American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - Wim Hof: My Immune System Can Handle ANYTHING

Episode Date: October 5, 2024

Wim Hof, AKA The Iceman, is a Dutch motivational speaker and extreme athlete noted for his ability to withstand freezing temperatures. He has set Guinness World Records for swimming under ice and prolonged full-body contact with ice, and previously held the record for a barefoot half marathon on ice and snow. He’s hiked Mount Everest barefoot in shorts and run a marathon in the desert with no water. He attributes these feats to his Wim Hof Method (WHM), a combination of frequent cold exposure. In this interview, we get a different side of him - a little more philosophical and a little more crazy :). Please enjoy! Guide to Wim Hof's Breathing Techniques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tybOi4hjZFQ *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7eOJzNRWY4l2UTDvIquxYg?app=desktop original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 - wim hof ice man breathing technique interview deep breathing cold therapy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Look what we have done. We go to Mars. Next is we go to nuts. Did you know there's a 62-year-old crazy Dutchman who holds 26 world records related to extreme endurance? These include the longest time being submerged under ice, hiking Mount Everest, barefoot with nothing but shorts, and even running a marathon in the desert with no water.

We are the alchemist. He even willfully injected himself with a dangerous pathogen, a bacteria called E. coli, and fended it off with a breathing technique that he developed. He then taught others to do the exact same thing. So who is this mysterious Dutchman, you might ask? Q the Iceman. Wim-Hoss. They hope.

We have inner power. Oh, I'm a lot of man, Buddha. Fuck Buddha! The Buddha would agree. Be happy, strong, and healthy. Rest is bullshit. That's it. Okay, I know what you're thinking.

Another YouTube interview with Wim Hof. Yeah, yeah. So what? Do you believe in aliens? And we are fucking aliens. All the time. Well, I'm gonna ask him a bunch of insanely trippy questions that no one else has,

about the formation of the American Medical Association, the electromagnetic field of the body. What breathwork does to the DNA on a cellular level? The existence of aliens. And we're even going to talk about the incentives of Big Pharma to marginalize people like him. We are going past and through this narrative. Not only is the content going to be different,

but for whatever reason, I got a higher voltage version of WIM in this interview. And once we get one hole through the wall, we will get many holes through the wall. Break the world. At one point, I even asked him if he'd be willing to inject himself with COVID-19. So you would expose yourself to COVID and beat it. No easy does it.

You're crazy, man. I'm crazy about life. Why do I love Wim Hof so much? It's not just because of his infectiously positive energy. What I love is that his technique is available to literally everyone, no matter who they are, across the globe. It's the definition of open service. Oh, shit. The method reduces inflammation.

It helps treat anxiety and depression. It strengthens the cardiovascular system. And it even allows somebody to control their autonomic nervous system, something we thought to be previously impossible. And he's earnestly engaging with the scientific and academic community to rigorously study his method and make it more mainstream. I always go to scientific evidence-based proof. You could read every self-help book in the world.

You can use neurolinguistic programming. You can think positive things. thoughts you can try to manifest, but nothing is probably going to change your physiological state as immediately as breathwork will. We need to get this wrong narrative out of the way. It's there, it's there. Only if you get there, you can get there. No, it's in there.

And let's make directly contact with it. So whether you're a newbie or a die-hard disciple long since baptized in the icy waters, get ready to be electrified by third. 35 Killehoff. That's 35 minutes of listening to Wim Hof. Without further ado, lean back and take in the high vibrations of today's larger-than-life American alchemist, Wim Hof. Different parts of the brain have different activities. But you know that, don't you?

Maybe you should interview me. Back then, I was always into, you know, nature, cold, into yoga, into doing exercising, all that. I was quite in connection with my deeper physiology. But what was happening to my wife? She is out of her mind. I don't know what, I can't reach her. She went to a doctor finally. I had not this conviction, this belief that I could fix it no more.

