Robert Evans and James Stout expose Wim Hof as a dangerous grifter whose Inner Fire organization allegedly caused 12 to 15 deaths through irresponsible cold training. They dissect conflicting narratives regarding his birth, father's death, and the inspiration for his techniques, which stem from his wife Olaya Fernandez's suicide. Journalist Scott Carney is criticized for omitting details about Hof abandoning his children and performing a self-inflicted enema with a public fountain nozzle that nearly killed him. Ultimately, the episode reveals that despite claims of wellness mastery, Hof's life is defined by deception, tragedy, and severe physical harm inflicted on himself and others. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:03
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where I, Robert Evans, am pulling a power move on Sophie with the script of today's episode again.
You want me to send it, Sophie?
You excited?
I don't know.
You ready?
Do you want pain and suffering?
I will drive to your house.
I will send it to you.
I didn't send another fake one.
I will literally end this Zoom call.
The Script of Today's Episode00:15:30
Yeah, yeah, you might.
You might.
You might.
People can't see, but Sophie has an axe behind her.
I do.
I got her that axe.
Probably a mistake.
That would be pretty ironic.
I'm so nervous to open this.
Uh-huh.
I know.
It's a Schrodinger's script.
It could be a fake again.
It could be the real script.
It's the real script.
You never know.
Dead cat.
Who knows?
It is the real script.
I send you the real script.
It's the real script because you're a fucking coward.
That's why.
Well, you don't want to do it every time.
I'm not going to do it two weeks in a row.
You'd expect it too much.
Respectfully.
I got to lull you back into a false sense of security and then another fake script.
You can send me the right script, you motherfucker.
This is the one use for Chat GPT.
I may have it.
Write a fake script that looks like on the surface, like it could be real, and then send that to you some week and see how long it takes before you get really angry at me.
I gotta be honest.
I read the first who said it to the chat.
GPT can write that shit.
You are an artiste, thank you.
Thank you.
Speaking of art uh, our guest for today, James Stout, a man whose life is a work of art.
James, how are you doing today so much better for that?
Robert, thank you, you're welcome.
Yeah sorry, your spear gun trigger's not working ideally.
Yeah, it's so optimal, but we're gonna make it work.
It's okay that the joy of building weapons for yourself is the long period of through which they don't work until you figure out what tiny thing you've gotten wrong.
Hopefully not when it discharges into you.
Yes, as long as you don't point them at yourself.
Yeah, they are fun and rewarding and white barrel, discipline is key.
You know what else is key?
James?
What is that, Robin?
Breath control.
And yeah, yeah.
Today we're talking about a guy who has gotten very probably rich.
I don't know his exact net worth, but certainly extremely famous for teaching people a series of very specific breathing techniques.
A fella that you may have heard of, that most of the, I'm going to guess a lot of our listeners have heard of, named Wim Hoff.
James.
Yeah.
You're aware of you're actually the guy who suggested this episode.
So what am I fucking around pretending like, James, what do you know about Wim Hoff?
Yeah, you know, you know, he's a dangerous grifter.
Yes.
I think that's fair.
I'm going to guess most of our audience don't because I really didn't.
You know, for me, Wim was a guy who, you know, he was, he was on the scene.
He's now spent a lot of time on like Joe Rogan's show.
He's been on like the goop podcast and he's working on a TV show with those people.
But prior to that, he was also pretty prominent.
I, back when I worked at crack.com, like 10 years ago, we featured him in an article for some of the stuff he would do.
In broad, Wim is a guy who like uses a series of breathing and meditative techniques that he claims basically renders him immune to the cold and capable of extreme feats of heretofore thought impossible athletic prowess.
He's been studied and by scientists in a number of occasions.
There are some things he's done that are impressive, although we'll talk about it, not in the way that he claims usually.
But, you know, I was somebody who I read about him.
I read, like, saw this video of him like submerged in ice, you know, for a crazy long period of time or like hiking up Kilimanjaro and shorts.
I was like, oh, that's impressive.
Cool.
I guess a guy figured out some new endurance techniques.
Nifty.
And I kind of didn't think about it much more than that, right?
It was not, it's, it wasn't one of those things.
Wim was not initially claiming like, I have cured cancer, you know, or I've got like, you know, you don't need vaccines.
Just do my exercise techniques.
He was just a guy who was like, you actually have more control over your body's reactions to cold than you think.
And here's how to do it, which didn't seem to me on the surface to be something particularly sketchy.
And I'm going to guess most people were kind of in that broad bucket where you were like, you saw some video of him, you read some articles, and you're like, oh, neat.
And then you went on with your life.
The truth is that he is, in fact, a rather dangerous con man.
Now, since Mr. Hoff is a bit of a famehound, it's not hard to find interviews with him.
And nearly all of them summarize his career in similar ways.
To set the scene, I'd like to read an excerpt from an article in the mirror, which is a shitty tabloid, but reasonably representative of the tone a lot of websites use when talking about Wim Hoff.
That's why I'm quoting it, not because The Mirror is a reliable source on anything.
Brittany's left-wing press.
Yeah.
Quote, a Daredevil record holder dubbed the Ice Man showed he can keep a cool head after scrambling to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in record time.
Wim Hoff, 55, holds a whopping 26 Guinness World Records for extreme sports challenges, including running a full marathon above the Arctic Circle wearing only a pair of shorts.
But Father of Five Wim from Sittard, Holland, proved he has ice in his veins after his 18 strong climbing groups scaled Africa's highest mountain in a record time of 31 hours and 25 minutes.
Now, James.
That does sound like Chat GPT.
Are we sure that that one wasn't strict?
I am absolutely not sure.
That could have been Chat GPT, but it is.
If it was, it's because they cut up a bunch of other newspapers talking about Wim.
They all use that kind of tone.
Yeah.
Now, James, do you want to guess what percentage of the claims made in those three sentences are true?
Zero?
Yeah, zero.
Every single thing I just read you is a lie.
A couple of them I heard.
And I was like, that doesn't sound right.
We're not sure about that.
You will see those not just repeated by the mirror.
You know, for example, The Guardian, pretty well-respected paper, not someone something would consider just like a tabloid generally.
And here's their summary from a recent article about the ice man.
