Part One: Wim Hof's Surprisingly Deadly Story

Robert sits down with James Stout to tell the grisly tale of Wim Hof, who got famous for teaching celebrities how to hyperventilate and has a much darker backstory than you'd guess.

(2 Part Series)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Ah, Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where I
Robert Evans am pulling a power move on Sophie with
the script of today's episode. Again, you want me to
send it, Sophie excited, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Do you want pain and suffering? I will drive to
your house. I will. I will literally end this zoom call.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah yeah, you might, you might, you might.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
People can't see it, so if he has an axe
behind it, I got her that act probably a mistake.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
I'm so nervous to open this.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
Uh uh huh. I know it's it's a Schrodinger's script.
It could be a fake again, it could be the
real script. You never know, dead cat, who is the
real script?

Speaker 2 (00:48):
The real script? Because you're a fucking coward. That's why.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
Well, you don't want to do it every time. I'm
not going to do it two weeks in a row.
You'd expect it too much.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
Respect.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
I gotta luw you back into a false sense of
security and then send.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Me the right script, you motherfucker.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
This is the one use for chat GPT. I may
have it write a fake script that looks like on
the surface like it could be real, and then send
that to you. Some week and see how long it
takes before you get really angry.

Speaker 4 (01:16):
I gotta be honest. I've read the first who said
it's a chat scheep, but you can write that shit.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
You are an artiste.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
Thank you, Thank you. Speaking of art. Our guest for today,
James Stout, a man whose life is a work of art. James,
how are you doing today? So much better for that? Roman?
Thank you? Welcome? Yeah? Sor are your spear gun triggers
not working ideally? Yeah? Yeah, I'm going to make it work.

(01:42):
It's okay. The joy of building weapons for yourself is
the long period through which they don't work, to figure
out what tiny thing you've gotten wrong, hopefully when it
discharges into you. Yes, as long as you don't point
them at yourself. Yeah, they are fun and rewarding. Why
barrel discipline is key? You know what else is key? James?

(02:07):
What is that? Root? Breath control and true? Yeah? Yeah,
Today we're talking about a guy who has gotten very
probably rich, I don't know his exact neck worth, but
certainly extremely famous for teaching people a series of very
specific breathing techniques. A fella that you may have heard

(02:28):
of that most of I'm gonna guess a lot of
our listeners have heard of named wim Hoff. James, Yeah,
you're you're aware of You're actually the guy who suggested
this episode. So what am I fucking around pretending like James?
What do you know about wim Hoff? Yeah? You know,
you know he's a dangerous grifter. Yes, I'm gonna guess
most of our audience don't because I really didn't, you know.

(02:50):
For for me, wim was a guy who you know
he was, He was on the scene. He's now spent
a lot of time in like Joe Rogan show, He's
been on like the Goop pod cast, and he's working
on a TV show with those people. But prior to that,
he was also pretty prominent. I back when I worked
at crack dot com like ten years ago, we featured
him in an article for some of the stuff he

(03:11):
would do and broad whim as a guy who like
uses a series of breathing and meditative techniques that he
claims basically renders him immune to the cold and capable
of extreme feats of heretofore thought impossible athletic prowess. He's
been studied and by scientists and a number of occasions
there are some things he's done that are impressive, although

(03:32):
we'll talk about it not in the way that he
claims usually. But you know, I was somebody who I
read about him. I read like, saw this video of
him like submerged in ice, you know, for a crazy
long period of time, or like hiking up Kilimanjaro in shorts,
and was like, Oh, that's impressive. Cool. I guess a
guy figured out some new endurance techniques, nifty, And I

(03:54):
kind of didn't think about it much more than that, right,
It was not. It wasn't one of those things. Wim
was not initially claiming I have cured cancer, you know,
or I've got like you know, you don't need vaccines,
just do my exercise techniques. He was just a guy
who was like, you actually have more control over your
body's reactions to cold than you think, and here's how
to do it, which didn't seem to me on the

(04:15):
service to be something particularly sketchy. And I'm gonna guess
most people were kind of in that broad bucket where
you were like, you saw some video of him, you
read some article, you're like, oh, neat, and then you
went on with your life. The truth is that he
is in fact a rather dangerous con man. Now, since
mister Hoff is a bit of a fame hound, it's

(04:36):
not hard to find interviews with him, and nearly all
of them summarize his career in similar ways. To set
the scene, I'd like to read an excerpt from an
article in The Mirror, which is a shitty tabloid but
reasonably representative of the tone a lot of websites use
when talking about whim Hoff. That's why I'm quoting it,
not to not because the Mirror is a reliable source on.

Speaker 3 (04:56):
Anything Brinn's left wing press.

Speaker 1 (04:58):
Yeah. Quote, but a daredevil record holder dubbed the Iceman,
showed he can keep a cool head after scrambling to
the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in record time. Wim Hoff,
fifty five, holds a whopping twenty six Guinness World records
for extreme sports challenges, including running a full marathon above
the Arctic Circle wearing only a pair of shorts. But
father of five, whim from Sittard, Holland, proved he has

(05:19):
ice in his veins after his eighteen strong climbing groups
scaled Africa's highest mountain in a record time of thirty
one hours and twenty five minutes.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
Now, James, it does sound by chat GPT. We show
that that one wasn't. I am absolutely not sure that
could have been chat GPT, but it is. If it was,
it's because they cut up a bunch of other newspapers
talking about whim.

Speaker 1 (05:38):
They all use that kind of tone. Now, James, do
you want to guess what percentage of the claims made
in those three sentences are true? Zero? Yeah, zero, every
single thing. I just read you as a lie. A
couple of them, my hood, nos like that. That doesn't
sound right. See, I'm sure about that. But you will

(06:00):
see those not just repeated by the Mirror. You know,
for example, the Guardian pretty well respected paper, not someone
something would consider just like a tabloid generally. And here's
their summary from a recent article about the Iceman. Wim
Hoff is known as the Iceman. He earned his name
after setting twenty six Guinness World records, which includes swimming
under ice, running a half marathon, a of the Arctic Circle, bear,

(06:23):
submerging himself in ice for an hour and fifty two minutes,
and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in just shorts and sandals. Now,
this will tell you something about like what good journalism
is worth versus bad journalism because the amount of things
that are correct in that sentence is higher than zero percent. Right,
that's good to hear. Yeah, there are four claims in there,

(06:45):
and one of them is accurate. Okay, so that's good.
Well it's we strive. We strive for a little more
and then you can say two of them are accurate,
but not in a meaningful way. We'll talk about it later.
So mind chik. This is probably a significant surprise to
most people who have kind of casually heard about whim

