The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 452: The Guru Comes Up for Air

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

Steve Rinella talks with Scott Carney, Brody Henderson, and Corinne Schneider. Topics include: On the road for the Catch a Crayfish, Count the Stars live tour; watch “The Rise and Fall of the Wim Hof Empire” and read the print story now; ambulance chaser lawyer billboards; how touching a bison calf doesn't lead to rejection from its mother; a correction on freeze drying; harvesting organs; meditating a whole lot; being cast from the womb; Steve being called a Calvinist; ice baths and breathing techniques; when hyperventilating makes you do more push ups; filling your scro with air; shallow water black outs; hiking Mount Kilimanjaro quickly and shirtless; What Doesn't Kill Us, a New York Times Best Seller; proving that you've turned off your immune response; saving the practice from the man; how you must never hyperventilate and then submerge in water; shallow water blackouts; all of the deaths from drowning; how fame accentuates your negative aspects; galimatias, or gobbledygook; Steve's new fake book cover, Lard Man; say "no" to gurus; listen to Scott’s investigative podcast; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light. Go farther, stay longer. Hey everybody. You might be listening and thinking that it sounds a teensy. Well, you probably haven't 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 matter so much as we're in someone's kitchen recording. With best-selling author Scott Carney. How's it going, Scott? Hey, man. Nice to see you again. The reason we're here is we've been out on a book tour, and I'm here with Brody. And we've been going around promoting the new book, Catch Crayfish, Count Stars, and bouncing around from city to city as we're working on stuff

and doing events in collaboration with Shields, who's been a phenomenal group of people to work with. As we've gone from city to city, the main thing we've talked about, and I've become a student of this, is anytime you're in a large city by an 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 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 i'll be a lawyer on a bike there's uh put the womack on them as a lawyer as a lawyer slogan so we've been checking out uh checking out that a whole bunch um also uh it was funny going around because we did a show and or did a book signing in texas where we signed and all the events we've gone to um i signed uh two guns in texas where you just wait in line with your gun

which is so funny a dude comes out to me, and he got a dude comes out to me, and he's showing me a turkey he killed. So this guy comes up, and his wife's like 10 feet away. His wife's 10 feet behind him, sort of like waiting for him to, like obviously ready to leave. And he's showing me a picture. He killed a wild turkey that had four spurs. So it 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 said his wife's like 10 feet away and she looks at me and goes full mount it's so funny man uh quick follow-up on something um where is this thing we're going to talk about we're not going to talk about too much we're It's so funny, man. Quick follow-up on something. Where is this thing we're going to talk about? We're not going to talk about it too much. We're going to get into what we're talking about. This might not be a totally normally show, so turn it off unless you want to hear about something super interesting.

This isn't the interesting part. We're going to get to that. We're going to get to something super interesting in a minute but um we covered meaning talked about laughed about this the the latest uh yellowstone national park uh scandal where a gentleman gentleman or a gentleman he okay so a bunch of buffalo go across the river i came here with the hell river do you remember what river a bunch of bison crossed the river sounds like the game of joke and and uh a calf doesn't join them won't it's it's too chicken to swim the river so uh this gentleman goes down and they just take off they just leave it sitting on the bank of the river this guy goes down and he like for whatever reason kind of grabs it and sc just leave it sitting on the bank of the river. This guy goes down, and he, for whatever reason,

kind of grabs it and scurries it up to the road, thinking he's going to save it. So he gets in all kinds of trouble and fined for all this, and then it becomes in the news how since he touched it, it was abandoned by its mother. Wait, what? So he got his human smell on it and now he's caused it and it had to be euthanized and the blood is on his hands okay um a couple people wrote into this

uh a a person that raises uh 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 Fish and Game Agency, who's been on the show a number of times, writes 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 Monteith, Randall Kaufman, Randy Larson, Brock McCullen, and he's naming all these researchers who do a lot of studies by putting GPS collars on ungulates. He goes to 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, he goes on to point out that if this was true, none of the 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 the strong current and said, bye, son. Huh? Good one. Yeah, Jim. Tough fingers. Yeah, he's a good one yeah jim powerful fingers yeah he's good if he made if he made that up that's good uh another correction from a past show i okay i feel like i'm wrong anytime i see that someone has like a math formula to correct 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 meat eater podcast 444 where a pair of inking 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 directly to vapor. He goes on to say these mummies were found at 20,000 feet where the atmospheric pressure is about 41, I don't know what KPA is. Okay.

Atmospheric pressure is about 40% 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 the phase diagram. The point where the pressure is low enough for sublimation to occur is roughly a 67 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 supplementing. I was equating it to your freeze-dry meal that you eat when you're backpacking. 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. It ends in an uncomment. One little educational bit. The KPA is a kilopascal, 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. Steve, I feel like just hearing you say this now, I feel like you should have gotten that right the first time. It just sounds so simple. I know. 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. I want to touch on the books you've done because the books you've done have a big bearing on what we're going to talk today. So walk me through your titles.

You did one on organ trafficking. Yeah, it 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... Really? Maybe not. But yeah, so I spent six years wandering around the world looking for interviewing people involved in buying and selling human 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 work where I made my bones

as a journalist so that was my first book well you know that uh i don't know 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 in a total bullshit your kidney's gone yeah that never happened start with one of those guys no what 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 organ brokers appear out of the ether to harvest organs. Usually with payments, it's way easier to pay someone like 50 bucks

or 500 bucks for a kidney than it is to kidnap them and cause a police case. But what I did – Also, 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 – so 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 we had like National Geographic cameras come in and get like 80 women all lined 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 which 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 legal market works, but the patterns in all the organs and all the body parts that are sold. I was also looking at blood and how people have their blood. This was messed up. I went on to the border of India and 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 addicted to heroin or something like that, offer them like 1,000 rupees, 1,500 rupees. That's about 30 bucks for a pint of blood. But he drained four pints of blood. So they were minimally conscious. And he kept them there for six months, eight months at a time until they died or were about to die. Oh, like harvesting. No, seriously. Seriously.

Like it was – 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 day. What rules is that? Well, it's going to be you try to buy low and sell high and you minimize your risk. And the more you think about body parts as just things, the more you treat them like things. Okay. Then your next one. The problem with that is that makes me not want to read that book because I feel like if someone tells me that they –

like if you told me right now – I've talked about this 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. Someone's like, I got poison ivy. I instantly itch. You get sympathetic diseases and ailments. Yeah, like if you said, man, I got a bad poison ivy case, my waistline would start to itch.