Wim Hoff is known as the Ice Man.
He earned his name after setting 26 Guinness World Records, which includes swimming under ice, running a half marathon above the Arctic Circle bear, submerging himself in ice for an hour and 52 minutes, and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in just shorts and sandals.
Now, this will tell you something about like what good journalism is worth versus bad journalism, because the amount of things that are correct in that sentence is higher than 0%, right?
That's good to hear.
Yeah, there are four claims in there, and one of them is accurate.
Okay.
So that's good.
Well, we strive for a little more in the journalism.
I would say two of them are accurate, but not in a meaningful way.
We'll talk about it later.
So this is probably a significant surprise to most people who have kind of casually heard about Wim because for seven or eight years, he's been very good at not just performing feats of endurance, but doing it while hooked up to equipment monitored by actual scientists from like reputable universities who have confirmed some of the health benefits of the breathing techniques he claims to have pioneered.
But the real story behind Wim Hoff breathing and the man himself is much shadier than that.
Now, given that he is a semi-beloved figure to many, I want to start us off by making the states clear, the stakes clear, because the breathing techniques that Wim uses, he did not really invent, but they're not bad, right?
He's not like lying about it.
There are uses for these techniques.
They go back much further than Wim Hoff.
We'll talk about the origins.
And like the ice bathing stuff that he does is not inherently bad.
There are some potential health benefits to cold water exposure when you do it in certain controlled ways, right?
Again, the way he tends to teach people about it is pretty reckless.
But fundamentally, there are aspects of the things he teaches that are not like inherently toxic.
However, I want to start again by making the stakes clear, which is that there are multiple allegations in court that the irresponsible training methods by Wim and his organization, Inner Fire, have led to the deaths of between 12 and 15 people.
So we are not talking about like, well, he's just like bullshits around.
We're talking about like, there's a body count for this episode, right?
That's what we're talking about, the guy.
If he was a dude who just got like some rich people from Santa Monica to like do ice baths and like pretend, right?
I just have a lot of respect for that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's fine.
Take their money.
I don't give a shit.
Yeah.
I think I have a lot of respect for the guy on the one wheel who gets rich people to crawl on their backs along train tracks watching shout outs.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Like I got no problem with those guys who do those like fake Navy SEAL trainings that convince like, I don't know, finance bros in their 30s to like, yeah, crawl backwards over train tracks, like you said.
Like, yeah, it's fine.
It's whatever.
They're willing to spend 10 grand to do that for four days.
Who gives a shit?
Yeah.
It's the best thing they could be doing with their time and money, if we're honest.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, Wim Hoff was born on April 20th, 1959, in Sittard, Limburg, the Netherlands.
He was one of 10 children and is also a twin.
In his book, The Way of the Ice Man, he claims he came out as something of a surprise.
Quote, after his mother had given birth to his twin brother, Andre, no one noticed that a second child was on the way.
When the doctors had left, his mother started to feel contractions coming on again.
His mother, a Catholic, prayed the second child would also be born healthy.
She expressed the hope that if it were healthy, the child would grow up to be a missionary.
Wim's mother told this story regularly, and Wim believed the circumstances of his birth and his mother's strength had a great influence on him.
So that's his claim, right?
Born to be a missionary.
You know, his mom prayed him into being.
Divinely chosen.
Yeah, that just strikes me as something that someone who's prone to bullshitting might say.
Yeah, it does.
It does seem like that might be the case with Wim.
So he's not a great writer.
In this book, The Way of the Ice Man, he is credited along with Cohen de Jong.
I don't know, you know these names, Danish names.
Like, I'm doing my best here, whatever.
As the author of this book, and I guess the safe assumption is that neither of them are good at writing books.
His stories about his early life are inconsistent, although not necessarily conflicting with the stories that he gives.
Like the stories he gives in this book are inconsistent with stories he's given in interviews and on podcasts, but they don't necessarily conflict.
It's just he tells weirdly different stories each time he's asked about his background.
It's not one of the, with a lot of grifters, it's like, oh, these are all clearly lies because all of these things can't be true.
With Wim, it's more like, why did you ignore that detail that you included in your book in this recitation of your background?
Like that seems kind of confusing to me.
In some interviews, he claims that his father died in a mountaineering accident when he was a young boy and says that this made him determine to conquer the mountains.
Bad lesson to learn from your dad dying mountaineering, by the way.
The lesson you should learn is respect the mountains.
Mountains are very dangerous.
You can try and conquer them, but they might fight back.
They are much older than you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think they've seen a few people come and go.
Yeah.
Including his dad.
Yeah, including his dad.
In The Way of the Ice Man, though, he gives a different story as to why he decides to get into conquering the mountains and doing weird cold weather stuff.
Hoff was fascinated by the cold from a very early age.
One freezing winter's night when he was seven, a neighbor found him in the snow.
Strongly attracted by the white landscape, Hoff had climbed out of bed, crept outside, and fallen asleep in the snow.
If his neighbor had not discovered him, he probably would have frozen to death.
I know, man.
Why?
Yeah, that seems normal behavior there.
Seems like congenitally bad risk assessment.
Yeah, there's something in the water in the Hoff household, which is leading him to make poor choices.
Yeah, something in the Hoff, in the male Hoff brain that does not want to pass on their genes.
He does not mention his dad dying at all in this book, though.
In fact, I didn't really come across, I'm not going to claim I read this thing like fucking Ulysses, but I did not come across him even talking about his dad here.
One thing he is consistent about is that he experimented a lot with the cold as an adolescent.
He does bring this up in every interview that he discusses.
This started with him sitting in the snow for hours and hours at a time, sometimes sleeping outside in the winter without a tent or a sleeping bag.
We don't know how much of this is true, but as we'll discuss, he makes other claims later about his fascination with enduring extreme temperatures.
When he was 13, Wim claims, he spent his fall holiday reading a book about psychology and later wrote, The psychological terminology gave birth to my inquisitive mind and the urge to philosophy everything around me.
It was then that I began to see the world in a different light.
All at once, I wanted to learn about different cultures, traditions, and new languages.
Now, in the way of the ice man, he claims that this process started when he was nine and that his interest was sparked by his older brother who had hitchhiked around the Middle East and the Far East and came back with strange and wonderful tales.