Finally, she jumped from eight stories down. That is more dramatic that you can understand or grasp. with your psych in a normal life. Back then, I was powerless. There was little money for children. So what do you do? There's nothing else to do than taking care of the children and having enough energy to do it all without money.

And that was those times. And who took care of that? That was the cold water. The cold water steals your mind because you've got to survive. In the icy water, you've got to adapt, you got to let go. And there I found peace. I found healing.

I began to do that all the time, every day, more and more. And another thing I began to do was to do it consciously. Because I wasn't aware what I really was doing before. I did it because I always felt so good and all that. But now I had a purpose. I had to take care of my children and I had to heal from absolutely broken-hearted emotional agony. When a trauma is inflicted, at that moment we get a cardiovascular imprint. The heart reacts. The whole 70,000 miles, they react.

It's a blueprint of the trauma is inside. Yeah. So if we do these breathing exercises, we exercise. the whole of cardiovascular system to the deepest. Doing it, you feel. And feeling is the real understanding. It's interesting. You do go through,

you shed trauma and painful layers as you breathe. And, you know, holotropic breathwork, the stand groff, it's meant to mean growing towards wholeness, like heliotropi is growing towards the sun. And so when I do your method as well, I feel like, you know, I'm moving past almost like sedimented rock of like a motion.

Yeah, exactly. And if we go deep enough round after round, we go deeper into the cardiovascular system, then we shake it loose the trauma. Maybe the Holy Grail we're all looking for is just the human heart. There it is. There we are. Let's enjoy life. Drink the nectar.

Juliet. Let it go. And now it shows after 20 years, it shows that I'm able to defy just by using the mind physical stress. This was impossible in science. Probably it's been done before many times. But nobody showed it in science.

And this is what I do. I always go to scientific experiment scientific evidence-based proof. Laboratory settings, blood proof, brain scans, doesn't matter. In the prehistoric times, we had no pharmacy, we had no shops, we had no all that. We had to solve the things right there,

like an instant. I challenge the world and I show that in our society, we alienated so much from our, nature that we have these problems with the stress, autoimmune diseases, cancer, depression, burnout, I call it. And that's simply a result of not being directly in connection with our inner nature. And let me tell you, I am powerful now. The modern medical system was basically created in 1910 by a Carnegie and Rockefeller

commissioned report called the Flexner Report. At the time, it was estimated that one-third of the doctors in the U.S. were osteopaths, homeopaths, people that worked with the electromagnetic field of the body, basically holistic healers. A lot of these people were snake oil salesmen, so they ended up choosing a scientifically-minded skeptic named Abraham Flexner to write the report. The report dramatically tightened government oversight when it came to medical schools and practitioners all over America. These more alternative holistic practitioners were shunned, kicked out and basically relegated to pseudoscience.

But what we have left is a very limited system, basically with the FDA and the American Medical Association, that only incentivizes the creation of patentable drugs. But it actively disincentivizes and even marginalizes widely available in open source techniques that could actually work better than some of these drugs. So you're up against very dark forces and... We are Luke Skywalker, the real ones.

So dark forces, be aware. We are probably. Exactly. Yeah, it's a sick model, man. Yeah. People have become clients. And it's wrong. It's fundamentally wrong to gain money,

privatizing economy, where sick people are being treated through medicine. That is the wrong thing. So what I do, I bring something that is good for left and right, for up and down. It doesn't matter. I go pro-human. I'm there for the father and the mother working in the pharmaceutical industry. Yes.

I want to give them and enjoy love as anybody else. And it is a birthright to experience that. That is my message. And I love you. That's what I say to those people. I love that. That's beautiful. It's my daily ice bath.

Happens right here. If you die once a day, and you know what life is all about. I've heard you say you need to die every day to lead a good life. Yeah. Are you familiar at all with them? There are these ancient Greek mystery. Stoics.

