Ep. 452: The Guru Comes Up for Air

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
If this is the Meat Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
bug bitten, and in my case, underwear.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Listening to podcast, you can't predict anything presented by First
Light creating proven versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers
to technical outerwear.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
For every hunt, first Light go farther, stay longer. Everybody.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
You might be listening and thinking that it sounds a
teensy well, you probably had enough time to determine this,
but by now you're picking up that it sounds a
teensy bit different than normal because we're not in our
normal studio and we're not with our normal stuff.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
We're in Colorado.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
That doesn't that doesn't matter so much as we're in
someone's kitchen recording with best selling author Scott Carney. How's
it going, Scott damn Man, Nice to see you again.

Speaker 3 (01:00):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
The reason we're here it is we're out on we've
been out on a book tour and I'm here with
Brody and we've been going around, uh, promoting the new
book Catch Crayfish, count Stars and bouncing around from city
to city as they're working on stuff and doing events
in collaboration with Shields, who's been phenomenal group of people

(01:25):
to work with. As we've gone from city to city,
the main thing we've talked about I've become a student
of this is, Uh, anytime you're in like a large
city by a airport, the ambulance chaser lawyers, they're billboards.

Speaker 4 (01:44):
Frank Azar here in Denver.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
We saw one the other day. It's the lawyer on
the billboard holding a sledgehammer.

Speaker 3 (01:54):
There's one called jungle law.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:58):
There's one where the lawyer is on a Harley.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
And I think the thinking is that people are like,
what do I think of When I think of a
tough person, I think of a biker. So when I
think of a tough lawyer, it'll be a lawyer on
a bike. There's a put the woomack on him as
a law as a lawyer slogan.

Speaker 3 (02:23):
So we've been checking out, uh, checking out that a
whole bunch. Also.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
Uh, it was funny going around cause we did a
show and or did a book signing in Texas where
we signed and all the events we've gone to. I
signed two guns in Texas where you just wait in
line with your gun. It's so funny. A dude comes

(02:51):
out to me too and he got. A dude comes
out to me and he's showed me a turkey he killed.
So this guy comes up with his wife's like ten
feet away. His wife's ten feet behind him, so like
waiting for him to like obviously ready to leave.

Speaker 3 (03:03):
And he's shown me a picture he killed.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
A wild turkey that had four spurs.

Speaker 3 (03:10):
So I had two spurs on each leg.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
So I said, I hope you saved it, and he said, yeah, man,
I got a full mount. And I says, his wife's
like ten feet away and she looks at me and
goes full mount. It so funny, man, A quick follow
up on something. Where's this thing we're gonna talk about.

(03:35):
We're not gonna talk about too much.

Speaker 3 (03:36):
We're gon we're gonna get in it.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
We're talking about This might not be a like totally
normally show, but so so turn it off unless you
might hear about something super interesting. This is the interesting part.
We're gonna get to that. We're gonna get something super
interesting in a minute. But we covered, meaning, talked about,
laughed about this. The latest Yellowstone National Park scandal where

(03:58):
a gentleman gentleman or a gentleman he okay, so a
bunch of buffalo go across the river. I came in
with the hell river. Do you remember what river? A
bunch of bikes across the river sounds like they became
of a joke, and and a calf doesn't join him. Well,

(04:21):
it's too chicken ship to swim the river. So this
gentleman goes down and they just take off is leave
it sitting on the bank of the river.

Speaker 3 (04:32):
This guy goes down and he.

Speaker 1 (04:33):
Like for whatever reason, kind of grabs it and scurries
it up to the road, thinking he's gonna save it.

Speaker 3 (04:40):
So he gets in.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
All kind of trouble and find for all this, and
then it becomes in the news. How since he touched it,
they it was abandoned by its mother.

Speaker 3 (04:49):
Wait what so he got his human smell on it,
and now.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
He's caused it and had to be euthanized and the
blood is on his hands.

Speaker 3 (04:59):
Okay. A couple of people wrote into this. A person
that raises.

Speaker 1 (05:08):
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,

(05:29):
our resident biologist from Arizona State Fishing Game Agency. He's
been on the show a number of times. Rights in
he heard this story too. He says, I heard this story,
but this is the first I heard the NPS say
it was because someone touched it. Total bullshit, he says,
if that was true, Kevin Monteeth, Randall Kaufman, Randy Larson,

(05:53):
Brock McCollen, And he's naming all these researchers who do
a lot of studies by putting GPS collars on ungulates.
Goes say, they handle ungulate calves all the time. They
tranquilize them, catch them, handle them, put collars on them.
They stand back up and go right back to their mother,

(06:15):
he said. Had He goes on to point out that
if this was true, none of their research would be
of any value because they would all be abandoned, when
in fact, they're not abandoned. He's all for getting people
to respect wildlife and not pick up bison calves, but
come on, you don't need to lie to do it.

Speaker 3 (06:37):
He had a good joke.

Speaker 1 (06:37):
The mother simply crossed the river and then looked back
at her young male calf that couldn't make it across
a strong current and said Bison, huh.

Speaker 3 (06:53):
Good one tuple fingers. Yeah, he's good. If you made
If you made that up, that's good. Another craction from
a past show.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
I Okay, I feel like I'm wrong anytime I see
that someone has like a math formula to crack to me,
I'm like, maybe I was wrong, But I don't know.
Maybe his math is wrong, he said. I wanted to
point out an inaccuracy in me Eater podcast four four four,
where a pair of ink and mummies are described as
having been freeze dried in the same sense as a

(07:24):
freeze dried meal, meaning that they were frozen solid in
an environment where the pressure was low enough for sublimation
phase change from solid directory to vapor. He goes on
to say, these mummies were found at twenty thousand feet,
where the atmospheric pressure is about forty one.

Speaker 3 (07:45):
I don't know what kPa is, Okay.

Speaker 1 (07:48):
Atmospheric pressure is about forty percent of sea level, the
triple point for water see attached phase diagram that intimidates
the shit out of me too. I didn't even look
at that phase diagram. The point where the pressure is
low enough for sublimation to occur is roughly a sixty
seven times higher vacuum than the atmosphere where the mummies

(08:12):
were found. Therefore, he goes on to say, that's not
what happened. They were not sublimating that. I was equating
it to your freeze dry meal that you eat when
you're backpacking.

Speaker 5 (08:28):
Um.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
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

(08:50):
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

(09:10):
dehydration could occur, the desiccation and shriveling of the organs
that is typical of exposed human remains never took place.

Speaker 3 (09:22):
He ends an undercomment, Well.

Speaker 6 (09:23):
A little educational b bit.

Speaker 5 (09:25):
The kPa is a kilo uh, pardon me, a kilo pascal,
which is a unit of pressure, and it's used basically
in countries where the metric system is followed, so it
replaces pounds per square inch.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
Oh got it, Steeve.

Speaker 4 (09:41):
I feel like, you know, just hearing you you say
this now, I feel like you should have gotten that
right the first time.

Speaker 3 (09:46):
It's not so simple as it's embarrassing. No, he's a
nice guy.

Speaker 1 (09:54):
I'm sure he's a nice guy, he says, thanks for
all the great content, John, Thank you.

Speaker 3 (09:58):
John.

Speaker 1 (10:00):
All right, So Scott, let's walk through the I want
to touch on the books you'd done, because the books
you've done have a big bearing on what we're going
to talk today.

Speaker 3 (10:08):
So want me through your titles. You did went on
organ trafficking. M hmmm. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (10:14):
I was called the red Market on the trail of
the world's organ brokers, bone thieves, blood farmers, and child traffickers.
I invented clickbait.

Speaker 3 (10:21):
It was.

Speaker 4 (10:23):
Maybe not, but yeah, so I you know, I spent
six years wandering around the world looking for uh, you know,
interviewing people involved in buying and selling him and body parts,
not mummy body parts, but like you know, kidneys, bones, hair,
surrogate wombs. I was tracking down kidnapped children from India

(10:44):
to the United States and that's sort of the where
I made.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
My bones as a journalist. So that was my first book. Well,
you know that, I don't know if I feel like
it's is it ever true? Like you know, like the
myth of like that you wake up in a hotel
room and a total bullshit, your kidney's gone, that never missed.

Speaker 3 (11:03):
Start with one of those guys.

Speaker 4 (11:05):
No, what usually happens, like the law of organ trafficking,
is that you find like a world class medical institution
located next to abject poverty, and you and organ brokers
appear out of the ether to harvest organs. You know,
usually with payments. It's way easier to pay someone like

(11:27):
fifty bucks or five hundred bucks for a kidney than
it is to kidnap them and cause a police case.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
But what I do, so you're saying, so this is people.
When you were focused on this, you were looking at
people who.

Speaker 3 (11:38):
Were buying.

Speaker 1 (11:41):
Sort of like illicitly buying organs for people waiting for transplants.

Speaker 4 (11:46):
Yeah, that's one of them, but I was also looking
at you know, so for for kidneys. Yeah, I was
looking at the organ brokers, so the criminal side of that.
I was interviewing the criminals and I was interviewing the victims.
So you know, we had like national geographic cameras come
in and get like eighty women all line up, where
every woman in a village had sold their kidneys to
the hospitals. And these would go mostly to the domestic

(12:07):
markets in India, but also abroad as.

Speaker 3 (12:10):
Well, So this was most common in witch countries.

Speaker 4 (12:13):
Oh, it's all over the place. I mean I focused
primarily in India, but if you're talking about kidneys, you're
talking in the Philippines, India, Egypt, Brazil, a little bit
of Mexico, South Africa, Indonesia. I mean, it's a giant trade.
And what I was trying to understand was not only
how the illegal market works, but the patterns in all

(12:37):
the organs, in all the body parts that are sold.
And I was also looking at blood and how people
have their blood like this was messed up. I went
onto the border of India Nepal where there's a blood shortage,
and I met this guy who used to be a
dairy farmer who would go to the bus station find
someone who was like addicted to heroin or something like
that offered them like a thousand rupees fifteen hundred rupees.

(13:00):
It's about thirty bucks for a pint of blood. But
he drained four pints of blood, so they were minially conscious.
And he kept him there for six months, eight months
at a time until they died or were about to die.

Speaker 3 (13:12):
Only like harvesting now.

Speaker 4 (13:14):
Seriously seriously, like it was. It's a I mean, the
rule of organ trafficking is once you start thinking about
the body as a commodity, like it's the same rules
as Nike shoes. At the end of the rules, well,
you know it's going to be you try to buy
low and sell high and you minimize your risk. And

(13:35):
you know, the more you think about body parts as
just things, the more you treat them like things.

Speaker 3 (13:41):
M okay, then your next one.

Speaker 1 (13:47):
That you know the problem with that is that makes
me not want to read that book because because I
feel like, like if someone tells me that they like,
if you told me right now, I've thought what was before,
but if you told me right now that your kidney
was failing, I would think my kidney was failing, my
kidney would start to hurt me. Oh man, So that
like when someone's like, I got poison IVY, I instantly.

Speaker 7 (14:06):
Is sympathetic sympathetic disease.

Speaker 1 (14:11):
Yeah, Like if you said, man, I got a bad
poison ivy case, my waistline would start to it. Yeah right,
I'd like reading that book made my kidney ache.

Speaker 4 (14:18):
Yeah, that's the nocebo effect. And I write about that
in my book The Wedge. But yeah, my second book
was called The Enlightenment Trap. And that's in a way
how this conversation sure and Els is starting. Yeah, yeah,
where you know, I was investigating these Charlottean gurus around
the world, and I was looking in particular about Tibetan
Buddhism and like Americans who go to India and Tibetan

(14:43):
come back in red robes, and the sort of insanity
that occurs when someone declares themselves as enlightened. And i'd
seen you know, the book start.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
So you're in there, you're focused on sort of like
enlightenment as something specific, Yeah, as.

Speaker 4 (14:58):
Like attaining a final state.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
Yeah, you know, it'd be the same in pursuit of
us of a I don't want to call it like
a confined to a particular religious perspective, But you mean,
like like enlightened in the definition that would be of
Eastern religious thought or Eastern spiritual thought.

Speaker 4 (15:16):
Yeah, I mean, for sure, specifically I'm talking about people
who see themselves as a Tibetan Buddhist bodhisatta, right.

Speaker 3 (15:23):
But the.

Speaker 4 (15:26):
I mean it applies to anyone like it applies like
if you're talking to God, I'm thinking that there's some
sort of more mental problem here. Then I'm seeing God
actually talking to and if he is talking to I
want to see some really good proof I want to see. Yeah,
And then this is what the Tibetans would talk about.
They'd say, look, if you think you're enlightened, you go
up to the top of the temple. And they say

(15:46):
this all the time. It's really funny. Go up to
the top of the time. I want you to see
you pee off the top of the temple, and before
the urine hits the ground, I want you to suck
that urine backup into Urethra as proof that you are enlightened.

Speaker 3 (15:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (15:58):
This is a test that they tried many times in
ti Bet. Because you want to prove if you're if
you're actually that's that's that's I specifically talk about that
particular miracle on two different occasions.

Speaker 3 (16:09):
Here has pulled it off.

Speaker 4 (16:10):
Well they say they have, but you know, the sources
are all medieval and there was no cameras. But you know,
here's the thing, like when you get enlightened and there's
and I think this is particularly relevant to what we're
gonna talk.

Speaker 3 (16:22):
Like we felt that word around big time.

Speaker 1 (16:24):
Now yeah, yeah, right, but not even I know what
we mean when we say it. Well, the words i'd say,
like I was enlightened, I switched to fry my fish and.