Yeah, right. I feel 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 between us is starting. Yeah, yeah. Where I was investigating these charlatan gurus around the world. And I was

looking in particular about Tibetan Buddhism and Americans who go to India and Tibet and come back in red robes and the sort of insanity that occurs when someone declares themselves as enlightened. And I'd seen the book start. So in there, you're focused on enlightenment as something specific. Yeah, as attaining a final state. It'd be the same as- In pursuit of a, I don't want to call it confined to a particular religious perspective, but you mean 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 bodhisattva. Yeah. Right? Yeah. 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 than I'm seeing God actually talking to.

Or if he is talking to you, I want to see some really good proof. I want to see, and this is what the Tibetans would talk about. They'd say, look, 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 temple. I want you to pee off the top of the temple. I want you to pee off the top of the temple. And before the urine hits the ground, I want you to suck that urine back up into your urethra as proof that you are enlightened. Yeah, this is a test that they tried many times in Tibet.

Huh. Because you want a proof. Actually that. That's it. I specifically talk about that particular miracle on two different occasions here. Has anybody pulled it off? Well, they say they have. But, you know, the sources are all medieval

and there was no cameras. Oh, God. But, you know, here's the thing. Like, when you get enlightened, and I think this is particularly relevant to what we're going to talk about. Because we throw that word around big time now. Yeah, yeah.

Right. But not even, I don't even know what we mean when we say it. Well, the word. I'd say, like, I was enlightened. I switched to frying my fish in pork lard i like that version of enlightenment actually that's my i can relate to that uh 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 uh 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, a woman named Emily O'Connor, she was like this type A, super driven personality. But we're silent. 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 the 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 like a 27-year-old kid at this point, and I'm tasked with recovering her body and figuring out why she killed herself. And her journal, I reprint a lot of it in that

book, but essentially it says, the last words are, I am a bodhisattva, 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 leave her body. So it wasn't suicide. Well, it was suicide. But I mean, she didn't think that, but no, okay, but she knew that she was going to have physical death. Yeah. Or she thought that she was going to pull a trick like pulling your urine back up. No, no.

No, she knew she was getting physical death. Yeah, yeah. I mean, one of the lines in her journal was, I know there's going to be a lot of pain and we have to go through it. So 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, how someone might,

there's been cases where someone's on like LSD and they jump off a cliff because 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, what it was is when you're meditating, when you're taking on a new spiritual practice, there's this law of, you know, 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 everything starts getting better. You start feeling these really positive changes. 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 even those realizations were starting to slip from her fingers.

Oh. And then? Well, and then she jumped off the roof of the retreat center and died, and that sent my life spinning on an entirely different trajectory. We talked about my book on organ trafficking. That originated out of this moment because I had spent six days with her body, 106 degree heat, trying to preserve it. We had to bring it back to the States. I was suddenly looking at a body as-

How did it become your responsibility? I was the director of the program. I see. Yeah. I spoke Hindi. And I could actually navigate the police system and no one... We had another 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 cops continually. And initially, they thought it was a murder because of the extent of her injuries. They asked me if there was enemies.

And it could have gone really, really bad. But the journal pretty much showed what her mental state was. Oh, man. How old are you in that heaven? I was about 27 years old, I think. When you did that book, did you start, do you think looking back on it now, was it like a form of therapy? I think. You know what 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, in like, you know, diminishing ways as I go. But 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 suddenly turn flesh into commerce, because, you know, they were taking pieces of her brain and liver and stuff

and sending 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 in it? I don't know. But like, then it becomes property of the state 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 in my mind. Like, was she enlightened? Like, what was going on in her mind? 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 Daya Lama's teacher and oracles, all sorts of things. I'm trying to figure out, well, was she enlightened? And the consensus is no. But that led me down this thing, like, 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 hypothesis was she'd like suicide as in depressed. But I wanted to know what is the thing where a positive can make you do something that's incredibly dangerous and bad. And 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 100 Westerners a year end up in mental asylums in India and have to get sent home. But, you know, when I look at a lot of that stuff, people that are really –

and we're going to get into this when we get into Wim Hof and the, you know, ice, frozen water and hyperventilating and all that. I think that, here's what you think about this. I think that there's like people that are looking for a fix. Yeah. So someone that's going to go and study, and I'm just picking on Buddhism because we're talking about it. Yeah, that's good. They're already fragile and vulnerable.

Mm-hmm. 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, if I only eat ligament, if I only eat vegetables, if I only, whatever, is you're feeling an alleviation in the symptomology of being lost and weak. So your euphoria, you think, I'm cured. It's just an alleviation of symptom, but you're already terminally lost.

You're terminally weak. You get a little break, and you think it feels good. But that's why so few people who are vulnerable and lost stay fixed for long. They're always looking for a new thing. I feel like you find so many people that they don't stay fixed. You're a drunk, you have a religious epiphany, and I'm like, yeah, we'll see. We'll see, because I got a feeling 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 how many chronic alcoholics suddenly find Jesus and then get drunk on Jesus, right? I mean, this is a thing. You're describing something that I think is out there, sort of the conversion symptomology. But I will say that some... The high rate of recidivism. Is that the word? Is that how you say that word? I think that is the way you say that word. A high rate of return. But I do think... I wouldn't just throw all of those epiphanies under the bus. I mean, sometimes the stuff is good. Not every one of them.

A lot of them. Sure. There's going to be a percentage, right? We could study it like a drug. But sometimes you need structure and 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 it was meditation, right? And meditation gave you a stable point and a 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 is your solution, well then, you know, my book, The Wedge, I was somewhat friends with Andrew Huberman, who's this big podcaster now, 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 playing 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 jump frog 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've 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. I don't know. I feel that humans are, just from my experience and things I've seen, I feel like humans are in some way your kind of caste. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like you're thrown from the womb as a something. And that thing generally winds up being pretty consistent.

Yeah, I mean. People break it. Yeah. But it's like they break it but it's it's a little bit um nature the nature nurture thing i think there's like a fundamental tenacity that that a lot a lot of people have like a fundamental tenacity a fundamental survival mentality and they kind of go on yeah and if they hadn't done one thing and found success, they would have done some other damn thing and found success.

Or they would have found some level of peace or some level of contentment, and you could have put them in any situation, and they probably would have kicked out. That's interesting. So you're a Calvinist, I guess. You're someone who believes that there is destiny, and somehow it's in your genetics, I guess, or somewhere someone who believes that there is destiny and somehow it's in your genetics, I guess, or somewhere else. I don't know where it comes from.