The Stoics, but then they're the El Eucinian mystery rituals. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, all of them would go to Elusis. Elus was 13 miles northwest of Athens, and they'd come back saying they witnessed their immortal soul. I like your knowledge. Thank you, man. I appreciate it. I like your wisdom. You got an old soul.

Amazing. That means a lot to me. This is coming from you. Thank you. But I hear you speak, and it feels like almost like a simulation of a modern mystery ritual. It is. What I say is, I got to die once a day. Big!

Yeah! To go to the death. of myself. To go past the fear of dying. So for that, you got to go into life and fully experience a fearless being. It's God given for everybody to be fearless. Because the soul is unbreakable. The soul is everlasting. Why should that be fair if you always live and you can't be broken? So there it is. Die. Do something. day that goes past your conceptualizing mind. Oh man, I'm a different man right down.

Take the damn cold shower because it brings the soul to the surface. The mysticism has gone too complicated, too far away. It's bloody hair, nowhere else. And we need to get this wrong narrative out of the way to say, it's there, it's there. if you get there, you can get there. No, it's in there. And let's make directly contact with it. We are born to be unconditionally there. I remember watching the Vice documentary with you, and you said something about an electromagnetic aura or something over somebody's head. Oh, hey, man, I tell you more. You can make pictures of that nowadays with these measurement devices,

photography, Curlyan photography, for example. Would you lean across to each other and start kissing? Go to it. The symbol for the crowd is called Corona Radiata. It's a nerve endings inside the brain. And we were thought of in neurology. We cannot control this. We cannot activate that.

And then I came and I showed how to enlighten activate the corona radiata, white mass inside the brain. I know I'm a king, man, the real king. You and all of us, we should be kings. I think it could even change our model of consciousness because we don't really know what a human being is. We all have electromagnetic fields. You've found a way to increase somebody's electromagnetic field.

Maybe we are transmitting something from elsewhere. Oh, yeah, absolutely, not only. I say, fuck enlightenment. Fuck enlightenment. That is so over-indulging. Oh, I'm an alightment. I'm Buddha.

Fuck Buddha. The Buddha would agree. Hey, Buddha, good morning. Oh, sorry. I'm interrupting his meditation. Shh. People doing this breathing exercise, they go deeper inside the brain

than people who are practicing mindfulness for four hours. for years. Within 10 minutes, you are deeper. Amazing. And then another fact, there's a new study, that five times more blood has been flushed into the heart to maintain the security of the vital organs by doing this bloody stupid, simple breathing exercises. Two, there you go. One. The Wim Hof method is fascinating, and it's fascinating.

fascinating because we don't know exactly how it works. When you breathe in more oxygen than you emit CO2, you basically hyperventilate. This alkalizes your blood. According to Wim, this reboots your entire nervous system. But how that happens is a little unclear. Maybe it affects voltage-gated ion channels and allows for faster cellular communication. When you hyper-oxygenate your body, you actually speed up the respiration process. This actually accelerates the creation of free radicals, which can be harmful.

But when you create free radicals in short, concentrated breath work, you could actually just be strengthening your body's ability to clean up those free radicals. So it's basically acting like any hermetic stressor. When you work out, you tear muscle fiber, your muscles get bigger. Same sort of concept. It's the ultimate cardiovascular exercise. Cardiovascular related diseases is killer number one in our society. This is the way to attack it. Yes.

To tackle it. To do exercising of the 100,000 kilometers, the 70,000 miles inside, millions of little muscles. That's amazing. Hey! Goodbye, Pharmacide, girls. It's almost like our body has a computer, and we thought of it as this, like, we couldn't mess with the computer. It was this autonomic nervous system, and now you're going into the servers of the computer, and you're tweaking it. You can get to a much lower level.