Speaker 4 (16:34):
Port I like that version of enlightenment. Actually that's my
I can relate to that. But you know i'd seen
so I had a student, so I was you know,
at the beginning of my career, I was getting my
PhD anthropology and I dropped out right at the dissertation.
I was leading these abroad programs around North India and
on a seven day silent meditation retreat, my best and

(16:56):
brightest student, woman named Emily O'Connor. You know, she was
like this type aid super driven personality. But we're silent,
you know, in meditation. You're meditating on like in this tradition,
we're trying to find silence in ourselves and bliss and
nirvana and all these good things that you can think of,
and also our own deaths, because it's a big thing

(17:18):
you do, you meditate on death. Last day of silent
Meditation retreat, she climbs up to the roof of the
retreat center and jumps off to her death, taking her
own life. And I'm I'm like a twenty seven year
old kid at this point, and I'm tasked with recovering
her body and figuring out why she killed herself. And

(17:39):
her journal, her journal, the you know, I reprint a
lot of it in that book, but essentially it says
the last words or I am a bodhisatva, meaning that
she had, in the course of that meditation retreat, learned
all of the sacred teachings, knew everything about this, and all.

Speaker 3 (17:55):
She had to do was all her body.

Speaker 4 (17:57):
Well it was suicide.

Speaker 3 (17:59):
I mean she didn't think that, but no, okay, but.

Speaker 1 (18:04):
She knew that she was going to have physical death,
or she thought that she was going to pull a trick.

Speaker 3 (18:08):
Like pulling your urine back up. No, no, she knew
she was getting physical death.

Speaker 4 (18:12):
Yeah, yeah, I mean one of the lines in the
book in her journal was, you know, I know there's
gonna be a lot of pain, uh, and you know
we have to go through it. So, you know, the
conception of death was maybe a little different because she
thought she would become essentially a Tibetan Buddhist angel.

Speaker 1 (18:26):
I thought, you meant like when you know how someone
might you know, there's been cases where someone's on like
LSD and they jump off a cliffs.

Speaker 3 (18:33):
They think that something else is going to happen, other
than what you'd think was going to happen.

Speaker 4 (18:37):
No, I you know, she she knew what was She
knew what this was for. And I think what it
was when you're meditating, when you're taking on a new
spiritual practice, there's this law of you know, so we
call it the law of diminishing returns, but it's also
the law of speedy gains, right. It's the idea that
you start meditating and and everything starts getting better. You know,

(18:58):
you start feeling these really positive changes and and it
can feel very enticing. Time speeds up, it slows down
the quality of the light changes, You have these realizations
about how your mind works and you want to grab
onto that and you don't want to let it go.
And I think at that point she saw death as
a way of holding onto it because she knew that

(19:20):
those even those realizations were starting to slip from her fingers.

Speaker 3 (19:24):
Huh.

Speaker 4 (19:25):
And then well, and then you know, then she jumped
off the roof of the retreat center and died. And
that that sent my life on spinning on an entirely
different trajectory. I mean, you know, we talked about my
book on organ trafficking that originated out of this moment
because I had spent six days with her body one
hundred and six degree heat trying to preserve it, and
we had to bring it back to the States, and

(19:46):
I was suddenly looking at a body as responsibility. I
was the director of the program, let's see. Yeah, and
I spoke Hindy and I, you know, I could actually
navigate the police system that no and no one And
we had two other director there, but I was the guy.

Speaker 7 (20:03):
Did law enforcement or the state department or anything like
that get involved.

Speaker 4 (20:07):
Yeah, I mean I was dealing with the cops continually.
Uh and uh, you know, I initially they thought it
was a murder because the extent of her injuries, and
they asked me if there was an enemies and it
could have gone really, really bad, but the the journal
pretty much showed what her mental state was.

Speaker 1 (20:27):
Oh man, uh, how old are you? And I haven't
I was about twenty seven years old. I think when
you did that book, was it did you start? Do
you think looking back on it now?

Speaker 3 (20:38):
Was it was it like a like a form of therapy?

Speaker 1 (20:44):
I think, I mean, was it like a thing stuck
in your head and you wanted to start writing about it?

Speaker 3 (20:48):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (20:48):
I mean it's the theme that connects all my books, right,
and I actually recount that story. I think it appears
in four of my books, and like, you know, diminishing
ways as I go. But uh, yeah, I mean I
was dealing with two questions right at first. I wanted
to know about the material nature of the body. How
we certainly turned flesh into commerce, because you know, they
were taking pieces of her brain and liver and stuff

(21:09):
and send it all over for various tests and things.
And I wanted to think about that question of like,
you know, there's a body and it's special, it's alive.
I don't know, is there a soul and I don't know,
but like then then it becomes property of the state,
and there's and and things alter. And so that was
the book The Red Market, like it was all coming

(21:29):
out of that event. But here's the other question that's
going on my mind, like was she enlightened? Like what
was going on? Is there a connection between spiritual attainment
and madness? This is what I wanted to know, and
I you know, I spent about another six eight months
interviewing lamas, you know, these sort of Tibetan Buddhist monks

(21:51):
and you know, the Dialama's teacher and oracles, all sorts
of things. I'm trying to figure out what was she enlightened?
And then the consensus is no. But it that led
me down this thing. Look, okay, what is it about
intensive spiritual seeking that can drive you mad? And I
wasn't interested as much as the depression. You know, your
first hypothe is was she'd like suicide asn't depressed, But

(22:13):
I want to know what is the thing where a
positive can make you do something that's incredibly dangerous and bad. Uh.
And And that that leads into this book The Enlightenment Trap,
where I look at her case but also cases of
people who go to India and just go crazy, something
called India syndrome where they believe they're Krishna or they

(22:33):
believe they're Shiva. And about one hundred Westerners a year
end up in mental asylums in India and you have
to get sent home.

Speaker 1 (22:42):
But you know, when I look at a lot of
that stuff, people that are really and we're gonna get
into this and we get into the whim Hoff and
the yeah, you know, ice frozen water and hyperventilank and
all that.

Speaker 3 (22:54):
I think that curious what you think about this.

Speaker 1 (22:57):
I think that there's like people that are looking for
a fix, so something that's going to go and study.

Speaker 3 (23:04):
And I'm just picking on Buddhism cause we're.

Speaker 1 (23:06):
Talking about Yeah, they're they're already fragile and vulnerable. Okay,
when they hit what they think is enlightenment or whatever truth.
Maybe it's whatever truth you're getting from spending a bunch
of time in icy water, whatever the hell you got
going on. You're already fragile and vulnerable. The euphoria that

(23:28):
you get when you find a solution, like a new
diet that you can believe in.

Speaker 3 (23:32):
You know, if I only eat ligament, if.

Speaker 1 (23:34):
I only eat, if I only eat vegetables, if I
only whatever. Right is, you're feeling an alleviation in the
symptomology of being lost and weak. So you're euphoria. You
think I'm cured. It's just an alleviation of symptom, but
you're already terminally You're you're terminally lost, you're terminally weak.

Speaker 3 (23:57):
You get a little break and you think it feels good.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
But that's why so few people are who are vulnerable
and lost stay fixed for long.

Speaker 3 (24:07):
They're always looking for a like I feel like that.
You find some people that like, they don't stay fixed.

Speaker 1 (24:13):
They like you're you're a drunk you have a religious epiphany,
And I'm like, yeah, we'll see, Yeah, we'll see, because
I got a feeling that that you have an alleviation
of the symptom.

Speaker 3 (24:26):
But it's going to creep back on you.

Speaker 4 (24:28):
I mean, you're right. I mean, look at how many
chronic alcoholics suddenly find Jesus and then get like drunk
on Jesus.

Speaker 3 (24:36):
Right.

Speaker 4 (24:36):
I mean that this is a thing. You're describing, something
that I think is out there, sort of the conversion symptomology.
But I will say that's a high rate of recidivism.
I think that is the way you said a high
rate of return. But I do think I wouldn't just
throw all of those infanies under the bus. I mean,

(24:56):
sometimes one of them, a lot of them. Sure, there's
it gonna be a percentage, right, we could, we could,
we could study it like a drug. But sometimes you
need structure, you need control, and taking control of one
thing in your life can generalize out to controlling other
things in your life. Right, Like if you have a
technique and let's say, let's say was meditation, right, and
meditation gave you a stable point and the technique to

(25:20):
help yourself, and then you did other things too to
help yourself. It can be very beneficial. But if it
becomes the only thing that that that is your solution,
well then you know, I know, I you know my
book The Wedge, I was somewhat friends with Andrew Huperman,
who's this big you know, podcaster now on Neuroscientist, and
his definition of addiction was really interesting, which was addiction

(25:45):
is the progressive narrowing of the things that give you pleasure.
And if that is what you're doing, then that's a problem.
And all you're doing is like you're putting a shell
game with your addictions. But if instead you can take
something and it gives you a stable like an anchor,
and then you can do you can like jump fraug
to something else, well, then you can have a beneficial transition.

(26:06):
But it's not like it's a one size fits all
for anyone. Like you got to do the work, and
you've got to realize that the work is not just
like tripling down on what your guru is telling you.

Speaker 3 (26:16):
Yeah, I guess I have I need to develop this more.
I just have a I need to make a name
for it and build it up better. Uh, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (26:28):
I feel that humans are just from my experience and
things I've seen that I feel like humans are are
someone you're kind of cast. Yeah, you know what I mean,
Like you're thrown from the womb as a as a something,
and that thing generally winds up being pretty consistent. Yeah,

(26:50):
I mean, people break it, but it's like they break it,
but it's it's a little bit nature, the nature nurture thing.
I think there's like a fund mental tenacity that that
that a lot of a lot of people have, like
a fundamental tenacity a fundamental survival mentality, and they kind
of go on, Yeah, if they hadn't done one thing

(27:13):
and found success, it would have done some other damn
thing and found success.

Speaker 3 (27:17):
Or if they had, you know, they.

Speaker 1 (27:18):
Would have found some level of peace or some level
of contentment.

Speaker 3 (27:22):
And you could have put them in any situation they
probably would have.

Speaker 4 (27:26):
It's interesting. So you're kicked out. So you're a Calvinist.
I guess you're you're you're you're someone who believes that
there is destiny and somehow is your genetics, I guess,
or somewhere else I don't work.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
No, no, no, I think you're cast. I shouldn't say
from the womb. I don't know, from some young age.
I don't know what it is. Maybe when you're ten,
I'll start watching my kids and find out when they
look when they seem cast.

Speaker 3 (27:47):
Well, my thirteen year old, I feel like he's cast.

Speaker 1 (27:49):
Okay, So whatever happened to him between genetics and upbringing,
I feel like now he's like, you know what didn't
didn't the don't don't the Jews have something like once
you're old enough to like a buttered bread or something
like that.

Speaker 3 (28:02):
What is it?

Speaker 5 (28:04):
I have?

Speaker 3 (28:05):
Oh? Well, it doesn't matter what I think. I'm not.

Speaker 8 (28:07):
I don't.

Speaker 3 (28:08):
I don't have a bunch of books about this stuff.

Speaker 1 (28:10):
Okay, this is gonna lead us into where this is
gonna lead us in the where we're going where things
get really interesting. Then you did a book What Doesn't
Kill Us right, How freezing water, extreme altitude, and environmental
conditioning will renew our lost evolutionary strength, which was largely
about a feller.

Speaker 3 (28:31):
Name wim Hoff. That's right.

Speaker 1 (28:34):
So if back of your head you're like, you think
about wim Hoff. If you're wondering, why have I heard
that name, I'll explain it. If you haven't heard that name,
but you're familiar with the recent you know the recent
trend around ice baths and breathing techniques, that's wim Hoff.
That's where that's where that's originating from. Okay, so from

(28:58):
our guests here, this is from Scott's on writing.

Speaker 3 (29:01):
You find this writing on his website, but it's just
a paragraph here that paints the picture. Okay. Scott says
his workshops like the.

Speaker 1 (29:11):
Small one I attended, would grow into a loose following,
meaning this guy does these breathing workshops in ice bath
or ice and breathing endurance workshops.

Speaker 3 (29:20):
Physical Endurance would.

Speaker 1 (29:22):
Evolve into an international organization which would explode into what
some people have called a cult.

Speaker 3 (29:29):
Inner Fire.

Speaker 1 (29:30):
That's the name of the organization run by Hoff's son,
anam As I supposed to name anem anem owns all
of the trademarks of wim Hoff's name, as well as
the property and income of the Hoff Empire, which has
a declared value of eighteen million. Hoff has routinely taught
his method to crowds that number in the many thousands,
sometimes spreading his message of ice and breath work for

(29:52):
two hundred dollars ticket price. His international best selling book,
The whim Hoff Method has been reprinted in twenty one language.
Gwyneth Paltrow's The Goop Lab series on Netflix did a
full episode on him. The BBC ran a full series.
His Instagram feed has grown from a few thousand people
when we met in twenty thirteen to more than three

(30:13):
million today, with similarly impressive numbers on YouTube two point
four million followers. There are seventy one videos about Haff
on YouTube, with more than a million views each in
one hundred and forty six thousand videos. Overall, The video
giving instructions for his basic breathing method alone has more

(30:34):
than sixty four million views. A search of the newspaper
archive of over sixteen thousand publications shows his name has
appeared on twelve front pages with more than four hundred
and eighty nine mentions overall. He's also about to get
the Hollywood treatment. A movie about HAFF starring Joseph Fines

(30:54):
reportedly began shooting in November twenty twenty two. So that
guy uh Howe, tell how you.

Speaker 3 (31:02):
Became aware of him, because this this is w ends
up being.

Speaker 1 (31:08):
What you were doing when you became aware of him and.