Wim goes on to claim that he was so impressed by how his brother had changed that he stopped listening in church and focused instead on meditation techniques that he'd learned from Hindu and Buddhist texts.
He went to school only with a healthy reluctance.
He then has his autobiographer describe him as, quote, a self-willed, clever, and cheerful young boy, which I do find a little bit off-putting when you're clearly writing this description of yourself as a kid.
Please make it up as a quote from someone else, bro.
Yeah, you've gone down that rabbit hole.
Like, just continue to fabricate.
Yeah.
So the specific meditative practices that Wim was drawn to most is called tumo meditation, t-u-m-m-o, sometimes g-tumo, g-t-u-m-m-o.
These are a set of meditative breathing techniques that are part of the Vajrayana tantric Buddhist practices.
Considered in their full context, tumo, which translates to inner fire in Tibetan, is a meditative technique that goes along with visualizations and rituals that are believed to help alleviate mental and physical pain.
Tumo breathing has been studied by researchers and it has been shown to allow practitioners to increase their body temperature.
And for a long time, it has been associated with at least temporary relief from a number of ailments.
Western researchers have been studying tumo breathing since the early 1980s, but the practices themselves go back a very long time.
These are basically different kinds of hyperventilation techniques, right?
So these are things.
These are things that go back a long time, this kind of breathing techniques.
And there are certain physiological changes that can be useful in some ways that they are tied to.
In most versions of this story, Wim will say that his journey from being a guy or to being a guy who spends all of his time in the cold started when he was 17 and he found himself possessed with an inexplicable urge to dive into a half-frozen canal in Amsterdam.
Here's how he related that story to The Guardian.
I was quite a thinker, a philosopher, but one day I felt attracted to the freezing water.
I jumped into a canal in Amsterdam and thought, this is it.
That deep connection I felt that day was the starting point.
Every day for 45 years, I've gone into the cold.
And this is where things are a little bit weird because these don't necessarily conflict that like in the earliest versions of his story, he would just say like, yeah, when I was 17, I just felt this urge to jump into a canal and that got me started doing these cold weather exposure, you know, experiments.
But in the more recent stuff that he's written or said about his background, he claims that like, oh, I was like eight or nine and my neighbor just found me sleeping outside in the snow.
No one could explain it.
Like he keeps pushing the timeline back.
Swimming the Ganges00:06:09
Yeah.
And like going from like, yeah, like as a lot of us, when we are 17 year old boys, feel an urge to do stupid shit, right?
It's kind of it's kind of the sine qua non of being a 17 year old boy in many ways.
But to take it from like, yeah, from birth, I was like attracted to the cold because I'm specialist kind of.
My version of this is that when I was 17, I felt an overpowering urge to pour an entire pint glass of fucking Jim Bean and see what happens if I drink it all at once.
How did that go for you, Robin?
You know, I developed a new set of meditative breathing techniques that I can teach you for just $12,000.
Yeah, do you breathe from the stomach upwards and with the contents of it?
Shallowly on my side while coughing up vomit.
Yes.
That's the real technique.
You will not notice if you're in the cold.
It's true.
Once you're drunk enough.
Once you've alcohol poisoned yourself, it becomes secondary concern.
Alcohol poison yourself to better health.
That's my breathing technique.
So he goes into a bit more detail about his journey here in a Discovery Magazine interview from a few years ago.
Even today, he has a difficult time explaining the impulse.
I felt this attraction to the cold water, he says.
And then after I went in, I felt this understanding, an inside connection.
It gave me a rush.
My mind was free of gibberish.
It was so good, in fact, that he returned the next day to take the plunge again, and he continued through the winter and beyond, along the way evolving his breathing technique, which is based on the centuries-old Tibetan Buddhist practice known as Tumo meditation, but features none of its spiritual trappings.
Now, this canal story is present in basically every interview where Wim talks about his past, but oddly enough, he doesn't list it as part of his journey in the way of the ice man.
There he goes for a more exotic story, claiming that he traveled to India as a young adult to find a teacher who knew more about what was really important in life.
His biographer insists to us he was looking for a deeper spiritual understanding.
And I feel like I have to read the next couple paragraphs of this to you verbatim so you can truly appreciate how insufferable this man is, James.
He flew to Karachi and took a train to New Delhi.
In search of yogis, he slept in the enormous Birla Mandir temple complex.
He met the owner of a tea house and the rebellious son of a carpet magnate there.
These two men persuaded Hoff to accompany them to Rishikesh and Badranath, two places of pilgrimage on the Ganges.
This colorful trio set off together.
A strong bearded Sikh who ran a tea house, a black sheep from the carpet industry who could get anything he wanted and who was fed up with the corruption of his world and Hoff.
They thought Hoff was crazy because he went swimming in the Ganges a couple of times a day.
Hoff even swam across to the other side, no mean feet given the strong current.
He was also impressed, he also impressed them with the acrobatic yoga exercises he could do, despite never having had a yoga lesson in his life.
In India, Hoff discovered that his autodidactic approach had already brought him a long way.
He could already stand on one leg and put the other leg behind his neck, a position many people have to practice for years to master.
His traveling companions remained behind in an ashram, but Hoff didn't feel at home there.
He didn't like the clingy, cozy atmosphere of the foreign participants.
And although many of the yogis had learned very special techniques, he didn't like the way they profited from them.
He also discovered that he could not learn much from them as he had already mastered their tricks.
He continued his travels alone on foot.
Just the best.
Why, I went to India, but I knew more than all of the teachers.
And they were doing it for money, which is bad.
Unlike me, who's a fucking celebrity guru now.
Yeah.
Soiled, killing people in their swimming pools.
We've all met this guy as well, right?
Oh, absolutely.
Anyone who has left the United States has encountered this guy in some place in the global south.
They are insufferable.
Also, I love that he's like, they were mystified that I swam in the Ganges.
It's like, man, I've been to Rishikesh.
I have swam in the Ganges in the Rishikesh.
I know exactly where he did.
It's not that you got to be careful, right?
Sometimes the current is too much, right?
There are times that you don't want to be swimming in the Ganges, but like Rishikesh is up in the far north.
It's in the Himalayan foothills.
It's relatively clean.