I think people don't realize that they have the capacity to go a little farther than, you know, they think. I can teach people to do so just in a couple of days. So all this paradigm of that it is not possible to control the autonomic nervous system, the proprioception, interoception, the sick sense, the ability to go into 100% of your own brain. This was a new discovery in brain scans, which I'm. made happen by doing these breathing exercises, people willfully activate 100% neural activity. It's the radio. You know, the radio Gaga, radio, Google.

I mean, sending and receiving, it's your radio. It's not only the buttons. You know how to find, tune it, to receive the messages, the news and the right music for, your silence, for your peace, for your understanding, for your deeper understanding than our schooling is able to provide. And there is the deep peace. We got him. We got him. We got him. So we've, yeah, man. I love it, man. I love your energy. So we, what do we do? Because we have all the, we have smartphones and we have air conditioning and we have clothes. There are a lot of esoteric philosophers who like to use the word involution, the fact that we've actually devolved.

Can we go back or are we just, you know, totally screwed? Let me tell it. It's even stronger. It is the time. It's the time to connect with it all. I have found the ways to create the ultimate biochemical condition that is breathing, alkalizing the blood, by which the neuro signaling of our, will, which is neurotransmitters, is able to connect with the via interior and luminous, light itself, which is electricity, which is neurology, to the level of the autonomic nervous system, which is nervous system is nerves, is electricity. The autonomic, now no longer is autonomous. And now we are able to relieve the trauma deeply hidden within our ancestral encrypted

codes. This is what the natives brought before. I bless your ancestors for the seven generations before and the seven generations to come. And then we Westerners came in. We took it all over. You sub primitive people, your assholes, we are glad out. This is us. And now we are here. Look what we have done. We polluted the planet. We go to Mars. The next next is we go to nuts.

We go to nuts, man. It's crazy. We've got to go back now. And now we can do this consciously. Have you ever heard of a mid-century scientist named Royal Rife? He had these Tesla coils. And it was like a tuning fork for the body. and you can convert

molecular mass into frequency. I feel like things like that and breathing, they're open source. And so it's going to be very hard to get them accepted by kind of the powers that be. How do you get this stuff proven in the modern kind of skeptical establishment? In two weeks, within two weeks,

I get new results with the top researchers on the DNA of this world. And that's in San Francisco, with Dr. Elisa A. Pell in Elizabeth Blackburn, who's a Nobel Proz winner on the DNA. So they are behind me. They are saying this new exercising, which we are doing, the breathing and the cold, which is acute, self-inflicted, deep stressful exercise that activates and resets the body to molecular level, to just right.

And this is what you say with the test line, to the right frequency. And breathing does it as well. And don't you think it requires almost a new mentality about sickness, which is often when you get sick, it's there to tell you something. It's a message. It's not there to put the band-aid on, you know, rub it with-

Kill the messenger. Kill the messenger. Kill him! Bring back his hat! Shoot it! Shoot the hat back! These crazy people! You're almost saying it's like the environment is like a... or a pathogen is like a mirror, and it's pointing to you saying, how healthy are you? And if you're not healthy, okay, well then your immune system's going to react and then you're going to get sick. But if you're very healthy and you're, you know, doing all the stuff that you do,

then you can actually fend these things off, which, you know, is not. Yes. Yeah. And it's simply there. And the thing is, it's not difficult. Yeah. It's not complicated.

It's the air. Everybody has access to it. Yeah. Also, we can be right, but we still have to bring it. We have the capacity to listen to the symptoms of the body, to use it as a messenger, go back, do breathing exercises, bring down inflammation. In 2014, we showed in a competitive study for the first time in medical science

to bring down inflammation within a quarter of an hour. Never been sure. Thing is, once again, four and a half million people died of COVID, 60 to 70 million die every year of inflammation. And we just brought it down. So our... And the people died of COVID.

Diet of inflammation probably. A lot of them. Yes. No. Yeah, COVID. Yes, it is. The COVID, I've been looking at it up. What is the damaging factor of COVID?

