conversation sure and Els is starting. Yeah, yeah, where you know, I was investigating these Charlottean gurus around the world, and I was looking in particular about Tibetan Buddhism and like Americans who go to India and Tibetan come back in red robes, and the sort of insanity
that occurs when someone declares themselves as enlightened. And i'd seen you know, the book start.
So you're in there, you're focused on sort of like enlightenment as something specific, Yeah, as.
Like attaining a final state.
Yeah, you know, it'd be the same in pursuit of us of a I don't want to call it like a confined to a particular religious perspective, But you mean, like like enlightened in the definition that would be of Eastern religious thought or Eastern spiritual thought.
Yeah, I mean, for sure, specifically I'm talking about people who see themselves as a Tibetan Buddhist bodhisatta, right.
But the.
I mean it applies to anyone like it applies like if you're talking to God, I'm thinking that there's some sort of more mental problem here. Then I'm seeing God actually talking to and if he is talking to I want to see some really good proof I want to see. Yeah, And then this is what the Tibetans would talk about. They'd say, look, if you think you're enlightened, you go up to the top of the temple. And they say this all the time. It's really funny. Go up to
the top of the time. I want you to see you pee off the top of the temple, and before the urine hits the ground, I want you to suck that urine backup into Urethra as proof that you are enlightened.
Yeah.
This is a test that they tried many times in ti Bet. Because you want to prove if you're if you're actually that's that's that's I specifically talk about that particular miracle on two different occasions.
Here has pulled it off.
Well they say they have, but you know, the sources are all medieval and there was no cameras. But you know, here's the thing, like when you get enlightened and there's and I think this is particularly relevant to what we're gonna talk.
Like we felt that word around big time.
Now yeah, yeah, right, but not even I know what we mean when we say it. Well, the words i'd say, like I was enlightened, I switched to fry my fish and.
Port I like that version of enlightenment. Actually that's my I can relate to that. But you know i'd seen so I had a student, so I was you know, at the beginning of my career, I was getting my PhD anthropology and I dropped out right at the dissertation. I was leading these abroad programs around North India and on a seven day silent meditation retreat, my best and brightest student, woman named Emily O'Connor. You know, she was like this type aid super driven personality. But we're silent,
you know, in meditation. You're meditating on like in this tradition, we're trying to find silence in ourselves and bliss and nirvana and all these good things that you can think of, and also our own deaths, because it's a big thing you do, you meditate on death. Last day of silent Meditation retreat, she climbs up to the roof of the retreat center and jumps off to her death, taking her own life. And I'm I'm like a twenty seven year old kid at this point, and I'm tasked with recovering
her body and figuring out why she killed herself. And her journal, her journal, the you know, I reprint a lot of it in that book, but essentially it says the last words or I am a bodhisatva, meaning that she had, in the course of that meditation retreat, learned all of the sacred teachings, knew everything about this, and all.
She had to do was all her body.
Well it was suicide.
I mean she didn't think that, but no, okay, but.
She knew that she was going to have physical death, or she thought that she was going to pull a trick.
Like pulling your urine back up. No, no, she knew she was getting physical death.
Yeah, yeah, I mean one of the lines in the book in her journal was, you know, I know there's gonna be a lot of pain, uh, and you know we have to go through it. So, you know, the conception of death was maybe a little different because she thought she would become essentially a Tibetan Buddhist angel.
I thought, you meant like when you know how someone might you know, there's been cases where someone's on like LSD and they jump off a cliffs.
They think that something else is going to happen, other than what you'd think was going to happen.
No, I you know, she she knew what was She knew what this was for. And I think what it was when you're meditating, when you're taking on a new spiritual practice, there's this law of you know, so we call it the law of diminishing returns, but it's also the law of speedy gains, right. It's the idea that you start meditating and and everything starts getting better. You know, you start feeling these really positive changes and and it
can feel very enticing. Time speeds up, it slows down the quality of the light changes, You have these realizations about how your mind works and you want to grab onto that and you don't want to let it go. And I think at that point she saw death as a way of holding onto it because she knew that those even those realizations were starting to slip from her fingers.
Huh.
And then well, and then you know, then she jumped off the roof of the retreat center and died. And that that sent my life on spinning on an entirely different trajectory. I mean, you know, we talked about my book on organ trafficking that originated out of this moment because I had spent six days with her body one hundred and six degree heat trying to preserve it, and we had to bring it back to the States, and I was suddenly looking at a body as responsibility. I
was the director of the program, let's see. Yeah, and I spoke Hindy and I, you know, I could actually navigate the police system that no and no one And we had two other director there, but I was the guy.
Did law enforcement or the state department or anything like that get involved.
Yeah, I mean I was dealing with the cops continually. Uh and uh, you know, I initially they thought it was a murder because the extent of her injuries, and they asked me if there was an enemies and it could have gone really, really bad, but the the journal pretty much showed what her mental state was.
Oh man, uh, how old are you? And I haven't I was about twenty seven years old. I think when you did that book, was it did you start? Do you think looking back on it now?
Was it was it like a like a form of therapy?
I think, I mean, was it like a thing stuck in your head and you wanted to start writing about it?
Yeah?
I mean it's the theme that connects all my books, right, and I actually recount that story. I think it appears in four of my books, and like, you know, diminishing ways as I go. But uh, yeah, I mean I was dealing with two questions right at first. I wanted to know about the material nature of the body. How we certainly turned flesh into commerce, because you know, they were taking pieces of her brain and liver and stuff and send it all over for various tests and things.
And I wanted to think about that question of like, you know, there's a body and it's special, it's alive. I don't know, is there a soul and I don't know, but like then then it becomes property of the state, and there's and and things alter. And so that was the book The Red Market, like it was all coming out of that event. But here's the other question that's going on my mind, like was she enlightened? Like what was going on? Is there a connection between spiritual attainment
and madness? This is what I wanted to know, and I you know, I spent about another six eight months interviewing lamas, you know, these sort of Tibetan Buddhist monks and you know, the Dialama's teacher and oracles, all sorts of things. I'm trying to figure out what was she enlightened? And then the consensus is no. But it that led me down this thing. Look, okay, what is it about intensive spiritual seeking that can drive you mad? And I
wasn't interested as much as the depression. You know, your first hypothe is was she'd like suicide asn't depressed, But I want to know what is the thing where a positive can make you do something that's incredibly dangerous and bad. Uh. And And that that leads into this book The Enlightenment Trap, where I look at her case but also cases of people who go to India and just go crazy, something called India syndrome where they believe they're Krishna or they
believe they're Shiva. And about one hundred Westerners a year end up in mental asylums in India and you have to get sent home.
But you know, when I look at a lot of that stuff, people that are really and we're gonna get into this and we get into the whim Hoff and the yeah, you know, ice frozen water and hyperventilank and all that.
I think that curious what you think about this.
I think that there's like people that are looking for a fix, so something that's going to go and study.
And I'm just picking on Buddhism cause we're.
Talking about Yeah, they're they're already fragile and vulnerable. Okay, when they hit what they think is enlightenment or whatever truth. Maybe it's whatever truth you're getting from spending a bunch of time in icy water, whatever the hell you got going on. You're already fragile and vulnerable. The euphoria that you get when you find a solution, like a new diet that you can believe in.
You know, if I only eat ligament, if.
I only eat, if I only eat vegetables, if I only whatever. Right is, you're feeling an alleviation in the symptomology of being lost and weak. So you're euphoria. You think I'm cured. It's just an alleviation of symptom, but you're already terminally You're you're terminally lost, you're terminally weak.
You get a little break and you think it feels good.
But that's why so few people are who are vulnerable and lost stay fixed for long.
They're always looking for a like I feel like that. You find some people that like, they don't stay fixed.
They like you're you're a drunk you have a religious epiphany, And I'm like, yeah, we'll see, Yeah, we'll see, because I got a feeling that that you have an alleviation of the symptom.
But it's going to creep back on you.
I mean, you're right. I mean, look at how many chronic alcoholics suddenly find Jesus and then get like drunk on Jesus.
Right.
I mean that this is a thing. You're describing, something that I think is out there, sort of the conversion symptomology. But I will say that's a high rate of recidivism. I think that is the way you said a high rate of return. But I do think I wouldn't just throw all of those infanies under the bus. I mean, sometimes one of them, a lot of them. Sure, there's it gonna be a percentage, right, we could, we could,
we could study it like a drug. But sometimes you need structure, you need control, and taking control of one thing in your life can generalize out to controlling other things in your life. Right, Like if you have a technique and let's say, let's say was meditation, right, and meditation gave you a stable point and the technique to help yourself, and then you did other things too to
help yourself. It can be very beneficial. But if it becomes the only thing that that that is your solution, well then you know, I know, I you know my book The Wedge, I was somewhat friends with Andrew Huperman, who's this big you know, podcaster now on Neuroscientist, and his definition of addiction was really interesting, which was addiction is the progressive narrowing of the things that give you pleasure. And if that is what you're doing, then that's a problem.
And all you're doing is like you're putting a shell game with your addictions. But if instead you can take something and it gives you a stable like an anchor, and then you can do you can like jump fraug to something else, well, then you can have a beneficial transition. But it's not like it's a one size fits all for anyone. Like you got to do the work, and you've got to realize that the work is not just like tripling down on what your guru is telling you.
Yeah, I guess I have I need to develop this more. I just have a I need to make a name for it and build it up better. Uh, I don't know.
I feel that humans are just from my experience and things I've seen that I feel like humans are are someone you're kind of cast. Yeah, you know what I mean, Like you're thrown from the womb as a as a something, and that thing generally winds up being pretty consistent. Yeah, I mean, people break it, but it's like they break it, but it's it's a little bit nature, the nature nurture thing.