Some mix of... 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 10, I'll start watching my kids and find out when they seem cast. Well, my 13-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 didn't didn't the don't don't the jews have something like once you're old enough to like uh butter bread or something like that what is it i have no idea 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 um okay this is gonna going to lead us into where we're going,

where things get real 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 named Wim Hof. That's right. So if back your head, you're thinking about Wim Hof,

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 trend around ice baths and breathing techniques, that's Wim Hof. That's where that's originating from, okay? So from our guest here, this is from Scott's own writing. You can 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 and 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 Hoffson Anam. Is that how you spell his name? Anam. Anam. Owns all of the trademarks of Wim Hof's name as well as the property and income of the Hof Empire, which has a declared value of $18 million. Hof has routinely taught his method to crowds that number in the many thousands, sometimes spreading his message of ice and breath work for $200 ticket price. His international best-selling book, The Wim Hof Method, has been reprinted in 21 languages. 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 2013 to more than 3 million today,

with similarly impressive numbers on YouTube, 2.4 million followers. There are 71 videos about Hoff on YouTube, with more than a million views each and 146,000 videos overall. The video giving instructions for his basic breathing method alone has more than 64 million views. A search of the newspaper archive of over 16,000 publications shows his name has appeared on 12 front pages with more than 489 mentions overall. He's also about to get the treatment. A movie about Hoff starring Joseph Fiennes reportedly began shooting in November 2022. So that guy. Tell how you became aware of him because this is what 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 Hof, right? The first person – no, that's not true. I was the first, like, serious journalist to write about Wim Hof. 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 onto a mountaintop in a wet robe and meditating until all that robe is dry. And we're talking the Himalayas, so it's very cold out. And it's a

technique called tummo, but there's also this other thing called a siddhi. A siddhi is a miracle. And Wim Hof was teaching that he could sit on an iceberg and heat himself up and he could control his immune system and doing all these things that were not backed up by science. Can you give the listeners like the 30-second breakdown on who the guy is, though? Yeah. I know, but like where does he live? How old is he?

You know what I mean? That's a good idea, Brody. Wim Hof is a Dutch fitness guru, former like stunt clown man. He was known for like Guinness Books of World Record feats. But things that had... Not that he's... But, okay. Into world record feats that no one had currently held. Well, there's a question about... Something like hanging from a hot air balloon or something by a finger or whatever.

There's a question about his feats. But at that time, he claimed, you know, somewhere around 20 to 26 world records. Including, 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. Okay. 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 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. 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 and breathing, 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. There's more to it than that, but let's just go with that for now. And he could do these like superhuman seeming feats of endurance. And I was like, that's bullshit. I'm going to go and show the world your 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 an iceberg.

I was like, people are going to love this. And I want to get ahead of it because you're going to get people killed, just like I'd seen other people die doing this. 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 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 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 Playboy. Actually, it was Richard with Details, the magazine article, moved around. Not exciting.

Eventually, it was for Playboy. But you didn't go and say like, I'm a vulnerable, lost American. No, no, no, no. I don't do that. I have like an ethic. Like I don't do that with organ trafficking either. When I'm tracking down organ trafficker, I always tell them I'm a journalist and I get them to talk because I just ask them why they're doing it, you know? And people do talk. So I went, I tried his method and here's the crazy thing is it worked. Like in, 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. I get the, I get the breath hold because I've been learning spearfishing and freediving.

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 spearfishing called free dive. You breathe up, 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 and have a dude tell you that, but tell me about

what made you do more pushups. So it's the same thing, right? So 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 scrubbing? Are you hyperventilating before you do this and the way you do it? Long, deep breaths, and then like carbon dioxide purge breaths. But you go down on a big, full breath. Yeah. When I explained it to my kid, I said, 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.

No, it's not. We're going to get into why. We're going to get into why that's super dangerous. Well, yeah, sure. Yeah, there's people that have shallow water, right? Right. There's such a thing as shallow water blackout, but that is general. That is generally, I don't care if you're going down 20 feet, going on 30 feet, shooting fish.

It's just, there's a big difference between, there's a big difference between jumping off a boat, swimming over somewhere 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 go under 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 on your couch and held your breath you're just not uh no you're right so so here's here's the problem with shallow water so if we're going to talk about the physiology here but no no because you guys still want to hear about wim Hof. All right, all right, all right. We'll get into the physiology. We'll get into this in a second.

I have notes. Yeah, why don't we get on to it? I have some notes. Oh, how he got you doing a bunch of push-ups. Right. So at the point, I could do about 20 push-ups. That was what I could do. And then you hyperventilate.

And when you hyperventilate, you blow off your CO2. And your sort of gasping reflex is connected to this. And when you, God, how do I describe it? When you do this hyperventilating and 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 have in you. And it's not like my muscles grew bigger. It was just, I didn't realize where my limits were, because the hyperventilation changes that chemistry in the body. Even on something like, see, I didn't know, even on something like the feeling of I've done too

many pushups. Okay. Yes, exactly. 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. Then I hiked up this mountain with Wim. And you know, and we, in 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 barefoot. And, and the first time I do it, it's really painful, really hard. Second time I do it, it's way easier. Third time

I'm doing like, this is fine. And eventually I climb up a mountain with whim uh and this and a shirtless of course and it's i think i think it's two degrees fahrenheit out and 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 gonna 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 hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew!

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Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. I wrote What Doesn't Kill Us. That becomes a New York Times bestseller. I hike up Mount Kilimanjaro with him, and we get down to negative 30. We do it in a very fast time, 28 hours to the top. I'm shirtless again. And this book goes everywhere. I mean, I sell 250,000 copies of it. It's a, you know, and the other amazing thing about the Wim Hof 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 guru 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 lupus, Crohn's, arthritis, something where your own immune system is attacking yourself, it's really, really beneficial to turn off your immune system. 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 endotoxin experiment done at Radboud 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 Wim, breathe a lot, hang out, climb up a mountain in your bathing suit, 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, a kidney transplant, right? If you get that kidney transplant and you don't take any drugs, your immune system will be like, fuck that kidney. I am going to eat it and destroy it. And then you get this organ rejection. So the way you, 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 by heat. So that when it injects into your bloodstream, you have a primary immune response, which is so the E. coli is dead, so it's not going to do anything. But your immune system recognizes the cytokines, 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 primary basic immune response that you just use generally for anything. Now, the test was, if you inject it with endotoxin and you don't get those symptoms, that means you turned your immune system off. And that's what happened. Both Wim did this in a single test on his own. And then in a lab, 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 an interesting combination.