Speaker 3 (31:13):
What you're doing now is very interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (31:16):
So I was the first person to learn about wim Hoff, right,
but first person, No, that's not true. I was the
first serious journalist to write about wim Hoff. And I
had just written this book, The Enlightenment Trap, and I
was really interested in people who were seeking superpowers, trying
to seek things that were bigger than themselves. And one

(31:39):
superpower which is very well known in the Indian tradition,
which is going on to a mountaintop in a wet
robe and meditating until all that robe is dry and
we're talking to the Himalayas, so it's very cold out
and it was a it's a technique called tumo. But
there's also this other thing called a Sydney. A Sydney
is a miracle. And and wim Hoff was teaching that

(32:00):
he could sit on an iceberg and heat himself up,
and he could get control his immune system and doing
all these things that were not backed up by science.

Speaker 7 (32:12):
Can you can you give the listeners like the thirty
second breakdown on who the guy is?

Speaker 3 (32:16):
Though, yeah, I know, but like, where's how old is.

Speaker 4 (32:20):
Like wim Hoff. Wim Hoff is a Dutch fitness guru,
former like stunt clown man, you know, was known for
like Guinness books of world record feats and.

Speaker 1 (32:36):
The things that had not that he's but okay into
world record feeds that no one had currently held.

Speaker 4 (32:43):
Well, there's a.

Speaker 1 (32:43):
Question hanging from a hot air balloon or something by
a finger or whatever.

Speaker 3 (32:47):
There's a question about his feets, all right, But at that.

Speaker 4 (32:51):
Time, he claimed, you know, some somewhere around twenty to
twenty six world records.

Speaker 1 (32:56):
Including long like at the time like the longest under
ice swim, so swimming from one hole in the ice
to another hole in.

Speaker 4 (33:01):
The ice exactly, the longest under ice swim, also the
longest ice bath. At one point he held that and
he climbed up a lot of everest in shorts before
he got frostbite. He was when I had met him,
most of the world thought of him as sort of
a clown in a way. You know, he was a
guy who did these like stunt freak things. But he
was just about to teach this new method, and he

(33:24):
was going to show people his tricks for do for
being in the ice and controlling his mind. And I
was like, I'm going to debunk you as a charlatan
as I had these other people, meaning that.

Speaker 1 (33:33):
He could through the sheer force of his mind, yeah,
and breathing, HM be like, oh, I'm sitting in ice.
I should be cold, but I will make my mind
not just think I'm warm, but warm me up.

Speaker 3 (33:49):
More or less.

Speaker 4 (33:50):
Yeah, well there's more to it than that, but let's
just go with that for now. And and he could
do these like superhuman seeming feats of endurance, and I
was like, that's bullshit. I'm gonna go and show the
world you're bullshit. Because there was also like this cachet
to him, like I could feel the cachet. Just looking
at that photo of him sitting like half naked on Iceberg,

(34:10):
I was like, people are gonna love this, and I
want to get ahead of it because you're gonna get
people killed, just like I'd seen other people die doing this.
And but I went out. I went to his training
center in Poland. I tried his method, because you know,
the way I do journalism is I I you know,
I get in, I try stuff, and you know, I
give people a fair shot.

Speaker 7 (34:32):
Did you go in as a journalist or did you
go in like incognito?

Speaker 4 (34:36):
No, no, he knew I was there. I was there
as a journalist. I talked with him. I'd be like, Hi,
I'm writing for you know, a Playboy, and you know,
actually what was rich with details, the magazine article moved around,
not exciting. Eventually, was for Playboy.

Speaker 3 (34:50):
And you didn't go and say like I'm a vulnerable
lost American.

Speaker 4 (34:54):
No, no, no, no, I don't do that. That's I
have like an ethic, Like I don't do that with
organ trafficking either. When i'm track an organ track, I
always tell him I'm a journalist and I get him
to talk because I just I just ask them why
they're doing it, you know, and and and people do talk.
So I went, I tried his method, and here's the
crazy thing is it worked like it's so you know,

(35:17):
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.

Speaker 1 (35:29):
Well I get the I get the breath hold because
I uh, I've been learning spearfishing and free diving. Okay,
so but that's not I mean, that's just the thing.
I mean, anybody could have told you that, Like, there's
a way you can breathe, Like when you feel the

(35:49):
need to breathe, you think that you're breathing because you
think you need oxygen, you're breathing because of a trigger
from carbon dioxide. And there's a way you can breathe,
like your fisher called free diver. You breathe up, yeah,
and then you dive and you get a way longer
dive than you would if you didn't breathe up properly.
But you didn't need to go to poland have a

(36:12):
dude tell you that. But tell me about what made
you do more push ups.

Speaker 4 (36:15):
So it's the same thing, right, So I'm not I'm
not a free diver. And when you say breathe up,
I have questions in my mind about what you mean
by that. Are you are you scrubbing? Are you hyperventilating
before you do this? And the way you.

Speaker 1 (36:27):
Want long deep breaths and then like carbon dioxide purge
breaths and then you but you go down on a big,
full breath. Yeah, so that's pointing to my kid, I
sold breathe so deep that you're filling your scrotum with air.

Speaker 4 (36:40):
Yeah, Well, that's super dangerous, and we're going to get
into it. It's not we're gonna we're going to get
into why. We're going to get into why that's super dangerous.

Speaker 9 (36:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:48):
Sure, Yeah, there's people that have shallow water right, right,
there's such thing as shallow water blackout, but that is general.

Speaker 3 (36:54):
That is generally. I don't care if you're going down
twenty feet on thirty.

Speaker 1 (36:57):
Feet shoot fish, It's just there's a big difference, Yeah,
between there's a big difference between jumping off a boat,
swimming over some we're real fast and going down and
what you're going to get for a breath hold then,
and what you're going to get if you go somewhere,
hang grab onto something or float, relax every part of
your body and do like a breathing sequence and then
going to It's just different the same way that if

(37:17):
I told you to run down the road and stop
and hold your breath, you're not going to do as good.

Speaker 3 (37:20):
If you went in your couch and held your breath.
You're just not. No, you're right.

Speaker 4 (37:26):
So here's here's the problem with shallow water.

Speaker 8 (37:28):
So if we're going to talk about the physiology here,
but no, no, no, because you.

Speaker 3 (37:32):
Still want to hear about whim hall.

Speaker 4 (37:33):
All right, right, well we'll get into this in a second.

Speaker 3 (37:35):
I have you why do we get on there?

Speaker 4 (37:37):
I have some notes, but you asked me.

Speaker 3 (37:39):
You started how he got you doing a bunch of
pushing right.

Speaker 4 (37:41):
So at the point I could do about twenty push ups.
That was what I could do. And then you hyperventilate.
And when you hyperventilate, you blow off your c of
two and and and your sort of gasping reflex is
connected to this and when you god, how do I
describe it? When you do this hyper vent when you

(38:02):
hold your breath, the alarm bells for when your fatigue
is hitting sort of turn off, and all of a sudden,
you've unlocked this extra capacity that you that you have
in you. And it's not like my muscles grew bigger.
It was just I didn't realize that that my where
my limits were, because the hyperventilation changes that chemistry in
the body.

Speaker 1 (38:23):
Even on something like see, I didn't know that, even
on something like the feeling of I've done too many
push ups.

Speaker 4 (38:28):
Yeah, okay, yes exactly, or or maybe it's the feeling
of like I have to stop now. If you hyperventilate,
hold your breath, exhale, hold your breath, do your push ups,
you're going to do more than you could normally. But
there are problems with this, and we're going to get
into exactly what the problems are soon. But here's the
other crazy thing. You know. Then I hiked up this

(38:50):
mountain with whim and you know, and this cold training,
cold exposure we're standing in like you know, Polish winters,
the winter that stops the Nazi army. Like it's cold
and I'm in a bathing suit and brayerfoot and the
first time I do it, it's really painful, really hard.
Second time I do it's way easier. Third time I
do it like this is fine. And eventually I climb

(39:10):
up a mountain with whim and this and a shirtless
of course, and it's I think I think it's two
degrees fahrenheit out. It takes about seven hours to get
to the top of this mountain. And I'm fine. I'm
totally fine. And I was shocked because I came to
do the story about why the guy was getting to
get people killed with his methods, and instead his methods

(39:33):
are working, and it changes my life immediately.

Speaker 3 (39:37):
You become like his disciple.

Speaker 4 (39:38):
I'm like his chief disciple. I wrote What Doesn't Kill
Us that becomes the New York Times bestseller. I hicke
gop Mount Kilimanjaro with him, and we get down a
negative thirty We do it in a very fast time,
twenty eight hours to the top shirtless again. And this

(40:02):
book goes everywhere, and mean I sell two hundred fifty
thousand copies of it. It's a you know. And the
other amazing thing about the wim Hoff method, it's not
just these feats. In fact, the feats are just sort
of like a great way to market a cool technique
that the real benefits is actually autoimmune helps and anxiety help,

(40:23):
where there's like he's one of the only one of
these fitness Gurui people who frequently goes into labs and
get studied, and he was able to show that he
was able to turn off his immune system in a laboratory,
which you would think, well, why would I want to
do that? Well, if you have an autoimmune illness such
as lupez Crohn's arthritis, something where your own immune system

(40:47):
is attacking yourself, it's really really beneficial to turn off
your immune.

Speaker 1 (40:51):
How how does one prove in a lab that your
immune system is turned off?

Speaker 4 (40:56):
Yeah, So the way you do it is it's called
the dtoxin experiment, done at Radbound University in Holland, and
so he trained two groups of people. One was the
control group they didn't do much, and one was the
people who did exactly what I did in Poland, which
was hang out with whim, breathe a lot, hang out,
climb up a mountain in your bathing suit, you know,

(41:17):
learn his method. And then they took him to a
lab and the person who designed the experience, the same
person who designed the test to see anti rejection drugs.
So if you get a kidney treating a transplant, right,
if you get that kidney transplant and you don't take

(41:38):
any drugs, your immune system would be like, fuck that kidney,
I AM going to eat it and destroy it, and
then you get the organ rejection.

Speaker 3 (41:46):
So the way what you have to do is you
have to take.

Speaker 4 (41:48):
Immune suppressant drugs to turn off your immune response. And
so he designed the test for those immunosuppressant drugs. And
the test is you inject somebody with endotoxin, which is
basically E. Coli bacteria that has been killed in a
lab by heat, so that when it injects into your bloodstream,
you have a primary immune response, which is so the

(42:11):
equalized dead so it's not going to do anything, but
your immune system recognize the cytokinde, so the chemicals on
the walls, and it says this is a foreign invader,
and you immediately get your.

Speaker 3 (42:20):
Fever, your aches, your chills.

Speaker 4 (42:22):
These are all your like your primary basic immune response
that you just use generally for anything. Now, the test
was if you inject with endotoxin and you don't get
those symptoms, that means you turned your immune system off,
and that's what happened both Whim did this in a
single test on his own and then in a lab

(42:44):
they all of these college students, they didn't have any
serious reactions to the endotoxin, showing that they had turned
off their immune system.

Speaker 3 (42:53):
And they did this by breathing in a particular way.

Speaker 4 (42:57):
Well, it's it's an interesting combination. It's it's it's the
breath work, it's the cold exposure and learning in those environments.
And this is what I call the wedge, and I
wrote another book about called the wedge.

Speaker 3 (43:07):
Right.

Speaker 4 (43:08):
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

(43:29):
is telling you you have to fight or flight right now.
But instead you're going to say, no, I can chill here,
I can relax, and I can find some other way
to heat my body. And that is what has the
audioimmune benefit. It's not this, it's not all the other flash.
It's just a really good technique and an easy technique
to learn to have that mental resilience. And this is

(43:50):
what you were saying earlier, you know when I called
you a calvinist. Now, people are born some way and
they can't change. Well, this is one of these beachhead
techniques that I really believe in. I'm born certain way, yeah,
I ten, they become a certain way. And but this
is one of those things. It's like a beachhead like you.
You start doing these these sorts of things, and honestly,

(44:12):
it doesn't need to be ice water and breathing. Yeah,
it can be a lot of other strong stimuli that
make you want to fight or flight. And you say,
you clicking over into that other rest and digest.

Speaker 3 (44:28):
But here's where I don't want to do. There's so
much ground, we gotta.

Speaker 4 (44:31):
Cover so much.

Speaker 3 (44:32):
But I want to ask qu a question here.

Speaker 1 (44:34):
The thing about a difference I see with cold water
is you're you're aware, Yeah, okay, you're aware.

Speaker 3 (44:42):
Of your bodies. You're aware of what your body's telling you. Right,
It's like get out of the damn water. Yeah, okay,
whatever whatever's going on.

Speaker 1 (44:49):
You're extremely fatigued, you're like, Okay, I'm feeling the extreme fatigue.
I'm gonna do mind over matter whatever. I'm gonna come
up the other side. Uh, your immune system is not
consulting with you. You're not thinking I need to attack this,

(45:10):
I need to attack this bacteria, I need.

Speaker 3 (45:13):
To attack this virus. I'm going to tell myself not
to do it.

Speaker 4 (45:16):
Well, I think you might be a misunderstanding. When you're sick,
you're not supposed to jump into ice water, right. It
is this trick that you use to calm yourself, and
it is a generalizable effect. I wouldn't if you have
a flu ice waar ain't gonna help you. It's going
to make you sicker, for sure. But training regularly in

(45:36):
ice water, when you're healthy and you're not fatigued, you're
not messed up, you're not expending extra energy. You actually
are talking with your immune system because your immune system
is connected in your body. You know, when you're when
you're climbing up Mount Kilimanjaro in your bathing suit, your
immune systems walking up there with you. And if you're
dumping adrenaline and cortisol and all that into your blood

(45:58):
stream through your hormonal channels, your immune system is also
doing that. And like the the if you think about
what a you can just look at this in a lab.
You take a macrophase, which is a big immune cell
of the front line immune cell, and you dump adrenaline
on it. It's a little flagella are gonna go everywhere.
It's gonna go crazy, and if you don't, it's gonna

(46:20):
be chill. And the way I like to think about this,
the metaphor that I use is if you think that
your immune system is a pack of wolves, right, it's
going out there, it's trying to eat all the bad stuff.
Then what this method is is like giving those wolves
chew toys, so that we have this huge epidemic of
autoimmune illnesses in the in the world. And it's where

(46:42):
it's it's where your immune system literally attacks.