I think there's like a fund mental tenacity that that that a lot of a lot of people have, like a fundamental tenacity a fundamental survival mentality, and they kind of go on, Yeah, if they hadn't done one thing and found success, it would have done some other damn thing and found success.
Or if they had, you know, they.
Would have found some level of peace or some level of contentment.
And you could have put them in any situation they probably would have.
It's interesting. So you're kicked out. So you're a Calvinist. I guess you're you're you're you're someone who believes that there is destiny and somehow is your genetics, I guess, or somewhere else I don't work.
No, no, no, I think you're cast. I shouldn't say from the womb. I don't know, from some young age. I don't know what it is. Maybe when you're ten, I'll start watching my kids and find out when they look when they seem cast.
Well, my thirteen year old, I feel like he's cast.
Okay, So whatever happened to him between genetics and upbringing, I feel like now he's like, you know what didn't didn't the don't don't the Jews have something like once you're old enough to like a buttered bread or something like that.
What is it?
I have?
Oh? Well, it doesn't matter what I think. I'm not.
I don't.
I don't have a bunch of books about this stuff.
Okay, this is gonna lead us into where this is gonna lead us in the where we're going where things get really interesting. Then you did a book What Doesn't Kill Us right, How freezing water, extreme altitude, and environmental conditioning will renew our lost evolutionary strength, which was largely about a feller.
Name wim Hoff. That's right.
So if back of your head you're like, you think about wim Hoff. If you're wondering, why have I heard that name, I'll explain it. If you haven't heard that name, but you're familiar with the recent you know the recent trend around ice baths and breathing techniques, that's wim Hoff. That's where that's where that's originating from. Okay, so from our guests here, this is from Scott's on writing.
You find this writing on his website, but it's just a paragraph here that paints the picture. Okay. Scott says his workshops like the.
Small one I attended, would grow into a loose following, meaning this guy does these breathing workshops in ice bath or ice and breathing endurance workshops.
Physical Endurance would.
Evolve into an international organization which would explode into what some people have called a cult.
Inner Fire.
That's the name of the organization run by Hoff's son, anam As I supposed to name anem anem owns all of the trademarks of wim Hoff's name, as well as the property and income of the Hoff Empire, which has a declared value of eighteen million. Hoff has routinely taught his method to crowds that number in the many thousands, sometimes spreading his message of ice and breath work for
two hundred dollars ticket price. His international best selling book, The whim Hoff Method has been reprinted in twenty one language. Gwyneth Paltrow's The Goop Lab series on Netflix did a full episode on him. The BBC ran a full series. His Instagram feed has grown from a few thousand people when we met in twenty thirteen to more than three million today, with similarly impressive numbers on YouTube two point
four million followers. There are seventy one videos about Haff on YouTube, with more than a million views each in one hundred and forty six thousand videos. Overall, The video giving instructions for his basic breathing method alone has more than sixty four million views. A search of the newspaper archive of over sixteen thousand publications shows his name has appeared on twelve front pages with more than four hundred and eighty nine mentions overall. He's also about to get
the Hollywood treatment. A movie about HAFF starring Joseph Fines reportedly began shooting in November twenty twenty two. So that guy uh Howe, tell how you.
Became aware of him, because this this is w ends up being.
What you were doing when you became aware of him and.
What you're doing now is very interesting. Yeah.
So I was the first person to learn about wim Hoff, right, but first person, No, that's not true. I was the first serious journalist to write about wim Hoff. And I had just written this book, The Enlightenment Trap, and I was really interested in people who were seeking superpowers, trying
to seek things that were bigger than themselves. And one superpower which is very well known in the Indian tradition, which is going on to a mountaintop in a wet robe and meditating until all that robe is dry and we're talking to the Himalayas, so it's very cold out and it was a it's a technique called tumo. But there's also this other thing called a Sydney. A Sydney
is a miracle. And and wim Hoff was teaching that he could sit on an iceberg and heat himself up, and he could get control his immune system and doing all these things that were not backed up by science.
Can you can you give the listeners like the thirty second breakdown on who the guy is?
Though, yeah, I know, but like, where's how old is.
Like wim Hoff. Wim Hoff is a Dutch fitness guru, former like stunt clown man, you know, was known for like Guinness books of world record feats and.
The things that had not that he's but okay into world record feeds that no one had currently held.
Well, there's a.
Question hanging from a hot air balloon or something by a finger or whatever.
There's a question about his feets, all right, But at that.
Time, he claimed, you know, some somewhere around twenty to twenty six world records.
Including long like at the time like the longest under ice swim, so swimming from one hole in the ice to another hole in.
The ice exactly, the longest under ice swim, also the longest ice bath. At one point he held that and he climbed up a lot of everest in shorts before he got frostbite. He was when I had met him, most of the world thought of him as sort of a clown in a way. You know, he was a guy who did these like stunt freak things. But he was just about to teach this new method, and he was going to show people his tricks for do for
being in the ice and controlling his mind. And I was like, I'm going to debunk you as a charlatan as I had these other people, meaning that.
He could through the sheer force of his mind, yeah, and breathing, HM be like, oh, I'm sitting in ice. I should be cold, but I will make my mind not just think I'm warm, but warm me up.
More or less.
Yeah, well there's more to it than that, but let's just go with that for now. And and he could do these like superhuman seeming feats of endurance, and I was like, that's bullshit. I'm gonna go and show the world you're bullshit. Because there was also like this cachet
to him, like I could feel the cachet. Just looking at that photo of him sitting like half naked on Iceberg, I was like, people are gonna love this, and I want to get ahead of it because you're gonna get people killed, just like I'd seen other people die doing this. And but I went out. I went to his training center in Poland. I tried his method, because you know, the way I do journalism is I I you know, I get in, I try stuff, and you know, I give people a fair shot.
Did you go in as a journalist or did you go in like incognito?
No, no, he knew I was there. I was there as a journalist. I talked with him. I'd be like, Hi, I'm writing for you know, a Playboy, and you know, actually what was rich with details, the magazine article moved around, not exciting. Eventually, was for Playboy.
And you didn't go and say like I'm a vulnerable lost American.
No, no, no, no, I don't do that. That's I have like an ethic, Like I don't do that with organ trafficking either. When i'm track an organ track, I always tell him I'm a journalist and I get him to talk because I just I just ask them why they're doing it, you know, and and and people do talk. So I went, I tried his method, and here's the crazy thing is it worked like it's so you know, in a in a in like a day, I was hyperventilating and holding my breath for like two three minutes
at a time, which I'd never done before. I doubled the number of pushups I could do, and then very soon.
Well I get the I get the breath hold because I uh, I've been learning spearfishing and free diving. Okay, so but that's not I mean, that's just the thing. I mean, anybody could have told you that, Like, there's a way you can breathe, Like when you feel the need to breathe, you think that you're breathing because you think you need oxygen, you're breathing because of a trigger from carbon dioxide. And there's a way you can breathe,
like your fisher called free diver. You breathe up, yeah, and then you dive and you get a way longer dive than you would if you didn't breathe up properly. But you didn't need to go to poland have a dude tell you that. But tell me about what made you do more push ups.
So it's the same thing, right, So I'm not I'm not a free diver. And when you say breathe up, I have questions in my mind about what you mean by that. Are you are you scrubbing? Are you hyperventilating before you do this? And the way you.
Want long deep breaths and then like carbon dioxide purge breaths and then you but you go down on a big, full breath. Yeah, so that's pointing to my kid, I sold breathe so deep that you're filling your scrotum with air.
Yeah, Well, that's super dangerous, and we're going to get into it. It's not we're gonna we're going to get into why. We're going to get into why that's super dangerous.
Yeah.
Sure, Yeah, there's people that have shallow water right, right, there's such thing as shallow water blackout, but that is general.
That is generally. I don't care if you're going down twenty feet on thirty.
Feet shoot fish, It's just there's a big difference, Yeah, between there's a big difference between jumping off a boat, swimming over some we're real fast and going down and what you're going to get for a breath hold then, and what you're going to get if you go somewhere, hang grab onto something or float, relax every part of your body and do like a breathing sequence and then going to It's just different the same way that if I told you to run down the road and stop
and hold your breath, you're not going to do as good.
If you went in your couch and held your breath. You're just not. No, you're right.
So here's here's the problem with shallow water.
So if we're going to talk about the physiology here, but no, no, no, because you.
Still want to hear about whim hall.
All right, right, well we'll get into this in a second.
I have you why do we get on there?
I have some notes, but you asked me.
You started how he got you doing a bunch of pushing right.
So at the point I could do about twenty push ups. That was what I could do. And then you hyperventilate. And when you hyperventilate, you blow off your c of two and and and your sort of gasping reflex is connected to this and when you god, how do I describe it? When you do this hyper vent when you hold your breath, the alarm bells for when your fatigue is hitting sort of turn off, and all of a sudden, you've unlocked this extra capacity that you that you have
in you. And it's not like my muscles grew bigger. It was just I didn't realize that that my where my limits were, because the hyperventilation changes that chemistry in the body.
Even on something like see, I didn't know that, even on something like the feeling of I've done too many push ups.
Yeah, okay, yes exactly, or or maybe it's the feeling of like I have to stop now. If you hyperventilate, hold your breath, exhale, hold your breath, do your push ups, you're going to do more than you could normally. But there are problems with this, and we're going to get into exactly what the problems are soon. But here's the other crazy thing. You know. Then I hiked up this mountain with whim and you know, and this cold training, cold exposure we're standing in like you know, Polish winters,
the winter that stops the Nazi army. Like it's cold and I'm in a bathing suit and brayerfoot and the first time I do it, it's really painful, really hard. Second time I do it's way easier. Third time I do it like this is fine. And eventually I climb up a mountain with whim and this and a shirtless of course, and it's I think I think it's two degrees fahrenheit out. It takes about seven hours to get to the top of this mountain. And I'm fine. I'm
totally fine. And I was shocked because I came to do the story about why the guy was getting to get people killed with his methods, and instead his methods are working, and it changes my life immediately.