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 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 gonna 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 autoimmune benefit. 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 when I called you a Calvinist. People

are born some way and they can't change. Well, this is one of these beachhead techniques that I really believe in, right? Not born a certain way. Yeah. At 10, they become a certain way. But this is one of those things. It's like a beachhead. Like you start doing 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're clicking over

into that other rest and digest uh but here's where i don't want to there's so much ground we got to cover so much but but i want to ask a quick 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 body you're aware of what your body's telling you right it's like get out of the damn water yeah okay whatever whatever is going on you're extremely fatigued um you're like okay i'm feeling the extreme fatigue i'm gonna do mind over matter whatever i'm gonna come out the other side. Your immune system is not consulting with you. You're not thinking, 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 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 has this generalizable effect. If you have a flu, ice water ain't going to 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. When you're climbing up Mount Kilimanjaro in your bathing suit,

your immune system's walking up there with you. And if you're dumping adrenaline and cortisol and all that into your bloodstream through your hormonal channels, your immune system's also doing that. And if you think about what a, or if you can just look at this in a lab, you take a macrophage, which is a big immune cell, the frontline immune cell, and you dump adrenaline on it, its little flagella are going to go everywhere. It's going to go crazy. And if you don't, it's going to 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 we have this huge epidemic of autoimmune illnesses in the world. And it's where your immune system literally attacks the stuff it's not supposed to. Those wolves are bored. And if you hop up your wolves on adrenaline or wolf PCP, those wolves are going to chew things they're not supposed to.

So what this does from an evolutionary perspective, and we know, I've done 300 podcasts on this. We can do 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 system not to freak out. And, 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 narrows the range in where people can be comfortable. If you're going out, right now we're in my comfortable house in Denver, but 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 – you find that you go out in 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 Wim Hof Method is one way into that stuff. And frankly, a pretty good way because it's pretty efficient, especially for someone who, you know, when you have that, that strong stimulus, 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, what should I, what, how should I manage my taxes this year? I think that I, maybe I should take a deduction, maybe the standard deduction. You're not thinking that shit, right? You are thinking I'm in ice water and I 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 going to 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 feats now. I've done like half an hour in 32-degree water, and I lived. But if you think about what... Most people would think that's insane.

Yeah. And I find that as like, this is something that's really good. And it's actually a type of meditation. You think about meditation as someone sitting on a mat in a Buddhist temple in 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. Brody was asking you to lay out the basic. So you went there and you became an acolytete is that the right word yeah yeah that's a good one um wrote a lot about him yeah now i want to return to because we're going to start getting into what we're getting into now uh you i'm going to 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 right i share one of those no please do okay and then i want to talk about why you didn't include this um so our this is again reading from our guest work one story One story begins in 2008 when Hoff had not seen his children in almost 10 years. That decade had been rough on the family. Hoff's wife, Olaya, is that correct? Olaya. Olaya committed suicide by jumping from an eight-floor balcony in Pamplona in 1995 after a long struggle with 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, Anam, was only 15 years old when he became the family's surrogate dad. Eventually, Hoff's relationship with the woman ended and he found himself with a, what monetary symbol is that? Was that a euro? It was a $30,000 tax. A $30,000 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 a time to rendezvous at Vondelpark in Amsterdam. Hoff 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 2013, Hoff recounts 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 gauge sent water cutting through his intestines like a knife, filling his bowels with 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 were that he needed to go to a hospital.

Why would you, and writing about a health phenomenon, a health phenom, and a guru, and your own guru, tell me the impulse to not, to edit that out of the book. 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 Wim Hof Empire, it's been ever so hard for me just put out, right? So my YouTube channel, The Rise and Fall of the Wim Hof 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, we didn't want to necessarily present Hof as a complete madman, right? We didn't want to show, we're like, look, we're talking about ice water and all of these benefits that go to this. Hoth'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, I call him a madman in the book, but I don't tell 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 sideshow. 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 back. I'm like that kid who was at Hoff Center the first time being like, oh, my God, 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, right? He's on Goop Lab. He talks with Russell Brand all the time on his podcast. Jordan Peterson, he has a feature film coming. And everyone says the same story that

I did. Here's this awesome kooky ice man who does these kooky 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 I saw this occurring. I saw him go from like 2,000 followers on Instagram to what, 4 million or 3 million or whatever he has right now. And we're putting him on that same stage 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 with something that's really nice, they're really good and beneficial to people. But as they declare themselves enlightened or other reasons that they may get isolated, they don't have any peers anymore. They sort of sit on this pedestal. For 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 leads to sex scandals and all these fun things. With Wim Hof, he is so famous now and 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. The worst father around abandons his kids in a squad house for 10 years. I can 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 teaching.

Sure. And I, and, and I can see that someone who is sort of like interested in, in learning cold cold tolerance learning endurance yeah i could i could see him being like uh well it doesn't matter for instance um the heimlich maneuver yeah who knows what heimlich was up to well you know i'll tell you something worried about him but uh the heimlich 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. Yeah. So it's a little bit irrelevant, but he's got a little bit of like what, he's got a little bit of what the picture you started to paint about this fella 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 a epileptic seizure zapping with the i don't know that in particular but he he wanted a feeling that the heimlich maneuver was applicable to all these other issues just in his you know

kind of like tarnish his own reputation like he kind of went went crazy with the heimlich yeah but point being what heimlich was up to i don't have no idea what he's up to as a parent what he's up to as a parent has no bearing that's a great way to dislodge yeah you know i heimlich someone one day yeah 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. Apparently it's like, I know somebody who does it, but

apparently there is 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 to do it 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? Was it sudden or was it like a thing that just built up over the years? It's been a slow process because here's the

thing. I'm very conflicted 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, just like Heimlich, right? If Heimlich had a podcast that was huge, right? And Heimlich was like, hey, man. Heimlich had millions of Instagram followers. If Heimlich had the million followers, you can be like, look, he's got this great method for dislodging stuff from the throat.

But he also thinks that 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. Give your buddy a Heimlich underwater. Exactly. It's phenomenal. This is the problem. And what has happened is that, so this organization that has built up around Wim Hof, like if you're just hanging out with Wim, it's a great time. He's a good guy, genuine.

He's got his highs and his lows, but he's different than most people I know. I don't think he's personally influenced by money at all, which is really unusual. Most people I know are really influenced by money, but he does love the adulation. He does love people being amazed by what he's got. 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 8 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 going to get people who take his message and push it. He's the Iceman. He swims underwater and gets these Guinness Book of 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.

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 2014. People were doing his method in various water situations. And he was teaching actively, scrubbing, which is hyperventilation, taking out all that CO2, putting your face in the water and holding it as long as you can in various levels. And other people were doing this too. I'm friends with the big wave surfer, Laird levels. And other people are doing this too. Like, you know, I'm friends with the big wave surfer, Laird 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- No, you're talking about full hyperventilating, not like, like not taking elements of hyper, like a couple hyperventilating breaths. You're talking sustained hyperventilating breaths. You can get into a shallow water blackout situation in as little as five or ten breaths. Wim Hof breathing is often a lot more. And there are warnings. Do two or so breaths 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 buildup of CO2, right? So it's not like low oxygen. You feel that popping sound like I got to breathe because I have little oxygen. Instead, it's the buildup of CO2 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. It's well known. You can pass out before you sense any urge to breathe, which means your own internal recognition, your own interoceptive 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. 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. I hit 80 once doing that. On a breath hold. On a breath hold, yeah.