(07:05):
because for seven or eight years he's been very good
at not just performing feats of endurance, but doing it
while hooked up to equipment monitored by actual scientists from
like reputable universities who have confirmed some of the health
benefits of the breathing techniques he claims to have pioneered.
But the real story behind wim Hoff breathing and the
man himself is much shadier than that. Now, given that

(07:28):
he is a semi beloved figure too many, I want
to start us off by making the states clear. But
the stake's clear because the breathing techniques that wim uses
he did not really invent, but they're not bad, right,
He's not like lying about it. There are uses for
these techniques. They go back much further than wim Hoff.
We'll talk about the origins and like, the ice bathing

(07:48):
stuff that he does is not inherently bad. There are
some potential health benefits to cold water exposure when you
do it in certain controlled ways. Right. Again, the way
he tends to teach people about it is pretty reckless,
but fundamentally there are aspects of the things he teaches
that are not like inherently toxic. However, I want to
start again by making the stakes clear, which is that

(08:10):
there are multiple allegations in court that the irresponsible training
methods by Whim and his organization Inner Fire, have led
to the deaths of between twelve and fifteen people. So yeah,
we are not talking about like, well he's just like
bullshits around. We're talking about, like there's body count for
this episode, right, That's why we're talking about the guy.
If he was a dude who just got like some
rich people from Santa Monica to like do ice bats

(08:33):
and like particularly right, I have a lot of respect
for that. Yeah, yeah, well that's fine. I don't take
their money. I don't give a shit.

Speaker 3 (08:39):
Yeah, I have a lot of respect for the guy
on the one wheel who gets rich people to crawl
on their backs along train tracks.

Speaker 1 (08:45):
He's absolutely, absolutely, like, I got no problem with those
guys who do those like fake Navy seal trainings that
convince like, I don't know, finance bros in their thirties
to like, yeah, crawl backwards over train tracks, like you said, like, yeah,
finance whatever praxies there, willing has been ten grand to
do that for four days. Gives a shit.

Speaker 3 (09:06):
Yeah, it's the best thing they could be doing with
that time and money, if we're honest.

Speaker 1 (09:09):
Yeah, yeah now. Wim Hoff was born on April twentieth,
nineteen fifty nine, in Sittard Limberg, the Netherlands. He was
one of ten children and is also a twin. In
his book The Way of the Iceman, he claims he
came out as something of a surprise. Quote. After his
mother had given birth to his twin brother Andre, no

(09:31):
one noticed that a second child was on the way.
When the doctors had left, his mother started to feel
contractions coming on again. His mother, a Catholic, prayed the
second child would also be born healthy. She expressed the
hope that if it were healthy, the child would grow
up to be a missionary. WiM's mother told this story regularly,
and Wim believed the circumstances of his birth and his
mother's strength had a great influence on him. So that's

(09:53):
his claim right born to be a missionary. You know,
his mom prayed him into being divine, he chose, mm hmm. Yeah.
That just strikes me as something to someone who's parent
to bullshitting might say, yeah, it does seem like like
that might be the case with Whim. So he's not
a great writer. In this book, The Way of the
Ice Man, he is credited along with Cohen Deong. I

(10:16):
don't know, you know, you know these names, it's Danish names,
like I'm doing my best here whatever as the author
of this book, and I guess the safe assumption is
that neither of them are good at writing books. His
stories about his early life are inconsistent, although not necessarily conflicting,
with the stories that he gives like the stories he
gives in this book are inconsistent with stories he's given

(10:37):
in interviews and on podcasts, but they don't necessarily conflict.
It's just he tells weirdly different stories each time he's
asked about his background. It's not one of the with
a lot of grifters, it's like, oh, these are all
clearly lies, because all of these things can't be true
with whim. It's more like, why did you ignore that
detail that you included in your book in this recitation

(10:57):
of your background, Like that seems kind of using to me.
In some interviews, he claims that his father died in
a mountaineering accident when he was a young boy, and
says that this made him determine to conquer the mountains.
Bad lesson to learn from your dad dying mountaineering. By
the way, lesson you should learn is respect the mountains.
Mountains are very dangerous. You can try and coquer them,
but yeah, they lie, fight back. They are much older

(11:20):
than you. Yeah. Yeah, they've seen a few people come
and go. Yeah's dad. Yeah, including his dad. In the
way of the ice Man, though he gives a different
story as to why he decides to get into conquering
the mountains and doing weird cold weather stuff. Haff was
fascinated by the cold from a very early age. One
freezing winter's night when he was seven, a neighbor found

(11:41):
him in the snow. Strongly attracted by the white landscape,
Haff had climbed out of bed, crept outside, and fallen
asleep in the snow. If his neighbor had not discovered him,
he probably would have frozen to death. I know, man, why, Yeah,
that seems it's a normal no behavior, seems like congenitally
bad assessment. Yeah. Yeah, there's something in the water in

(12:04):
the Hoff household which has him to make poor choices. Yeah,
something in the Hoff in the male Hoff brain that
does not want to pass on their genes. He does
not mention his dad dying at all in this book, though,
in fact I didn't really come across I'm not going
to claim I read this thing like fucking Ulysses, but
I did not come across him even talking about his
dad here. One thing he is consistent about is that

(12:27):
he experimented a lot with the cold as an adolescent.
He does bring this up in every interview that he
that he discusses. This started with him sitting in the
snow for hours and hours at a time, sometimes sleeping
outside in the winter without a tint or a sleeping bag.
We don't know how much of this is true, but
as we'll discuss. He makes other claims later about his
fascination with enduring extreme temperatures. When he was thirteen, Whim

(12:49):
claims he spent his fall holiday reading a book about psychology,
and later wrote the psychological terminology gave birth to my
inquisitive mind and the urge to philosophy everything around me.
It was then that I began to see the world
in a different light, all at once. I wanted to
learn about different cultures, traditions, and new languages. Now in
the way of the ice Man. He claims that this
process started when he was nine, and that his interest

(13:10):
was sparked by his older brother, who had hitchtiked around
the Middle East and the Far East and came back
with strange and wonderful tales. Wim goes on to claim
that he was so impressed by how his brother had
changed that he stopped listening in church and focused instead
on meditation techniques that he'd learned from Hindu and Buddhist texts.
He went to school only with a healthy reluctance. He

(13:32):
then has his autobiographer describe him as quote a self willed, clever,
and cheerful young boy, which I do find a little
bit off putting when you're clearly writing this description of
yourself as a kid. At least make it up as
a quote from someone else.

Speaker 3 (13:47):
Bro, Yeah, you've gone down that Rabbi hole, like just
to continue to fabricate.

Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah. So the specific meditative practices that Whim was drawn
to most is called tumo meditation t ummo, sometimes g tumo,
g dash t ummo. These are a set of meditative
breathing techniques that are part of the Vajrayana tantric Buddhist practices.
Considered in their full context, toumo, which translates to inner

(14:15):
fire in Tibetan, is a meditative technique that goes along
with visualizations and rituals that are believed to help alleviate
mental and physical pain. Tumo breathing has been studied by
researchers and it has been shown to allow practitioners to
increase their body temperature and for a long time that
has been associated with at least temporary relief from a
number of ailments. Western researchers have been studying tumo breathing

(14:39):
since the early nineteen eighties, but the practices themselves go
back a very long time. These are basically different kinds
of hyperventilation techniques. Right, So these are things, These are
things that go back a long time, this kind of
breathing techniques, and there are certain physiological changes that can
be useful in some ways that they are tied to.
In most versions of this story, Whim will say that

(15:00):
his journey from being a guy or to being a
guy who spends all of his time in the cold
started me was seventeen and he found himself possessed with
an inexplicable urge to dive into a half frozen canal
in Amsterdam. Here's how he related that story to The Guardian.
I was quite a thinker, a philosopher, but one day
I felt attracted to the freezing water. I jumped into
a canal in Amsterdam and thought, this is it. That

(15:22):
deep connection I felt that day was the starting point.
Every day for forty five years, I've gone into the cold.
And this is more things are a little bit weird
because these don't necessarily conflict that like in the earliest
versions of his story, he would just say like, yeah,
when I was seventeen, I just felt this urge to
jump into a canal, and that got me started doing
these cold weather exposure, you know, experiments. But in the

(15:44):
more recent stuff that he's written or said about his background,
he claims that, like, oh, I was like eight or
nine and my neighbor just found me sleeping outside in
the snow. No one could explain it. Like he keeps
pushing the timeline back. Yeah, and like going from like yeah,
like a lot of when we have seventeen year old
boys feel nurge to do stupid shit, right, It's kind
it's kind of the scene quion of being a seventeen

(16:05):
year old boy in many ways. But to take it
from like, yeah, from birth, I was like attracted to
the cold because I'm specialist. Kind of my version of
this is that when I was seventeen, I felt an
overpowering urge to pour an entire pint glass of a
fucking jim bean and see what happens if I drink
it all at once. How did I go for you, Robert?

(16:26):
You know, I developed a new set of meditative breathing
techniques that I could teach you for just twelve thousand dollars.

Speaker 3 (16:33):
He breathed from the stomach upwards and with the content so.

Speaker 1 (16:37):
Shallowly on my side while while while coughing up vomit. Yes,
that's the that's the real technique. You will not notice
if you're in the cold. What's true. Once you're drunk enough,
once you've alcohol poisoned yourself and becomes secondary concerned alcohol
poison yourself to better health. That's that's my breathing technique.
So he goes into a bit more detail about his

(16:59):
journey here in a Discovery magazine interview from a few
years ago. Even today, he has a difficult time explaining
the impulse. I felt this attraction to the cold water,
he says, and then after I went in, I felt
this understanding, an inside connection. It gave me a rush.
My mind was free of gibberish. It was so good,
in fact, that he returned the next day to take
the plunge again, and he continued through the winter and beyond,

(17:19):
along the way, evolving his breathing technique, which is based
on the centuries old Tibetan Buddhist practice known as Tumo meditation,
but features none of its spiritual trappings. Now, this canal
story is present in basically every interview where Wim talks
about his past, but oddly enough, he doesn't list it
as part of his journey in the Way of the Iceman.
There he goes for a more exotic story, claiming that

(17:41):
he traveled to India as a young adult to find
a teacher who knew more about what was really important
in life. His biographer insists to us he was looking
for a deeper spiritual understanding. And I feel like I
have to read the next couple paragraphs of this to
you verbatim so you can truly appreciate how insufferable this
man is. James. He flew to Karachi and took a

(18:02):
train to New Delhi in search of yogis. He slept
in the enormous Berla Mandir Temple complex. He met the
owner of a tea house and the rebellious son of
a carpet magnate. There these two men persuaded Hoff to
accompany them to Rishikesh and Badrinath, two places of pilgrimage
on the Ganges. This colorful trio set off together a
strong bearded Sia Kuran, a tea house, a black sheet

(18:22):
from the carpet industry who could get anything he wanted,
and he was fed up with the corruption of his
world and haff They thought Hoff was crazy because he
went swimming in the Ganges a couple of times a day.
Hoff even swam across to the other side no mean
feet given the strong current. He was also impressed. He
also impressed them with the acrobatic yoga exercises he could do,
despite never having had a yoga lesson in his life.

(18:43):
In India, Haff discovered that his autodidactic approach had already
brought him a long way. He could already stand on
one leg and put the other leg behind his neck,
a position many people left to practice for years to master.
His traveling companions remained behind in an ashram, but Haff
didn't feel at home there. He didn't like the klingi
cozy atmosphere of the foreign participants, and although many of
the yogis had learned very special techniques, he didn't like

(19:05):
the way they profited from them. He also discovered that
he could not learn much from them, as he had
already mastered their tricks. He continued his travels alone on foot,
just me just the best. Why I went to India,
But I knew more than all of the teachers, and
they were doing it for money, which is bad unlike me,
who's I am pure fucking celebrity guru.

Speaker 3 (19:27):
Now, yeah, I'm soiled killing people in the swimming pools.
We've all met this guy as well, right, absolutely, anyone
who has left the United States has encountered this guy
in some place in the global South.

Speaker 1 (19:40):
They are insufferable. Also, I love that he's like they
were mystified that I swam in the Ganji. I was like, man,
I've been to Rishikesh. I have swam in the ganjis
in the Rishikesh I know exactly where he did. It's
not that you got to be careful, right, Sometimes the
current is too much, Right, there are times that you
don't want to be swimming in the ganjis. But like

(20:00):
Rishikesh is up in the far north, it's in the
Himalayan foothills, it's relatively clean. Lots of people swim and
raft in the gangs up there. Not weird to see
people doing it. No one's going to be like, oh,
white man swimming in the Ganges. Like we're not talking
about being like down like fucking south of Delhi where
you've got a lot of affluvia in it, and it's
a lot like less safe to swim in the ganjis

(20:22):
because like you've got cities and stuff like you are
talking about a place where a lot of people do this. Anyway, whatever, Whim,
come on the Hoff.

Speaker 3 (20:33):
Yeah he used his last name, that Hoff, giving himself
a little stolen hoff Fata.