Speaker 3 (46:44):
The stuff it's not supposed to.

Speaker 4 (46:46):
If those wolves are bored and if you hop up
your wolves on adrenaline or you know wolf PCP, you
know those wolves are gonna chew things they're not supposed to.
So what this does from an evolutionary perspective, and we
could you know, I've done three hundred podcasts on this.
We can do that that podcast.

Speaker 3 (47:04):
No, I don't want to.

Speaker 4 (47:05):
Yeah, but you know we could. Like what it's doing
is it's sort of training your immune sism not to
freak out. And and you know, you know, I would
think that your audience gets out of nature more than
the average audience. I'm just going to go out on
a limb here. Well, a lot of people don't. A
lot of people stay in static environments all the time.

(47:26):
And that static environment is you know, it narrows the
range and where people can be comfortable. You know, if
you're going out. You know, right now we're in my
comfortable house in Denver, but you know, you also dragged
a buffalo out of Alaska. You have range, and that
probably has an immune benefit in addition to the other
benefits that comes with you. It probably also has an

(47:46):
a you know, you find that you go out of
nature you feel good. Well, that has a psychological benefit,
immune benefit. It connects you with nature. It's all part
of it. And the whim Hoff method is one way
into that stuff. Uh And I frankly a pretty good
way because it's pretty efficient, especially for someone who you know,
when you have that strong stem as you jumping into
ice water, your brain's going to pay attention, like you

(48:08):
don't get into ice water and you start thinking about
what should I how should I manage my taxes this year?
I think that maybe I should take a deduction, maybe
the standard deductions. You're not thinking that shit, right, You
are thinking, I am in ice water, and I'm either
going to levitate out of that ice water and get
out of here. You can't levitate, or you're going to
relax into it and you're gonna and you're gonna find

(48:30):
that the people who have the ability to stay in
that stressful, automatic, stressful environment are the ones who can relax.
And you know, I've done a lot of ice feeds. Now,
I've done like half an hour and thirty to thirty
two degree water and I lived right. But you know,
if you think about what most people would think that's insane. Yeah,

(48:52):
And I think find that as like this is something
that's really good and it's actually a type of meditation.
You know, you think about meditation as a you know,
some one sitting on a mat in a Buddhist temple
and like lotus position. But this is another way to
force your mind into a place where it has to
think in a totally different way.

Speaker 1 (49:12):
Uh, where were you. Brody's asking you like, lay out
the basic So you went there and you became an acolyte.

Speaker 3 (49:22):
Is that the right word? Yeah?

Speaker 4 (49:23):
Yeah, that's a good one.

Speaker 3 (49:25):
Wrote a lot about them. Yep.

Speaker 1 (49:27):
Now I want to return to because we're gonna start
getting into what we're getting into now, Uh you go,
I'm gonna read another passage.

Speaker 3 (49:36):
There are some things that you found when you were
writing about him. There were some things you.

Speaker 1 (49:40):
Found that you included in your book and then decided
to not put in the book.

Speaker 3 (49:46):
Yeah, I share one of those.

Speaker 4 (49:48):
No, please do.

Speaker 1 (49:49):
Okay, And then I want to talk about why you
didn't include this. So this is again reading from our
guest work. One story begins in two thousand and eight,
when Hoff had not seen his children in almost ten years.
That decade had been rough on the family. Hoff's wife, Oleah,
Is that right? Elia Oliah committed suicide by jumping from

(50:12):
an eight floor balcony in Pamplona in nineteen ninety five
after a long struggle with many mental illness, leaving him
to raise four children on his own. After his wife's death,
he began a relationship with a woman in another city
and left his kids to live alone. In a squat
house in Amsterdam. The eldest Annam is that right Anem.

(50:34):
Anem was only fifteen years old when he became the
family's surrogate dad. Eventually, Haff's relationship with the woman ended
and he found himself with what monetary symbol is at that?

Speaker 5 (50:47):
You're a.

Speaker 1 (50:50):
Thirty thousand year tax debt. That seemed to be the
impetus to reconnect with his family. Hoff asked his second son, Michael,
to meet him, and they set it time to vous
at Vandel Park in Amsterdam. Haff arrived early and went
for a swim in the park's pond. While he was waiting,
he paddled out to a fountain and positioned himself over

(51:12):
the spout to give himself an enema that he thought
would cleanse all of his intestines or, as he often
likes to say, get the shit out. On a recording
of one of our conversations in twenty thirteen, Hawf recounts
that he had done that He had done the park
fountain enema at least a hundred times before, but that,

(51:34):
unbeknownst to him, the park service had changed the spigot
on the fountain to create a more impressive spray.

Speaker 3 (51:41):
The narrower gage sent water.

Speaker 1 (51:42):
Cutting through his intestines like a knife, filling his bowels
of dirty water. He managed to make it back to
shore while blood and feces leaked from his rectum. Hoff's
first words to his son in a decade or that
he needed to go to a hospital.

Speaker 3 (52:02):
Why would you? Why would you in writing about.

Speaker 1 (52:04):
A health phenomenon, a health phenom and a guru in
your own guru, tell me the impulse to not to edit.

Speaker 3 (52:14):
That out of the work.

Speaker 4 (52:15):
Yeah, so this is the impetus for the video that
I've just put out right, so my YouTube channel, the
Rise and Fall of the whim Hoff Empire. It's been
so hard for me to do this right because when
I was writing this book, originally in my conversation with
my editor at Rodale, you know, we didn't want to
necessarily present Hoff as a complete madman, right, We didn't

(52:37):
want to show but we're like, look, we're talking about ice,
water and all of these benefits that go to this.
It's not the only character in this book. We're trying
to show that being in environments can change the way
your body works, and we want that positive news. But
if we had shown if we had used this story,
a real story about this guy and the fact that
you know, I call him a madman in the book,

(52:59):
but I don't tell him everyone exactly why. And it's
stuff like this, it's stuff that he does that is
so damaging that, you know, I was worried that people
would see this and they wouldn't take the ice water
stuff seriously, they wouldn't take the practice seriously. And well,
the problem is is that by the time we get

(53:20):
to now, now hoff is uber famous. Then he was
just like sort of a side show. Now he's really
really famous, and he teaches things that are getting people hurt.
And I feel like I'm back at the beginning. I'm
like that kid who was who was at haff Center
the first time, being like, oh my god, this is
You're going to get people killed. But then I found

(53:41):
this thing about him which was amazing, which legitimately is amazing.

Speaker 3 (53:47):
But then now you're back to but you are getting
people killed.

Speaker 4 (53:50):
But you are getting people killed, right, And the reason why,
the fundamental underlying thing is actually he hasn't changed so
much as a person, but he has gotten really famous.
And you read that passage or he's on Goop Lab.
He talks with Russell Brand all the time on his
podcast see Jordan Peterson. He has a feature film coman.

(54:14):
Everyone says the same story that I did. Here's this
awesome kookie iceman who does these kookie things in ice water,
and he's smarter than science, and you should listen to
basically whatever he says. And that's the message that gets
out there, and we as in the press, have continually
reinforced that story without showing a full picture of Hoff

(54:35):
And you know, I saw this occurring. I saw him
go from like two thousand followers on Instagram to what
four million or three million or whatever he has right now,
And we're putting him on that same stage of as
a guru as these people that I was writing about
in The Enlightenment Trap. And the problem with gurus, the real,

(54:55):
the fundamental problem with gurus is that usually they do
start something that's really nice, really good and beneficial to people.
But as they get as they declare themselves enlightened or
for other reasons that they may get isolated, they don't
have any peers anymore. They sort of sit on this
pedestal someone who's enlightened. There's like, well, you're not enlightened.

(55:16):
So I am the only one who knows the ultimate truth,
so you just have to do what I say. And
this led to lead to sex scandals and all these
you know, fun things with wim Hoff. He is so
famous now when so many people have told him he's
right all the time, that we do not see him
for who he is, which is a dynamic person who
has these really dangerous parts of his personality. These you know,

(55:38):
the worst father around right, abandons his kids in a
squad house for ten years.

Speaker 1 (55:43):
I could see the argument that that's irrelevant if you're like,
if you're focused on the if you're focused on.

Speaker 3 (55:52):
The health benefit of what he's changing.

Speaker 4 (55:53):
Sure, and.

Speaker 1 (55:56):
I could see that someone who is sort of like
interested in learning cold tolerance, learning endurance, I can see
him being like, uh, well it doesn't matter.

Speaker 3 (56:08):
For instance, the Heimlich maneuver.

Speaker 4 (56:14):
Yeah, who knows what Heinlich was up to.

Speaker 3 (56:15):
Well, you know, I'll tell you someth worried about him.

Speaker 1 (56:17):
But the Heinlich maneuver, he could have abandoned every damn
kid on the planet.

Speaker 3 (56:22):
Sure, but it's still a great way to dislodge food
stuck in your throat.

Speaker 1 (56:27):
But he's got a little bit of like what he's
got a little bit of what the picture you start
to painting about this Feller because he later in life
started thinking that it fixed things that it didn't.

Speaker 3 (56:37):
Oh my god, Oh no, he later in.

Speaker 1 (56:40):
Life got to be like, oh, yeah, if you're having
an epileptic seizures, happing with the I don't know if
that in particular, but he wanted feeling that the Heimlich
maneuver was applicable to all these other issues. Just in
this you know, it kind of like tarnished his own reputation,
like he kind of went went crazy with the Heimlich
But point being, well, was up to and I don't know,

(57:01):
idea what he's up to as a parent, what he's
up to as a parent has no bearing.

Speaker 3 (57:04):
It's a great way to dislodge.

Speaker 1 (57:05):
Yeah, you know, I amlick someone one day and it
was astonishingly effective.

Speaker 3 (57:09):
I don't care what the hell the guy did.

Speaker 1 (57:11):
Yeah, the like the fountain animal stuff like that starts
to paint like a really yeah, that paints a different picture.

Speaker 6 (57:19):
People people do that. It's called rectal douching, and apparently
it's like, I mean, I know somebody who does it,
but apparently there is uh. You know, you feel lighter
and you feel cleansed, and then there's some kind of
idea of it affecting your whole sense of self.

Speaker 3 (57:38):
Is it common ad at the town pond?

Speaker 6 (57:41):
No?

Speaker 7 (57:43):
Was there like how long did it take you to
come full circle on him? And was there other alarm bells?
A lot like was it sudden or was it like
a thing that just built up over the years.

Speaker 4 (57:56):
It's it's been a slow process. Because here's the thing.
I'm very conflut for getting this story out in the
first place, because I really see value in the practice.
But I feel like my role right now is to
in a way save the practice from the man. And

(58:17):
he is getting to a point where you just like Heimlich, Right,
if Heimlich had a podcast that was huge, right, and
Heimlich was like a man Heimlich had millions of If
Heimlich had the million followers, you know, you can be like, look,
he's got this great method for dislodging stuff from the throat,

(58:38):
but he also thinks that the Heimlich will cure cancer
or will let you fly or whatever it is that
Heimlich might have gone off on.

Speaker 1 (58:44):
And then he says, try it underwater, right, And try
Buddy of Heimlich underwater Exactly.

Speaker 4 (58:50):
It's phenomenal. This the this is the problem and and
and what has happened is that so this organization that
is built up around wim Hoff, Like if you're just
hanging out with whim it's a great time. He's a
good guy, genuine you know, he's got his highs and
his lows. But like you, he's different than most people
I know. I don't think he's personally influenced by money

(59:10):
at all, which is really unusual, like most people I
know are really influenced by money. But he does love
the adulation. He does love people like being amazed by
what he's got. You know, we all like adulation. But
then he's getting infinite amounts of it, and he wants
to give people more and more. So you want to
push the techniques. You want to push a little further.
And the subtitle of one of his books is pushing

(59:32):
past Perceived limits. Well, if you're pushing past perceived limits
in a very controlled environment, that's one thing. But if
you're pushing past your perceived limits to your eight million
followers everywhere, and that's your method, you can keep on
doing it. You could do it you're the ultimate authority.
You're doing this stuff. Well, you're going to get people dying.
You're gonna get people who take his message and push it.

(59:54):
You know, he's the iceman. He swims underwater and gets
these get his spoken world records. It's cold exposure, it's
breath work. Why not mix the two. Well, it's very
clear you should never, under any circumstances hyperventilate and submerge
yourself in ice. It's here's what's going on.

Speaker 3 (01:00:17):
Well, yeah, let's talk about the deaths.

Speaker 4 (01:00:18):
Let's talk Well, yeah, so I started learning about deaths
back in twenty fourteen. People were doing his method in
various water situations, and he was teaching actively, you know, scrubbing,
which is hyperventilation, taking out all that co two, putting
your face in the water and holding it as long
as you can in various levels. And other people are

(01:00:39):
doing this too, like you know, I'm friends with a
big wave surfer, Laired Hamilton, and he had this XPT training.
When I went out to go hang out with him,
we did a similar version of that, and we didn't
really know the dangers. I think people did know the dangers,
but we hadn't fully so you're.

Speaker 1 (01:00:55):
Talking about full hyperventilating, not like like not taking elements
of like a couple hyper ventilating breath.

Speaker 3 (01:01:01):
You're talking sustained hyper ventilation.