You become like his disciple.
I'm like his chief disciple. I wrote What Doesn't Kill Us that becomes the New York Times bestseller. I hicke gop Mount Kilimanjaro with him, and we get down a negative thirty We do it in a very fast time, twenty eight hours to the top shirtless again. And this book goes everywhere, and mean I sell two hundred fifty thousand copies of it. It's a you know. And the other amazing thing about the wim Hoff method, it's not
just these feats. In fact, the feats are just sort of like a great way to market a cool technique that the real benefits is actually autoimmune helps and anxiety help, where there's like he's one of the only one of these fitness Gurui people who frequently goes into labs and get studied, and he was able to show that he was able to turn off his immune system in a laboratory, which you would think, well, why would I want to
do that? Well, if you have an autoimmune illness such as lupez Crohn's arthritis, something where your own immune system is attacking yourself, it's really really beneficial to turn off your immune.
How how does one prove in a lab that your immune system is turned off?
Yeah, So the way you do it is it's called the dtoxin experiment, done at Radbound University in Holland, and so he trained two groups of people. One was the control group they didn't do much, and one was the people who did exactly what I did in Poland, which was hang out with whim, breathe a lot, hang out, climb up a mountain in your bathing suit, you know,
learn his method. And then they took him to a lab and the person who designed the experience, the same person who designed the test to see anti rejection drugs. So if you get a kidney treating a transplant, right, if you get that kidney transplant and you don't take any drugs, your immune system would be like, fuck that kidney, I AM going to eat it and destroy it, and then you get the organ rejection.
So the way what you have to do is you have to take.
Immune suppressant drugs to turn off your immune response. And
so he designed the test for those immunosuppressant drugs. And the test is you inject somebody with endotoxin, which is basically E. Coli bacteria that has been killed in a lab by heat, so that when it injects into your bloodstream, you have a primary immune response, which is so the equalized dead so it's not going to do anything, but your immune system recognize the cytokinde, so the chemicals on the walls, and it says this is a foreign invader, and you immediately get your.
Fever, your aches, your chills.
These are all your like your primary basic immune response that you just use generally for anything. Now, the test was if you inject with endotoxin and you don't get those symptoms, that means you turned your immune system off, and that's what happened both Whim did this in a single test on his own and then in a lab they all of these college students, they didn't have any serious reactions to the endotoxin, showing that they had turned off their immune system.
And they did this by breathing in a particular way.
Well, it's it's an interesting combination. It's it's it's the breath work, it's the cold exposure and learning in those environments. And this is what I call the wedge, and I wrote another book about called the wedge.
Right.
What it is is you get into these environments and there's this external stress coming at you, whether it's cold water or that feeling of I have to breathe in the hyperventilation. And what you're doing is you're teaching yourself to calm yourself in that environment. Either the internal hypoxic which means low oxygen environment or the external cold water is telling you you have to fight or flight right now.
But instead you're going to say, no, I can chill here, I can relax, and I can find some other way to heat my body. And that is what has the audioimmune benefit. It's not this, it's not all the other flash. It's just a really good technique and an easy technique to learn to have that mental resilience. And this is what you were saying earlier, you know when I called you a calvinist. Now, people are born some way and they can't change. Well, this is one of these beachhead
techniques that I really believe in. I'm born certain way, yeah, I ten, they become a certain way. And but this is one of those things. It's like a beachhead like you. You start doing these these sorts of things, and honestly, it doesn't need to be ice water and breathing. Yeah, it can be a lot of other strong stimuli that make you want to fight or flight. And you say, you clicking over into that other rest and digest.
But here's where I don't want to do. There's so much ground, we gotta.
Cover so much.
But I want to ask qu a question here.
The thing about a difference I see with cold water is you're you're aware, Yeah, okay, you're aware.
Of your bodies. You're aware of what your body's telling you. Right, It's like get out of the damn water. Yeah, okay, whatever whatever's going on.
You're extremely fatigued, you're like, Okay, I'm feeling the extreme fatigue. I'm gonna do mind over matter whatever. I'm gonna come up the other side. Uh, your immune system is not consulting with you. You're not thinking I need to attack this, I need to attack this bacteria, I need.
To attack this virus. I'm going to tell myself not to do it.
Well, I think you might be a misunderstanding. When you're sick, you're not supposed to jump into ice water, right. It is this trick that you use to calm yourself, and it is a generalizable effect. I wouldn't if you have a flu ice waar ain't gonna help you. It's going to make you sicker, for sure. But training regularly in ice water, when you're healthy and you're not fatigued, you're
not messed up, you're not expending extra energy. You actually are talking with your immune system because your immune system is connected in your body. You know, when you're when you're climbing up Mount Kilimanjaro in your bathing suit, your immune systems walking up there with you. And if you're dumping adrenaline and cortisol and all that into your blood stream through your hormonal channels, your immune system is also
doing that. And like the the if you think about what a you can just look at this in a lab. You take a macrophase, which is a big immune cell of the front line immune cell, and you dump adrenaline on it. It's a little flagella are gonna go everywhere. It's gonna go crazy, and if you don't, it's gonna
be chill. And the way I like to think about this, the metaphor that I use is if you think that your immune system is a pack of wolves, right, it's going out there, it's trying to eat all the bad stuff. Then what this method is is like giving those wolves chew toys, so that we have this huge epidemic of autoimmune illnesses in the in the world. And it's where it's it's where your immune system literally attacks.
The stuff it's not supposed to.
If those wolves are bored and if you hop up your wolves on adrenaline or you know wolf PCP, you know those wolves are gonna chew things they're not supposed to. So what this does from an evolutionary perspective, and we could you know, I've done three hundred podcasts on this. We can do that that podcast.
No, I don't want to.
Yeah, but you know we could. Like what it's doing is it's sort of training your immune sism not to freak out. And and you know, you know, I would think that your audience gets out of nature more than the average audience. I'm just going to go out on a limb here. Well, a lot of people don't. A lot of people stay in static environments all the time. And that static environment is you know, it narrows the range and where people can be comfortable. You know, if
you're going out. You know, right now we're in my comfortable house in Denver, but you know, you also dragged a buffalo out of Alaska. You have range, and that probably has an immune benefit in addition to the other benefits that comes with you. It probably also has an a you know, you find that you go out of nature you feel good. Well, that has a psychological benefit, immune benefit. It connects you with nature. It's all part of it. And the whim Hoff method is one way
into that stuff. Uh And I frankly a pretty good way because it's pretty efficient, especially for someone who you know, when you have that strong stem as you jumping into ice water, your brain's going to pay attention, like you don't get into ice water and you start thinking about what should I how should I manage my taxes this year? I think that maybe I should take a deduction, maybe
the standard deductions. You're not thinking that shit, right, You are thinking, I am in ice water, and I'm either going to levitate out of that ice water and get out of here. You can't levitate, or you're going to relax into it and you're gonna and you're gonna find that the people who have the ability to stay in that stressful, automatic, stressful environment are the ones who can relax. And you know, I've done a lot of ice feeds. Now, I've done like half an hour and thirty to thirty
two degree water and I lived right. But you know, if you think about what most people would think that's insane. Yeah, And I think find that as like this is something that's really good and it's actually a type of meditation. You know, you think about meditation as a you know, some one sitting on a mat in a Buddhist temple and like lotus position. But this is another way to force your mind into a place where it has to think in a totally different way.
Uh, where were you. Brody's asking you like, lay out the basic So you went there and you became an acolyte.
Is that the right word? Yeah?
Yeah, that's a good one.
Wrote a lot about them. Yep.
Now I want to return to because we're gonna start getting into what we're getting into now, Uh you go, I'm gonna read another passage.
There are some things that you found when you were writing about him. There were some things you.
Found that you included in your book and then decided to not put in the book.
Yeah, I share one of those.
No, please do.
Okay, And then I want to talk about why you didn't include this. So this is again reading from our guest work. One story begins in two thousand and eight, when Hoff had not seen his children in almost ten years. That decade had been rough on the family. Hoff's wife, Oleah, Is that right? Elia Oliah committed suicide by jumping from an eight floor balcony in Pamplona in nineteen ninety five after a long struggle with many mental illness, leaving him
to raise four children on his own. After his wife's death, he began a relationship with a woman in another city and left his kids to live alone. In a squat house in Amsterdam. The eldest Annam is that right Anem. Anem was only fifteen years old when he became the family's surrogate dad. Eventually, Haff's relationship with the woman ended and he found himself with what monetary symbol is at that?
You're a.
Thirty thousand year tax debt. That seemed to be the impetus to reconnect with his family. Hoff asked his second son, Michael, to meet him, and they set it time to vous at Vandel Park in Amsterdam. Haff arrived early and went for a swim in the park's pond. While he was waiting, he paddled out to a fountain and positioned himself over the spout to give himself an enema that he thought would cleanse all of his intestines or, as he often
likes to say, get the shit out. On a recording of one of our conversations in twenty thirteen, Hawf recounts that he had done that He had done the park fountain enema at least a hundred times before, but that, unbeknownst to him, the park service had changed the spigot on the fountain to create a more impressive spray.
The narrower gage sent water.
Cutting through his intestines like a knife, filling his bowels of dirty water. He managed to make it back to shore while blood and feces leaked from his rectum. Hoff's first words to his son in a decade or that he needed to go to a hospital.
Why would you? Why would you in writing about.
A health phenomenon, a health phenom and a guru in your own guru, tell me the impulse to not to edit.
That out of the work.