Speaker 1 (20:38):
Yeah that's right, that's right. So in this version of events,
Wim describes feeling an overpowering urge to leap under a
massive waterfall. The water was so cold it stopped him
from being able to think. Quote, the sensation of a
strength and power greater than himself took hold of him.
Since then, he has loved ice cold water. So now
we're at like three or four different stories about like

(21:00):
how he came to experiment with ice cold water emerging.
I guess, yeah, yeah, it does clear the mind. I went, like,
I remember, I think I have plunged into the waterfall
he's talking about, if it's the one that's a little
north of Rishikesh.

Speaker 3 (21:15):
Right, he just didn't turn me into a giant rift.
Like my first experience with extremely cold water, I think
was I was pack rafting in Alaska and we stopped
on like a chunk of an iceberg, and because I'm
a boy, I pissed from the top of it, right,
because that's the sort of standard operating procedure. And then
from there I jumped off it into the water having

(21:36):
not done up the like the relief zipper on on
the on the dry suit, and it certainly clears the
mind when you when you hit water which is like
just above freezing.

Speaker 1 (21:46):
Yes, it's dangerous too, you know, dangerous out You gotta
be real careful with the water. In that moment, it
felt pretty dangerous. I didn't want to go back. That's
that's that's smart, James. But you know who can never die?

Speaker 3 (22:00):
Uh Elon musk Uh.

Speaker 1 (22:03):
That remains yet to be seen. But our sponsors of
our podcast, all of them are willing to fight Elon
in a steel cage at the house. Yeah yeah, at
their house if if you're in also, I am. By
the way, Elon, let's let's go, buddy. It has been
thrown down.

Speaker 5 (22:24):
Yeah yeah, and the weird back.

Speaker 2 (22:36):
I would bet on you.

Speaker 1 (22:37):
Thank you me too, thank you, Sophie. I would also
bet on me against Elon.

Speaker 3 (22:41):
Would you do it like full duel style? Would you
like let him pick the weapons and then look, because
that's that's the if you issue a challenge, he should
be picking the weapons, right, sure, why not?

Speaker 1 (22:52):
What if he chooses Teslas? Oh then we'll both die? Yeah,
I got you children? Uh yeah, fine, you'll go down
a hero. Yeah, yeah, the way I always wanted to. So.
Soon after which, again, if you're taking the claim that
he encountered coldwater immersion in fucking India, then soon after

(23:16):
this he decides to go home, having learned everything he
can from mysticism in Southeast Asia and decided to go
home and devote himself to unlocking the powerful spiritual benefits
of being in cold water. He returns home to Amsterdam
at age twenty, and he sets up in a squat
with about ninety other people. By his own description, he

(23:37):
ate very little food and mostly did yoga, avoiding the
drugs the other squatters did. Now, I might say that
starving yourself and doing yoga for twenty hours a day
could theoretically be less healthy for you than just doing
some fucking k and eating schwarma, but that's a personal choice.
People are allowed to do whatever. So he seems to

(23:59):
have basically spent this time busking by teaching yoga in
the park, which is again fine. And one day, while
he's doing this, this thing that he had also criticized
these Indian yogis for, by the way, kind of worth
note in taking money. Yeah, he meets his future wife,
Oleah Fernandez. She moves in with him, and he claims

(24:20):
for a year they didn't have sex, which I was
not going to ask about, h yeah in the book. Yeah,
but he wants us to know. So now we have
to fucking interrogate this. Yeah, let's go, he says. He
does explain why they didn't fuck, and it's because, quote
Hoff's what life was devoted to yoga, and his Spanish
girlfriend respected that. And I always, I always find it

(24:43):
a little weird. It's fine if you're like, he met
his wife, you know, a basque woman from from you know,
Spain or whatever. Okay, Like that's that's fine for whatever reason,
Just like the way, just like describing her as his
Spanish girlfriend, I do find slightly off putting. Yeah, I
can't exactly tell you why. Yeah, she's like a character
in a story he's telling him by himself. Yeah, we'll

(25:04):
be talking about her a bit. So she goes home
after they're together for like a very sexless year, according
to Whim, and the next thing that happens in his
life that he talks about in his book is a
bike trip to Senegal, which is very spiritual to him.
I don't care. It's very boring, James. His spiritual journey
is boring his ass. I much prefer like I don't

(25:25):
know l Ron Hubbard's. But he claims after Senegal he
goes back to India and he studies under Yogi's this time,
I guess he finds someones that have lessons to teach him.
Still non profit yogis, Yeah, nonprofit yogis. We have no idea,
no way of knowing if any of this is true.
But given how inconsistent his story is, I'm going to
throw serious doubt on this next passage quote. He trained

(25:48):
his body in mind under extreme conditions. Sometimes he spent
several days at great heights while enduring temperatures of negative
two degrees without food negative two degrees celsius without food.
He discovered a new way to survive the extreme cold,
controlling his breathing. With breathing exercises, he could transform his
fear and the negative experience of the cold into a
powerful form of energy. He saw his body in a

(26:09):
new way and learned that breathing is an important instrument.
This was also where he learned his breathing exercises. So
I don't know. I don't believe that, but that's one
of the claims that he makes about his background. He
tells different stories in other mediums. In some interviews, he
claims that he learned to control his body temperature through

(26:32):
diving in the freezing canals and other cold weather exercise
in the Netherlands. I'm not sure that's how that works.
It is not how that works, but here's how he made.
I want to read a claim that he makes in
a Reddit ama that this guy sounds powerfully Reddit. He
makes some fascinating claims in his AMA. So here's iceman Hoff.

(26:56):
Because our natural ability to withstand cold makes us not
able to freeze and not go below zero degrees. If
your cells go below that temperature, you get a reparable damage.
If you exposure self for that temperature, your body knows
what to do to not freeze. The body is able
to go to the extremities besides the core, which remains
thirty seven degrees. I can do all that stuff. I
trained with kung fu masters in Beijing and they respected

(27:18):
me very much. Kung kung fu masters in Beijing just
throws that out there in the reddit. Enemy. I haven't
seen that elsewhere, but I guess in between the yogis
and the top of mountains, he went and trained with
some kung fu masters stew and then they respected me
very much. Fuck me. The orientalism is so profound, it

(27:42):
is out it is outstanding orientalism. He missed travel to
the eighteen forties to get orientalism like this normally. Yeah,
this guy could have crushed it and oh my god,
he would have been huge. Yeah yeah, like he could
been on some learns for Arabia shit, but he would
have been almost to god until he died of fucking
tetanus at age thirty seven ye bacterian infection from the Thames,