Lots of people swim and raft in the Ganges up there.
Not weird to see people doing it.
No one's going to be like, oh, white man swimming in the Ganges?
Like, we're not talking about being like down south of Delhi where you've got a lot of effluvia in it and it's a lot like less safe to swim in the Ganges because like you've got cities and stuff.
Like you are talking about a place where a lot of people do this.
Anyway, whatever, Wim, come on.
The Hof.
Yeah.
He used his last name there, Hoff, giving himself a little bit of stolen Hofvada.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
So in this version of events, Wim describes feeling an overpowering urge to leap under a massive waterfall.
The water was so cold, it stopped him from being able to think.
Quote, the sensation of a strength and power greater than himself took hold of him.
Since then, he has loved ice-cold water.
So now we're at like three or four different stories about like how he came to experiment with ice-cold water emerging, picking shoes, I guess.
Yeah, yeah, it does clear the mind.
I won't like, I remember.
I think I have plunged into the waterfall he's talking about.
If it's the one that's a little north of Rishikesh, right?
Yeah, he just didn't turn into a giant grift.
Like my first experience with extremely cold water, I think, was I was packrafting in Alaska and we'd stopped on like a chunk of an iceberg.
And because I'm a boy, I pissed from the top of it, right?
Because that's the sort of standard operating procedure.
And then from there, I jumped off it into the water, having not done up the relief zipper on the dry suit.
And it totally clears the mind when you hit water, which is like just above freezing.
Yes.
And can be dangerous too.
Yes, as you can see.
It felt dangerous.
Gotta be real careful with water.
In that moment, it felt pretty dangerous.
I didn't want to go back.
That's smart, James.
But you know who can never die?
Elon Musk.
That remains to be seen.
Dangerous Cold Water Immersion00:03:53
But our sponsors of our podcast, all of whom are willing to fight Elon in a steel cage at the house.
Yeah, at their house, if you're in.
Also, I am, by the way, Elon.
Let's go, buddy.
The cord has been thrown down.
Yeah.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
I would bet on you.
Thank you.
Oh, yeah, me too.
Thank you, Sophie.
I would also bet on me against Elon.
Would you do it like full duel style?
Dueling Elon Musk00:07:52
Would you like let him pick the weapons and then look, because that's that's so if you issue the challenge, he should be picking the weapons, right?
Sure, why not?
What if he chooses Teslas?
Oh, then we'll both die.
Yeah, I've got two drills in hot air balloons.
Yeah, fine.
You'll go down a hero.
Yeah, yeah, the way I always wanted to.
So soon after, which again, if you're taking the claim that he encountered cold water immersion in fucking India, then soon after this, he decides to go home, having learned everything he can from mysticism in Southeast Asia and decided to go home and devote himself to unlocking the powerful spiritual benefits of being in cold water.
He returns home to Amsterdam at age 20 and he sets up in a squat with about 90 other people.
By his own description, he ate very little food and mostly did yoga, avoiding the drugs the other squatters did.
Now, I might say that starving yourself and doing yoga for 20 hours a day could theoretically be less healthy for you than just doing some fucking K and eating shwarma.
But that's a personal choice.
People are allowed to do whatever.
So he seems to have basically spent this time busking by teaching yoga in the park, which is again fine.
And one day while he's doing this, this thing that he had also criticized these Indian yogis for, by the way, kind of worth noting.
Taking money.
Yeah.
He meets his future wife, Olea Fernandez.
She moves in with him and he claims for a year they didn't have sex, which I was not going to ask about.
Yeah, don't worry in the book.
But he wants us to know.
So now we have to fucking interrogate this.
Yeah, let's go.
He says he does explain why they didn't fuck.
And it's because, quote, Hoff's life was devoted to yoga and his Spanish girlfriend respected that.
And I always, I always find it a little weird.
It's fine if you're like, he met his wife, you know, a Basque woman from, you know, Spain or whatever.
Okay, like that's, that's fine.
For whatever reason, just like the way just like describing her as his Spanish girlfriend, I do find slightly off-putting.
I can't exactly tell you why.
Yeah, she's like a bit character in a story he's telling about himself.
Yeah, we'll be talking about her a bit.
So she goes home after they're together for like a very sexless year, according to Wim.
And the next thing that happens in his life that he talks about in his book is a bike trip to Senegal, which is very spiritual to him.
I don't care.
It's very boring, James.
His spiritual journey is boring as ass.
I much prefer like, I don't know, L. Ron Hubbard's.
But he claims after Senegal, he goes back to India and he studies under yogis this time.
I guess he finds some ones that have lessons to teach him still.
Non-profit yogis.
Yeah, non-profit yogis.
We have no idea, no way of knowing if any of this is true, but given how inconsistent his story is, I'm going to throw serious doubt on this next passage.
Quote, he trained his body and mind under extreme conditions.
Sometimes he spent several days at great heights while enduring temperatures of negative two degrees without food, negative two degrees Celsius, without food.
He discovered a new way to survive the extreme cold, controlling his breathing.
With breathing exercises, he could transform his fear and the negative experience of the cold into a powerful form of energy.
He saw his body in a new way and learned that breathing is an important instrument.
This was also where he learned his breathing exercises.
So, I don't know.
I don't believe that, but that's one of the claims that he makes about his background.
He tells different stories in other mediums.
In some interviews, he claims that he learned to control his body temperature through diving in the freezing canals and other cold weather exercise in the Netherlands.
I'm not sure that's how that works.
It is not how that works.
But here's how he I want to read a claim that he makes in a Reddit AMA that I found.
This guy sounds powerfully Reddit.
He makes some fascinating claims in his AMA.
Yeah.
So here's Eisman Hoff.
Because our natural ability to withstand cold makes us not able to freeze and not go below zero degrees.
If your cells go below that temperature, you get irreparable damage.
If you expose yourself for that temperature, your body knows what to do to not freeze.
The body is able to go to the extremities besides the core, which remains 37 degrees.
I can do all that stuff.
I trained with Kung Fu Masters in Beijing and they respected me very much.
Kung Fauf!
Kung Fu Masters in Beijing just throws that out there in the Reddit AMA.
I haven't seen that elsewhere, but I guess in between the yogis and the top of mountains, he went and trained with some kung fu masters too.
