James and Sophie dissect Wim Hof's controversial legacy, debunking his false claims of holding 26 Guinness World Records and summiting Mount Everest in shorts while clarifying that his immune suppression stems from cold immersion rather than breathing alone. They analyze dangerous safety failures, including the $67 million lawsuit filed by the Metzger family over their daughter Madeline Rose's drowning death and Andrew Incenas' fatal 2019 incident, exposing how his "guru syndrome" approach to hyperventilation risks lives despite scientific evidence showing his feats rely on physiological afterdrops and mental conditioning. Ultimately, the episode warns that while his methods can empower some, his reckless pseudoscience and disregard for safety protocols have created a deadly cult-like following with a tragic body count. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Dangerous Con Man00:01:54
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 Laurie 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.
What's a dangerous con man?
My this fucking dude, Wim Hoff.
James, guest, happy.
How are you?
Wonderful.
Good.
Yeah, thriving.
Controlling the Immune System00:15:23
Ready for learning more about park enemas.
Very happy to hear that, James.
I, you know, speaking of enemas, what is it about enemas?
Why are some people fucking obsessed with this as like the key to all health?
It does seem to have a captivating power of the human spirit, doesn't it?
The enema.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a kind of person, enema guys and enema girls, who are just like obsessed with fucking enemas as the answer to all health problems.
Yeah, it's I don't know.
It's a laughing thread throughout human history.
Someone should do a PhD on it.
Yeah, I think it may have something to do with the fact that it's like an intense experience that creates like powerful physical sensations and some people just flip out over it.
I don't know.
Yeah, I know.
It seems central to their life.
Yeah.
Yeah, in a way that it's not if you inject park water into your colon.
Yeah, you gotta like, I don't know.
Like there are like obviously sometimes enemas are a useful tool for healthcare people to give.
Sometimes people need enemas, but it should never be like a regular part of your day-to-day, right?
No, it should not be just like giving yourself enemas for fun.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
Under medical supervision only, I think is my stance on enemas.
Yeah.
Look at us.
Enema cops, both of us.
Yeah, enema cops.
That's my job.
I'm going to make sure people's assholes are nice and dry.
I've broken with the anarchist over this and I'll be becoming one of those really annoying Stalinists on Twitter.
You're an asshole authoritarian.
Well, you know who's not an asshole authoritarian is Wim Hoff.
He thinks, you know, if you live in a state with public health care, you should just cut your guts to ribbons with a sprinkler head.
And, you know, your fellow citizens can pay for that because you're a drifter who abandoned your family for a decade.
That's what socialism does to him to a motherfucker.
Yeah.
Yep.
Every time.
Yeah.
Can't not do it.
Happens everywhere.
So, James, when we left Wim, he had just shattered his guts by taking a public enema from a water fountain to avoid acknowledging that he'd abandoned his family.
That said, he does eventually come back to the picture.
His book, The Way of the Ice Man, gives us very little detail on the long gap between Olea's suicide and his rise to prominence.
Right after later, Wim remarried and had another son.
We just get this line.
The children grew up, and Hoff looked for more challenges.
Yeah, they grew up more or less without you, buddy.
Yeah, he looked for challenges that did not include parenting.
I guess not a challenge he was that interested in.
So at this point, his story jumps ahead to the mid-aughts.
There are not any particularly good or objective sources about the reality of his life in this period.
So we're going to have to rely on some bad ones.
I found an article with Irishnews.com that features heavily an interview with Laura Hoff.
Now, today, Laura is involved in her father's business, Inner Fire.
So, not an unbiased source without a financial interest in how Wim is seen.
And her interview does not acknowledge some of the unpleasant stories that Scott talks about.
But I think her claims about what it was like being raised by Wim are still worthy of analysis because, at the very least, if this is not accurate to reality, it does show how his kids who are affiliated with his business think it is advantageous for their father to be seen, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, sure.
If this is not an accurate recitation of reality, and we do not objectively know what happened with Women as kids, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Quote: On a cold winter's day in Amsterdam, many years ago, while other parents were wrapped up warm to collect their kids from school, Laura Hoff recalls her dad turning up in a t-shirt, shorts, and sandals, and then doing a bit of yoga in the schoolyard.