(28:06):
trying to show off his breathing techniques. And it's very so.
He says that, like I trade with kung fu masters,
they respected me very much. The response, the one Reddit
response whom jam Brooklyn is just very inspiring. Thank you.
Oh yeah, fuck me. He's really getting high on his

(28:29):
own supply here, believably so. And again yeah. So. One
of the things I find intriguing about whim is that
this is not the kind of situation we see all
the time where grifter kind of workshops a version of
their life story and there are inconsistencies in the past,
and then they pick a story and stick with it, right,

(28:49):
And if you dig into it you can find like, oh,
they used to tell a different story, but they tend to,
like when they get famous, stick with a version of events, right,
because that's the smart thing to do. What's interesting to
me about what he's so inconsistent still to this day
with like his exact journey and like when he had
his revelations and when he got inspired to do what

(29:10):
just very interesting to me how he has drunk guide
to ba and she has not like experienced scrift or energy. Yeah,
which I think is probably part of what works for
him is that he does seem a little bit less
polished than some of these more explicit con men. Yes, yeah,
he's not like aodh and he doesn't look like like
he's not If people are watching there listening to this,

(29:32):
and like they haven't looked at wim Hoff, you want
to look at wim Hoff because it's not the extreme
mountain athlete you're probably thinking of. No, No, he does
kind of look like a normal man in his fifties
from you know this part of the world, so up
to the present day, he continues to give different anecdotes
about his path to figuring out his special breathing techniques.

(29:53):
The Way of the Iceman came out in twenty seventeen,
but you can find articles from the twenty twenties where
he tells the Canals story instead. I do find that
book to be the most interesting version of his backstory,
in part because of how badly written and off putting
it is. So after his time in Senegal, Wim breaks
up the narrative with a message to the reader, which

(30:14):
basically says, Hey, we know you're probably wondering why we're
getting all these bullshit stories about spiritualism and shit and
a book ostensibly about breath control exercises. Don't worry, we'll
tell you soon. But first quote, we must share the
sad story of Whim's wife, Olayah. You ready for this, James,

(30:35):
I don't think I am. You are not ready for this.
It's impossible to be ready for this. Hit me with
the Yeah, I'm going to hit you with my best shot,
so fire away. That is a peculiar way of introducing
what will prove to be a very dark story. So
before going back to India to study with Yogi's, maybe

(30:57):
Haff returned to Amsterdam and met with Oleya. They got
married and they had a son in nineteen eighty three,
presumably after he got back from studying in the mountains
with Yogi's, although he doesn't say. They had two daughters
soon after. But it was too cold for Olea in
the Netherlands, so they moved to the Pyrenees and Wilm
got it a job teaching English. Now. Whim claims that

(31:20):
he took to mountain climbing up in the Pyrenees with
basically no gear. He'd go up in like shorts and
shoes and nothing else and stuff as a hobby, right,
so that he could he could just feel alive. He's
got to like go up there without proper safety equipment,
otherwise he doesn't. He's not on the edge. He's not alive.
Now this pisses off his wife because they have three
children together, and she's like, you are taking dumb risks

(31:42):
with your life for no reason, and like we have
kids that we're responsible for. Would you give us a
fact criticism if you're just a dude and your hobby
is risking your life in unnecessary ways. You got a
right to do that, you know, Yeah, to a point,
as long as you're not endangering other people with it.

(32:02):
When you have three kids with someone, you are kind
of a dick for continuing to do that is a
douche move. Yeah, like you have a responsibility. Now, you
gotta at least get those kids out the door before
you go back to your suicide.

Speaker 3 (32:15):
How did your father die? Yeah, well he was hiking
in his box of shorts in the parodies, being a.

Speaker 1 (32:20):
Dumb ass, and so I here him every day by
continuing his legacy being a stupid asshole in the mouth.

Speaker 3 (32:27):
I like to ghost ride my car.

Speaker 1 (32:28):
Yeah exactly, now now you say that, James, Actually you
may be unaware of this. Ghost riding the whip is
the most reliable way to treat uh uh chemo resistant
forms of cancer. Oh fruscinating. Yeah, doctors agree. It's really
the most antioxidant rich activity you can engage in. Ghost
riding your car. Yeah, bigger the car, the better. Just

(32:51):
rent an eighteen wheeler and and just fucking get that
thing going downhill and then just tuck and roll. Baby. Okay,
you you actually okay, you don't go right on top
of it. You that is actually more terrorism. Actually, hey,
when I think of it, that.

Speaker 2 (33:05):
This bit is bad. Shut the fuck up.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
Uh huh, that's is that, Sophie. You don't you don't
like no ghost writing? You don't like ghostwriting?

Speaker 2 (33:14):
No, I don't. I don't like uh fake wink cancer.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
Oh I love a good fake cancer here, Sophie. That's
like our bread and butter. Yeah, none of us would
have jobs if people didn't have fakes for answer, Sophie, Yeah, yes,
but no. Okay, Well, Sophie doesn't like my retirement plan,
but that's not going to stop me from retiring. Uh
so where were we? Just like, no one's going to

(33:41):
stop that wheeler rob it rub the energy of a
least truck paraly down the freeway, gets pissed at him
for risking his life when they've got kids together, pointlessly
uh And eventually he agrees to stop doing his suicide
climbs and instead devotes his free time to learning how
to hold his breath underwater. Eventually he gets up to

(34:01):
six minutes. Now. When I first read that, I was like,
that sounds like bullshit. I don't think people can hold
their breath that long. Turns out they can. Yeah, it's
actually totally doable. I was when I was looking this up.
You know what, the longest anyone's ever held their breath
for underwater eight minutes twenty four fun. Now, that is
the longest anyone's done it with oxygen pre breathing. Right, Okay,

(34:24):
it's not like they're not like raw Dog in it
right there in Haley pure O two before. But still,
that's fucking wild. That is wild. It's like whale numbers
a half man, half dolphin. Yeah, without pre breathing. The
record is eleven minutes and fifty four seconds, which is
fucking nuts. That is so long to hold bad.

Speaker 3 (34:45):
Yeah, get bored, like you got to work onto mind
exercises to think of Sudoku down there, something.