And because you've blown off all the CO2, you've confused all the systems. And then I hit 80 and then boom, 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, a long time goes by before you start breathing. It could be various ways. Yeah. The reset could be different in a number of ways.

Not in a long time. Minutes go by. Yeah. All depending on factors, right? For me, yeah, there's a lot of physiology to talk about there. So we knew in 2014 this was happening. A newspaper in Holland had disclosed four deaths with the Wim Hof Method. Wim Hof Method practitioners dying in water. And then there were some warnings. Everyone who was doing this hyperventilation stuff, there's a big warning in my book. There's warnings on Wim Hof's website.

There's warnings. XPD doesn't do it anymore. But everyone knows. The word got out. A couple Navy SEALs died doing shallow water blackout. There were a lot of news stories about it. They were trying to use this to get a better underwater breath holding. I don't believe they were doing... I don't know for sure what they were doing.

Okay. 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. People get like... Yeah. I mean, people die from shallow water background blackout every year, right? Tons of them. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, whether or not they're practicing something particular or not. No, there's a whole society called the Shallow Water Blackout Prevention Organization. I mean, it's out there. It's known. And, but what would need to happen at this point? Can we talk for a second about just so people understand why we're talking about this yeah why it's called shallow water blackout yeah so it's

like you generally like it generally hit happens to people um toward the surface right i mean well it could happen anywhere i mean it has to do with this this carbon dioxide blowing off 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 an answer for i think it's because people can drown in surprisingly shallow amounts of water you know we're talking i hear from like when i'm talking to people that have experienced it been 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 you're near the end right right you're near the end of the

dive right and i thought for some reason it was related to that that doesn't make any sense no i think i think it has to do with 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 And freedivers, there are a lot of freedivers. Meaning you can drown in a hot tub. Drown in a hot tub. Yeah, gotcha. And one of the things that I want to point to is that the Wim Hof 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 Wim Hof method, right? You're like, oh, I do the hyperventilation and I can 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 8 million people, you've got a real problem. And that's, so that's something that I feel like can be dealt with warnings. And Interfire has warnings, to their credit, all over the place. But 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 get to the madness. Like if I had a knife juggling video and there's a sign next to it that said, don't juggle knives. Right. So when you watch, so watch my video, right? Like if I had a knife juggling video and there's a sign next to it that said, don't juggle knives.

Right. So watch my video, right? It's on my YouTube channel. And you'll see that Wim Hof sells this course on his website for $99. And when I was talking with them in 2017, they told me that they were making a million dollars a month selling this course. So I don't know, what's that, like 10,000-ish courses a year, sorry, a month. And in week eight of their 10-week course, there's Wim Hof 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, you know, 10 seconds, 20 seconds, I'm just trying to paraphrase here, 30 seconds and see how far you can go. And he says this three times in his,

in his, in his, in that one video. And then next to it, in a warning, that's just right next to it says what you are, don't believe your lion eyes. Wim Hof, he doesn't say that, but it says what you are seeing is not Wim Hof leading someone in ice immersion. It is him teaching cold tolerance. So never do this in water. So there's a big juxtaposition between what Wim the madman is teaching and what the inner fire of 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 Hof website right now. But it's also, I was on stage with him in 2017,

teaching the Wim Hof breathwork to a group of about 300 people. I'm talking about the book, and he's talking about the breathwork. And he has all these people who have never done the breathwork before, and they all hyperventilate. And then he says, hold your breath. And then he plays on the screen behind me a video of him with his famous swim under the eyes conflating the water and the breath work uh and there's also and and more and more and i've collected a bunch of these videos and and showing how he is ignoring his own warnings and people are dying Are the warnings there because his lawyers are making him put them there or like, obviously he doesn't, would they be there if it was up to him is what I'm asking.

Well, Wim 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. Prophet because he has his cool method, not because he's God, but madman because he's all over the place. 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 crazy spots, and he wants to please people. And by doing that, he conflates repeatedly

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 Wim. Either way, he's still teaching hyperventilation in water despite knowing about this. And I talked to him about this in 2017. I was like, Wim, you cannot do this. Like, you cannot teach this. 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. I was aware there were warnings. Didn't someone in the organization call it not a bummer? What did they call it? He said it's lame. The deaths were lame. Anum 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 in water would be one thing that

you could do. And there's just so much confusion just because of who he is and the two pillars of his practice, that this is becoming a real major problem. And people are, you know, there's currently a lawsuit. Yeah, I want to get into it. Talk about some of the deaths that have the lawsuits attached to them. Well, let me tell you about one that shows a very clear connection. There's this guy named Andrew Encinas. He's in Orange County, California. And he's super Wim Hof practitioner, go-getter, wants to push his limits.

He's one of these guys who's type A and loves it. And he 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's a tech entrepreneur, has a social media game going on.

It's Labor Day, and he says, hey, to his brother, Adam, he's like, I'm going to do some Wim Hof in the pool because he does it. And we have videos of him doing Wim Hof in the pool. And he goes to the pool and passes out. And a few minutes later, 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 he was doing Wim Hof method in water,

dies, and, you know, and that's where he is. And the lawsuit is from another sort of similar case. A 17-year-old Madeline Rose Medsker has been practicing the Wim Hof method for a while, accessing it on the computer. Father's at their house in Long Beach, California. He doesn't see her for a little while, later. You had a detail where he was arguing with his ex-wife about what, algebra class? Yeah, no, there was an argument over some sort of higher mathematics. You and I are both not good at math. We've already established this. Just a snapshot of life, right?

Like what's going on in her, I don't know, the ongoings of a family. Right, and she's known for using these techniques for calming her nerves because there's this big anti-anxiety effect to the Wim Hof method. Okay. He finds her passed out in the pool. She usually doesn't use the pool. And he assumes that she was doing the Wim Hof 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- But she had like Wim Hof tabs, you were saying. Yeah, I mean, you know- On the computer or whatever. This is what the lawsuit alleges, you know? 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 Hof 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 13 cases just from the Google search saying the Wim Hof practitioner drowns in water, and we're pretty sure this is how it happened. Yeah, yeah. saying the Wim Hof practitioner drowns in water, and we're pretty sure this is how it happened. And you got to think of that sample. Well, that's pretty, you know, that's pretty small. I've been a reporter for a long time. I know that most drowning deaths 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 Hofmeth. And how would you know if somebody just is swimming and it's like, hey, I'm going to hyperventilate in the water now. And they just drown. They're just listed as a drowning. And I will say that my sample, it's a global sample. I got 13 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 the way I have collected information, the way it's available, it's actually a much smaller and skewed sample because of that. Yeah. 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. And there's a big warning at the front of my book saying always to consult a doctor, that sort of thing. Yeah, but you pointed to, you said how in the front of your book, there he is in the ice and he's a breathing exercise guy. So I don't know I do feel complicit. I was, I mean, I'm his chief alkylate, whether he likes it or not, right?