Yeah, so this is the impetus for the video that I've just put out right, so my YouTube channel, the Rise and Fall of the whim Hoff Empire. It's been so hard for me to do this right because when I was writing this book, originally in my conversation with my editor at Rodale, you know, we didn't want to necessarily present Hoff as a complete madman, right, We didn't want to show but we're like, look, we're talking about ice, water and all of these benefits that go to this.
It's not the only character in this book. We're trying to show that being in environments can change the way your body works, and we want that positive news. But if we had shown if we had used this story, a real story about this guy and the fact that you know, I call him a madman in the book, but I don't tell him everyone exactly why. And it's stuff like this, it's stuff that he does that is so damaging that, you know, I was worried that people would see this and they wouldn't take the ice water
stuff seriously, they wouldn't take the practice seriously. And well, the problem is is that by the time we get to now, now hoff is uber famous. Then he was just like sort of a side show. Now he's really really famous, and he teaches things that are getting people hurt. And I feel like I'm back at the beginning. I'm like that kid who was who was at haff Center the first time, being like, oh my god, this is
You're going to get people killed. But then I found this thing about him which was amazing, which legitimately is amazing.
But then now you're back to but you are getting people killed.
But you are getting people killed, right, And the reason why, the fundamental underlying thing is actually he hasn't changed so much as a person, but he has gotten really famous. And you read that passage or he's on Goop Lab. He talks with Russell Brand all the time on his podcast see Jordan Peterson. He has a feature film coman.
Everyone says the same story that I did. Here's this awesome kookie iceman who does these kookie things in ice water, and he's smarter than science, and you should listen to basically whatever he says. And that's the message that gets out there, and we as in the press, have continually reinforced that story without showing a full picture of Hoff
And you know, I saw this occurring. I saw him go from like two thousand followers on Instagram to what four million or three million or whatever he has right now, And we're putting him on that same stage of as a guru as these people that I was writing about in The Enlightenment Trap. And the problem with gurus, the real, the fundamental problem with gurus is that usually they do start something that's really nice, really good and beneficial to people.
But as they get as they declare themselves enlightened or for other reasons that they may get isolated, they don't have any peers anymore. They sort of sit on this pedestal someone who's enlightened. There's like, well, you're not enlightened. So I am the only one who knows the ultimate truth, so you just have to do what I say. And this led to lead to sex scandals and all these
you know, fun things with wim Hoff. He is so famous now when so many people have told him he's right all the time, that we do not see him for who he is, which is a dynamic person who has these really dangerous parts of his personality. These you know, the worst father around right, abandons his kids in a squad house for ten years.
I could see the argument that that's irrelevant if you're like, if you're focused on the if you're focused on.
The health benefit of what he's changing.
Sure, and.
I could see that someone who is sort of like interested in learning cold tolerance, learning endurance, I can see him being like, uh, well it doesn't matter.
For instance, the Heimlich maneuver.
Yeah, who knows what Heinlich was up to.
Well, you know, I'll tell you someth worried about him.
But the Heinlich maneuver, he could have abandoned every damn kid on the planet.
Sure, but it's still a great way to dislodge food stuck in your throat.
But he's got a little bit of like what he's got a little bit of what the picture you start to painting about this Feller because he later in life started thinking that it fixed things that it didn't.
Oh my god, Oh no, he later in.
Life got to be like, oh, yeah, if you're having an epileptic seizures, happing with the I don't know if that in particular, but he wanted feeling that the Heimlich maneuver was applicable to all these other issues. Just in this you know, it kind of like tarnished his own reputation, like he kind of went went crazy with the Heimlich But point being, well, was up to and I don't know, idea what he's up to as a parent, what he's up to as a parent has no bearing.
It's a great way to dislodge.
Yeah, you know, I amlick someone one day and it was astonishingly effective.
I don't care what the hell the guy did.
Yeah, the like the fountain animal stuff like that starts to paint like a really yeah, that paints a different picture.
People people do that. It's called rectal douching, and apparently it's like, I mean, I know somebody who does it, but apparently there is uh. You know, you feel lighter and you feel cleansed, and then there's some kind of idea of it affecting your whole sense of self.
Is it common ad at the town pond?
No?
Was there like how long did it take you to come full circle on him? And was there other alarm bells? A lot like was it sudden or was it like a thing that just built up over the years.
It's it's been a slow process. Because here's the thing. I'm very conflut for getting this story out in the first place, because I really see value in the practice. But I feel like my role right now is to
in a way save the practice from the man. And he is getting to a point where you just like Heimlich, Right, if Heimlich had a podcast that was huge, right, and Heimlich was like a man Heimlich had millions of If Heimlich had the million followers, you know, you can be like, look, he's got this great method for dislodging stuff from the throat, but he also thinks that the Heimlich will cure cancer or will let you fly or whatever it is that Heimlich might have gone off on.
And then he says, try it underwater, right, And try Buddy of Heimlich underwater Exactly.
It's phenomenal. This the this is the problem and and and what has happened is that so this organization that is built up around wim Hoff, Like if you're just hanging out with whim it's a great time. He's a good guy, genuine you know, he's got his highs and his lows. But like you, he's different than most people I know. I don't think he's personally influenced by money at all, which is really unusual, like most people I know are really influenced by money. But he does love
the adulation. He does love people like being amazed by what he's got. You know, we all like adulation. But then he's getting infinite amounts of it, and he wants to give people more and more. So you want to push the techniques. You want to push a little further. And the subtitle of one of his books is pushing past Perceived limits. Well, if you're pushing past perceived limits
in a very controlled environment, that's one thing. But if you're pushing past your perceived limits to your eight million followers everywhere, and that's your method, you can keep on doing it. You could do it you're the ultimate authority. You're doing this stuff. Well, you're going to get people dying. You're gonna get people who take his message and push it. You know, he's the iceman. He swims underwater and gets these get his spoken world records. It's cold exposure, it's
breath work. Why not mix the two. Well, it's very clear you should never, under any circumstances hyperventilate and submerge yourself in ice. It's here's what's going on.
Well, yeah, let's talk about the deaths.
Let's talk Well, yeah, so I started learning about deaths back in twenty fourteen. People were doing his method in various water situations, and he was teaching actively, you know, scrubbing, which is hyperventilation, taking out all that co two, putting your face in the water and holding it as long as you can in various levels. And other people are doing this too, like you know, I'm friends with a big wave surfer, Laired Hamilton, and he had this XPT training.
When I went out to go hang out with him, we did a similar version of that, and we didn't really know the dangers. I think people did know the dangers, but we hadn't fully so you're.
Talking about full hyperventilating, not like like not taking elements of like a couple hyper ventilating breath.
You're talking sustained hyper ventilation.
You can get you can get into a shallow water blackout situation as little as five or ten breaths. Wim Hof breathing is often a lot more, and there are warning do two or so brass just so we can hear it, something like that, But there's you know, you can do various patterns of this in general, because your body senses the urge to breathe by the build up of CO two, right, So it's not like low oxygen you feel that popping sound like I gotta breathe because
I have little oxygen. Instead, it's the build up of CO two in your lungs. So when you hyperventilate, essentially it's like cooking in a kitchen and taking the smoke detector off the wall. There's no alarm system here at all, and you can depending on how you do it. And any sort of hyperventilation water is dangerous well known. You can pass out before you sense any urge to breathe, which means your own internal recognition, your own inter receptive idea of where you are is just not working and
you pass out underwater. Now, I've done this on dry land with the push ups, like, and it's incredibly dangerous if you take a full long breath of air at the end and then do your push ups because you'll get more push ups out that way.
You know.
I hit eighty once doing that on a breath hold on a breath hold. Yeah, and because you've blown off all the co two, you've confused all the systems and then you know, I hit eighty and then boot passed out, hit the floor, which on dry land, I got a bruise in the water. You die because when you pass out, your body just resets and you start breathing, and that gets into your lungs and well, long.
Tangles by before you start breathing.
It could be various ways. Yeah, the reset could be different than not in a long time, minutes go by, Yeah, yeah, depending on factors, right, you know for me, you know, yeah, there's a lot of physiology to talk about there. So we knew in twenty fourteen this was happening. Whim there are four A newspaper in Holland had disclosed four deaths with the wim Hoff Methode wim Hoff method practitioners dying in water. And then there were some warnings everyone who
was doing this hyper ventilation stuff. You know, there's a big warning in my book, there's warnings on wim Hoff's website, there's warnings. You know, XPD doesn't do it anymore. But like everyone knows, the word got out. A couple of Navy seals died doing shallow water blackout and there are a lot of news stories about it.
They were trying to use this to get a better underwater breath wall.
I don't believe they were doing. I don't know for sure what they were doing, but it was shallow water. They were competing against each other and they both drowned at the bottom of a pool at a naval training center. And then people started to become aware of it, at least in my circles.
Like people, you know, people die during.
The shallow water background blackout every year, right, tons of them.
Yeah, yeah, whether or not they're practicing something particular or.
Now there's a whole society called the Shallow Water Blackout Prevention Organization. I mean, it's out there, it's known, and but what need to happen at this point.
Can we talk first about just some people understand why we're talking about this? Yeah, why it's called shallow water blackout? Yeah, so like you generally like it generally hit happens to people forward the surface, right, I mean, well.
It could happen anywhere. I mean, it has to do with this this carbon dioxide blowing.
But I've always been confused. Why is it called shallow water blackout?
Yeah, that's actually a surprisingly good question that I don't have answered for. I think it's because people can drown in surprisingly shallow amounts of water.
We're talking about I hear from like when I'm talking to people that have experienced it and with friends that have had it. Like free divers for whatever reason, tend to be like very near the end of the dive, probably because you're you're at the end of the you're near the end, right, right, You're near the end of the dive, right, And I thought, for some reasons related to that, that doesn't make me send.