That is interlequin, which is inflammation marker. Yes. Interlequin number one, number six, number eight, and number 17. Very exact. That it is. And we brought them down in 2014. They don't want to know. They don't talk.

about the immune system. They don't talk about natural ways how to activate and to boost up the immune system so it killed the intruder at the beginning. They don't talk about it, but we showed that. They injected us with the bacteria and the bacteria had no chance. Yeah. Because we activated the specific immune system, which normally works after six to eight days with the flu. Now, within 15 minutes. That's what breathing does. Would you? And that's what... Could you do this thing with COVID? Yeah, sure. Anytime.

Would you would... And I'm not suggesting... Oh, no problem. No problem. You're crazy, man. You're saying you would expose... No, I'm crazy about life. That's not crazy. So you would expose yourself to COVID and beat it. Oh, easy does it. they just create this fear they are crazy

they are in power of a system that is going to collapse I think COVID came from a lab oh yeah yeah yeah it came from and it came from somebody's lab it came from somebody's lab and it's sad to me

that we keep having to learn the same lesson which is gain of function research is the most dumb fucking thing I've ever heard of in my life. It's like creating, you know, a nuclear bomb so you can try to create a defense against the nuclear bomb. Like, it makes no fucking sense. We can't even, we can barely come up with a cure now. And as both of us think, you know, the cures are deeper and more natural than, you know, any of this stuff. Yeah, yeah. No, they are completely lost. And they are into the money model again. Yeah, it's sick care.

It's not health care. None of the long. long-term factors are cared about or they're completely ignored and neglected. And those are the things that are most important. All of the comorbidities are just, it's just general health. Just be very generally healthy. Obviously, they're freak situations and their anomalies and, you know, a track runner and their 20s can get really, really sick. And everybody has a story like that.

But it's just been crazy to see this kind of fear and hysteria. And then, by the way, we can eat like shit. We can not sleep. would be stressed out all the time. It needs to stop. It is going to stop. This indulging is going. It's blowing itself up.

And if people don't take the measures, then it's going to go wrong. But I believe in the people. I believe in people, they are not stupid, but stupefied. And we got to wake them up. And that's what we do. As philosophers,

like Socrates, now it's called Jesse and it's called Whim. And they will make the history back in the moment. The core values are reestablished and happiness, strength, and health is a guarantee for everybody. And with that comes confidence and prosperity. That makes us the new leaders. I love that. You got to learn of the heart. The heart, the cardiovascular system is a, is a,

very vulnerable, a very powerful system. And it is able to adapt to the icy water within one minute, one half minute, completely you don't feel anything anymore. Not because you're numb, but because your cardiovascular system is taking care of the power inside, to oppose the power of the outside coming in. It deposes it. And then I'm able to sit for half. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job posts the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people

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Yes, yes. You become much more in connection with your own core. Why dwell all the time over there, over there, over there? You know, you just stay here. An intelligent person is always happy, strong and healthy. He is not going to go into conflicts and to battle conflicts. Oh, I won, I won. No, a person who is happy doesn't go to war.

A person who is happy is not into possessive gaining power. He's already there unconditionally. And that is the core. Our cause to be spiritual and to maintain it. There will be the eye of the hurricane. Your intention of life is to bring good, to feel good, and to heal the world, and all those beautiful things you are doing, and you are in the eye of the hurricane.

As long as you are there, you're not out there. You're inside. And you just watch how the waters are going. Do you have kind of like a metaphysical worldview? You've said a lot, and I've heard it, you say it elsewhere, you've said it here, that you are a king, I'm a king. Do you believe, you know, there's the gospel of Thomas that says the kingdom of heaven is within you and spread out across earth? Do you think that we are gods? When you say namaste.

Oh, no, no, no, absolutely. And it's proven. I showed that in the DNA. I show to go past the time into the genetics. Heredical, hereditary past. We can show this now through the microscopes and the DNA research that that's the way it works. What happens to the DNA specifically? Okay, you got the cell.