I think I was raised by a very special man, which I only understood later, says Laura, 36, agreeing that the childhood that she shared with her three siblings was absolutely different than that of her friends.
We always used to play outside.
If it was cold, it didn't really matter.
The weatherman never dictated what we needed to wear.
Now, that could be also go with Wim's basically abandoning them to a squat.
The fact that no one was there to make sure they were dressed brightly.
So we didn't have any clothes.
Yeah, so we didn't have any clothes.
Laura gives us little detail on what Wim's life was like after Olea's suicide and his eventual return to his family, which she, of course, has no obligation to do.
But it does mean that this next period of his life is a bit of a black box when it comes to hard facts.
This is as much as she says about being raised by Wim.
We were very free.
I don't think there were any rules.
Sometimes you would think, okay, kids need some rules, but it was also the best time in my life.
My father used to play more than we did.
So he always wanted to go outside with us, and that was great.
So, I don't know.
That's another version of the story.
Believe what you want.
Rather juxtaposed.
Yeah.
So Wim claims that after his wife's suicide and his return to his family, he traveled around the world doing what a normal person would call extreme stunts.
Summarized in his autobiography this way.
His breathing techniques, yoga, and cold training gave him enormous strength, and he liked to share it with others.
The media got him in their sights.
Encouraged by the attention and the effect it had on other people, Wim broke record after record.
He took the longest path in ice.
He climbed snow-covered mountain peaks wearing shorts.
He ran a marathon in Lapland at negative 30 degrees Celsius.
He swam hundreds of meters under ice.
His records were reported on television in Japan, Germany, Poland, Spain, and many other countries.
The BBC made a documentary about him, and millions of people watched his feats on the internet.
And again, the way he's talking about his early activities is almost as if they like the fame that he received, the media coverage was an accident, right?
The media got him in their sights, as opposed to he was kind of a famehound and he deliberately went out of his way to get covered by the media.
Yeah, he actively pursued being in the media at any opportunity.
Yeah, it was like, oh, he just wound up getting famous somehow.
Real crapshoot.
There's some dude over there climbing mountains in box of shorts.
Maybe we should do a story.
Yeah.
Now, all of these records, the 26 Guinness World records that he claims to have set, are in reality somewhat less than accurate.
And we'll cover that shortly.
But for right now, I want to return to another one of Wim's claims.
He says frequently that after years of groundbreaking athletic success, he grew frustrated, quote, possibly because he was still coming to terms with Olea's suicide.
Quote, from his book, he felt the need to share his knowledge and the possibilities of his body with more people.
Could other people do what he can do?
In 2007, the renowned Feinstein Institute in New York studied Hoff.
The results showed that he was able to control his autonomic nervous system.
For Wim, the results were logical.
After all, he had trained to do it for many years, but the researchers thought he was a medical wonder.
From then on, Hoff put himself at the disposal of science.
His main aim was to show others that they could also train to do what he does.
It was the start of a very special time in Wim's life.
He attracted more and more attention, and those who started using his method were wildly enthusiastic.
Now, James, I'm going to admit to a potential failure as a researcher here.
I have definitely found evidence of the Feinstein Center and Dr. Tracy, who runs it, commenting in articles that feature Wim Hoff.
They seem to be connected.
I have not come across any publication from the Feinstein Center about Wim from 2007.
But 2007 is the year that he claims to have run the world's fastest half marathon while barefoot on ice or snow in two hours and 16 minutes.
Yeah.
How much competition is there for that time?
I don't think there's a lot.
Was there a previous record?
First, it is important you remember the qualifier here is this is the fastest half marathon barefoot on ice or snow, right?
Not the fastest half marathon, not even the fastest half marathon barefoot.
Now, this is his only legitimate Guinness world record.
He did do this.
This was verified by Guinness.
He does hold this record.
I do want to note here that Wim's time, if you are not using the qualifier, that it's the fastest half marathon barefoot on ice or snow, is not particularly historic, right?
As a half marathon time.
The current fastest half marathon is 59 minutes and 47 seconds, which is insane for 13.1 miles.
And it wouldn't be record-breaking as a marathon time.
Yeah.
No, it would be good.