Now, I think I think it has to do what you know, the nomenclature. I don't know, I think, but I think it has to do with like you can drown in any body of water and free divers. There are a lot of free divers.
You drowned a hot.
Tub and drowning a hot tb gotcha. And and one of the things that I want to point to is that the wim Hoff method is you know the ice guy, Like, look at the cover of my book. Here's the ice guy getting into the water. And we know he's a breathwork guy and he's famous for swimming underneath ice. And that message is out there, and it's super easy to
get confused without knowing anything about the whim Hoff method. Right, You're like, oh, I do the hyperventilation and I could hold it for longer, and it makes sense I could do it. And yet every time you do it, it's really really dangerous because you've knocked off the alarm bells. Scale that up to eight million peace people, you've got a real problem. And that's so that's something that I
feel like can be dealt with warnings. And they an Inner Fire has warnings to their credit all over the place.
Will they put warnings over videos of people doing the exact thing they're warning them not to do? Well, that's now here's where we came out in a knife juggling video, and there's a sign next to it and said, don't juggle knives.
Right, So when you watch so watch my video right, it's it's on my YouTube channel, and you'll see that. Wim Hoff sells this course on his website for ninety nine dollars. And when I was talking with them in twenty seventeen, they told me that they were making a million dollars a month selling this course. So I don't know what's that like? Ten thousand ish courses a year, a month. And in week eight of their ten week course,
there's wim Hoff saying, here's what you do. You breathe keep on doing the breathing, Keep on doing the breathing, Go in the water, immerse in the water, and hold your breath for as long as you know ten second I'm just trying to paraphrase here, thirty seconds, and see how far you can go. And he says this three times in his in that one video, and then next to it in a warning that's just right next.
To it says what your don't believe.
You're lying eyes wim Haw. He doesn't say that, but it says what you are seeing is not wim Hoff leading someone in nice immersion. It is him teaching cold tolerance, so never do this in water. So there's a big juxtaposition between what whim the Madman is teaching and what the Inner Fire the organization is trying to present to
the world. And it's not just that incident, it's also and that course is still available as far as I'm aware on the wim Hoff website right now, but it's also I was on stage with him in twenty seventeen teaching the wim Hoff Breathwork to a group of about
three hundred people. You know, I'm talking about the book, and he's talking about the breath work, and all these people have never done the breath work before, and they all hyperventilate, and then he says, hold your breath, and then he plays on screen behind me a video of him with his famous swim under there is conflating the
water and the breath work. And there's also and more and more, and I've collected a bunch of these videos and showing how he is ignoring his own warnings and people are dying.
Are the warnings there because his lawyers are making him put him there? Or like obviously he doesn't.
Would they be there if it was up to him as what a mask.
Well, wim T has told me that he's never even been on his own website, so I don't think he cares one way or the other. What's there, Wim is the madman and the prophet, right, That's what I call him. He's a madman and a prophet profit because he has his cool method, not because he's God, but madman because he's all over the place, like he's he's way out there, and I think he wants to impress people. He wants people to think that they can push their limits to
like crazy spots, and he wants to please people. And by doing that, he conflates repeatedly these dangerous but these dangerous practices, and the organization might be maybe it's just a callous legal thing. Maybe it's they're scrambling to do what they can to control Whim. Either way, he's still teaching hyperventilation in water despite knowing about this, And I talked to him about this in twenty seventeen. I was like, Whim, you cannot do this, like you cannot teach a people
are dying, you know they're dying. And he's like, yeah, there's warnings on my website, So I guess he had been on his website, so it's where there were one.
Then someone in the organization call it not a bomber what they call it.
He said, it's lame. Yeah, ainam Hoff says, yeah, I know it's lame. And then but we have warnings all over our website. What more can we do? And well, you could stop teaching hyperventilation and water would be one thing that you could do. And this is there's just so much confusion just because of who he is and and the two pillars of his practice that this is becoming a real major problem. And you know, and people are you know he's you know, there's currently a lawsuit.
Yeah, I want to get into talk about some of the deaths they have the lawsuits attached to him.
Well, let me tell you about one of the butt shows a very clear connection. Right, there's this guy named Andrew and seen as he's in Orange County, California, and he's super wim Hoff practitioner. Go Getter wants to push his limits like he's one of these guys who who's type A and loves it. And he uh watched all the videos on YouTube, maybe downloaded the course, maybe not couldn't confirm that.
How was he cast?
Yeah, a Rufio maybe a karate kid. I put him like a was it Michael Rufio? So he he's a tech entrepreneur, has a social media think game going on. He goes it's labor day and he's says, hey to his brother. Adam's like, I'm gonna do some wim Hoff in the pool, because he does it, and we have videos of him doing wim Hoff in the pool. He goes to the pool and passes out. And a few minutes later, you know, Adam, his brother goes and sees him. He's in a meditative position under the water, and they
pull him out. They do CPR, he gets his heart started, brings him to UCI Medical Center, brain dead on arrival. He's an organ donor a few days later, and you know, it's just clear that he was doing wim Hoff method and water dies, and you know, and that's where he is. And the lawsuit is from another sort of similar case. Seventeen year old Madeleine Rose Medsker, you know, has been practicing the myth hot wim Hoff method for a while, accessing it on the computer fathers at their house in
Long Beach, California. He doesn't see her for a little while.
Long later, you.
Had a detail where there he was arguing with his ex wife about what algebra class.
Yeah, I know that there's an argument over some sort of higher mathematics, which you and I are both not good at math. We've already established this.
There's just a snapshot of life, right, like, like what's going on in her, right, I don't know, but she's not.
The ongoings of a family, right, And she's known for, you know, using tech these techniques for calming her nerves because there's this big anti anxiety effect to the wim Hoff method. He finds her.
Passed out in the pool.
She does usually doesn't use the pool, and he assumes that she was doing the wim Hoff method in the pool. But this is a problem with these cases, right when someone drowns and there's no witnesses and there's no video, how do you know what they're doing in the water?
And then she had like wim Hoff tabs.
You're saying, yeah, I mean this is what the lawsuit of ledges, you know, and and and this is one of the big problems actually, you know, I started trying to investigate how many people have drowned. No one's there's no Bureau of wim Hoff Drowning Statistics.
Right.
This is me on Google trying to find the news articles that pop up saying, hey, this person passed out in water and drowned. And I was able to find thirteen cases just from the Google search saying the wim Hoff practitioner drowns in water and we're pretty sure this is this is how it happened. And you got to think that that sample, well, that's pretty you know, that's pretty small. Like I've been a reporter for a long time.
I know that most drowning desks don't generate news articles, let alone make connections for what was happening when there's no video, no major evidence. I'm thinking that that sample is incredibly skewed to small that many people. It's very easy to get the wrong idea about the wim Hoffman. And how would you know if somebody just is swimming and it's like, hey, I'm going to hyperventily in the in the water now and they just drowned as a drowning, and you know, I will say that my sample, it's
a global sample. I got thirty teen names. Four are in California and seven are in the United States. So are we thinking that Americans are particularly prone to shallow water blackout? Or perhaps maybe that that that that the the way I collected information, the way it's available, it's actually a much smaller and skewed sample because of that. Yeah.
Uh. But if he's like, how much did in your book? How much did you push what he's pushing in water? Yeah?
Oh, I mean no, no, never.
So your book's clear about it.
My book is clear about it. I talk about the deaths at that point, there were fewer. Uh, and you know, there's a big warning at the front of my books, and you know, always to consult a doctor, you know that sort of thing.
Yeah, but you pointed to you said, how they're in the front of your book.
There he is in the ice and he's a breathing actually, guy, So I don't know if you feel complicit.
Well, I I what I feel. And the reason why I'm so out about this right now, and why you know, honestly the whim Hoff community does not like me at all right now is because I do feel complicit.
I was.
I'm his chief alcoholic, whether he likes it or not. Right, I've been doing this for ten years. I am a daily practitioner. I did my ice bath today, I did my breath work today. I love that method. I've done three hundred news programs on Doctor Oz. You know, I've been on Ben Green. I haven't been on your podcast until right now, but I have been spreading his message for a long time. I know that, you know, two hundred fifty thousand people read this book. That's at least
a quarter million. How many of those people got the wrong idea? And I feel like if whim is still conflating and still teaching this practice, still selling that dangerous conflation on his website, I have to go out and we have to tell the true and full story because fame, I mean, it accentuates mental illness, right, Fame is isolating.
Fame will will accentuate your negative aspects. And when you're doing something which is potentially dangerous and then you're telling people to push there them that said, we're going to have fallout. And this is where I'm at the beginning again. It's like I'm in Poland, I'm meeting him again for the first time. And if I feel like if I had written that story initially right now, like if I was on assignment with him right now, I would write a very different story about who wim Hoff is.
That was the thing I thought about when I was reading it, when I was reading what you'd.
Reading, what you'd written.
About your falling out with some of the teachings, is that you went originally to debunk something. Yes, became a convert, and like you said, you're now back around to where you were, but.
Not necessarily for the same reasons, for.
Very different reasons. Yeah, And it's because the hard thing is because like this stuff does work, and the but we are putting too much faith into an individual, right, That is the dangerous thing with all these cults. It's like you give away your control over to some sort of figurehead and you let them run that conversation of your life and you follow them as an example. And the thing I loved about whim when I first met him is like you meet him, You're like, well, I
would never follow this guy's example. Like just look at him. He's got this big alcoholic nose, he's a smoker. He's like he's you know, obviously like maybe the worst father around. I looked at him, I was like, look, he has all these obvious flaws and yet he's got this this awesome thing. And I thought that was a really good combination in a way, because his flaws were out there.