I've been doing this for 10 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 300 news programs on Dr. Oz. I've been on Ben Greenfield. I haven't been on your podcast until right now. No. But I have been spreading his message for a long time. I know that 250,000 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 Wim 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 accentuate your negative aspects. And when you're doing something which is potentially dangerous, and then you're telling people to push their limits, 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, if I was on assignment with him right now, I would write a very different story about who Wim Hof is.

That was the thing I thought about when I was 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 this stuff does work, 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 Wim when I first met him is like you meet him and you're like, oh, 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. Like, he like, I looked at him, I was like, look, he has all of these obvious flaws

and yet he's got 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 $18 million inner fire business run by his son, Anum, who was one of those abandoned kids who does not practice the method, who basically, you can look in my video. I have a video of him saying, I hadn't seen him in 10 years and he was getting quite famous. And I thought, essentially, he could make a lot of money doing this. Essentially, he could 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, hell, anyone can do commerce. Like, it's not bad to do commerce, and they 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. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew.

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As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. How do you... You might be equipped to answer this. You've used the word cult,

and even inner fire is like... It's like... You can take any cult in american history and you could have called it inner fire and people like yeah and dude like i don't like i don't you know i i'm learning right now i don't i don't have any um i don't have any history sure i never heard inner fire until i was reading your stuff i didn't know about it but it's just has like a funny it has like a culty flavor to it but how do you get hey if if someone has a a fitness breakthrough health breakthrough whatever it is okay someone discovers something yeah that's beneficial how do you get where the person is bundled with the thing?

Meaning, why did Heimlich – why are we not talking about Heimlich as a cult figure? Yeah, he didn't have a podcast, I guess. YouTube wasn't around. But how does it happen? For instance, and as poorly as I understand it, like I said, my journey into free diving, it's like I spent 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.

Mm-hmm. the things I learn from them would be like, I've learned things from them that have very much not pushed my limits, but have made it be that in 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, it never occurred to me to land the surface

of the water and completely relax. Imagine completely relaxing every muscle in my body and just slowly breathing for a while, right? And getting like everything relaxed and going underwater and staying calm and fighting that like, oh my my God, I'm under the water feeling, right? And I learned all this stuff, and now I can go deeper. I can stay down longer. I can do things I always wanted to do and couldn't do. But I don't attach that to a figure, Kimmy Werner, Greg Fonz. I don't attach it to them being like, where I'm going to go.

Like my love of the knowledge, as much as I love those people, my love of the knowledge does not extend to them as being like a leader. Yes. Yeah. Or, you know, I don't go and ask, and I'm like, Greg, what do you think I should do about my marriage? It's like, I just don't. Yeah.

He taught me some really cool stuff. Right. He learned it from someone. Right. Who learned it from someone. Right. Who learned it from someone. Right. And he's translated it to me. And it's taken me beyond my limits. Mm-hmm.

But there's no culty factor. Yeah. Like, how did he become bundled? Like, why is it not that he has these ideas, these ideas travel around? Mm-hmm. And why does it not be that people want to put their hands on them? Yeah. They want to stand in a circle around them.

He needs to say the most guru thing in the world, which is I'm not your guru. Which is like the most guru thing on the planet. I never have occasion to say that to anybody. Or no, I'm not your fucking guru. Which is like very guru-y. I'm just from inner fire. I mean, this is exactly it. Like the cult of personality around him.

He is a charismatic, I don't know why he's charismatic. He's not really good looking. Like, and also people look at him now and they're like, 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 re-stitch his intestines. He's fat. He's got this big bulb of his nose.

And people are like, oh, no, Wim Hof is an extreme athlete. He doesn't have any records anymore other than the, I think he has a barefoot marathon record in the Arctic. Half marathon. Half marathon. He did, I want to say, six hours? It's not that great of a time, but maybe no one else tried it, right? I'm not dogging on that. I've never done it.

Might be great. I mean, you know, he has, he is an impressive guy, right? He has done impressive things, but people have, for some reason, Hoff has gotten to a point where people's just blinders go up. They're like, oh, well, he has this science behind him, so he must be right about almost everything.

Is there an aspect, because in the wellness industry, I see some of that, right? So is that culty personality thing kind of tied to the wellness industry? Totally. Does the wellness industry like feed that? Well, I mean, his method is good for a lot of like chronic conditions. And 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.

You go to the wellness guru for something you can't quite put your finger on. Right. And the Wim Hof Method actually is good for that stuff. Like, and a lot of stuff is good for that stuff. It's not just the Wim Hof, like, you know what I said? You put your tent pole down. This can be a beachhead to actually help you work on a lot of different things. And I think the Wim Hof 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 Wim 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, when he's on Rogan, and he's also said this to me, like, I get above 100% oxygen. For the first time, they proved it in the lab, above 100% oxygen if I hyperventilate. And of course, you can't get above 100%. 100% is 100%. And you- Yeah, it's like the amplifier and spinal tap that goes up to 11. Right, right. And he is that amplifier.

He is spinal tap here. And people let him get away with it. And then he'll throw out these sort of nonsense scientific phrases to explain what he does. And maybe 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 and fact check it. You can't be like, what are you saying? So there's this one quote on Rogan,

860, I don't know, some number on Rogan, where we can just read, you might read that quote. You do your best Wim Hof if you can. Oh, I can't because I never, I haven't, like I said, man, I'm just finding out all about this. It's interesting to me because I'm, but I can't do it. I'm not familiar. And I hope that's coming across to listeners. I'm not familiar. I'm into this whole thing, though. Well, you have that quote.

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 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 38 molecules they can produce. What happens? What happens with the cell that is deprived for 48 hours of 35% less oxygen? It becomes cancerous. As simple as that.

Yeah. Does that make any sense to anybody here? He throws it out with a sense of confidence. And so I actually spent a little while on this paragraph, right? I called two doctors over at Harvard, and I was like, is there anything? No, one was at Harvard, one 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 I was like, no, but specifically, are eight oxygen molecules on this hemoglobin and whatever?