Speaker 4 (01:01:03):
You can get you can get into a shallow water
blackout situation as little as five or ten breaths. Wim
Hof breathing is often a lot more, and there are
warning do two or so brass just so we can
hear it, something like that, But there's you know, you

(01:01:23):
can do various patterns of this in general, because your
body senses the urge to breathe by the build up
of CO two, right, So it's not like low oxygen
you feel that popping sound like I gotta breathe because
I have little oxygen. Instead, it's the build up of
CO two in your lungs. So when you hyperventilate, essentially

(01:01:45):
it's like cooking in a kitchen and taking the smoke
detector off the wall. There's no alarm system here at all,
and you can depending on how you do it. And
any sort of hyperventilation water is dangerous well known. You
can pass out before you sense any urge to breathe,

(01:02:06):
which means your own internal recognition, your own inter receptive
idea of where you are is just not working and
you pass out underwater. Now, I've done this on dry
land with the push ups, like, and it's incredibly dangerous
if you take a full long breath of air at
the end and then do your push ups because you'll
get more push ups out that way.

Speaker 3 (01:02:27):
You know.

Speaker 4 (01:02:27):
I hit eighty once doing that on a breath hold
on a breath hold. Yeah, and because you've blown off
all the co two, you've confused all the systems and
then you know, I hit eighty and then boot passed out,
hit the floor, which on dry land, I got a
bruise in the water. You die because when you pass out,
your body just resets and you start breathing, and that

(01:02:47):
gets into your lungs and well, long.

Speaker 3 (01:02:50):
Tangles by before you start breathing.

Speaker 4 (01:02:53):
It could be various ways. Yeah, the reset could be
different than not in a long time, minutes go by, Yeah, yeah,
depending on factors, right, you know for me, you know, yeah,
there's a lot of physiology to talk about there. So
we knew in twenty fourteen this was happening. Whim there
are four A newspaper in Holland had disclosed four deaths

(01:03:18):
with the wim Hoff Methode wim Hoff method practitioners dying
in water. And then there were some warnings everyone who
was doing this hyper ventilation stuff. You know, there's a
big warning in my book, there's warnings on wim Hoff's website,
there's warnings. You know, XPD doesn't do it anymore. But
like everyone knows, the word got out. A couple of
Navy seals died doing shallow water blackout and there are

(01:03:39):
a lot of news stories about it.

Speaker 1 (01:03:40):
They were trying to use this to get a better
underwater breath wall.

Speaker 4 (01:03:44):
I don't believe they were doing. I don't know for
sure what they were doing, but it was shallow water.
They were competing against each other and they both drowned
at the bottom of a pool at a naval training center.
And then people started to become aware of it, at
least in my circles.

Speaker 3 (01:03:58):
Like people, you know, people die during.

Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
The shallow water background blackout every year, right, tons of them.

Speaker 3 (01:04:07):
Yeah, yeah, whether or not they're practicing something particular or.

Speaker 4 (01:04:10):
Now there's a whole society called the Shallow Water Blackout
Prevention Organization. I mean, it's out there, it's known, and
but what need to happen at this point.

Speaker 1 (01:04:21):
Can we talk first about just some people understand why
we're talking about this? Yeah, why it's called shallow water blackout? Yeah,
so like you generally like it generally hit happens to
people forward the surface, right, I mean, well.

Speaker 4 (01:04:33):
It could happen anywhere. I mean, it has to do
with this this carbon dioxide blowing.

Speaker 3 (01:04:39):
But I've always been confused. Why is it called shallow
water blackout?

Speaker 4 (01:04:42):
Yeah, that's actually a surprisingly good question that I don't
have answered for. I think it's because people can drown
in surprisingly shallow amounts of water.

Speaker 1 (01:04:52):
We're talking about I hear from like when I'm talking
to people that have experienced it and with friends that
have had it. Like free divers for whatever reason, tend
to be like very near the end of the dive,
probably because you're you're at the end of the you're
near the end, right, right, You're near the end of
the dive, right, And I thought, for some reasons related
to that, that doesn't make me send.

Speaker 4 (01:05:10):
Now, I think I think it has to do what
you know, the nomenclature. I don't know, I think, but
I think it has to do with like you can
drown in any body of water and free divers. There
are a lot of free divers.

Speaker 3 (01:05:21):
You drowned a hot.

Speaker 4 (01:05:21):
Tub and drowning a hot tb gotcha. And and one
of the things that I want to point to is
that the wim Hoff method is you know the ice guy, Like,
look at the cover of my book. Here's the ice
guy getting into the water. And we know he's a
breathwork guy and he's famous for swimming underneath ice. And

(01:05:42):
that message is out there, and it's super easy to
get confused without knowing anything about the whim Hoff method. Right,
You're like, oh, I do the hyperventilation and I could
hold it for longer, and it makes sense I could
do it. And yet every time you do it, it's
really really dangerous because you've knocked off the alarm bells.
Scale that up to eight million peace people, you've got
a real problem. And that's so that's something that I

(01:06:03):
feel like can be dealt with warnings. And they an
Inner Fire has warnings to their credit all over the place.

Speaker 1 (01:06:09):
Will they put warnings over videos of people doing the
exact thing they're warning them not to do? Well, that's
now here's where we came out in a knife juggling video,
and there's a sign next to it and said, don't
juggle knives.

Speaker 4 (01:06:21):
Right, So when you watch so watch my video right,
it's it's on my YouTube channel, and you'll see that.
Wim Hoff sells this course on his website for ninety
nine dollars. And when I was talking with them in
twenty seventeen, they told me that they were making a
million dollars a month selling this course. So I don't
know what's that like? Ten thousand ish courses a year,

(01:06:43):
a month. And in week eight of their ten week course,
there's wim Hoff saying, here's what you do. You breathe
keep on doing the breathing, Keep on doing the breathing,
Go in the water, immerse in the water, and hold
your breath for as long as you know ten second
I'm just trying to paraphrase here, thirty seconds, and see

(01:07:04):
how far you can go. And he says this three
times in his in that one video, and then next
to it in a warning that's just right next.

Speaker 3 (01:07:13):
To it says what your don't believe.

Speaker 4 (01:07:16):
You're lying eyes wim Haw. He doesn't say that, but
it says what you are seeing is not wim Hoff
leading someone in nice immersion. It is him teaching cold tolerance,
so never do this in water. So there's a big
juxtaposition between what whim the Madman is teaching and what
the Inner Fire the organization is trying to present to
the world. And it's not just that incident, it's also

(01:07:39):
and that course is still available as far as I'm
aware on the wim Hoff website right now, but it's
also I was on stage with him in twenty seventeen
teaching the wim Hoff Breathwork to a group of about
three hundred people. You know, I'm talking about the book,
and he's talking about the breath work, and all these
people have never done the breath work before, and they
all hyperventilate, and then he says, hold your breath, and
then he plays on screen behind me a video of

(01:08:02):
him with his famous swim under there is conflating the
water and the breath work. And there's also and more
and more, and I've collected a bunch of these videos
and showing how he is ignoring his own warnings and
people are dying.

Speaker 7 (01:08:21):
Are the warnings there because his lawyers are making him
put him there? Or like obviously he doesn't.

Speaker 3 (01:08:27):
Would they be there if it was up to him
as what a mask.

Speaker 4 (01:08:31):
Well, wim T has told me that he's never even
been on his own website, so I don't think he
cares one way or the other. What's there, Wim is
the madman and the prophet, right, That's what I call him.
He's a madman and a prophet profit because he has
his cool method, not because he's God, but madman because
he's all over the place, like he's he's way out there,

(01:08:52):
and I think he wants to impress people. He wants
people to think that they can push their limits to
like crazy spots, and he wants to please people. And
by doing that, he conflates repeatedly these dangerous but these
dangerous practices, and the organization might be maybe it's just
a callous legal thing. Maybe it's they're scrambling to do

(01:09:12):
what they can to control Whim. Either way, he's still
teaching hyperventilation in water despite knowing about this, And I
talked to him about this in twenty seventeen. I was like, Whim,
you cannot do this, like you cannot teach a people
are dying, you know they're dying. And he's like, yeah,
there's warnings on my website, So I guess he had
been on his website, so it's where there were one.

Speaker 3 (01:09:33):
Then someone in the organization call it not a bomber
what they call it.

Speaker 4 (01:09:37):
He said, it's lame. Yeah, ainam Hoff says, yeah, I
know it's lame. And then but we have warnings all
over our website. What more can we do? And well,
you could stop teaching hyperventilation and water would be one
thing that you could do. And this is there's just
so much confusion just because of who he is and

(01:09:58):
and the two pillars of his practice that this is
becoming a real major problem. And you know, and people
are you know he's you know, there's currently a lawsuit.

Speaker 1 (01:10:11):
Yeah, I want to get into talk about some of
the deaths they have the lawsuits attached to him.

Speaker 4 (01:10:16):
Well, let me tell you about one of the butt
shows a very clear connection. Right, there's this guy named
Andrew and seen as he's in Orange County, California, and
he's super wim Hoff practitioner. Go Getter wants to push
his limits like he's one of these guys who who's
type A and loves it. And he uh watched all

(01:10:37):
the videos on YouTube, maybe downloaded the course, maybe not
couldn't confirm that.

Speaker 3 (01:10:42):
How was he cast?

Speaker 4 (01:10:43):
Yeah, a Rufio maybe a karate kid. I put him
like a was it Michael Rufio? So he he's a
tech entrepreneur, has a social media think game going on.
He goes it's labor day and he's says, hey to
his brother. Adam's like, I'm gonna do some wim Hoff
in the pool, because he does it, and we have

(01:11:04):
videos of him doing wim Hoff in the pool. He
goes to the pool and passes out. And a few
minutes later, you know, Adam, his brother goes and sees him.
He's in a meditative position under the water, and they
pull him out. They do CPR, he gets his heart started,
brings him to UCI Medical Center, brain dead on arrival.

(01:11:27):
He's an organ donor a few days later, and you know,
it's just clear that he was doing wim Hoff method
and water dies, and you know, and that's where he is.
And the lawsuit is from another sort of similar case.
Seventeen year old Madeleine Rose Medsker, you know, has been
practicing the myth hot wim Hoff method for a while,

(01:11:48):
accessing it on the computer fathers at their house in
Long Beach, California. He doesn't see her for a little while.

Speaker 3 (01:11:55):
Long later, you.

Speaker 1 (01:11:56):
Had a detail where there he was arguing with his
ex wife about what algebra class.

Speaker 4 (01:12:01):
Yeah, I know that there's an argument over some sort
of higher mathematics, which you and I are both not
good at math. We've already established this.

Speaker 3 (01:12:11):
There's just a snapshot of life, right, like, like what's
going on in her, right, I don't know, but she's not.

Speaker 4 (01:12:18):
The ongoings of a family, right, And she's known for,
you know, using tech these techniques for calming her nerves
because there's this big anti anxiety effect to the wim
Hoff method. He finds her.

Speaker 3 (01:12:28):
Passed out in the pool.

Speaker 4 (01:12:29):
She does usually doesn't use the pool, and he assumes
that she was doing the wim Hoff method in the pool.
But this is a problem with these cases, right when
someone drowns and there's no witnesses and there's no video,
how do you know what they're doing in the water?

Speaker 3 (01:12:43):
And then she had like wim Hoff tabs.

Speaker 4 (01:12:46):
You're saying, yeah, I mean this is what the lawsuit
of ledges, you know, and and and this is one
of the big problems actually, you know, I started trying
to investigate how many people have drowned. No one's there's
no Bureau of wim Hoff Drowning Statistics.

Speaker 3 (01:13:02):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:13:02):
This is me on Google trying to find the news
articles that pop up saying, hey, this person passed out
in water and drowned. And I was able to find
thirteen cases just from the Google search saying the wim
Hoff practitioner drowns in water and we're pretty sure this
is this is how it happened. And you got to

(01:13:22):
think that that sample, well, that's pretty you know, that's
pretty small. Like I've been a reporter for a long time.
I know that most drowning desks don't generate news articles,
let alone make connections for what was happening when there's
no video, no major evidence. I'm thinking that that sample
is incredibly skewed to small that many people. It's very

(01:13:43):
easy to get the wrong idea about the wim Hoffman.
And how would you know if somebody just is swimming
and it's like, hey, I'm going to hyperventily in the
in the water now and they just drowned as a drowning,
and you know, I will say that my sample, it's
a global sample. I got thirty teen names. Four are
in California and seven are in the United States. So

(01:14:06):
are we thinking that Americans are particularly prone to shallow
water blackout? Or perhaps maybe that that that that the
the way I collected information, the way it's available, it's
actually a much smaller and skewed sample because of that. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:14:25):
Uh. But if he's like, how much did in your book?
How much did you push what he's pushing in water? Yeah?

Speaker 4 (01:14:35):
Oh, I mean no, no, never.

Speaker 3 (01:14:37):
So your book's clear about it.

Speaker 4 (01:14:38):
My book is clear about it. I talk about the
deaths at that point, there were fewer. Uh, and you know,
there's a big warning at the front of my books,
and you know, always to consult a doctor, you know
that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (01:14:50):
Yeah, but you pointed to you said, how they're in
the front of your book.

Speaker 1 (01:14:52):
There he is in the ice and he's a breathing actually, guy,
So I don't know if you feel complicit.

Speaker 4 (01:14:56):
Well, I I what I feel. And the reason why
I'm so out about this right now, and why you know,
honestly the whim Hoff community does not like me at
all right now is because I do feel complicit.

Speaker 3 (01:15:07):
I was.