He wasn't pretending not to be who he was. And I feel like it's not totally his fault that it has gotten to this way, because when you speak with him, he's still very genuine. But there's a business. It's an eighteen million dollar inner fire business run by his son, AmAm, who was one of those abandoned kids who does not practice the method, who who basically you know, you'll you can look in my video.
There's that I have.
I have a video of him saying, you know, I hadn't seen him in ten years and he was getting quite famous, and like I was, you know, I thought, you know, essentially he could make a lot of money doing this. Essentially he could take his take his father's image and build an effective social media, breathwork and ice business,
which is exactly what he did. And that is I mean, I mean, hell, anyone can do commerce, like it's not bad to do commerce, and and then you spread the message, but it doesn't feel genuine and it feels like.
It's moved away from what I.
Have loved about this method, how do you you might you might be equipped to answer this.
You've used the word cult and even inner fire.
Is like it's like, I don't get you could take any cult in American history and he could have called it interfire and like yeah, and dude, like I don't, like, I don't you know I'm learning right now?
I don't.
I don't have any I don't have any history. Sure, I never heard of interfire until I was reading your stuff. I didn't know about it. But it just has like a funny has like a culty flavor to it.
But how do you.
Get Hey, if someone has a fitness break through, health breakthrough, whatever it is, okay, someone discovers something that's beneficial, how do you get where the person is bundled with the thing? Meaning why did Heimlick? Why are we not talking about Heimlick as a cult figure?
Yeah, he didn't have a podcast.
I guess YouTube wasn't around, But how does it happen?
Like, for instance, and as poorly as I understand it, Like I said.
My journey into my journey into free diving.
It's like I spend some amount of time on it over the last some odd years, I hang out with people who just because of the good fortune and circumstances of my life, I'm able to hang out with.
People who are really good at it. Sure I'm not.
The things I learned from them would be like I've learned things from them that have very much not pushed my limits, but have made it be an educated way. I can do things that I couldn't do before. Sure, I didn't understand how to properly clear my ears in
the way that didn't create big ear problems. I didn't understand how to that never occurred to me to land the surface of the water and completely relax imagine completely relaxing every muscle in my body and just blowly breathing for a while, right and getting like everything relaxed, and going underwater and staying calm and fighting that like, oh my god, A'm out of the water, feeling right. And I learned all the stuff, and now I can go deeper, I stay down longer. I can do things I could
I always wanted to do and couldn't do. But I don't attach that to a figure Kimmy Werner, Greg Fonce. I don't attach it to them being like where I'm gonna go like my love of the knowledge. Just as much as I love those people, my love of the knowledge is not extend to them as being like a leader.
Yes, yeah, or you.
Know, I don't go and a and I'm like, Greg, what do you think I should do about my marriage? It's like, I just don't. He taught me some really cool stuff, right, he learned it from someone who learned it from someone and he's translated it to me, and it's it's taken me beyond my limits.
But there's no CULTI factor, like how do you who? How did he become bundled?
Like why is it not he has these ideas, These ideas travel around and why does it not be that people want to put their hands on them, they want to stand in a circle around him. He needs to say the most guru thing in the world, which is I'm not your guru.
It's just like the most guru thing on the planet. I never have occasion.
I mean no, I'm not your fucking guru, you know, which is like very guruy, right, I'm just from inner fire.
Yeah, I mean this is exactly it, like like the cult of personality around him. He is a charismatic I don't know why he's charismatic. Is not a good looking like and also people look at him now and they're like, he's a he's an athlete, but like he's not an athlete. He's got this huge star out of his navel where they had to do surgery to read stitches and testines.
He's he's fat. He's got like this big bulb of his nose, and people are like, oh no, we'm off is an extreme athlete, Like he doesn't have any records anymore other than the I think he is a barefoot marathon record in the Arctic half marathon half marathon he did like I want to say, six hours. It's not that great of a time, but maybe no one else tried it, right.
I.
Mean, you know it's he has He is an impressive guy, right, he has done impressive things, but people have for some reason, haff has gotten to a point where where people's just blinders go up. They're like, oh, well, he has this science behind him, so he must he must be right about almost everything.
And is there an aspect because like in the wellness industry, you see like I see some of that, right, So is that like CULTI personality thing? Kind of tied to the wellness industry and like totally does the wellness industry like feed that well.
I mean his method is good for a lot of like chronic conditions, when the wellness industry loves the chronic conditions.
Right.
You know, you don't go to the wellness guru if you have a broken leg, right, you go to the wellness guru because you have a gut something you can't quite put your finger on, right, And the actually is good for that stuff, like, and a lot of stuff is good for that stuff. It's not just the woman like that. You know when I said you put your your your tent pole down. This can be a thing like a beach head to actually help you work on a lot of different things. And I think the Wimhuff
method is a great beachhead. But then when you have that beachhead, some people, not everyone, but some people are like, well, what else does whim do? He's such a great guy.
Oh, I love it.
He's funny. He's got a YouTube channel, he plays guitar. He talks in nonsense on stage because he says stuff that's way beyond the science. He says, you know, when he's on Rogan and he's also said this to me, like, you know, I get above one hundred percent oxygen for the first time. They proved it in the lab above a hundred percent oxygen if hyperventilate, and and of course you can't get above one hundred percent hundred percent and you you.
It's like the amplifier and spinal tap that goes up to eleven.
Right right, and he is that amplifier. He is spinal tap here and and people like let him get away with it, and then he'll throw out these sort of nonsense scientific phrases to explain what it is. And maybe they're like they sound well, is that plausible? Is that not plausible? But you'll be talking to him in a podcast or whatever, and you can't sit in fact check it.
You can't be like, what are you saying? So you know, there's this one quote on Rogan sixty I don't know, some some number on Rogan where we can just read you won't read that quote. Well, you do your best whim Hoff if you can.
And I can't.
I never I haven't said and I'm just finding all about this. It's interesting me because but I can't do it. I'm not I'm not I'm like, not familiar. Well, and I hope that's coming across to listeners, and I'm not familiar.
I'm just I'm into this whole thing, though.
Well, you know you have that.
He says this.
They did it with a laser on the chest, and then they were able to measure the mitochondrial oxygen tension. They're able to receive more oction oxygen. That is a great finding. It shows that we can have more oxygen inside. Suddenly we were able to get into the cell and influence the energy production. If it is anaerobic, it is like two molecules able to produce. When it becomes aerobic, then it's up to thirty eight molecules they can produce.
What happens what happens with the cell that is deprived for forty eight hours of thirty five percent less oxygen, it becomes cancerous. As simple as that.
Yeah, does that make any sense to anybody here? Like, you know, he throws it out with a sense of confidence. And so I actually spent a little while on this paragraph.
Right, Like, I called two doctors over.
At Harvard and I was like, is there anything No one was the Harvard was at Stanford, and I was like, is there anything to this that backs it up? And they're like, well, you know, maybe oxygen could you know, deprivation might be cancerous but like I was like no, but specifically our eight oxygen molecules on this hemoglobe and whatever. And they're like, no, this makes no sense. This is all just just crazy talk.
And there's a word.
Another there's a word another researcher uses Brian McKenzie.
Uh.
Brian McKenzie, a breath work expert, an author of the book Power, Speed and Endurance. Uh calls some of the language they use.
What's the word he has for it, actually galamataeus. So so just to.
Correct you here so we don't have to get that correction later. What mackenzie says is that no person the organization understands the physiology and the person uh you know
it's actually market Well. Walter von markin Liechtenbelt, who's a scientist who has actually studied uh haff in a lab who says that basically, uh whim scientific of acabula Larry is galimatis, which is and he wrote that in a in a scientific article which I read again this morning, and and galamatis basically means gobbleybook.
Okay.
He goes on to say he mixes in a nonsensical way scientific terms as irrefutable evidence.
Yeah, and we see that a lot on the internet these days.
The only uh the only real for me personally, the health and wellness things that make sense to me are thing are things.
Like, uh, work out like a lot, eat a very diet. Yeah, I like that, Like things you want to get good at doing a whole bunch. Yeah, you know, stuff like that.
But uh, like I'm always like half hearing this kind of stuff. And we never did it, but I was we were gonna make a thing recently where it was, uh, we're gonna.
Make a I only made the book cover.
I made a we made a book jacket called lard man.
It was gonna be like I wanted to like compile like the.
Gobblely goot yeah about like if you only eat lard, And I wanted to come up with all of the language it explains all the health benefits and what it does to your mitochondrial DNA.
You should that and just make like an insane paragraph of like shit that comes from eating lard and make it be like people be like damn that sounds like a good idea.
You should do that.
So that you can say to other people that I'm not your guru.
So we made the book cover it's called lard Man.
Personally, I think that you should get into the lard and the coffee business, like, because lard will definitely supercharge your Yeah.
No, I think we had it was a guide, an ancient pathway to but this is only the farthest we got.
On my Instagram at Steve Marnella, you'll see my Lardman book cover. It's called lard Man, an Ancient pathway to more muscle, slickerball movements, and better sex. And it was because it was just it came from us, sort of like listening to health advice from every place, that's like ultimately contradictory and as often I've found weirdly reflective of
people's reflective of people's ideologies. Meaning a person that is going to extol the virtues of eating a vegan, how good they feel on a vegan diet, that diet probably appeals to some sensibility they held right. Another person like oh no, I only eat meat and I feel great, right, probably appeals to a sensibility and and the you know, there's this thing.
That that we talked about this past.
Overwhelmingly a right leaning person likes enjoys meat rarer than a left leaning person.
Now is that a scientific fact?
Overwhelmingly the right leaning person enjoys the taste.
How your taste receptors are tied to your pol they just are or a thing I always bring up.
Left leaning people are much more inclined to have gluten intolerance.
Is that true?
Yes? So?
Wait?
Is that yes?
Or is that you're.
Seventy four percent?