It'd be very impressive.
Yeah, two hours is a great marathon.
Yeah, but to two and a quarter hours is like, yeah, it's less than fast.
People are running for fast marathons.
So the first hard evidence of scientific analysis of Wims' claims that I have is from 2011.
Wim had by this point turned his experiments in cold weather endurance into a lifestyle.
He was well known for going on long barefoot runs in the snow and submerging himself in ice for long periods of time without shivering.
A 2011 article published by Radboud University's Medical Center is the first example I found of him being tested by a reputable scientific source.
It is notable that this early article describes him as the ice man Wim Hoff.
Radboud's researchers were specifically testing Wim's claims that he could influence his autonomic nervous system and immune response through concentration and meditation.
And in that, they are talking about what people now call Wim Hoff breathing, that is a version of GTUMO breathing.
And I'm going to quote from this study here.
To investigate this, Hoff was administered endotoxin while practicing his concentration and meditation technique.
During this experiment, various measurements were performed, including brain activity, autonomic nervous system activity, and inflammatory mediators in the blood.
One of the researchers said, After endotoxin administration, the increase of the stress hormone cortisol in Hoff was much more pronounced compared to other healthy volunteers.
We know that this hormone is released in response to increased autonomic nervous system activity and that it suppresses the immune response.
In accordance, the levels of inflammatory mediators in Hoff's blood were much lower.
On average, Hoff's immune response was decreased by 50% compared to other healthy volunteers.
In addition, hardly any flu-like symptoms were observed.
These results are definitely remarkable.
So that makes it sound like Hoff was able to basically control his immune system to reduce his immune response to being mildly poisoned in a way that reduced his symptoms, which is very impressive sounding, right?
If that's a thing he was able to do, that is impressive.
That's interesting.
But the paper went on to caution those results were only obtained from a single person and thus could not serve as evidence for claims that Hoff's techniques could influence the immune system in meaningful ways.
Sure, he could just have a weird response.
Yeah, we will refer there's follow-ups to this study, so we will talk about that in a little bit.
The year before that 2011 study, 2010, Hoff and his eldest son Inam had set up a company called Inner Fire to capitalize on the growing fascination with Wim and his claims of superhuman abilities granted through breathing techniques.
They started organizing workshops, first in the Netherlands, but then all over the world.
Several other of his children joined the organization, which grew rapidly as Wim became a bona fide celebrity.
Now, if you don't recall, the period from 2010 to 2013 was the birth of commodified viral content online.
Journalists and writers for culture websites like my old employer, Crack.com, had a voracious appetite for so-weird it must-be-true stories, and Wim Hoff was perfectly situated to go viral in this area.
The number one reason for his success was his embrace of mainstream scientific studies of his techniques.
Hoff could do this because GTUMO breathing, which is the basis of all of his claims, does work in measurable ways.
In 2012, researchers from Radbaud performed that follow-up study, comparing volunteers trained by Hoff and a control group.
Testes were poisoned lightly, and the immune activation of the different groups was studied.
An analysis of various studies on Wim Hoff breathing by the medical journal Temperature notes: The trained group had significantly increased epinephrine levels, increased levels of anti-inflammatory cytokine, decreased levels of pro-inflammatory mediators, and less pronounced fever.
Also, flu-like symptoms were lower in the trained group compared with the untrained group.
And you will find this cited constantly on Wim's website and in news articles about Wim.
Usually, the study results are summed up as the people who Wim trained were able to control their immune systems and avoid sickness.
That is not what happened.
And that journal article continues.
The setup of the research, however, did not allow discrimination between the acute and the acquired responses, because during the experiment itself, the volunteers from the intervention group were allowed to hyperventilate, and the control group was not.
Therefore, the investigators included that hyperventilation can temporarily activate the sympathetic nervous system and suppress the innate immune response.
Yeah, long-term training effects were not addressed.
Therefore, it still needs to be sorted out if the training itself, hyperventilation, cold, and/or meditation cause the observed effects.
This study also notes that the trainees were not just given cyclic hyperventilation training.
They were immersed in ice-cold water, while the control group was not.
This matters more than you might think.
Quote: Finally, cold may exert health effects.