Speaker 4 (01:15:08):
I'm his chief alcoholic, whether he likes it or not. Right,
I've been doing this for ten years. I am a
daily practitioner. I did my ice bath today, I did
my breath work today. I love that method. I've done
three hundred news programs on Doctor Oz. You know, I've
been on Ben Green. I haven't been on your podcast
until right now, but I have been spreading his message

(01:15:30):
for a long time. I know that, you know, two
hundred fifty thousand people read this book. That's at least
a quarter million. How many of those people got the
wrong idea? And I feel like if whim is still
conflating and still teaching this practice, still selling that dangerous
conflation on his website, I have to go out and
we have to tell the true and full story because fame,

(01:15:54):
I mean, it accentuates mental illness, right, Fame is isolating.
Fame will will accentuate your negative aspects. And when you're
doing something which is potentially dangerous and then you're telling
people to push there them that said, we're going to
have fallout. And this is where I'm at the beginning again.
It's like I'm in Poland, I'm meeting him again for

(01:16:16):
the first time. And if I feel like if I
had written that story initially right now, like if I
was on assignment with him right now, I would write
a very different story about who wim Hoff is.

Speaker 1 (01:16:29):
That was the thing I thought about when I was
reading it, when I was reading what you'd.

Speaker 3 (01:16:34):
Reading, what you'd written.

Speaker 1 (01:16:35):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:16:48):
Not necessarily for the same reasons, for.

Speaker 4 (01:16:50):
Very different reasons. Yeah, And it's because the hard thing
is because like this stuff does work, and the but
we are putting too much faith into an individual, right,
That is the dangerous thing with all these cults. It's
like you give away your control over to some sort
of figurehead and you let them run that conversation of

(01:17:14):
your life and you follow them as an example. And
the thing I loved about whim when I first met
him is like you meet him, You're like, well, I
would never follow this guy's example. Like just look at him.
He's got this big alcoholic nose, he's a smoker. He's
like he's you know, obviously like maybe the worst father around.
I looked at him, I was like, look, he has
all these obvious flaws and yet he's got this this

(01:17:38):
awesome thing. And I thought that was a really good
combination in a way, because his flaws were out there.
He wasn't pretending not to be who he was. And
I feel like it's not totally his fault that it
has gotten to this way, because when you speak with him,
he's still very genuine. But there's a business. It's an
eighteen million dollar inner fire business run by his son, AmAm,

(01:17:59):
who was one of those abandoned kids who does not
practice the method, who who basically you know, you'll you
can look in my video.

Speaker 3 (01:18:08):
There's that I have.

Speaker 4 (01:18:09):
I have a video of him saying, you know, I
hadn't seen him in ten years and he was getting
quite famous, and like I was, you know, I thought,
you know, essentially he could make a lot of money
doing this. Essentially he could take his take his father's
image and build an effective social media, breathwork and ice business,
which is exactly what he did. And that is I mean,

(01:18:33):
I mean, hell, anyone can do commerce, like it's not
bad to do commerce, and and then you spread the message,
but it doesn't feel genuine and it feels like.

Speaker 3 (01:18:42):
It's moved away from what I.

Speaker 8 (01:18:43):
Have loved about this method, how do you you might
you might be equipped to answer this.

Speaker 3 (01:18:59):
You've used the word cult and even inner fire.

Speaker 1 (01:19:03):
Is like it's like, I don't get you could take
any cult in American history and he could have called
it interfire and like yeah, and dude, like I don't, like,
I don't you know I'm learning right now?

Speaker 3 (01:19:19):
I don't.

Speaker 1 (01:19:20):
I don't have any I don't have any history. Sure,
I never heard of interfire until I was reading your stuff.
I didn't know about it. But it just has like
a funny has like a culty flavor to it.

Speaker 3 (01:19:31):
But how do you.

Speaker 1 (01:19:32):
Get Hey, if someone has a fitness break through, health breakthrough,
whatever it is, okay, someone discovers something that's beneficial, how
do you get where the person is bundled with the thing?
Meaning why did Heimlick? Why are we not talking about

(01:19:57):
Heimlick as a cult figure?

Speaker 3 (01:19:58):
Yeah, he didn't have a podcast.

Speaker 4 (01:20:00):
I guess YouTube wasn't around, But how does it happen?

Speaker 1 (01:20:03):
Like, for instance, and as poorly as I understand it,
Like I said.

Speaker 3 (01:20:07):
My journey into my journey into free diving.

Speaker 1 (01:20:11):
It's like I spend some amount of time on it
over the last some odd years, I hang out with
people who just because of the good fortune and circumstances
of my life, I'm able to hang out with.

Speaker 3 (01:20:22):
People who are really good at it. Sure I'm not.

Speaker 1 (01:20:27):
The things I learned from them would be like I've
learned things from them that have very much not pushed
my limits, but have made it be an educated way.
I can do things that I couldn't do before. Sure,
I didn't understand how to properly clear my ears in
the way that didn't create big ear problems. I didn't

(01:20:47):
understand how to that never occurred to me to land
the surface of the water and completely relax imagine completely
relaxing every muscle in my body and just blowly breathing
for a while, right and getting like everything relaxed, and
going underwater and staying calm and fighting that like, oh

(01:21:08):
my god, A'm out of the water, feeling right. And
I learned all the stuff, and now I can go deeper,
I stay down longer. I can do things I could
I always wanted to do and couldn't do. But I
don't attach that to a figure Kimmy Werner, Greg Fonce.
I don't attach it to them being like where I'm
gonna go like my love of the knowledge. Just as

(01:21:34):
much as I love those people, my love of the
knowledge is not extend to them as being like a leader.

Speaker 3 (01:21:39):
Yes, yeah, or you.

Speaker 1 (01:21:40):
Know, I don't go and a and I'm like, Greg,
what do you think I should do about my marriage?
It's like, I just don't. He taught me some really
cool stuff, right, he learned it from someone who learned
it from someone and he's translated it to me, and
it's it's taken me beyond my limits.

Speaker 3 (01:21:56):
But there's no CULTI factor, like how do you who?
How did he become bundled?

Speaker 1 (01:22:02):
Like why is it not he has these ideas, These
ideas travel around and why does it not be that
people want to put their hands on them, they want
to stand in a circle around him. He needs to
say the most guru thing in the world, which is
I'm not your guru.

Speaker 3 (01:22:15):
It's just like the most guru thing on the planet.
I never have occasion.

Speaker 1 (01:22:22):
I mean no, I'm not your fucking guru, you know,
which is like very guruy, right, I'm just from inner fire.

Speaker 4 (01:22:28):
Yeah, I mean this is exactly it, like like the
cult of personality around him. He is a charismatic I
don't know why he's charismatic. Is not a good looking
like and also people look at him now and they're like,
he's a he's an athlete, but like he's not an athlete.
He's got this huge star out of his navel where

(01:22:49):
they had to do surgery to read stitches and testines.
He's he's fat. He's got like this big bulb of
his nose, and people are like, oh no, we'm off
is an extreme athlete, Like he doesn't have any records
anymore other than the I think he is a barefoot
marathon record in the Arctic half marathon half marathon he
did like I want to say, six hours. It's not

(01:23:10):
that great of a time, but maybe no one else
tried it, right.

Speaker 5 (01:23:14):
I.

Speaker 4 (01:23:17):
Mean, you know it's he has He is an impressive guy, right,
he has done impressive things, but people have for some reason,
haff has gotten to a point where where people's just
blinders go up. They're like, oh, well, he has this
science behind him, so he must he must be right
about almost everything.

Speaker 7 (01:23:38):
And is there an aspect because like in the wellness industry,
you see like I see some of that, right, So
is that like CULTI personality thing? Kind of tied to
the wellness industry and like totally does the wellness industry
like feed that well.

Speaker 4 (01:23:57):
I mean his method is good for a lot of
like chronic conditions, when the wellness industry loves the chronic conditions.

Speaker 3 (01:24:04):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:24:04):
You know, you don't go to the wellness guru if
you have a broken leg, right, you go to the
wellness guru because you have a gut something you can't
quite put your finger on, right, And the actually is
good for that stuff, like, and a lot of stuff
is good for that stuff. It's not just the woman
like that. You know when I said you put your
your your tent pole down. This can be a thing

(01:24:25):
like a beach head to actually help you work on
a lot of different things. And I think the Wimhuff
method is a great beachhead. But then when you have
that beachhead, some people, not everyone, but some people are like, well,
what else does whim do? He's such a great guy.

Speaker 3 (01:24:40):
Oh, I love it.

Speaker 4 (01:24:41):
He's funny. He's got a YouTube channel, he plays guitar.
He talks in nonsense on stage because he says stuff
that's way beyond the science. He says, you know, when
he's on Rogan and he's also said this to me, like,
you know, I get above one hundred percent oxygen for
the first time. They proved it in the lab above
a hundred percent oxygen if hyperventilate, and and of course
you can't get above one hundred percent hundred percent and

(01:25:04):
you you.

Speaker 1 (01:25:05):
It's like the amplifier and spinal tap that goes up
to eleven.

Speaker 4 (01:25:09):
Right right, and he is that amplifier. He is spinal
tap here and and people like let him get away
with it, and then he'll throw out these sort of
nonsense scientific phrases to explain what it is. And maybe
they're like they sound well, is that plausible? Is that
not plausible? But you'll be talking to him in a
podcast or whatever, and you can't sit in fact check it.

(01:25:29):
You can't be like, what are you saying? So you know,
there's this one quote on Rogan sixty I don't know,
some some number on Rogan where we can just read
you won't read that quote. Well, you do your best
whim Hoff if you can.

Speaker 3 (01:25:42):
And I can't.

Speaker 1 (01:25:43):
I never I haven't said and I'm just finding all
about this. It's interesting me because but I can't do it.
I'm not I'm not I'm like, not familiar. Well, and
I hope that's coming across to listeners, and I'm not familiar.

Speaker 3 (01:25:55):
I'm just I'm into this whole thing, though.

Speaker 4 (01:25:57):
Well, you know you have that.

Speaker 3 (01:25:58):
He says this.

Speaker 1 (01:26:01):
They did it with a laser on the chest, and
then they were able to measure the mitochondrial oxygen tension.
They're able to receive more oction oxygen. That is a
great finding. It shows that we can have more oxygen inside.
Suddenly we were able to get into the cell and
influence the energy production. If it is anaerobic, it is

(01:26:21):
like two molecules able to produce. When it becomes aerobic,
then it's up to thirty eight molecules they can produce.
What happens what happens with the cell that is deprived
for forty eight hours of thirty five percent less oxygen,
it becomes cancerous. As simple as that.

Speaker 4 (01:26:38):
Yeah, does that make any sense to anybody here? Like,
you know, he throws it out with a sense of confidence.
And so I actually spent a little while on this paragraph.

Speaker 3 (01:26:48):
Right, Like, I called two doctors over.

Speaker 4 (01:26:51):
At Harvard and I was like, is there anything No
one was the Harvard was at Stanford, and I was like,
is there anything to this that backs it up? And
they're like, well, you know, maybe oxygen could you know,
deprivation might be cancerous but like I was like no,
but specifically our eight oxygen molecules on this hemoglobe and whatever.
And they're like, no, this makes no sense. This is
all just just crazy talk.

Speaker 3 (01:27:13):
And there's a word.

Speaker 1 (01:27:14):
Another there's a word another researcher uses Brian McKenzie.

Speaker 3 (01:27:20):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:27:21):
Brian McKenzie, a breath work expert, an author of the
book Power, Speed and Endurance. Uh calls some of the
language they use.

Speaker 3 (01:27:32):
What's the word he has for it, actually galamataeus. So
so just to.

Speaker 4 (01:27:37):
Correct you here so we don't have to get that
correction later. What mackenzie says is that no person the
organization understands the physiology and the person uh you know
it's actually market Well. Walter von markin Liechtenbelt, who's a
scientist who has actually studied uh haff in a lab
who says that basically, uh whim scientific of acabula Larry

(01:28:00):
is galimatis, which is and he wrote that in a
in a scientific article which I read again this morning,
and and galamatis basically means gobbleybook.

Speaker 3 (01:28:08):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:28:09):
He goes on to say he mixes in a nonsensical
way scientific terms as irrefutable evidence.

Speaker 4 (01:28:15):
Yeah, and we see that a lot on the internet
these days.

Speaker 1 (01:28:18):
The only uh the only real for me personally, the
health and wellness things that make sense to me are
thing are things.

Speaker 3 (01:28:26):
Like, uh, work out like a lot, eat a very diet. Yeah,
I like that, Like things you want to get good
at doing a whole bunch. Yeah, you know, stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (01:28:37):
But uh, like I'm always like half hearing this kind
of stuff. And we never did it, but I was
we were gonna make a thing recently where it was, uh,
we're gonna.

Speaker 3 (01:28:47):
Make a I only made the book cover.

Speaker 1 (01:28:50):
I made a we made a book jacket called lard man.

Speaker 3 (01:28:53):
It was gonna be like I wanted to like compile
like the.

Speaker 10 (01:28:57):
Gobblely goot yeah about like if you only eat lard,
And I wanted to come up with all of the
language it explains all the health benefits and what it
does to your mitochondrial DNA.

Speaker 1 (01:29:08):
You should that and just make like an insane paragraph
of like shit that comes from eating lard and make
it be like people be like damn that sounds like
a good idea.

Speaker 3 (01:29:19):
You should do that.

Speaker 6 (01:29:20):
So that you can say to other people that I'm
not your guru.

Speaker 3 (01:29:24):
So we made the book cover it's called lard Man.

Speaker 4 (01:29:27):
Personally, I think that you should get into the lard
and the coffee business, like, because lard will definitely supercharge
your Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:29:35):
No, I think we had it was a guide, an
ancient pathway to but this is only the farthest we got.