I can't remember what it was, Spencer, You're seventy four percent more likely don't want a medium rare steak if you lean right?
Wait? Will you be my guru? All right? That's what That's all I want to know.
So I'm on the lookout for the guru.
Can you remember why Spencer reported on this? Okay? Like?
Like, I was surprised because the most common way to order a steak in America is medium rare, which I would have thought it was medium. Medium rare is the most commonly ordered steak in America, and it's overwhelmingly when you get a steak if your right wing, you want to cook less?
Wait, but I'm I'm left leaning, but I also order steaks medium rare. Do I have to start cooking them longer?
You're one of the twenty four, you're like the other end of it, point being, the point being only that the reason like one of the ways I sort of like watch one of the areas in which I'm interested in, like wild health things, sure, is that there's so often a reflection of current cultures. There's aspects of it that are reacting against things. There's things that seem appealing that
there's things that would that would like. There's like I could come to you with two equally valid sounding hell things and I and you might be able to make My guess is they're gonna they're going to like the sounds of this one.
I think you're going to make some sense to them.
I think you're hitting on actually a very deep and interesting topic, which is that and I touch on this in a lot of my of my books that are the environment that we exist in changes changes our physiology. Right, if you live in a varied environment, like you know, you're able to go out into the wilds a lot and you're able to change to interact with the cold or the heat or the stress or the New York
City streets. All of those external influences literally change your physiology. Literally, there's a connecting pathway between you being comfortable in Times
Square or you know, in the Adirondacks. Right, there's a there's some sort of connection with and it's also goes to, no doubt, the political environment that you live in, the social media environment you live in, and all of those things, Like for that information to come into your senses, it wires your brain in different ways, and that wiring the brains releases different cocktails of hormones and proteins, genetic epigenetic responses.
It's all connected. So it doesn't surprise me actually that you might say that rarer meat does correlate with maybe a conservative ideology. Maybe there's a way that works, And I think I think that it probably does through these sensory pathways like maybe liberals, you know, maybe maybe like the vegetable is more salient to somebody who's left leaning
because that sort of broader cultural meme. And I'm talking about that not in a like an internet meme, but there's an anthropological idea of the meme that that actually translates into our physiology because we are intimately connected with our environment. You can't really think of a human not in their environment.
Who would you be?
Who would your ten year old child be without all of the experiences prior to it to that? And who would that child be without all of your experiences that led to that child being born in the first place.
Yeah, picture that.
Picture that you've always like. Your parents' eyes made you eat a lot of steak and stuff. You could only ever think about the cow. You always felt a little bad. You understood that it was really important to need a very diet. It always nagged on you, the welfare. And then one day you meet someone who's like, man, I don't eat I don't eat any meat, and I feel fantastic. That person then cuts meat out of their diet. They're like, god, I feel so much better.
Well, sure, and humans, And I'm not even saying it's not true. Homo sapiens are omnivorous and highly varied. Right, So from my anthropological training, you know there isn't an ancestral lifestyle, right, But I will say that it's not lunchables, right, It's not going to the grocery store. The ancestral lifestyle had to do with the environment, that we inhabited. If you are a coastal tribe with a rich mollusk access, you survived on bivalves because that was available. You varied
with the seasons. And I don't know if there were true vegetarian groups.
But there may have been.
There could have well been a tuber centric tribe out there, and they probably survived just fine, because one of the evolutionary advantages of humans is that we are incredibly adaptable to a highly varied environ.
Do you feel that you are susceptible to something like whim Hoff because you you're a searcher, so like you got you went into Betan Buddhism, got into it, presumably not as into it now you got into wim Hoff, you got out of it. Do you feel that you have like a searcher mind and you're susceptible to gurus. No,
I don't think I'm as susceptible to gurus. Actually, I think that I am very skeptical by nature, and I have a real you know, a bug in my bonnet for truth, right and one of the reasons why, and I have meditated for years, but I've never followed, like, never gotten guru afide right, I was leading that a broad program, but I wasn't a Tibetan Buddhist.
I don't have a lama or anything like that. What I'm interested in is the intersection of complex cultures and individuals. And I'm really you know, I think that if someone lies to me or I feel like there is something that's untrue or that I need to investigate, my nature is to investigate. My nature is to go like a bloodhound on a story and find out what the truth is. And I realized that maybe that is a personality flaw because I'm always digging around in things that maybe don't
even matter in the end. Right, maybe no one needs to know what the Buddha was saying eight hundred years ago that led people to commit suicide, right, Like, maybe that doesn't even matter. But I have this just impulse to sort out bullshit from reality.
Did you when it came to too going after like in pointing out the risk and the you know, you've identified thirteen potential deaths here, did you initially think that?
Have you in the past gone to Inner Fire or gone to wim.
Hoff and said, listen, there's like a problem and we should read you guys should redo a bunch of stuff and clarify this point. And and that just didn't doesn't get traction.
Four years, I mean, this has not been a new thing. Like in twenty seventeen when we were on stage. The first thing I said to him after we were on stage was you can't do this, and he was like, oh, they're warnings, don't worry about it. And and I have been a a you know, I don't. I didn't talk to Himhoff for a few years after the book came out after that moment. And I also don't really like,
have you ever tried to change someone's mind? You know, like, have you ever been successful at changing someone's mind?
With at that?
With oh you have? Okay, well, oh just buying a little thing. But not but like you're doing something wrong right, Like.
You against dishwashers and I've gotten into dishwashers.
Okay, but did you yourself by who with the dishwasher change your mind?
No?
My wife and my friend honest, okay, well those people.
You know, it doesn't sound like a deeply held reb but I can no, No, it was. But there's no way in the world that I could convince you that animals need to be protected under all conditions and uh, and never be hunted. Right, there's no there's no combination of words that leave my mouth that go to your brain. You're like, wal Scott, you got a point. I'm going to be a vegan. I just don't see that happening.
I think, yeah.
And it's the same thing with Whim. He's been doing this for so long. He's been doing these feats. He believes in what he does and and he just doesn't hear things that contradict that. And you know there's this one quote you can bring that up. Uh, just search for Jesus.
Uh.
Right.
So I started asking him, like, what is.
The what is the command key for search?
Control F?
Control F.
That's why they were goal M. That's why I was thinking control.
So I approached him during the reporting of this story. This was like a month or two ago, and I was like, look, you know, you have people drowning and uh and and there's some problems here and it's roughly the stuff that we were talking about here. He follows my you know, Instagram post, and he knows that I'm you know, causing trouble.
Uh.
And you know, he wrote to me twenty eight thousand people drown every year, and that I was blaming him for all of their deaths, which I wasn't. And also it's two hundred and eighty thousand people that drown every year. And then he wrote me this, well, so I was talking specifically about I read Yeah, I read it like
five times. So just to give you some context. At a recent Whimhoff event, he teaches something called a baptism where peop will hyperventilate, they take twelve very deep breaths and then all put their face in the water together. And there's this video. It's very culty, very you know, it's intense. And then here I asked him about that and he said, look into baptism. This is my Wimhoff impression. Look into baptism then the real meaning of it. You
might learn something. I know what I do baptism. The real one is shutting down our over controlling mind and activate deep healing mechanisms in the body. Not going to explain this physiologically, not into cut competition sports here, which is entertainment. Since the Roman Empire who killed an innocent man called Jesus. Now, I don't know what this means, all right, I really don't, but it does.
Look, he's inviting you to go to the Bible.
And look into the real meaning of baptism, which in his starting of the Bible he has found it that what Jesus was doing when he baptized his disciples, as he was shutting down their over controlling minds and activating deep healing mechanisms in their body.
I don't I'm no uh theologian, but I don't think.
That that's what Jesus is saying when he teaches baptism.
No, but it does seem that's what is saying exactly.
But he's not.
I'm telling you asked what he's so he says, I'm not going to explain this physiogical.
He's not.
He doesn't want to explain a physiology. He's not into competition. He's not into sports because sports is entertainment. Since the Roman Empire killed an innocent man called Jesus, sports is entertainment.
Yeah, you're gonna you're gonna run in circles here, man, I don't.
Know where you're going. I'm trying to understand the passage.
You know, in college they toss a good trick when you're reading something. If you when you read a sentence that you feel as total bullshit. M hmm okay, and you're like, I've read the sentence a home times, I don't know what it means. There's a good trick. Add the word not into it, put the word not somewhere in the sense anywhere, and then read it again. Wait there be like wait a minute, that's the opposite. Or you're like, well, no, that didn't change anything.
But there already is a knot into it, not not into competitions for it.
Is a double I'm saying.
But in this case, since the word not is in there, pull the word not outa read the sentence that you think is horseshit and feel like did.
It did it fundamentally change for you?
And when I do that exercise, it doesn't fundamentally change.
Its correct because it was not going to do it.
That is a good trick.
It doesn't help you know what they're talking about.
It just helps you go like, even when I add the knot, or in this case, I take away the knot and I read it, it.
Doesn't fund It doesn't fundamentally change.
Mind, it remains gobblly gook.
Yeah, it's like it doesn't. Yeah, it's a way it's a trick. It's a thing to go like, is this sentence bullshit? I'm going to add the word not somewhere and then read it again, and then I still look at it and I'm like, no, just as full shit as it was a minute ago.
It's well just to me. To me, what this looks like is like wim Hoff comparing himself to Jesus. It looks like he has gotten to the point where he is in the enlightenment trap. And the enlightenment trap is when you start believing all your own shit because you have talken to angels, are talking to your Buddhist angels.
And in this case, I don't think women as a Christian in particular, but I do think that he does a lot of water work, and he has a spiritual bent to the things that he says, and I like spirituality. It's great to a point. And I think that he is so isolated now that he is comparing himself to Jesus. He sees himself as infallible to some degree, and that when confronted with the little evidence of deaths and of sixty seven, a million dollar lawsuit that we haven't talked
about yet. Oh we did a sixty seven million dollar lawsuit. He's still diverting in some sort of spiritual bypassing framework.