And then they respected me very much.
Fuck me.
His orientalism is so profound.
It is outstanding Orientalism.
He missed travel to the 1840s to get Orientalism like this normally.
Yeah, this guy could have crushed it.
Oh my God.
He would have been huge.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like he could have been on some Lawrence Arabia shit.
No, he would have been almost a god until he died of fucking tetanus at age 37.
Yes, yes.
Bacterial infection from the Thames trying to show off his breathing technique.
And it's very, so he says that, like, I trained with Kung Fu Masters and they respected me very much.
The response, the one Reddit response from JM Brooklyn is just very inspiring.
Thank you.
Yeah, fuck me.
He just, he's really getting high on his own supply here.
No one's calling his.
Unbelievably so.
And it gets, yeah.
So one of the things I find intriguing about Wim is that this is not the kind of situation we see all the time where Grifter kind of workshops a version of their life story.
And there are inconsistencies in the past and then they pick a story and stick with it.
Right.
And if you dig into it, you can find like, oh, they used to tell a different story.
But they tend to like, when they get famous, stick with a version of events, right?
Because that's the smart thing to do.
What's interesting to me about, he's so inconsistent still to this day with like his exact journey and like when he had his revelations and when he got inspired to do what.
Just very interesting to me how Kaine.
He has drunk guy at a bar energy.
Not like experienced Grifter energy.
Yeah, which I think is probably part of what works for him is that he does seem a little bit less polished than some of these more explicit con men.
Yes, yeah.
He's not like he doesn't look like he's not the people.
If people are watching or listening to this and like they haven't looked at Wim Hoff, you want to look at Wim Hoff because it's not the extreme mountain athlete you're probably thinking of.
No, no.
He does kind of look like a normal man in his 50s from, you know, this part of the world.
So up to the present day, he continues to give different anecdotes about his path to figuring out his special breathing techniques.
The Way of the Ice Man came out in 2017, but you can find articles from the 2020s where he tells the canal story instead.
I do find that book to be the most interesting version of his backstory, in part because of how badly written and off-putting it is.
So after his time in Senegal, Wim breaks up the narrative with a message to the reader, which basically says, hey, we know you're probably wondering why we're getting all these bullshit stories about spiritualism and shit in a book ostensibly about breath control exercises.
Don't worry.
We'll tell you soon.
But first, quote, we must share the sad story of Wim's wife, Olaya.
You ready for this, James?
The Way of the Ice Man00:07:25
I don't think I am.
You are.
You are not ready for this.
It's impossible to be ready for this.
Hit me with the...
Yeah, I'm going to hit you with my best shot.
So that is a peculiar way of introducing what will prove to be a very dark story.
So before going back to India to study with yogis, maybe, Hoff returned to Amsterdam and met with Olea.
They got married and they had a son in 1983, presumably after he got back from studying in the mountains with yogis, although he doesn't say.
They had two daughters soon after, but it was too cold for Olea in the Netherlands.
So they moved to the Pyrenees and Will got a job teaching English.
Now, Wim claims that he took to mountain climbing up in the Pyrenees with basically no gear.
He'd go up in like shorts and shoes and nothing else and stuff as a hobby, right?
So that he could just feel alive.
He's got to like go up there without proper safety equipment.
Otherwise he doesn't.
Yeah, if he's not on the edge, he's not alive.
Now, this pisses off his wife because they have three children together.
And she's like, you are taking dumb risks with your life for no reason.
And like, we have kids that we're responsible for.
Give us a fair criticism.
If you're just a dude and your hobby is risking your life in unnecessary ways, you got a right to do that, you know, up to a point, as long as you're not endangering other people with it.
When you have three kids with someone, you are kind of a dick for continuing to do that.
That is a douche move.
Yeah.
Like you have a responsibility now.
You got to at least get those kids out the door before you go back to your suicide height.
How did your father die?
Oh, well, he was hiking in his box of shorts in the Pyrenees.
He was being a dumbass.
And so I honor him every day by continuing his legacy.
Being a stupid asshole in the mountains.
I like to ghost ride my car.
Yeah, exactly.
Now, no, you say that, James.
Actually, you may be unaware of this.
Ghost riding the whip is the most reliable way to treat chemo-resistant forms of cancer.
Oh, fascinating.
Yeah, doctors agree.
It's really the most anti-oxidant-rich activity you can engage in, ghost riding your car.
Yeah.
Bigger the car, the better.
Just rent an 18-wheeler and just fucking get that thing going downhill and then just tuck and roll, baby.
Okay, you actually, okay, you don't ghost ride on top of it.
No, that is actually more terrorism, actually.
Hey, this bit.
Yeah, when I think of it like that.
This bit is bad.
Shut the fuck up.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Is that a bad bit, Sophie?
You don't like ghostwriting?
You don't like ghost writing.
No, I don't like fake cancer.
Sophie wants the cancer to win.
Oh, I love a good fake cancer cure, Sophie.
That's like our bread and butter.
Yeah.
None of us would have jobs if people didn't have fake cures for cancer, Sophie.
Anyway.
Yes, but no.
Okay.
Well, Sophie doesn't like my retirement plan, but that's not going to stop me from retiring.
So where were we here?
Just like no one's going to stop that 18-wheeler, Robert.
So Robert's got the energy of a loose truck barreling down the freeway.
Ole gets pissed at him for risking his life when they've got kids together pointlessly.
And eventually he agrees to stop doing his suicide climbs and instead devotes his free time to learning how to hold his breath underwater.
Eventually, he gets up to six minutes.
Now, when I first read that, I was like, that sounds like bullshit.
I don't think people can hold their breath that long.
Turns out they can.
Yeah, dude.
That's actually totally doable.
When I was looking this up, you know what the longest anyone's ever held their breath for underwater?
Eight minutes?
24.
Now, that is the longest anyone's done it with oxygen pre-breathing, right?
Okay.
Not like they're not like raw dog in it, right?
They're inhaling pure O2 before, but still, that's fucking wild.
That is wild.
That's like whale numbers.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
A half man, half dolphin.
Yeah, with without pre-breathing, the record is 11 minutes and 54 seconds, which is fucking nuts.
That's so long to hold off, bro.
Yeah.
Get bored.