Speaker 1 (01:29:43):
On my Instagram at Steve Marnella, you'll see my Lardman
book cover. It's called lard Man, an Ancient pathway to
more muscle, slickerball movements, and better sex. And it was
because it was just it came from us, sort of
like listening to health advice from every place, that's like
ultimately contradictory and as often I've found weirdly reflective of

(01:30:08):
people's reflective of people's ideologies. Meaning a person that is
going to extol the virtues of eating a vegan, how
good they feel on a vegan diet, that diet probably
appeals to some sensibility they held right. Another person like

(01:30:28):
oh no, I only eat meat and I feel great, right,
probably appeals to a sensibility and and the you know,
there's this thing.

Speaker 3 (01:30:37):
That that we talked about this past.

Speaker 1 (01:30:40):
Overwhelmingly a right leaning person likes enjoys meat rarer than
a left leaning person.

Speaker 4 (01:30:49):
Now is that a scientific fact?

Speaker 1 (01:30:53):
Overwhelmingly the right leaning person enjoys the taste.

Speaker 3 (01:30:59):
How your taste receptors are tied to your pol they
just are or a thing I always bring up.

Speaker 1 (01:31:06):
Left leaning people are much more inclined to have gluten intolerance.

Speaker 4 (01:31:10):
Is that true?

Speaker 3 (01:31:10):
Yes? So?

Speaker 4 (01:31:12):
Wait?

Speaker 3 (01:31:12):
Is that yes?

Speaker 7 (01:31:13):
Or is that you're.

Speaker 3 (01:31:17):
Seventy four percent?

Speaker 1 (01:31:18):
I can't remember what it was, Spencer, You're seventy four
percent more likely don't want a medium rare steak if
you lean right?

Speaker 3 (01:31:23):
Wait? Will you be my guru? All right? That's what
That's all I want to know.

Speaker 4 (01:31:27):
So I'm on the lookout for the guru.

Speaker 3 (01:31:31):
Can you remember why Spencer reported on this? Okay? Like?

Speaker 1 (01:31:37):
Like, I was surprised because the most common way to
order a steak in America is medium rare, which I
would have thought it was medium. Medium rare is the
most commonly ordered steak in America, and it's overwhelmingly when
you get a steak if your right wing, you want
to cook less?

Speaker 4 (01:31:54):
Wait, but I'm I'm left leaning, but I also order
steaks medium rare. Do I have to start cooking them longer?

Speaker 1 (01:32:01):
You're one of the twenty four, you're like the other
end of it, point being, the point being only that
the reason like one of the ways I sort of
like watch one of the areas in which I'm interested in,
like wild health things, sure, is that there's so often
a reflection of current cultures. There's aspects of it that

(01:32:25):
are reacting against things. There's things that seem appealing that
there's things that would that would like. There's like I
could come to you with two equally valid sounding hell
things and I and you might be able to make
My guess is they're gonna they're going to like the
sounds of this one.

Speaker 3 (01:32:40):
I think you're going to make some sense to them.

Speaker 4 (01:32:42):
I think you're hitting on actually a very deep and
interesting topic, which is that and I touch on this
in a lot of my of my books that are
the environment that we exist in changes changes our physiology. Right,
if you live in a varied environment, like you know,
you're able to go out into the wilds a lot
and you're able to change to interact with the cold

(01:33:04):
or the heat or the stress or the New York
City streets. All of those external influences literally change your physiology. Literally,
there's a connecting pathway between you being comfortable in Times
Square or you know, in the Adirondacks. Right, there's a
there's some sort of connection with and it's also goes to,

(01:33:26):
no doubt, the political environment that you live in, the
social media environment you live in, and all of those things,
Like for that information to come into your senses, it
wires your brain in different ways, and that wiring the
brains releases different cocktails of hormones and proteins, genetic epigenetic responses.

(01:33:48):
It's all connected. So it doesn't surprise me actually that
you might say that rarer meat does correlate with maybe
a conservative ideology. Maybe there's a way that works, And
I think I think that it probably does through these
sensory pathways like maybe liberals, you know, maybe maybe like
the vegetable is more salient to somebody who's left leaning

(01:34:11):
because that sort of broader cultural meme. And I'm talking
about that not in a like an internet meme, but
there's an anthropological idea of the meme that that actually
translates into our physiology because we are intimately connected with
our environment. You can't really think of a human not
in their environment.

Speaker 3 (01:34:29):
Who would you be?

Speaker 4 (01:34:30):
Who would your ten year old child be without all
of the experiences prior to it to that? And who
would that child be without all of your experiences that
led to that child being born in the first place.

Speaker 3 (01:34:40):
Yeah, picture that.

Speaker 1 (01:34:43):
Picture that you've always like. Your parents' eyes made you
eat a lot of steak and stuff. You could only
ever think about the cow. You always felt a little bad.
You understood that it was really important to need a
very diet. It always nagged on you, the welfare. And
then one day you meet someone who's like, man, I
don't eat I don't eat any meat, and I feel fantastic.

(01:35:06):
That person then cuts meat out of their diet. They're like, god,
I feel so much better.

Speaker 4 (01:35:10):
Well, sure, and humans, And I'm not even saying it's
not true. Homo sapiens are omnivorous and highly varied. Right,
So from my anthropological training, you know there isn't an
ancestral lifestyle, right, But I will say that it's not lunchables, right,
It's not going to the grocery store. The ancestral lifestyle

(01:35:30):
had to do with the environment, that we inhabited. If
you are a coastal tribe with a rich mollusk access,
you survived on bivalves because that was available. You varied
with the seasons. And I don't know if there were
true vegetarian groups.

Speaker 3 (01:35:44):
But there may have been.

Speaker 4 (01:35:45):
There could have well been a tuber centric tribe out there,
and they probably survived just fine, because one of the
evolutionary advantages of humans is that we are incredibly adaptable
to a highly varied environ.

Speaker 1 (01:36:01):
Do you feel that you are susceptible to something like
whim Hoff because you you're a searcher, so like you
got you went into Betan Buddhism, got into it, presumably
not as into it now you got into wim Hoff,
you got out of it. Do you feel that you
have like a searcher mind and you're susceptible to gurus. No,

(01:36:25):
I don't think I'm as susceptible to gurus. Actually, I
think that I am very skeptical by nature, and I
have a real you know, a bug in my bonnet
for truth, right and one of the reasons why, and
I have meditated for years, but I've never followed, like,
never gotten guru afide right, I was leading that a

(01:36:45):
broad program, but I wasn't a Tibetan Buddhist.

Speaker 4 (01:36:49):
I don't have a lama or anything like that. What
I'm interested in is the intersection of complex cultures and individuals.
And I'm really you know, I think that if someone
lies to me or I feel like there is something
that's untrue or that I need to investigate, my nature

(01:37:09):
is to investigate. My nature is to go like a
bloodhound on a story and find out what the truth is.
And I realized that maybe that is a personality flaw
because I'm always digging around in things that maybe don't
even matter in the end. Right, maybe no one needs
to know what the Buddha was saying eight hundred years
ago that led people to commit suicide, right, Like, maybe

(01:37:30):
that doesn't even matter. But I have this just impulse
to sort out bullshit from reality.

Speaker 1 (01:37:40):
Did you when it came to too going after like
in pointing out the risk and the you know, you've
identified thirteen potential deaths here, did you initially think that?

Speaker 3 (01:37:57):
Have you in the past gone to Inner Fire or
gone to wim.

Speaker 1 (01:38:02):
Hoff and said, listen, there's like a problem and we
should read you guys should redo a bunch of stuff
and clarify this point. And and that just didn't doesn't
get traction.

Speaker 4 (01:38:11):
Four years, I mean, this has not been a new thing.
Like in twenty seventeen when we were on stage. The
first thing I said to him after we were on
stage was you can't do this, and he was like, oh,
they're warnings, don't worry about it. And and I have
been a a you know, I don't. I didn't talk
to Himhoff for a few years after the book came

(01:38:31):
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?

Speaker 3 (01:38:42):
With at that?

Speaker 4 (01:38:43):
With oh you have? Okay, well, oh just buying a
little thing. But not but like you're doing something wrong right, Like.

Speaker 1 (01:38:51):
You against dishwashers and I've gotten into dishwashers.

Speaker 4 (01:38:56):
Okay, but did you yourself by who with the dishwasher
change your mind?

Speaker 5 (01:39:00):
No?

Speaker 3 (01:39:01):
My wife and my friend honest, okay, well those people.

Speaker 4 (01:39:04):
You know, it doesn't sound like a deeply held reb
but I can no, No, it was. But there's no
way in the world that I could convince you that
animals need to be protected under all conditions and uh,
and never be hunted. Right, there's no there's no combination
of words that leave my mouth that go to your brain.

(01:39:26):
You're like, wal Scott, you got a point. I'm going
to be a vegan. I just don't see that happening.

Speaker 3 (01:39:31):
I think, yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:39:32):
And it's the same thing with Whim. He's been doing
this for so long. He's been doing these feats. He
believes in what he does and and he just doesn't
hear things that contradict that. And you know there's this
one quote you can bring that up. Uh, just search

(01:39:52):
for Jesus.

Speaker 3 (01:39:53):
Uh.

Speaker 9 (01:39:58):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:39:58):
So I started asking him, like, what is.

Speaker 3 (01:40:03):
The what is the command key for search?

Speaker 5 (01:40:06):
Control F?

Speaker 4 (01:40:07):
Control F.

Speaker 3 (01:40:08):
That's why they were goal M. That's why I was
thinking control.

Speaker 4 (01:40:13):
So I approached him during the reporting of this story.
This was like a month or two ago, and I
was like, look, you know, you have people drowning and
uh and and there's some problems here and it's roughly
the stuff that we were talking about here. He follows
my you know, Instagram post, and he knows that I'm
you know, causing trouble.

Speaker 1 (01:40:31):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (01:40:31):
And you know, he wrote to me twenty eight thousand
people drown every year, and that I was blaming him
for all of their deaths, which I wasn't. And also
it's two hundred and eighty thousand people that drown every year.
And then he wrote me this, well, so I was
talking specifically about I read Yeah, I read it like
five times. So just to give you some context. At

(01:40:55):
a recent Whimhoff event, he teaches something called a baptism
where peop will hyperventilate, they take twelve very deep breaths
and then all put their face in the water together.
And there's this video. It's very culty, very you know,
it's intense. And then here I asked him about that
and he said, look into baptism. This is my Wimhoff impression.
Look into baptism then the real meaning of it. You

(01:41:17):
might learn something. I know what I do baptism. The
real one is shutting down our over controlling mind and
activate deep healing mechanisms in the body. Not going to
explain this physiologically, not into cut competition sports here, which
is entertainment. Since the Roman Empire who killed an innocent
man called Jesus. Now, I don't know what this means,

(01:41:42):
all right, I really don't, but it does.

Speaker 3 (01:41:45):
Look, he's inviting you to go to the Bible.

Speaker 1 (01:41:49):
And look into the real meaning of baptism, which in
his starting of the Bible he has found it that
what Jesus was doing when he baptized his disciples, as
he was shutting down their over controlling minds and activating
deep healing mechanisms in their body.

Speaker 3 (01:42:10):
I don't I'm no uh theologian, but I don't think.

Speaker 1 (01:42:18):
That that's what Jesus is saying when he teaches baptism.

Speaker 4 (01:42:22):
No, but it does seem that's what is saying exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:42:26):
But he's not.

Speaker 1 (01:42:26):
I'm telling you asked what he's so he says, I'm
not going to explain this physiogical.

Speaker 3 (01:42:30):
He's not.

Speaker 1 (01:42:30):
He doesn't want to explain a physiology. He's not into competition.
He's not into sports because sports is entertainment. Since the
Roman Empire killed an innocent man called Jesus, sports is entertainment.

Speaker 4 (01:42:49):
Yeah, you're gonna you're gonna run in circles here, man,
I don't.

Speaker 3 (01:42:53):
Know where you're going. I'm trying to understand the passage.

Speaker 1 (01:42:57):
You know, in college they toss a good trick when
you're reading something. If you when you read a sentence
that you feel as total bullshit. M hmm okay, and
you're like, I've read the sentence a home times, I
don't know what it means. There's a good trick. Add
the word not into it, put the word not somewhere
in the sense anywhere, and then read it again. Wait
there be like wait a minute, that's the opposite. Or
you're like, well, no, that didn't change anything.

Speaker 4 (01:43:18):
But there already is a knot into it, not not
into competitions for it.

Speaker 3 (01:43:23):
Is a double I'm saying.

Speaker 1 (01:43:24):
But in this case, since the word not is in there,
pull the word not outa read the sentence that you
think is horseshit and feel like did.

Speaker 3 (01:43:32):
It did it fundamentally change for you?

Speaker 1 (01:43:34):
And when I do that exercise, it doesn't fundamentally change.

Speaker 3 (01:43:37):
Its correct because it was not going to do it.

Speaker 4 (01:43:39):
That is a good trick.

Speaker 3 (01:43:41):
It doesn't help you know what they're talking about.

Speaker 1 (01:43:44):
It just helps you go like, even when I add
the knot, or in this case, I take away the
knot and I read it, it.

Speaker 3 (01:43:50):
Doesn't fund It doesn't fundamentally change.

Speaker 7 (01:43:54):
Mind, it remains gobblly gook.

Speaker 1 (01:43:56):
Yeah, it's like it doesn't. Yeah, it's a way it's
a trick. It's a thing to go like, is this
sentence bullshit? I'm going to add the word not somewhere
and then read it again, and then I still look
at it and I'm like, no, just as full shit
as it was a minute ago.