And they're like no this makes no sense this is all just just crazy talk well there's a word another there's a word another researcher uses um brian mckenzie uh brian mckenzie a breathwork expert and 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. Gala Mateus. So just to correct you here so we don't have to get that correction later,

what McKenzie says is that no person in the organization understands the physiology. And the person, you know, it's actually Walter von Markenlichtenbelt, who's a scientist who's actually studied Hoff in a lab, who says that basically Wim's scientific vocabulary is galamitis. And he wrote that in a scientific article, which I read again this morning. And galamitis basically means gobbledygook. 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 real, for me personally, the health and wellness things that make sense to me are things like workout, hike a lot eat a varied diet yeah i like that like things you want to get good at doing a whole bunch yeah you know stuff like that yeah but uh like i'm always like half hearing this kind of stuff and we never did it but i was gonna we were gonna make a thing recently where it was uh we were gonna make... I only made the book cover. We made a book jacket called Lard Man. It was going to be like, I wanted to compile the gobbledygook about if you only eat lard,

and I wanted to come up with all of the language that explains all the health benefits and what it does to your mitochondrial DNA. You should spin that. And just make an insane paragraph of shit that comes from eating lard and make 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. I don't know. 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 testosterone yeah no i think we had it as a guide an ancient pathway to um but this is only the farthest we got on my instagram

at steve ronella you'll see my lard man book cover it's called lard man an ancient pathway to more muscle slicker bowel movements and better sex and it was because it was just it came from my 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 would 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's like, oh no, I only eat meat and I feel great, probably appeals to

a sensibility. There's this thing that we've talked about this past. Overwhelmingly, a right-leaning person enjoys meat rarer than a left-leaning person.

Now, is that a scientific fact that you have here? It looks at what you ordered. Overwhelmingly, a right-leaning person enjoys the taste. How your taste receptors are tied to your – 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. Wait, is that yes or is that yes?

Can't believe in God. No, go look. What did Spencer, you're 74%—I can't remember what it was. Spencer, you're 74% more likely to want a medium-rare steak if you lean right. Wait, will you be my guru? All right, that's all I want to know. I'm on the lookout for a guru. Can you remember?

One man right here. Were you there when Spencer reported on this? Yeah, I'm vaguely aware. Okay. 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 you're right wing, you want it cooked less.

Wait, but I'm left leaning, but I also order steaks medium rare. Do I have to start cooking them longer, do you think? No, you're one of the 24. 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.

Yes. There's aspects of it that are reacting against things. There's things that seem appealing. There's things that would like, there's like, I could come to you with two equally valid sounding health things. And you might be like, my guess is they're gonna like the sounds of this one. I think you're actually-

This one's gonna 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 books, that the environment that we exist in changes our physiology, right? If you live in a varied environment, like you're able to go out into the wilds a lot, and you're able 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 in the Adirondacks, right? There's some sort of connection. And it also goes to, no doubt, the political environment that you live in, the social media environment 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 of the brains releases different cocktails of hormones and proteins and 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 that it probably does through these sensory pathways. Like maybe liberals, you know, 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 uh 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 10-year-old child be without all of the experiences prior 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 always 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 eat a varied diet. It always nagged on you, the animal welfare. And then one day you meet someone who's like, man, I don't eat any meat and I feel fantastic. That person then cuts meat out of their diet.

They're like, by God, I feel so much better. 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, 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 were 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 uh to to a highly varied environment do you feel that you are susceptible to something like wim hof because you you're a searcher. So you went into Tibetan

Buddhism, got into it, presumably not as into it now. You got into Wim Hof, you got out of it. Do you feel that you have a searcher mind and you're susceptible to gurus? No, I don't think I'm susceptible to gurus, actually. I think that I am very skeptical by nature, and I have a real bug in my bonnet for truth. And one of the reasons why... And I have meditated for years, but I've never followed, never gotten guru-ified. I was leading that 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 – 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 realize 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 800 years ago that led people to commit suicide right like maybe that doesn't even matter but it i i have this just impulse to sort out bullshit from reality did you when it came to to going after like in pointing out the risk and the, you know, you've identified 13 potential deaths here. Did you initially think that, have you in the past gone to Interfire or gone to Wim Hof and said, listen, there's like a problem. We should read, you guys should redo a bunch of stuff and clarify this point.

And that just didn't just doesn't get traction. For years. I mean, this has not been a new thing. Like in 2017, when we were on stage, the first thing I said to Wim after we were on stage was, you can't do this. And he was like, oh, there are warnings. Don't worry about it. And I have been a, you know, I didn't talk to W to him 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 minor little things. But not by like, you're doing something wrong, right? No, no, no. I used to be very against dishwashers, and I've gotten into dishwashers. Okay, but did you do that yourself? By who?

The dishwasher changed your mind? No, my wife and my friend, Giannis. Okay, well, those people. It doesn't sound like a deeply held review. No, no, it was very deeply held. But there's no way in the world that I could convince you that animals need to be protected under all conditions and never be hunted. There's no combination of words that leave my mouth that go to your brain. You're like, well, Scott, you got a point.

I'm going to be a vegan. I just don't see that happening. I see what you mean that happening. And it's the same thing with Wim. He's been doing this for so long. He's been doing these feats. He believes in what he does. And he just doesn't hear things that contradict that. And there's this one quote, You can bring that up. Just search for Jesus. Right? So I started asking him, like— What is the command key for search? Control-F. Control-F.

Why is there a find? That's why I never—oh. That's why I never, oh. That's why I never, I always think it's Control F. 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 there's some problems here, and it's roughly the stuff that we were talking about here.

He follows my, you know, Instagram posts, and he knows that I'm causing trouble. And he wrote to me, 28,000 people drown every year and that I was blaming him for all of their deaths, which I wasn't. And also it's 280,000 people who drown every year. And then he wrote me this. So I was talking specifically about- Yes, I read his quote. This is another one where I had to read it like... Five times. So just to give you some context, at a recent Wim Hof event, he teaches something called a baptism where people hyperventilate. They take 12 very deep breaths, and then all put their face in the water together. And there's this video. It's very culty, very...

It's intense. And then I asked him about that. And he said, look into baptism. This is my Wim Hof impression. Look into baptism and 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 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, 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 studying of the Bible, he has found that what Jesus was doing when he baptized his disciples is he was shutting down their over-controlling minds and activating deep healing mechanisms in their body. I'm no 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 Wim Hof is saying. Exactly. But he's not... I'm telling you, you asked what he's... So he says, I'm not going to explain this physiology. He's not, he doesn't want to explain the 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 going to run in circles here, Matt. I don't know where you're going. I'm trying to understand the passage. You know, in college, they taught us a good trick.

When you're reading something, when you read a sentence that you feel is total bullshit, okay, and you're like, I've read this sentence a hundred times, I don't know what it means. It was a good trick. Add the word not into it. Put the word not somewhere in the sentence a hundred times. I don't know what it means. It was a good trick. Add the word not into it. Put the word not somewhere in the sentence. Anywhere. And then read it again. Are you like, wait a minute, that's the opposite.