Like, you got to work on some mind exercises or think of Sudoku down there or something.
So it's plausible.
Wim very likely probably can do something like this, given some of the other stuff I've seen him do.
So I'll give him that one.
In The Way of the Ice Man, he claims that around this time, while he's spending God knows how long preparing to hold his breath underwater, his wife starts disappearing for periods of time because she is severely depressed and she would regularly threaten to commit suicide.
He says that they returned to Amsterdam because he no longer felt safe with her in their farmhouse, which is very sad.
Some of this, this is to some extent true.
They have another kid, though, while this is all going on.
And then after they have this last kid, Olea abandons them again for a period of time.
Now, in numerous other sources, he says that Olea was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia.
This includes in 2017 in The Way of the Ice Man.
He also will sometimes just say that she was depressed.
Obviously, both of those things can go together.
She does eventually commit suicide.
And this is very bleak.
I want to first read to you how that story is related in a 2017 Rolling Stone article.
And then I'm going to read how it's related in his book because the differences between the two of them are fascinating.
So here's that Rolling Stone article.
Okay, hit me.
One day in 1995, after kissing her four children goodbye, she jumped off the eighth floor of an apartment building.
A bit later, Hoff had a vision in which he saw how his breathing technique could help people like his wife.
I can bring people back to tranquility, he once said.
My method can give them back control.
So that's very paragraph.
That's just a choice.
That is a series of choices he made there.
Kind of think I'd write that.
Yeah, it's fucked up in my mind, but you know, whatever.
Not worth getting into too much there.
My judgment on the matter.
But here's how he relates the same story in his 2017 book, The Way of the Iceman.
One day when Hoff was alone in the mountains, Olea jumped from the eighth floor of her parents' house in Pamplona.
Olea was dead.
Anam, Isabel, Laura, and Michael lost their mother, and Wim lost his wife.
He felt guilty, and the children were devastated.
Hoff devoted himself to caring for his children, occasionally retreating to be alone with nature to recharge his batteries.
In those years, he was a well-known figure in the Vandal Park.
With ropes and belay equipment, he showed young children how to climb the highest trees.
The children learned that they could do more than they thought was possible.
Hoff enjoyed the natural surroundings, even in the heart of Amsterdam.
Later, Wim remarried and had another son.
So that's also a paragraph.
Quite a page or whatever.
One just gets across first how odd reading Wim's different life stories can be.
Again, they're not necessarily in conflict with each other, but they all are so different in terms of what is emphasized and claimed that it does feel peculiar.
And spoilers, in both of those versions of the Wim Hoff story, he leaves out some very fucking important details, which we are about to get into.
But James, you know what we're going to get into first?
Uncovering Disturbing Patterns00:05:04
Is it some advertising?
Oh, we are sure going to get into some ads.
James, you know what I love about capitalism?
No, actually, no.
Please enlighten me.
Oh, man.
Oh, wow.
First off, the fact that content can be supported with ads.
That's wonderful.
Which is a sustainable situation.
I was just thinking the other day, you know, it would be a great way to run newspapers, making guys supported.
That's a stable way to make sure people have access to the best news at all times.
And it helps because the press holds people in power to account.
So it's important that there's also advertising.
Yeah, yeah, critical, critical.
So be a part of that by buying whoever it is you hear from next.
You know, if it's a Reagan coin, if it's the Washington State Highway Patrol, send them money.
Just send money to a random phone number on Venmo.
You know, what?
Type numbers into Venia.
Some of them are.
Spread some joy.
Spread some joy in the world.
Say, I would rather you did that than the Reagan guy.
If you've got a pot of money and you're thinking about where to send it, random Venmo.
James, I don't think it's responsible to advise our listeners not to invest in Reagan coins.
Because they will be quadrupling in value, I'm sure.
Is it a crypto type coin or is it a physical coin?
Physically?
I don't know.
Fiscal coin.
I skipped through that shit.
You didn't read the PDF.
Hey, here's an idea.
How about people don't do that and they subscribe if they are able and want to to Cooler's and Media and then they don't get any ads.
Wow.
Or alternatively.
These drawings of monkeys that you can buy on the internet.
That's a great thing to spend your money on.
No, James.
No.
That is a good idea.
That is what I have reinvested the whole company pension plan into.
Smart.
Because we totally have that.
And that's why our motto is.
I got an incredible deal on Jimmy Fallon's monkey drawing.
Is it on the boat?
Yeah.
It could be on a boat.
That's up to you.
You can take your monkey drawing.
Nice.
Anyway.
Can an MS paint and update that bad boy now?
Products.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of the girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
Doctored Paternity Tests00:15:44
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
So I've just read two different claims or versions of the story of Wim's wife, Olaya's suicide.
And this brings me to a fella named Scott Carney.
Now, in addition to having a funny name, Scott is an American journalist.
He is an author and anthropologist who, in my opinion, made some serious moral lapses as a reporter when he started writing about Wim Hoff.
We'll be talking about that in more detail in part two.
He says that he met Wim while working on a book about the Enlightenment and the spiritualism grift industry.
This is a critical book about like guru grifters, right?
Like the guy and the guy that Wim Hoff is, right?
He's writing this book, but he becomes kind of enraptured with Wim and particularly with how well his breathing technique works.
So he writes an article and then eventually a book on Wim.
And Scott's work, like writing on Wim, is a big part of like why Wim Hoff becomes famous, right?
Scott plays a significant role in sort of the birth of him as a major media figure.
He has come to regret aspects of the role he played here, largely because of all those deaths.
Well, the people definitely died.
It's alleged that Wim Hoff's training has, and there's court cases currently continuing.
So he seems to have come to regret some of this.
And he wrote a blog post recently called The Rise and Fall of the Wim Hoff Empire, which we will be referring back to several times in these episodes.
That article includes a very different story about Olaya's death and particularly what happened after.
So again, in, you know, just going back to the book, he says that, you know, he was devastated, obviously, after his wife committed suicide and he devoted himself to caring for his children and like teaching other kids in the park and whatnot in order to deal with his grief.
And then later, Wim remarried and had another son.
That's the version that the book gives broadly in line with what he usually says in interviews.
Most versions of the Wim Hoff story make a big deal about the fact that his wife commits suicide and he is left to raise their four children alone as a single father.