Speaker 1 (34:51):
Taxes or some shit. Yeah, so it's plausible. Whim very
likely probably can do something like this, given some of
the other stuff I've seen him do. So I'll give
them that. In the way of the Ice Man, he
claims that around this time, while he's spending god knows
how long preparing to hold his breath underwater, his wife
starts disappearing for periods of time because she is severely depressed,

(35:15):
and she will regularly threatened to commit suicide. He says
that they returned to Amsterdam because he no longer felt
safe with her in their farmhouse, which is very sad.
This is to some extent true. They have another kid though,
while this is all going on, and then after they
have this last kid, Olea abandons them again for a

(35:37):
period of time. Now in numerous other storeses sources, he
says that Oleah was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. This includes
in twenty seventeen in the Way of the Iceman. He
also will sometimes just say that she was depressed. Obviously,
both of those things can go together. She does eventually
commit suicide, and this is very bleak. I want to

(35:58):
first read to you how that story is related in
a twenty seventeen Rolling Stone article, and then I'm going
to read how it's related in his book, because the
differences between the two of them are fascinating. So here's
that Rolling Stone article. Okay hit me. One day in
nineteen ninety five, after kissing her four children goodbye, she
jumped off the eighth floor of an apartment building. A

(36:19):
bit later, Hoff had a vision in which he saw
how his breathing technique could help people like his wife.
I can bring people back to tranquility. He once said,
my method can give them back control. So that's yeah,
very paragraph. That's just a choice, that is, that is
a series of choices. See, man, there, I think i'd
write that. Yes, fucked up in my mind, but you

(36:42):
know whatever, not worth getting into too much there. Yeah,
my judgment on the matter. But here's how he relates
the same story in his twenty seventeen book The Way
of the Iceman. One day, when Hoff was alone in
the mountains, Olea jumped from the eighth floor of her parents'
house in Pamplona. Olea was dead. Jennam, Isabelle, Laura and
Michael lost their mother, and Wim lost his wife. He

(37:04):
felt guilty and the children were devastated. Hoff devoted himself
to caring for his children, occasionally retreating to be alone
with nature to recharge his batteries. In those years, he
was a well known figure in the Vondel Park. With
ropes and ballet equipment, he showed young children how to
climb the highest trees. The children learned that they could
do more than they thought was possible. Hoff enjoyed the
natural surroundings, even in the heart of Amsterdam. Later, wim

(37:26):
remarried and had another son, So that's also a paragraph,
quite a page or whatever that just gets across. First,
how odd reading Whim's different life stories can be. Again,
they're not necessarily in conflict with each other, but they
all are so different in terms of what is emphasized
and claimed that it does feel peculiar and spoilers. In

(37:48):
both of those versions of the wim Hoff story, he
leaves out some very fucking important details which we are
about to get into. But James, you know what we're
going to get into first? Is it some advertising? Oh,
we are sure going to get James, you know what
I love about capitalism? No? Actually, no, please enlighten me.

(38:11):
Oh man, oh wow. First off, the fact that content
can be supported with ads. That's wonderful, which is a
sustainable situation. I was just thinking the other day, you know,
it would be a great way to run newspapers, make
it import That's a stable way to make sure people
have access to the best news at all times.

Speaker 3 (38:31):
And it helps because they sort of the press holds
people in power to account. So it's important that it's
also advertising.

Speaker 1 (38:37):
Yeah, yeah, Critical Critical, So be a part of that
by buying whoever it is you you hear from next
you know, if it's a Reagan coin, it's the Washington
State Highway Patrol. Send them money. Just send money to
a random phone number on Venmo. You know what type
numbers and VINDI and the spreads and joy spreads and
joy will you than the Reagan guy if you've got

(39:00):
a pot of money and you're thinking about what to
send it random Venmo? James, I don't think it's responsible
to advise our listeners not to invest in Reagan coins.

Speaker 3 (39:09):
Because they will be quadrupling in value.

Speaker 1 (39:13):
I'm sure it. Is it a crypto type coin or
is it a physical I don't know. There's fiscal coin.
I skipped through that ship. You didn't read the pdf.

Speaker 2 (39:22):
Hey, here's an idea.

Speaker 4 (39:23):
How about people don't do that and they they subscribe
if they are able and want to to cooler zon media,
and then they don't get any ads.

Speaker 3 (39:33):
Wow, or alternatively these drawings of monkeys that you can
buy on the internet. That's a great thing to spend
your money on.

Speaker 2 (39:42):
James, no way.

Speaker 1 (39:44):
I have reinvested the whole company pension plan into smart
because we have.

Speaker 2 (39:49):
We totally have that, mm hmm.

Speaker 3 (39:51):
And that's why our motto is the fast Diana.

Speaker 1 (39:54):
I got an incredible deal on Jimmy Fallon's monkey dry
This is it on the boat? Yeah, it could be
on a boat. That's up to you.

Speaker 4 (40:03):
You can.

Speaker 1 (40:04):
We only write your monkey drawing nice anyway. And I
must paint and update that bad boy now products we're back.
So I've just read two different claims or versions of

(40:26):
the story of Whim's wife, Oliah's suicide, and this brings
me to a fella named Scott Carney. Now, in addition
to having a funny name, Scott is an American journalist.
He is an author and anthropologist who, in my opinion,
made some serious moral lapses as a reporter when he
started writing about whim Hoff. We'll be talking about that

(40:47):
in more detail in Part two. He says that he
met wim while working on a book about the Enlightenment
and the spiritualism grift industry. This is a critical book
about like guru grifters, right, like the guy and the
guy that wim Hoff is, right, who's writing this book.
But he becomes kind of enraptured with women, particularly with
how well his breathing technique works, so he writes an

(41:09):
article and then eventually a book on wim In Scott's
work like writing on whim is a big part of
like why wim Hoff becomes famous, right he Scott plays
a significant role in sort of the birth of him
as a major media figure. He has come to regret
aspects of the role he played here, largely because of
all those deaths. Well, the people definitely died. It's alleged

(41:32):
that wim Hoff's training has as and there's fourth cases
currently continuing. So he seems to have come to regret
some of this, and he wrote a blog post recently
called the Rise and Fall of the wim Hoff Empire,
which we will be referring back to several times in
these episodes. That article includes a very different story about

(41:52):
Oliah's death and particularly what happened after. So again in
you know, just going back to the book, he says
that you know, well, he was devastated obviously after his
wife committed suicide, and he devoted himself to caring for
his children and like teaching other kids in the park
and whatnot in order to deal with his grief. And
then later whim we married and had another son. That's

(42:13):
the version that the book gives, broadly in line with
what he usually says in interviews. Most versions of the
wim Hoff story make a big deal about the fact
that his wife commits suicide and he is left to
raise their four children alone as a single father. Obviously,
that is a noteworthy thing about anyone's life who has
a similar cher. I can imagine very few experiences or
in situations more difficult in demanding than being left as

(42:36):
a single parent to raise four kids alone. That's a
very difficult thing to deal with, very much worth mentioning
in someone's biography, I would say, much more impressive than
hiking up a mountain in shorts. Yes, perhaps more beneficial, yes, yeah. Now.
In a video interview with WMX Presents, currently about two
point one million views, wim says this about his wife's