Speaker 4 (01:44:09):
It's well just to me. To me, what this looks
like is like wim Hoff comparing himself to Jesus. It
looks like he has gotten to the point where he
is in the enlightenment trap. And the enlightenment trap is
when you start believing all your own shit because you
have talken to angels, are talking to your Buddhist angels.
And in this case, I don't think women as a

(01:44:31):
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

(01:44:55):
when confronted with the little evidence of deaths and of
sixty seven, a million dollar lawsuit that we haven't talked
about yet. Oh we did a sixty seven million dollar lawsuit.
He's still diverting in some sort of spiritual bypassing framework.

Speaker 7 (01:45:12):
Has he ever, like, in any way acknowledged that people
have died doing his deal?

Speaker 3 (01:45:19):
Yes?

Speaker 4 (01:45:20):
Yes, in this passage, he's like, are you gonna blame
me for all the twenty eight thousand people who have drowned?
And they do have warnings on their website, and the
warnings were placed there in response to deaths, perhaps, as
you mentioned earlier, for a legal reason. But he knows
this is going on.

Speaker 3 (01:45:35):
He is well aware of it.

Speaker 4 (01:45:38):
Whether or not he believes he's ultimately responsible, now that's
a different question.

Speaker 3 (01:45:44):
Hmm.

Speaker 1 (01:45:47):
So what what's going to happen to you?

Speaker 3 (01:45:52):
Now?

Speaker 4 (01:45:53):
Oh my god, Well, I'm already getting a fair amount
of attacks by the sort of there's a lot large
group of people who subscribe to the wim Hoff method,
and most of them are very sane. You know, the
wim Hoff instructors that I've known, I will to their credit,
I've never met one of them who says hyperventilate and water.

(01:46:14):
And there's like, I guess, eighteen hundred wim Hoff method instructors.

Speaker 3 (01:46:16):
So the people who teach.

Speaker 4 (01:46:18):
This method, who I have met, seem to be doing
the good work and are understanding what's going on. There
are many people who are, I believe, hooked into this
idea of wim Hoff as not their guru, but really
might their guru. And I see a lot of people
whove been very angry at me for putting this out

(01:46:38):
because you know, as his essentially his chief alkholite for
ten years, you know, been doing his method for ten years,
been doing videos about him for a while.

Speaker 1 (01:46:46):
Yeah, you gotta admit it looks like I'm just it
looks suspicious.

Speaker 4 (01:46:50):
What do you mean what you're doing?

Speaker 1 (01:46:51):
Why is that because you were like his disciple? Yeah,
and now you're going against him. It's like it's got
like a Star Wars you kind of groove to it. Yeah,
I mean it's like a whole part of like like
a like a mentor has like a mentee has to
turn that. It's like some kind I can't remember how
that there's like a like a mentee. We will eventually

(01:47:12):
have to bypass. And but you're not looking for the
crown though.

Speaker 4 (01:47:15):
No, I don't want to be whim Hoff. I want
to do other things. I'm writing a book on napping
right now, like I am so done with this.

Speaker 3 (01:47:26):
If you look if you're.

Speaker 1 (01:47:27):
Looking for the crown, if you were looking for the crown,
it would be very suspicious, right. But I could see that.
I could see where someone might look. If someone came
to me and said, hey, man, there's a guy. There's
a writer. Okay, oh right, uh.

Speaker 3 (01:47:46):
Like everything. Let's return to Apocalypse now.

Speaker 1 (01:47:49):
In Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard, they come to Captain Willer.

Speaker 3 (01:47:55):
Who's nuts.

Speaker 1 (01:47:56):
Willard's nuts, and they come to them and say, we
need you to go kill the nuts guy, right, Colonel Kurtz.
So he goes up the river to find Kurtz and
kill him. When he gets to Kurtz, he for quite
a while. You can tell what's turning into his head.

Speaker 4 (01:48:17):
Is I kind of see where he's coming from.

Speaker 1 (01:48:22):
He's like, this guy's got a lot of good points. Yeah, yeah,
it's intoxicating. He meets a photographer, Dennis Hopper. Dennis Hopper's like, listen,
I'm really crazy. I can't go tell them what a
genius he is. You need to go tell him what
a gene you're here. You don't know what you're here.
You think you're here to kill him, You're here to

(01:48:44):
tell the world.

Speaker 3 (01:48:46):
What a genius he is.

Speaker 1 (01:48:48):
He knows how to win the war, but then he
chopped from ote the machete, so he doesn't do it.

Speaker 3 (01:48:54):
In the end.

Speaker 1 (01:48:54):
But I'm saying, like, it's like a mini version to
be that you went to like debunk him, became an right.

Speaker 4 (01:49:01):
So wait are you so is this the guy?

Speaker 3 (01:49:02):
Am I supposed to get.

Speaker 4 (01:49:03):
A machete here?

Speaker 3 (01:49:07):
But you spent longer in the temple. Okay, you spent
longer in the temple. Now you're going to get him
with the machete.

Speaker 1 (01:49:13):
So I'm just saying, yeah, if people are mad, I could,
like if someone came to me and sketched out like
there was a writer that went to debunk Guru and
became a disciple of the guru and then later went
to like debunk the Guru, I would just I would.
I would think of apocalypse now. So for people to
be mad, I'm not surprised that they're mad, but they
still have to they still have to wrestle with what you're.

Speaker 3 (01:49:35):
Laying out exactly.

Speaker 4 (01:49:36):
And my feeling is that I am here to tell
the truth and that was the way I started. I
haven't changed all that much.

Speaker 3 (01:49:46):
You still like the method.

Speaker 4 (01:49:47):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:49:54):
Make is such a better story, Okay, And.

Speaker 4 (01:49:58):
Now the disciple has become the no. I mean, I
have do my own things and uh and he can have.

Speaker 3 (01:50:06):
Is that that whole world.

Speaker 4 (01:50:08):
I just don't want people dying. And I also want
them not to actually take any gurus. I want them not.
I'm not your fucking guru. Whim's not your fucking girl.
You're not their fucking girl. You're not their fucking guru.
No one's a fucking guru. You have to do this yourself.
And we do not give control over to other people
like this and I and I feel very sad for
Whim that he has become so isolated by this organization.

(01:50:31):
And I would like to see the beauty again that
was there at the beginning, where it wasn't so commercialized,
where it wasn't such a big business, and you could
be like, hey, we're taking anice bath. Were pushing our limits,
and it's rational because that is where the the that's
where the magic is. It's confronting your own self in
these environments and.

Speaker 3 (01:50:52):
It is the heimlich maneuver.

Speaker 4 (01:50:53):
It's the Hindlick maneuver, not hindlick heim Lick heim Lick.

Speaker 3 (01:50:58):
It's the maneuver, not the man.

Speaker 6 (01:51:01):
So.

Speaker 7 (01:51:01):
I mean, if you could like break it down to
like one thing that you would want people to do,
it would just be do the method, but don't do
it in ice water.

Speaker 4 (01:51:10):
Yeah, that would have made this podcast much shorter.

Speaker 1 (01:51:15):
Brod should start a podcast where it's a really quick podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:51:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:51:22):
His Watergate investigation would be they went into a building
and stole some stuff, and.

Speaker 4 (01:51:31):
The president.

Speaker 3 (01:51:33):
It turns out they all do. Yeah, I tell me
real quick in clothes talking about napping, Oh man, you
got it. You give me a napping good. You're gonna
come over your house and fall sleep too. Dude. I
so want that.

Speaker 4 (01:51:46):
I so want that role. That's the role I want.
I want to be the napping No. I love naps.
Naps are the best.

Speaker 3 (01:51:52):
I could pay you two hundred bucks to go nap
at your house.

Speaker 4 (01:51:54):
Yes, yes, you're already here. There's a blanket on this
table in front of us. I mean, we're ready for you.

Speaker 5 (01:51:59):
No.

Speaker 4 (01:52:00):
Napping like are so They're so restorative And you know
I've been doing all this extreme stuff for a while,
putting myself in extreme environments, and that's cool. You learn
to relax in the extreme environments. What I what I'm
discovering with napping, and this book's not out yet, it'll
be on September. What I'm discovering with napping is that
you can actually get outcomes out of naps like you can.

Speaker 3 (01:52:21):
You can.

Speaker 4 (01:52:21):
I'm going to use this very still environment to also
change my physiology. It's like, you know, there's the fight
or flight, there's rest and digest. I've explored fight or flight.
Now I'm in rest and digest and there's so much
cool stuff in it. You can change the way your
memory works, you can change the way you react to

(01:52:41):
to external stimuli but in your brain world. And here's
a We're just going to leave you with some crazy,
crazy thought.

Speaker 1 (01:52:48):
Okay, I leave you with something you probably missed out on,
all right, talking to Turkey hunters. Because the nap, the
psychological transformation that happens in your late morning app on
a turkey hunt, you need to talk. You need to
interview Turkey hunters about that. You're right, I actually like,
how could fifteen minutes be so transformative? I'm actually sort
of curious, depressed.

Speaker 3 (01:53:10):
I thought we'd never get a turkey not fired up.

Speaker 4 (01:53:14):
I mean, yeah, there's something to that.

Speaker 3 (01:53:16):
It's transformative.

Speaker 4 (01:53:17):
But here's the thing, Like you already.

Speaker 3 (01:53:18):
Recognize yourself when you wake up, and then that.

Speaker 4 (01:53:22):
In your brain, all right, in your brain, you experience
the world a fifth of a second behind real time.

Speaker 3 (01:53:28):
Okay, is that right?

Speaker 4 (01:53:29):
This is true? Is it comes in through your nerves,
your eyeballs, The signal has to transfer, and what your
brain does is it speeds up the world. It makes
a whole simulation of the world and speeds it up
five seconds to sort of figure out how the world is,
which means we are essentially living in a simulation created
by our brains. Right, this means because of this transition,

(01:53:51):
true consciousness, What the truest form of consciousness is what
happens when your brain is not having stimulus from the
outside world. It happens when you're dreaming than naps.

Speaker 3 (01:54:01):
Mind blown. I am your guru.

Speaker 1 (01:54:04):
Have you gotten into I imagine in that work you
probably got into it, and that where you've gotten.

Speaker 3 (01:54:08):
To sleep in general?

Speaker 1 (01:54:09):
Yes, of course, Okay, I've been like running around not
broadcasting this publicly because I don't and please don't think
I'm doing it now, but I's been running around conversationally
half understanding something I read.

Speaker 3 (01:54:20):
Have have you is there?

Speaker 1 (01:54:22):
Like a is there any basis too to dementia in
lack of sleep? Meaning like like people who were chronically
chronically one sleep deprived?

Speaker 4 (01:54:39):
So much science Matt Walkers, Why we sleep?

Speaker 3 (01:54:43):
Just read it?

Speaker 4 (01:54:43):
Yeah, dementia.

Speaker 3 (01:54:45):
I keep telling people.

Speaker 1 (01:54:45):
I'm like, I think I heard something about it made
me feel like because I sometimes when I sleep, like
if I sleep eight hours, I'll be like, are you
lazy bastard? But then now I feel better about it
after reading that. Yeah, no, start, there's something there.

Speaker 4 (01:54:56):
Yeah, there's a lot to it, and and that will
be our next podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:54:59):
Because I because you're thinking about it.

Speaker 4 (01:55:03):
In fact, if you're thinking about it, can you have dementia?

Speaker 3 (01:55:05):
Mmm?

Speaker 1 (01:55:06):
So there is like more, there's more than just that
you feel real rest, that there's more stuff going on.

Speaker 4 (01:55:11):
Yes, Oh, I mean because sleep is an active state.
It's not like you turn a slight switch off and
like it's not like evolution put sleep. You know, animals
are vulnerable when they're sleep, right that that you can
get killed, you can get eat and you're not. You
have no defenses. You can't run away. Evolution put that there,
not because it was like, hey, this is a great
idea for a vulnerability. It did it because it was
important to the physiology and every creature on the planet

(01:55:34):
down to like protoplankton sleeps. So it's it's an essential
part of consciousness and interacting in the world, and evolution
would not have put it there if it was not vital.

Speaker 1 (01:55:45):
And if you're a great way to think about it,
because you know I talked about you feel guilty sleeping
mm hmm because you think of it as I guess
maybe culturally we think of it as not doing something. Yeah,
m hmm, I'm going to not do something, yeah, and
go to sleep. That has been the mod to be like, no,
I need to do something for my productivity.

Speaker 3 (01:56:09):
I need to go to sleep. Yes, yes, no, that's true.

Speaker 4 (01:56:12):
You you you put a sign on your door say
I'm working here and take a nap. M That's that's
one of the takeaways of the book. Maybe you don't
need to read the book. We can have you.

Speaker 3 (01:56:24):
For us right now.

Speaker 7 (01:56:25):
Sure feel better after I take a nap?

Speaker 3 (01:56:31):
All right, man? Well, thank you?

Speaker 1 (01:56:32):
So if people want to dig into this more. Tell
people where to go find stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:56:39):
All right.

Speaker 4 (01:56:39):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:56:50):
I have a lot of books, yep, what doesn't kill us,
Big mega best seller, Enlightenment Trap, Enlightenment Trap, the Wedge,
and the Vortext. There's a lot, and the then you're uh,
the Red Trade and the Red Market, the Red Market
and soon Time to Nap or whatever I'm gonna end
up calling that book Time to Nap. I like that
one man. All right, thank you very much for coming out.

Speaker 3 (01:57:11):
Man, it's been great.

Speaker 4 (01:57:12):
Appreciate it. Oh A ride on.

Speaker 5 (01:57:24):
A seal gray shine like silver in the sun.

Speaker 3 (01:57:35):
Ride ride on along, sweetheart.

Speaker 9 (01:57:43):
Were done, beat this damn horse to death, taking a
new one rid We're done beat this damn horse today,
So take your new ride on.

Speaker 3 (01:58:10):
H

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Steven Rinella

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep. 452: The Guru Comes Up for Air