Obviously, that is a noteworthy thing about anyone's life who has a similar character.
I can imagine very few experiences or situations more difficult and demanding than being left as a single parent to raise four kids alone.
That's a very difficult thing to deal with, very much worth mentioning in someone's biography.
I would say much more impressive than hiking up a mountain in shorts.
Yes.
Perhaps more beneficial to the world.
Yes.
Yeah.
Now, in a video interview with WMX Presents, currently at about 2.1 million views, Wim says this about his wife's death.
Four children I had with my wife, and I was to be with her forever.
She was the love of my life.
She died.
She suicided.
It's a black hole within yourself.
It breaks your heart, and you don't know why.
But the train of daily life is going on, and you've got to catch up, otherwise, you lose it.
So I had to be there for my children.
And yes, we created a new nest.
My children made me survive in that time, but nature healed my wounds.
So, again, very focused on the idea that he bravely takes on his kids and they help each other heal after this.
That is not the version of the story that Scott Carney gives in this write-up.
Quote: After his wife's death, he began a relationship with a woman in another city and left his kids to survive alone in a squat house in Amsterdam.
The eldest, Anam, was only 15 years old when he became the family's surrogate dad.
Eventually, Hoff's relationship with the woman ended and he found himself with a 30,000 Euro tax debt.
That seemed to be the impetus to reconnect with his family.
Ah, there we go.
There we go.
Now we got some of that classic bast abandoning your family and then coming back to get it, pay your tax bill.
Oh, there we go.
That's that good shit.
You feel that deep in your that's like that's like the spiritual equivalent of a nice bowl of gaspacho, right?
Where you just feel it filling you up, nourishing you.
Yeah, nom, Love it.
That's yeah, that's what I think about when I think about someone abandoning their children.
That's the exact noise I make.
That is why I do this podcast, James.
The joy that sparked in your eyes was really made it for me.
Now, that's that's bad person shit, right?
Yes, look, a douche move.
I have a lot of empathy for someone who loses a spouse.
There's a lot of bad behavior, even that can be justified by just the madness of grief.
But abandoning your children to go shack up with somebody else and leaving them alone in a squat with your 15-year-old, not acceptable behavior.
You have a responsibility to do better than that for your kids.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
And then to just omit that from all his own rent.
Yeah.
No, we saved each other.
Like, man, you were fucking, you bounced, homie.
Now, it gets even weirder than that, though, because once he decided he needed to get back in touch with his family, he asks his second oldest son, because his oldest son is pissed about being made dad suddenly.
Yeah, he asks his second oldest boy, Michael, to meet him in the Vondal Park in Amsterdam.
Quote: Hoff arrived early and went for a swim in the park's pond while he was waiting.
He paddled out for a fountain and positioned himself over the spout to give himself an enema he thought would cleanse out all of his intestines.
Or as he often likes to say, get the shit out.
Well, no, first off, you're a bastard for doing that in the public fountain.
You don't give yourself an enema in a public fountain.
You're going to get your shit everywhere.
You fucked up asshole.
That literally hurts everyone involved.
Like, what?
Who does that?
A fucking piece of an asshole.
A bastard.
That is not a normal maneuver.
I'm going to continue that quote.
In a recording of one of our conversations in 2013, Hoff recounts that he had done the park fountain enema at least 100 times before.
But unbeknownst, but then unbeknownst to him, the park service had changed the spigot on the fountain to create a more best spray.
The narrower gauge sent water cutting through his intestines like a knife, filling his bowels with dirty water.
He managed to make it back to store to shore while blood and feces leaked from his rectum.
Hoff's first words to his son in a decade were that he needed to go to a hospital.
I would not welcome that man back into my life at that point.
I'm just going to say that.
Walk away.
Your dad bounces to shack up with somebody you don't know and leaves your 15-year-old brother in charge after your mom kills herself.
And the first time you see him, he's crawling across the ground, blood and shit leaking out of him because he gave himself a fountain enema before hanging out.
Yeah, better off done.
Like, just walk away.
I love The Hospital, bro.
Yeah, this is all you, buddy.
I love the Dutch Park Service employee who saw this 99 times and relaxed.
Wasn't going to be 100.
He put an end to that shit immediately.
I do love adding that story.
Yeah.
Someone do a PRA for the man who replaced that spigot.
He's coming on cool people next week.
So Scott claims that he pressed Wim about like, why did you really decide to give yourself a fountain enema, right?
Like, because Scott doesn't believe that he would have accidentally hurt himself on the fountain without knowing it could be dangerous.
Quote, I asked Hoff if he had an inclination that the fountain maneuver might hurt him and whether hurting himself before meeting his son might have been a way to show his remorse for abandoning his children for a decade.
You get the feeling that you want to kill yourself and want to end the story, not deliberately, but unconsciously.
Stop this shit, even if you have to die.
Something like that was going on, Hoff said.
So either if you take kind of what they're saying, he felt so bad that he felt like he had to do this to kind of like express the sorrow in his heart and because he was so guilty for his failures.
I kind of think maybe he knew that his kids had very valid reason to be angry at him.
And he fucking decided that he, the best thing he could do was injure himself in order that they would feel bad for him so that he wouldn't have to deal with the actual guilt that he has for failing them.
Like, I kind of think this was another emotionally abusive thing by him where he's like, well, if I fuck myself up, then they can't be angry at me, right?
Because they'll have to have to be dealing with this health problem.
I kind of think that's why.
The methodology is still fascinating to me.
Either way, yeah, it's not good decision making.
Nobody's going to claim that.
You could get your foot run over or something, but he committed to the bit.
He sure did.
So I was curious as to whether or not Wim had discussed his fountain injury with anyone else during his many, many press events.
And I found a terrible article in my research from a website called High Existence by John Brooks.
It is a listicle titled 13 Crazy Facts About Iceman Wim Hoff that nobody talks about.
The cover image is a crude photoshop of Wim's head on the Night King from Game of Thrones.
Now, cool.
I hate getting into some good shit.
Yeah, I hate this article, and I hate John Brooks, who wrote it, but it is useful for our purposes because it is written by a weirdo freak who's obsessed with Wim Hoff and has spent more time listening to his podcast appearances and video interviews than I ever will.