First of all, cold may increase energy expenditure by shivering, but also by non-shivering thermogenesis, as mentioned above.
In the recent past, quite a few studies from several laboratories showed that humans are able to increase their non-shivering thermogenesis capacity due to cold acclimation.
This mirrors numerous studies in rodents.
However, the study effects in humans are of a smaller magnitude compared with these animals.
So, number one, it's very debatable.
There's no evidence that there's significant health benefit to this.
These people had mildly less symptoms than the control group, right, of this mild poisoning in a controlled situation.
And number two, there are too many variables that we're not isolated for that you can't say, oh, it was because of the breathing or the meditation.
Or it may have just been, yeah, there's health benefits to being immersed in cold water, like potentially, at least short-term ones.
Their body was freaking out because it was drowning.
Yes, you can't say the kinds of things that are claimed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that was like, for people who were on the internet back then, like, that was the whole genre of like a health viral influencer, right?
Was taking a solid scientific claim and then building gradually less and less solid claims on top of that and then grifting off that and telling people you can make them happy and healthy and save their lives and such.
Yeah.
So anyway, that gives you an idea.
And you can find other studies about Wim.
They all have breakdowns like that when you actually get into what is being studied.
Anyway, we will talk a little bit more about this later.
So that's 2012, that that follow-up study is conducted by Rad Baud.
Kilimanjaro and Exaggerated Claims00:12:29
And it is the very next year that our ethically questionable friend Scott Carney comes onto the scene.
2013 is the year that he met Wim Hoff.
And he's working on this book called The Enlightenment Trap, and he thinks Wim might be an interesting subject for it.
He kind of wants to expose him as a grifter.
So he talks Playboy Magazine into letting him go hang out and take one of Hoff's classes.
So, yeah.
And he specifically writes in his more recent article that he wanted to, quote, debunk him as a charlatan trying to sell fake superpowers to the masses, which is, I think, a reasonable way to describe Wim Hoff.
Yes.
Yeah.
He started out just fine.
So Carney describes Wim in 2013 as, quote, at Mercedes, a circus act.
He wore a green hat and had a red nose and ruddy skin that made him appear a little gnomish.
He was bursting with energy, talked loudly, and smelled like an onion.
To the extent that he was known at all, it was for performing death-defying stunts in ice water and for a stint shilling battery-heated jackets for Columbia sportswear, not for possessing valuable insights on the mind-body connection.
Yeah, real, uh, yeah, I didn't know.
I had a feeling they had a fallout.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, something happened here.
It is interesting because like he describes him in this period as like, yeah, he was like a big media figure in this part of Europe, uh, but he was kind of like, you know, a little bit of a carny, you know, someone who you had to shill these gimmick jackets.
Yeah, he's like a Joe exotic of like doing this stuff, you know, like he's famous, but not necessarily respected, I guess.
Yeah, I would, I would say that.
So, so Scott gets to work studying whim and listening to his classes.
And he finds himself, as he says, flabbergasted by the fact that Wim's techniques really do work.
There's powerful benefits to this stuff.
That's how Scott describes it.
Quote, within a few days, I learned to hold my breath for several minutes at a stretch and heat my body in the snow.
An autoimmune illness that had plagued me for 30 years went away.
A few years later, I climbed shirtless up Mount Kilimanjaro with Hoff when the temperature dipped into minus 30 degrees.
There was no doubt about it.
I was a convert.
Soon I became his chief evangelist, not only writing the book What Doesn't Kill Us, which spent a few months on the New York Times bestseller list, but also appearing for more than 300 media engagements from TV shows and news articles to radio programs and podcasts where I preached the good news.
That's so weird.
Like, I don't know, man.
I've written about some people I admire and I've written about some people I hate, but I've never, like, done 300 podcast interviews about how great anyone is.
Like, it he kind of seems to have moved from journalism to part of this Hoff grift at this point.
Yeah.
So it's at this point that we should probably talk about Mount Kilimanjaro, James, because Kilimanjaro is central to Wim's claims of supernatural ability.
It features heavily in all of his stories.
And I'm going to quote first from how his conquest of that infamous mountain is described by Rolling Stone article Eric Hedegaard in a 2017 article.