(42:59):
death children. I had with my wife, and I was
to be with her forever. She was the love of
my life. She died, She suicided. It's a black hole
within yourself. It breaks your heart and you don't know why,
but the train of daily life is going on and
you've got to catch up otherwise you lose it. So
I had to be there for my children. And yes
we created a new nest. My children made me survive
in that time, but nature healed my wounds. So again,

(43:22):
very focused on the idea that he bravely takes on
his kids and they help each other heal after this.
That is not the version of the story that Scott
Carney gives in this ride up quote. After his wife's death,
he began a relationship with a woman in another city
and left his kids to survive alone in a squat
house in Amsterdam. The eldest Innam was only fifteen years

(43:43):
old when he became the family's surrogate dad. Eventually, Hoff's
relationship with the woman ended, and he found himself with
a thirty thousand euro tax debt that seemed to be
the impetus to reconnect with his family. Ah there we go, Oh,
there we go. Now we got some of that classic
bas abandoning your family and then coming back to get
pay your tax bill. Ah, there we go. That's that

(44:07):
good ship you feel that deep in your that's like
as like the spiritual equivalent of a nice bowl of
gaspacho right where you just feel it filling you up,
nourishing you. Yeah, I love it.

Speaker 3 (44:19):
Yeah, that's what I think about when I think about
someone abandoning that children.

Speaker 1 (44:23):
That's the exact noise I make. That is why I
do this podcast. Yeah, the joy that spots in your
eyes was really made it for me. Now that's that's
bad person shit, right, Yes, look a douche move. I
have a lot of empathy for someone who loses a spouse.
There's a lot of bad behavior, even that can be
justified by just the madness of grief. But abandoning your

(44:45):
children to go shack up with somebody else and leaving
them alone in a squat with your fifteen year old
not acceptable behavior. You have a possibility to do better
than that for your kids. Oh wow, Yeah, and then
you just admit that from all his own rent should
just start know we saved each other man, you were
fuck you bounced Tomy. Now it gets even weirder than that, though,

(45:10):
because once he decided he needed to get back in
touch with his family, he asks his second oldest son,
because his oldest son is pissed about being made dad suddenly, yeah,
he asks his second oldest boy, Michael, to meet him
in the Vandell Park in Amsterdam. Quote, haff arrived early
and went for a swim in the park's pond. While
he was waiting, he paddled out for a fountain and

(45:31):
positioned himself over the spout to give himself an enema
he thought would cleanse out all of his destines or is.
He often likes to say, get the shit out. Well, yeah, well,
first off, you're a bastard for doing that in a
public fountain. You don't give yourself an innima in a
public fountain. You're gonna get your shit everywhere. You fucked

(45:53):
up that soil.

Speaker 3 (45:56):
Oh, that literally hurts everyone involved, Like what who does that?

Speaker 1 (46:03):
A fucking piece of asshole, A bastard.

Speaker 3 (46:07):
That is not a normal maneuver.

Speaker 1 (46:09):
I'm going to continue that quote. A recording of one
of our conversations in twenty thirteen, Hoff recounts that he
had done the park fountain enema at least one hundred
times to work ray but unbeknownst but that unbeknownst to him,

(46:32):
the park Service had changed the spigott on the fountain
to spray the narrower gauge some water, cutting through his
intestines like a knight filling his bows with dirty water.
He managed to make it back to store to shore
while blood and feces leaked from his rectum. Hoff's first

(46:54):
words to his son in a decade where that he
needed to go to a hospital.

Speaker 3 (47:05):
I would not welcome that man back into my life
at that point. I'm just gonna say that walk away.

Speaker 1 (47:10):
Your dad bounces to shack up with somebody you don't
know and leaves your fifteen year old brother in charge
after your mom kills herself, and the first time you
see him, he's crawling across the ground, blood and shit
looking out of him because he gave himself a fountain
in a up before hanging out. Yeah, better off done,
like did walk away? I like to hospital by Yeah,

(47:35):
this is all you, buddy. I love the Dutch park
service employee who saw this ninety nine times in red
lights wasn't going to be one hundred deep and then
to that shit immediately. I do love ye adding that story. Yeah,
I want to hear him.

Speaker 3 (47:51):
Someone to a pr for the man who replaced that spigot.
He's giving on cool people next week.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
So Scott climes that he pressed whim about, like, why
did you really decide to give yourself a fountain enema? Right?

Speaker 4 (48:05):
Like?

Speaker 1 (48:05):
Because Scott doesn't believe that he would have accidentally hurt
himself on the fountain without knowing it could be dangerous. Quote.
I asked Kauf if he had an inclination that the
fountain maneuver might hurt him, and whether hurting himself before
meeting his son might have been a way to show
his remorse for abandoning his children for a decade. You
get the feeling that you want to kill yourself and
want to end the story, not deliberately, but unconsciously, stop

(48:27):
this shit, even if you have to die. Something like
that was going on. Hoff said, so either if you
take kind of what they're saying, he felt so bad
that he felt like he had to do this to
kind of like express the sorrow in his heart, and
because he was so guilty for his failures. I kind
of think maybe he knew that his kids had very

(48:48):
valid reason to be angry at him, and he fucking
decided that the best thing he could do was injure
himself in order that they would feel bad for him,
so that he wouldn't have to deal with the actual
guilt that he has for failing them. Like I kind
of think this was another emotionally abusive thing by him

(49:11):
where he's like, well, yeah, if I fuck myself up,
then they can't be angry at me, right because they'll
have it will have to be dealing with this health problem.

Speaker 3 (49:18):
I will say, that's why the methodology is still fascinating
to me.

Speaker 1 (49:21):
Either way. Yeah, it's not not good decision making. Nobody's
gotta claim that.

Speaker 3 (49:25):
You could get your foot run over or somethink that
he commit to the bit.

Speaker 1 (49:30):
He sure did so. I was curious as to whether
or not Whim had discussed his Fountain injury with anyone
else during his many, many precedents, and I found a
terrible article in my research from a website called High
Existence by John Brooks. It is a listical titled thirteen
crazy facts about Iceman wim Hoff that nobody talks about.