Here is entry number six on that listicle.
In the Becoming the Ice Man subreddit, a user asked how Wim got the scar over his belly button.
He received this reply: About 15 years ago, Wim was swimming at a fountain in Amsterdam and decided to give himself an enema on the nozzle of the jet.
He says he has done this before, but a few weeks earlier, the city altered the jet to have a more powerful spout.
So when he sat on the hose, the water cut through his colon and intestines like a water knife.
His son Michael, who he was meeting at the park, took him to the ER.
Wim has a pretty good ability to resist pain, so the hospital did not triaze him to surgery immediately because they didn't understand how serious the injury was.
After a few hours, he fainted and they realized how bad it was.
The doctors stitched him up, but rightly feared the risk of sepsis.
It took him a long time to recover.
He says that he used no antibiotics during recovery.
Got always a chance for a grift.
I do love that they're just like, yeah, all they say about the fact that this was their first time meeting in a decade is his son Michael, who he was meeting at the park.
Amazing.
What an amazing way to turn that L into a dub just by being like, yeah, I owned the self-inflicted colon injury.
And here's the thing.
The story we just read about him doing this after abandoning his family that comes from Scott Carney's recorded notes, right?
Scott also wrote the subreddit post that I just read you.
Yeah.
So here's what follows that version of the story and that post on the subreddit.
How do I know this?
I'm Scott Carney, author of a book about Wim.
I didn't include this story in the book because how on earth do you tell it and not lose track of the main story?
Now, that's why you fucking get good at writing, isn't it?
That's why you get good at writing.
Yeah, you don't just abandon the fucking story.
Like, and again, he's not in the subreddit, he's not saying I hid the part about him abandoning his family.
He's saying I just didn't tell about him getting his guts cut up by a water knife, right?
But the reality is he hid both of those things, right?
Scott hides the fact that Wim abandons his family and the story about him giving himself the death enema.
And this is why I think Scott's one of our bastards here, right?
Yeah.
Obviously, the true story, if the version that Scott is now giving is the true story, right?
We are, I have to, I assume it probably is because Scott is claiming I have this recorded.
And if he was lying about this, that's a significant legal liability, right?
Because Scott's not, he's putting this up on his blog.
He's not publishing this through an outlet even who would be, you know, it would be incumbent upon them to represent him.
So he'd better, you know, have some backup here.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, this Connie's journey is kind of fascinating.
And like, I don't know if you can ever treat him as truly credible, but like he has his own kind of oriental origin story that he tells as well.
Yeah.
And I, I, we're not going to get as much into that.
We'll talk more about him in the next episode, though.
But like, yeah, the true, assuming that the version he is giving now is a true story, it paints a story of Wim as a profoundly unbalanced man who whatever else you can say about him should not be the source of health and wellness advice.
This is a guy.
Number one who is habitually giving himself a public enema in a public fountain, that's a man you shouldn't take health advice from.
Yeah.
You can, yeah, you can be involuntarily constrained for doing that kind of thing.
Not that that should happen to him.
I'm not saying you should be, but you shouldn't be a health guru.
Yes.
Yeah.
I think if you continue to do that after the first time, you yeah, you're not giving good advice to the old health and wellness.
You are not someone who can be taken seriously on this sort of thing.
You know, maybe if you try it once when you're dumb and young and you learn what a bad idea it is.
A hundred times?
Yeah.
It's only got a 1% fail rate.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Really?
Can you afford not to?
But yeah, I think it is kind of damning because Scott's article today, like the one that he's written now, I think is a reasonably good article.
It does answer a lot of questions about Wim.
But the fact that he hides all this is really fucked up.
And he, I think why he does this is that the business that he knows Wim might do as a wellness influencer is too enticing to risk fucking up by dropping this story.
But here is how Scott explains why he hid this.
The story of Hoff abandoning his children and his near-fatal enema never made it into my own book because both my editor and I wanted to protect Hoff's reputation from evidence of his own madness.
It's a role that many other journalists have also fallen into when they might have otherwise doubled down on their fact-checking efforts.
And like, this is not a fact-checking issue, Scott, because he admits to doing this.
You just have to tell the story he's telling here.
Yeah, like they didn't have enough time and money to fact-check it.
Like, and then he's right that other people should maybe have fact-checked it, but sure, I'm sure everyone else cited him because, especially, like, health and wellness journalism, let's face it, like, there's people aren't fact-checking.
No, and it's yeah, uh, I think bad of you, Scott.
Yes, yes, I think we can agree.
So, what a good thing to do.
Yeah, to make the claim that other journalists are just as irresponsible as Scott, his next series of quotes from a Joe Rogan interview.
When Fact-Checking Fails00:03:36
And of all of Scott's sins, that may be the greatest.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves because, James, right now, you know what time it is?
Enema time.
Oh, James, we could do an enema right now.
Let's do it meet in the park.
You know what?
You know what?
Yes.
James and I are going to go do an enema in a public place endangering other people.
And you hang out until Thursday.
Maybe get your own enema.
You know, find a fountain out there.
Go to Disney World.
Yeah.
Or Vegas.
Go to the ARIA at Vegas.
Oh, yeah.
The big, yeah.
Or there's musical fountains that they have in Munchuk.
If you're in Barcelona, they can go to musical fountains.
Absolutely.
Go to Dubai.
Give yourself a fountain enema in Dubai.
God.
I bet the police and the Emirates will like that.
Yeah, I was going to say that will not end well for you.
You got anything to find, James?
What have I got to plug?
It's interesting.
I am, despite my better instincts, still on twitter.com, which, you know, James Stout is my name and also my Twitter handle.
I do a podcast with you and some other wonderful people called It Could Happen Here.
Really?
Yeah.
It happens every day here in your telephone.
Wow.
Oh, iPod.
Yeah.
And Sophie Something's joined us.
We talk about sheep and chickens and also Turkish drone strikes in the autonomous area of north and east Syria.
All kinds of things in that in that broad area.
Yeah, so you should listen to that.
I'm writing a book for AK Press, but I'm still writing it, so you can't buy it.
But buy some other books from AK Press.
They're very nice people.
Yeah.
All right, everybody.
Everything's good.
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