Has he ever, like, in any way acknowledged that people have died doing his deal?
Yes?
Yes, in this passage, he's like, are you gonna blame me for all the twenty eight thousand people who have drowned? And they do have warnings on their website, and the warnings were placed there in response to deaths, perhaps, as you mentioned earlier, for a legal reason. But he knows this is going on.
He is well aware of it.
Whether or not he believes he's ultimately responsible, now that's a different question.
Hmm.
So what what's going to happen to you?
Now?
Oh my god, Well, I'm already getting a fair amount of attacks by the sort of there's a lot large group of people who subscribe to the wim Hoff method, and most of them are very sane. You know, the wim Hoff instructors that I've known, I will to their credit, I've never met one of them who says hyperventilate and water. And there's like, I guess, eighteen hundred wim Hoff method instructors.
So the people who teach.
This method, who I have met, seem to be doing the good work and are understanding what's going on. There are many people who are, I believe, hooked into this idea of wim Hoff as not their guru, but really might their guru. And I see a lot of people whove been very angry at me for putting this out because you know, as his essentially his chief alkholite for ten years, you know, been doing his method for ten years, been doing videos about him for a while.
Yeah, you gotta admit it looks like I'm just it looks suspicious.
What do you mean what you're doing?
Why is that because you were like his disciple? Yeah, and now you're going against him. It's like it's got like a Star Wars you kind of groove to it. Yeah, I mean it's like a whole part of like like a like a mentor has like a mentee has to turn that. It's like some kind I can't remember how that there's like a like a mentee. We will eventually have to bypass. And but you're not looking for the crown though.
No, I don't want to be whim Hoff. I want to do other things. I'm writing a book on napping right now, like I am so done with this.
If you look if you're.
Looking for the crown, if you were looking for the crown, it would be very suspicious, right. But I could see that. I could see where someone might look. If someone came to me and said, hey, man, there's a guy. There's a writer. Okay, oh right, uh.
Like everything. Let's return to Apocalypse now.
In Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard, they come to Captain Willer.
Who's nuts.
Willard's nuts, and they come to them and say, we need you to go kill the nuts guy, right, Colonel Kurtz. So he goes up the river to find Kurtz and kill him. When he gets to Kurtz, he for quite a while. You can tell what's turning into his head.
Is I kind of see where he's coming from.
He's like, this guy's got a lot of good points. Yeah, yeah, it's intoxicating. He meets a photographer, Dennis Hopper. Dennis Hopper's like, listen, I'm really crazy. I can't go tell them what a genius he is. You need to go tell him what a gene you're here. You don't know what you're here. You think you're here to kill him, You're here to tell the world.
What a genius he is.
He knows how to win the war, but then he chopped from ote the machete, so he doesn't do it.
In the end.
But I'm saying, like, it's like a mini version to be that you went to like debunk him, became an right.
So wait are you so is this the guy?
Am I supposed to get.
A machete here?
But you spent longer in the temple. Okay, you spent longer in the temple. Now you're going to get him with the machete.
So I'm just saying, yeah, if people are mad, I could, like if someone came to me and sketched out like there was a writer that went to debunk Guru and became a disciple of the guru and then later went to like debunk the Guru, I would just I would. I would think of apocalypse now. So for people to be mad, I'm not surprised that they're mad, but they still have to they still have to wrestle with what you're.
Laying out exactly.
And my feeling is that I am here to tell the truth and that was the way I started. I haven't changed all that much.
You still like the method.
I still like the method. I'm still trying and I'm trying to save the method, and I don't want to run the method that's not my.
Make is such a better story, Okay, And.
Now the disciple has become the no. I mean, I have do my own things and uh and he can have.
Is that that whole world.
I just don't want people dying. And I also want them not to actually take any gurus. I want them not. I'm not your fucking guru. Whim's not your fucking girl. You're not their fucking girl. You're not their fucking guru. No one's a fucking guru. You have to do this yourself. And we do not give control over to other people like this and I and I feel very sad for Whim that he has become so isolated by this organization.
And I would like to see the beauty again that was there at the beginning, where it wasn't so commercialized, where it wasn't such a big business, and you could be like, hey, we're taking anice bath. Were pushing our limits, and it's rational because that is where the the that's where the magic is. It's confronting your own self in these environments and.
It is the heimlich maneuver.
It's the Hindlick maneuver, not hindlick heim Lick heim Lick.
It's the maneuver, not the man.
So.
I mean, if you could like break it down to like one thing that you would want people to do, it would just be do the method, but don't do it in ice water.
Yeah, that would have made this podcast much shorter.
Brod should start a podcast where it's a really quick podcast.
Yeah.
His Watergate investigation would be they went into a building and stole some stuff, and.
The president.
It turns out they all do. Yeah, I tell me real quick in clothes talking about napping, Oh man, you got it. You give me a napping good. You're gonna come over your house and fall sleep too. Dude. I so want that.
I so want that role. That's the role I want. I want to be the napping No. I love naps. Naps are the best.
I could pay you two hundred bucks to go nap at your house.
Yes, yes, you're already here. There's a blanket on this table in front of us. I mean, we're ready for you.
No.
Napping like are so They're so restorative And you know I've been doing all this extreme stuff for a while, putting myself in extreme environments, and that's cool. You learn to relax in the extreme environments. What I what I'm discovering with napping, and this book's not out yet, it'll be on September. What I'm discovering with napping is that you can actually get outcomes out of naps like you can.
You can.
I'm going to use this very still environment to also change my physiology. It's like, you know, there's the fight or flight, there's rest and digest. I've explored fight or flight. Now I'm in rest and digest and there's so much cool stuff in it. You can change the way your memory works, you can change the way you react to to external stimuli but in your brain world. And here's a We're just going to leave you with some crazy, crazy thought.
Okay, I leave you with something you probably missed out on, all right, talking to Turkey hunters. Because the nap, the psychological transformation that happens in your late morning app on a turkey hunt, you need to talk. You need to interview Turkey hunters about that. You're right, I actually like, how could fifteen minutes be so transformative? I'm actually sort of curious, depressed.
I thought we'd never get a turkey not fired up.
I mean, yeah, there's something to that.
It's transformative.
But here's the thing, Like you already.
Recognize yourself when you wake up, and then that.
In your brain, all right, in your brain, you experience the world a fifth of a second behind real time.
Okay, is that right?
This is true? Is it comes in through your nerves, your eyeballs, The signal has to transfer, and what your brain does is it speeds up the world. It makes a whole simulation of the world and speeds it up five seconds to sort of figure out how the world is, which means we are essentially living in a simulation created by our brains. Right, this means because of this transition, true consciousness, What the truest form of consciousness is what happens when your brain is not having stimulus from the
outside world. It happens when you're dreaming than naps.
Mind blown. I am your guru.
Have you gotten into I imagine in that work you probably got into it, and that where you've gotten.
To sleep in general?
Yes, of course, Okay, I've been like running around not broadcasting this publicly because I don't and please don't think I'm doing it now, but I's been running around conversationally half understanding something I read.
Have have you is there?
Like a is there any basis too to dementia in lack of sleep? Meaning like like people who were chronically chronically one sleep deprived?
So much science Matt Walkers, Why we sleep?
Just read it?
Yeah, dementia.
I keep telling people.
I'm like, I think I heard something about it made me feel like because I sometimes when I sleep, like if I sleep eight hours, I'll be like, are you lazy bastard? But then now I feel better about it after reading that. Yeah, no, start, there's something there.
Yeah, there's a lot to it, and and that will be our next podcast.
Because I because you're thinking about it.
In fact, if you're thinking about it, can you have dementia?
Mmm?
So there is like more, there's more than just that you feel real rest, that there's more stuff going on.
Yes, Oh, I mean because sleep is an active state. It's not like you turn a slight switch off and like it's not like evolution put sleep. You know, animals are vulnerable when they're sleep, right that that you can get killed, you can get eat and you're not. You have no defenses. You can't run away. Evolution put that there, not because it was like, hey, this is a great idea for a vulnerability. It did it because it was important to the physiology and every creature on the planet
down to like protoplankton sleeps. So it's it's an essential part of consciousness and interacting in the world, and evolution would not have put it there if it was not vital.
And if you're a great way to think about it, because you know I talked about you feel guilty sleeping mm hmm because you think of it as I guess maybe culturally we think of it as not doing something. Yeah, m hmm, I'm going to not do something, yeah, and go to sleep. That has been the mod to be like, no, I need to do something for my productivity.
I need to go to sleep. Yes, yes, no, that's true.
You you you put a sign on your door say I'm working here and take a nap. M That's that's one of the takeaways of the book. Maybe you don't need to read the book. We can have you.
For us right now.
Sure feel better after I take a nap?
All right, man? Well, thank you?
So if people want to dig into this more. Tell people where to go find stuff.
All right.
So I have a podcast called Scott Carney Investigates. It's on the same platforms maybe that you're listening to this on and my YouTube channel which is called Scott Carney or something like that.
I have a lot of books, yep, what doesn't kill us, Big mega best seller, Enlightenment Trap, Enlightenment Trap, the Wedge, and the Vortext. There's a lot, and the then you're uh, the Red Trade and the Red Market, the Red Market and soon Time to Nap or whatever I'm gonna end up calling that book Time to Nap. I like that one man. All right, thank you very much for coming out.
Man, it's been great.
Appreciate it. Oh A ride on.
A seal gray shine like silver in the sun.
Ride ride on along, sweetheart.
Were done, beat this damn horse to death, taking a new one rid We're done beat this damn horse today, So take your new ride on.
H