Or are you like, well, no, that didn't change anything. But there already is a not into it. Not into competition sport. It's a double negative. But I'm saying, in this case, since the word not is in there, pull the word not out. Read the sentence that you think is horseshit and feel like, did it fundamentally change for you? And when I do that exercise, it doesn't fundamentally change.

Correct. Because it would, well, I'm 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 not, or in this this case i take away the knot and i read it it doesn't fun it doesn't fundamentally change my understanding it remains gobbledygook 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 gonna add the word not somewhere in there and read it again and then i still look at it and i'm like no it's just

as full of shit as it was a minute ago. It's a test. To me, what this looks like is like Wim Hof 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 are talking to angels or talking to your Buddhist angels. And in this case, I don't think Wim is 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 literal evidence of deaths and a $67 million lawsuit that we haven't talked about yet. Oh, we did. A $67 million lawsuit, he's still diverting in some sort of spiritual bypassing framework. Has he ever in any way acknowledged that people have died doing his deal? Yes. In this passage, he's like, are you going to blame me for all the 28,000 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 you mentioned earlier for a legal reason but he knows this is going on uh he is well aware of it whether or not he believes he's ultimately responsible now that's a different question hmm so what uh um what's going to happen to you now oh my god well i'm already getting a fair amount of uh attacks by the the sort of there there's a large group of people who subscribe to the method and most of them are very sane um you know the wim hof instructors that i've known i will to their credit i've never met one of them who says hyperventilate in water. And there's like, I guess, 1,800 Wim Hof 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 Hof as not their guru, but really their guru. Yeah. And I see a lot of people being very angry at me for putting this out because, you know, essentially his chief alkylite for 10 years, you know, been doing his method for 10 years, been doing videos about him for a while. Yeah, you gotta admit, it 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 he kind of grooved to it yeah i mean it's like a whole part of like like a mint like a mentor has like a mentee uh has the turn of the

what it's like some kind i can't remember how there's like a like a mentee has the turn it's like some kind of i can't remember how there's like a like a mentee will eventually have to bypass and but you're not looking for the crown though no i don't want to be wim hof i want to do other things i'm writing a book on napping right now like i am so done with this yeah if you were 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 yeah oh right uh like everything let's return to Apocalypse Now. In Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard, they come to Captain Willard,

who's nuts, Willard's nuts, and they come to him and say, we need you to go kill a nuts guy. Right. Colonel Kurtz. Mm-hmm. So he goes up the river

to find Kurtz and kill him. Mm-hmm. When he gets to Kurtz, he, for quite a while, you can tell what's churning 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 them what a genius. You're here. You don't know it. 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 chops him off 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 what is the next you're willing but you spent longer in the, but you spent longer in the temple. Okay. You spent longer in the temple, and now you're going to get them with the machete. So I'm just saying, if people are mad, I could... If someone came to me and sketched out, like there was a writer that went to debunk a guru

and became a disciple of the guru, and then later went to debunk the guru, I would think of Apocalypse Now. Yeah. 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 uh and that was the where 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... It'd make it such a better story. Okay. And now the disciples become the master. No, I mean, I have to do my own things, and he can have that whole world. I just don't want people dying. And I also want them not to actually take any gurus. I want them – I'm not your fucking guru. Wim's not your fucking guru. You're not their fucking guru. 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 other people like this. And I feel very sad for Wim 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 an ice bath. We're pushing our limits. And it's rational because that is where the magic is.

It's confronting your own self in these environments. It's the Heimlich maneuver. It's the Heindlich maneuver. Not Heimlich. Not Heindlich. Heimlich. Heimlich. It's the maneuver, not the man.

So, I mean, if you could break it down to 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. Brody's just started a podcast where it's really quick podcast. Yeah. His Watergate investigation would be, they went into a building and stole some stuff.

And the president knew. It turns out they all knew. Yeah. Tell me real quick in close. Tell me about napping. Oh man, you got to start. Are you going to be a napping guru?

People are going to come over your house and fall asleep. Dude, dude, I so want that. I so want that role. That's the role I want. I want to be the napping guy. No, I love naps. Naps are the best. I can want that role. That's the role I want. I want to be the napping guy. No, I love naps.

Naps are the best. I could pay you 200 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, they're so restorative. And 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'm discovering with napping, and this book's not out yet. It'll be out in September. What I'm discovering with napping is that you can actually get outcomes out of naps. I'm going to use this very still environment to also change my physiology. It's like 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 external stimuli, but in your brain world. And here's a, we're just going to leave you with some crazy, a crazy thought. Okay. Well, I'm going to leave you with something you probably missed out on all right talking to turkey hunters

because the the nap the psychological transformation that happens in your late morning nap on a turkey hunt you need to talk you need to interview turkey hunters about that you're right i actually like how could 15 minutes be so transformative? I'm actually sort of curious. Can you understand? I was all depressed. I thought we'd never get a turkey. Now I'm fired up. I mean, yeah, there's something to that. It's transformative. But here's the thing.

You don't even recognize yourself when you wake up. In your brain, you experience the world a fifth of a second behind real time. Okay? Is that right? This is true. 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? Yeah. our brains right yeah 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 happens in naps mind blown i am your guru you know have you gotten into i imagine in that work you probably got into in that where you got into, I imagine in that work, you probably got into, in that work, you got into 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've just been running around conversationally half understanding something I read. any basis to to dementia and lack of sleep meaning like like people who were chronic like chronically one sleep deprived 100 more susceptible to dementia so much science is that right matt

walkers why we sleep just read it yeah dementia lack of 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 oh you lazy bastard but then now i feel better about it after reading that yeah no so there's something there yeah there's a lot to it and and that will be our next podcast because i'm developing dementia just because you're thinking about it in fact if you're thinking about it can you have dementia so so there is like uh more there's more than just that you feel real rested. 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 asleep, right? That you can get killed. You can get eaten. 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 that because it was important to the physiology. And every creature on the planet down to like protoplankton sleeps. So 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- That's a great way to think about it. Because you know, I talked about you feel guilty sleeping. Because you think of it as i guess maybe culturally we think of it as not doing something

yeah i'm gonna not do something yeah and go to sleep that has been the motto to be like no i need to do something for for my, I need to go sleep. Yes. Yes. No, that's true. You put a sign on your door, say, I'm working here, and take a nap. That's one of the takeaways of the book. Maybe you don't need to read the book.

We can have you. Brody's going to sum it up for us. Brody, sum it up 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 bestseller. Enlightenment Trap. Enlightenment Trap, The Wedge. And The Vortex.

There's a lot of books. Then you're, what, The Red Trade? And The Red Market. The Red Market. And soon, Time to Nap, or whatever I'm going to 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, ride on, ride on, let it ride on. I want to see your gray hair shine like silver in the sun Ride on, ride on, ride on Sweetheart, we're done beat this damn horse to death Take a new one and ride on.

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