When we have the cell, we got the protective proteins around it, which are normally no longer really present because we live in comfort zone behavior. Now, by self-inflicted stressful exercise, you reinstall the protective cold shock and heat shock proteins around the cell. By which the MRNA, the messenger are a ribonuclear acid, those are messages for temporary changes will be gone like a message inside. They are going to be accepted by the right filter of the protection field around the cell, the cold shock and the heat shock proteins.

their function is to filter the right MRNA for development. That's one. We now know how to reinstall that filter mechanism. So COVID wouldn't be able to get through that protective shield. The only one that is able to get through that shield is our intention. Our will, neurosignaling, it goes through pathways to the cell, through the protective cold shock proteins into the DNA. And then that is its function to heal.

We are alive, not just to walk around and eat hot dogs. We are here to bring the ancestry, which has been accumulated through stress and imprinted in our genetic codes, to free it when it is possible. And when is it possible, when we are alive. Because our parents or grandparents or forefathers and four sisters and brothers who died and all those traumatic deaths and all, they are present. But they are tied to our internal

genetical codes and we are able to free that. That is our, that is enlightenment. They ask me, what is enlightenment to a whim? And, please put it in one sentence. Oh, all Bibles are written on that shit and Korans and all these scriptures. You ask me to put it in one sentence? Okay, here it comes. Be happy, strong and healthy. Rest is bullshit. That's it.

And it is bullshit, eh? Do you believe in aliens? And we are fucking aliens all the time. We are astronauts on planet Earth. And whatever there is, they should have come in. there's fucking shitty aliens who let their planet go to a ruin, animals being slaughtered, and children being abused. Fuck you, aliens.

Let's de-alionate and get it here done. Bring the light here from the stars. We are the stars. And of course, I love aliens. I love all these cute little beings. Hello. My son, I got a little son. And he is looking at the aliens.

He's like he's following it. And I'm following it with him. It's fun. That's awesome. Well, man, this is great. I feel like we should create like a center. There's no reason why, to me, we can't have a place where people go for healing.

But then the bigger mission of the place is we're doing, we're getting data, we're doing R&D. We have scientists working there. I know, I love it. And we're also treating people with alternative medicine that we know work on an intuitive level or have worked for thousands of years in cultures, but don't for whatever reason meet the current FDA criteria. You know what it is, Jesse? We've got the measurement devices to show that the existing narrative has no future anymore.

In two years, I want to reach billions of people. And if that is so, I'm going to do the Hollywood film and. BBC 36 programs all over the world and a show not it's not me man it's themselves then then everybody's going to watch that boom boom boom boom boom boom boom they all wake up well it may you might not be a guru and it may be them healing themselves but you are a very amazing force for good and you're you're seating this all across the world and so i look skywalker yeah let's do it no but you too. And we have no fear. We just want to find out, discover. Take away the covers. You know, the apocalypse means the great unveilent. So it'll all be, it'll all be revealed.

Yes, internal. Internal. And on earth. Yes, on earth. And it's got to be unearthly. Yeah, yeah. And I play with words. But we are going to do it for real. It's happening. Amen. It was an honor. It was an honor for me, man. I love you and I think thank you for doing this. I really appreciate you. I love you. You're my brother. Yes.

And great. I love you. Keep on and shine bright. At this point your pH levels are sufficiently set. You're running at peak off. So why not take a cold shower do a three minute ice bath? Water that cold? It hits you like a thousand knives and all over your body.

Look, I'm with you. Intellectually knowing something's good for you and actually doing it are two very different things. But if there's anybody to motivate you to do this, it's definitely Wim Hof and not Jack Dawson. Let's do it! So why not start now with his guided breathing exercises, which I am linking in the description. And on the way down there, hit like and subscribe. Both will improve your lives, one physically, the other intellectually.

Until next time, I'm Jesse Michaels, and this is American Alchemy.