(49:51):
The cover image is a crude photoshop of Whim's head
on the Night King from Game of Thrones. Now, oh cool,
get some good shit. Yeah. I this article and I
hate John Brooks who wrote it, but it is useful
for our purposes because it is written by a weirdo
freak who's obsessed with wim Hoff and has spent more
time listening to his podcast appearances and video interviews than

(50:11):
I ever will. Here is entry number six on that listicle.
In the Becoming the Ice Man subreddit, a user asked
how Wim got the scar over his belly button. He
received this reply About fifteen years ago. Wim was swimming
at a fountain at Amsterdam and decided to give himself
an enema on the nozzle of the jet. He says
he has done this before, but a few weeks earlier
the city altered the jet to have a more powerful spout,

(50:33):
so when he sat on the hose, the water cut
through his colon and intestines like a water knife. His son, Michael,
who he was meeting at the park, took him to
the er. Whim is a pretty good ability to resist pain,
so the hospital did not tree as him to surgery
immediately because they didn't understand as serious the injury was.
After a few hours, he fainted and they realized how
bad it was. The doctor stitched him up, but rightly

(50:54):
feared the risk of sepsis. It took him a long
time to recover. He says that he used no antibiotics.
Staring recovery a god always a chance for a grift.
I do love it. They was like, yeah, all they
say about the fact that this was their first time
meeting in a decade is his son Michael, who he
was meeting.

Speaker 3 (51:13):
At the park y Yeah, yeah, are amazing. What an
amazing way to turn that l into a dub just
being like, yeah, I owned the self inflicted colon injury.

Speaker 1 (51:23):
And here's the thing, the story we just read about
him doing this after abandoning his family, that comes from
Scott Carney's recorded notes, right. Scott also wrote the subreddit
post that I just read you. Yeah, So here's what
follows that version of the story in that post on
the subreddit. How do I know this? I'm Scott Carney,

(51:45):
author of a book about whim. I didn't include this
story in the book because how on earth do you
tell it and not lose track of the main story. Now,
But that's why you fucking get good at writing, isn't it.
That's why you get good at writing. Yeah, you don't
just abandon the fucking story. Like, and again, he's not
in the subreddit. He's not saying I hid the part

(52:05):
about him abandoning his family. He's saying I just didn't
tell about him getting his guts cut up. By a
water knife, right, But the reality is he hid both
of those things, right, Scott hides the fact that Wim
abandons his family and the story about him giving himself
the death enema. And this is why I think Scott's
one of our bastards here, right. Yeah, obviously the true story.

(52:28):
If the version that Scott is now giving is the
true story, right, we are I have to I assume
it probably is because Scott is claiming I have this recorded,
and if he was lying about this, that's a significant
legal liability, right because Scott's not He's putting this up
on his blog. He's not publishing this through an outlet
even who would be, you know, it would be incumbent
upon them to represent him. So he better you know.

Speaker 3 (52:51):
Yeah, I mean yeah, this Connie's Jetty is kind of
fascinating and I don't know if you can ever treat
him as truly credible. He has his own kind of
Oriental origin story that he tells as well.

Speaker 1 (53:04):
Yeah, and I we're not going to get as much
in that. We'll talk more about him in the next
episode though, But like, yeah, the truth, assuming that the
version he is giving now is a true story, it
paints a story of whom as a profoundly unbalanced man who,
whatever else you can say about him, should not be
the source of health and wellness advice. I remember one

(53:25):
who is habitually giving himself a public enema in a
public fountain. That's a man you shouldn't take health advice from.

Speaker 3 (53:33):
Yeah you, Yeah, you can be involuntarily constrained for doing
that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (53:38):
That none that should happen to him. I'm not saying
you should be, but you shouldn't be a health guru. Yes, yeah,
I think if you continue to do that after the
first time, you, yeah, you're not giving good advice to
the old health Well, you are not someone who can
be taken seriously on this sort of thing. Uh, you know,
maybe if you try it once when you're dumb and
young and you learn what a bad idea issue one

(53:59):
hundred times yeah, yeah times.

Speaker 3 (54:02):
It's only got a one percent fail rate.

Speaker 1 (54:04):
Yeah yeah, really can you afford not to? But yeah,
I think it is kind of damning because it's Scott's
article today, Like the one that he's written now, I
think is a reasonably good article. It does answer a
lot of questions about whim, but the fact that he
hides all this is really fucked up, and he I

(54:26):
think why he does this is that the business that
he knows Wim might do as a wellness influencer is
too enticing to risk fucking up by dropping this story.
But here is how Scott explains why he had this.
The story of Hoff abandoning his children and his near
fatal inemin never made it into my own book because
both my editor and I wanted to protect Hoff's reputation

(54:47):
from evidence of his own madness. It's a role that
many other journalists have also fallen into when they might
have otherwise doubled down on their fact checking efforts. And like,
this is not a fact checking issue, Scott, because he
admits to doing. You just have to tell the story
he's telling here. Yeah, like they didn't have enough time
and money to fact check it. Like and then he's

(55:08):
right that other people should maybe have fact checked it.
But sure, I'm sure everyone else cited him because especially
like health and wellness journalism, let's face it, like this,
people aren't fact checking. No, And it's yeah, I think
bad of you, Scott.

Speaker 3 (55:24):
Yes, yes, I think we can agree. So what a
good thing to do?

Speaker 1 (55:28):
Yeah, to make the claim that other journalists are just
as irresponsible as Scott. His next series of quotes from
a Joe Rogan interview, and of all the Scott's sins,
that may be the greatest. But we're getting ahead of
ourselves because James, right now, you know what time? It
is anema time. Oh James, we could do an anema
right now. Let's do it. Meet in the par you

(55:48):
know what. You know what, Yes, James and I are
going to go do an enema in a public place.
I'm dangering other people. And you hang out until Thursday.
You get your own enema, you know. Find a fountain
out there. Go to Disney World. Yeah, we're saying, go
to the Aria.

Speaker 3 (56:07):
Oh yeah, the big Yeah, musical fountains. I'd have him
lunch week. If you're in Barcelona, they can go to
musical fountains. Absolutely, go to Dubai. Give yourself a fountain
anima in Dubai. God, I bet that the police and
the Emirates will like that. I was going to say,
that will not end well for.

Speaker 1 (56:23):
You, James. What have I got to plood? It's interesting.

Speaker 3 (56:29):
I am, despite my better instincts, still on Twitter dot com,
which you know, James Stout is my name and also
my Twitter handle. I do a podcast with with you
and some other wonderful people called it could happen here really, Yeah,
it happens every day here in your telephone well iPod. Yeah,
and so Sophia sometimes joined us. We talk about sheep

(56:51):
and chickens and also Turkish drone strikes in the Autonomous
Area of North and Eassyria, all kinds of things in
that in that broad air. Yeah, so that you should
listen to that. I'm writing a book for ak Press,
but I'm still writing it, so you can't buy it,
but buy some other books from Akpress.

Speaker 1 (57:08):
Very nice people. Yeah, all right, everybody, Everything's good.

Speaker 2 (57:19):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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