He attempted to scale Mount Everest wearing nothing but shorts and shoes, but was thwarted by a foot injury.
He tackled Mount Kilimanjaro next, wearing only shorts and shoes and reached the top in less than two days.
An unheard of feat.
So, James, thankfully, he has given us some stuff to dig into here.
So, the first question we should ask ourselves, is it an unheard of feat to reach Kilimanjaro and the top of Kilimanjaro in less than two days, right?
Is that exceptionally rare?
No.
The current world record, and this is fucking nuts, by the way.
The current world record for an individual climb and descent of Kilimanjaro is six hours and 42 minutes.
That is false.
That is fucking nuts.
That is some mountain running.
That is fucking impressive.
That is wild.
I actually don't know how that's physically possible, but it apparently has been.
Yeah.
The altitude change.
I've been up the other two highest mountains in Africa, High Atlas and Mount Kenya.
But that's.
I've never done higher than 14K for a peak.
And like, that is a thing, you know?
Like, fucking, and this is like, so by the way, Carl Egloff of Switzerland is the guy who did that.
Obviously, he'd be a Swiss dude.
Not surprised.
I had it down for being like someone from Tanzania or Kenya or somewhere.
I mean, and it is like when we are talking about Kilimanjaro, the peak of Kilimanjaro is 19,000 feet above sea level.
It is 16,000 feet above its base plateau.
That's the topographical prominence, which is a commonly used measure for the difficulty of climbing a mountain.
Basically, it's like, because you have a lot of peaks that might be like 16,000 feet.
Maybe they're only like a 2,000-foot hike or whatever above kind of the ridge or whatever.
So yeah, Kilimanjaro has the fourth highest topographical prominence of any peak on Earth, which makes it, you know, by any widely accepted mountaineering metric, one of the harder mountains out there to climb.
So hey, Wim is bullshitting about his time up to the top of Kilimanjaro being particularly exceptional.
But hiking to the top of Kilimanjaro in shorts and shoes does seem impressive.
And it's certainly not a bad time.
But he generally fails to note that he didn't actually summit Kilimanjaro.
He didn't actually reach the, he didn't reach the top summit of Kilimanjaro.
And I'm going to quote here from a write-up by Pepijin von Earp, a mathematician from Radboud University, which is the same school that carried out the experiments that initially seemed to verify Hoff's incredible claims.
Quote, Wim Hoff and the group of pioneers started on January 14th at an altitude of 1800 meters.
From there, they marched on to a camp at 3,700 meters.
They stayed there during the night and went early in the morning to break through the top at 5,685 meters, Gilman's Point.
This tempo would normally not have been possible because of the acclimation time used to prevent altitude seekness.
But wait a second, Gilman's Point.
That's not the actual summit of Kilimanjaro, is it, Wim Hoff?
And it is, in fact, one of three official summit points on the mountain, but not the actual peak, which is a Huru peak, which is where the dude who made the trek in less than seven hours reached and then made it back down.
So again, you can get some insight into the nature of Wim's personal sort of like PR tactics here, right?
Any normal person would consider reaching Gilman's Peak with a group of largely untrained hikers and getting back down in two days or less to be impressive and doing it in shorts, extra impressive.
But that's not going to go viral, right?
Because you're not breaking any records.
You know, you're doing a pretty good time and a pretty impressive thing, but you're not doing anything that's like going to win you an award.
And so you've got to kind of jink the truth in order to get something that's going to be real easy to like go viral in an article or whatever.
And like choosing Kilimanjaro is a choice, right?
Like it's a big ass mountain and it's a great achievement to climb it, but it's not a technical climb.
No, it's, you know, like it's, it's something you could like people do Kilimanjaro in their retirement if that's the kind of thing they enjoy and you could spend a lot of money and have someone carry all your stuff.
Like for something that sounds super impressive, like it's not Everest.
He compares them in the same paragraph in that piece you read a second ago.
So like, yeah, it's very, I don't know.
He's taken like one point of truth and extrapolated.
Exactly, exactly.
And the way that he phrases things, he's always got a defense if people call him out.
Because if someone's like, well, but you didn't actually do it this way, he can always be like, well, no, what I meant is that no one else hiked up at this time without a shirt or wearing shorts or with an untrained group of hikers, right?
So it's the shortest time for someone doing all those things because like no one keeps track of that shit.
Yeah.
It's like if I were to climb up Kilimanjaro in like five days and be like, yeah, but I did it the fastest anyone's ever done out in a head full of cocaine.
I was like, well, nobody's really keeping track of that, you know?
Fastest guy named Robert Evans.
He was doing Coke at the time.
Yeah, exactly.
I beat that other Robert Evans.
He didn't even make it up to Kilimanjaro when he was on cocaine.
Yeah.
No, I don't do cocaine, folks.
Just good old-fashioned gas station Adderall.
You know, that's the healthy thing to do.
Is that the stuff that's by when you check out?
It's called like giant trucker pills and I mix them with kratom.
We call that a 7-Eleven speedball.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You'll suppress some parts of your body's natural responses when you do that.
Let me tell you, you sure will, way better than Wim can.
We're going to line you up with some Dutch scientists, buddy.
This could be a whole thing.
Yeah.
So it's when you read Wim's book that it becomes clear he wants his followers to believe no one else can manage the hike in the time that he did.
Quote, Hoff decided he would climb Mount Kilimanjaro with a group of people.
Kilimanjaro was a 5,895 meter, 3.66 mile high mountain in Tanzania.
It's a very popular expedition for mountaineers and hikers.
Well-trained climbers can get to the top in six days.
To make the challenge even greater, Hoff wanted to climb Kilimanjaro in 48 hours with a group of 26 people.
Hoff wanted to show that we're all capable of doing much more than most people think is even possible.
With excess, this expedition too, everyone said it was impossible to get up to the top in 48 hours with such a large group.
As if that wasn't enough, some of the people in the group were suffering from diseases like multiple sclerosis, rheumatism, Crohn's disease, and cancer.
They also had no climbing experience.
The date was set for January 2014, and the run-up to the expedition was chaotic.
Dr. Geert Bougies of the Amsterdam Medical Center wanted to accompany the expedition in a personal capacity to help the group.
The local guides thought the whole thing was a bad idea.
At the last moment, the guides decided not to go.
However, Hoff was resolute that this group was capable of reaching the top by focusing on their breathing and because they had prepared with cold training.
So they went.
When the group arrived at Harombo Hut, a small huddle of climbing huts at an altitude of 3,705 meters, the temperature had fallen to 3 degrees Celsius, 37 degrees Fahrenheit, as if climbing to the top of Kilimanjaro in 48 hours with 26 people, many of whom were ill, was not enough.
Wim suggested they walk barechested and in shorts.
Breathing and cold training were the secrets.
And again, if that is the way that it actually went, that's impressive enough.
But again, It's dumb though, but Wim's gotta lie.
And it's not like superhuman.
Again, he's lying about like it's almost well-trained.
Only well-trained climbers can get to the top in less than six days.
No, man, people are up and down that thing.
Someone has done it in less than seven hours, which is not to say like everyone can do that.
Obviously, that's an extreme thing.
But like six days is, it's not like it doesn't, it's not like impossible to do in less than six days.
You don't have to keep doing that.
You have an altitude acclimation, right?
Like when you're doing that six, seven, 10-day trip, whatever you're doing, like you, you're, you're taking time to acclimate to different altitudes.
Yeah.
I know, like, I have a, I don't know why this one upsets me so much.
I think having done some walking up mountains, like if your guide says, nah, fuck it, I'm not going, that's dumb.
Like, don't go.
Because that same guide is going to be on a search and rescue team finding your dumbass and like risking their life to try and help you.
And that, that's not okay.
Yeah, he's being really reckless here.
And I've, I've been reckless doing a mountain climb before that was ill-advised, but not with 26 people I was responsible for, you know?
Like, again, it's about like who you endanger and like, yeah.
And I shouldn't have done the climb that I did, but it was a, it's, it, yeah, too.
Yeah, it's, it's this claiming that like what you're doing is somehow like impossible.
No one thought we could do it.
It's like, no, man, like people have done much more impressive things on Kilimanjaro than what you did.
Rooting it not in like, oh, I'm just a grifter, or I just wanted to see if I could do it even, or I wanted to do something hard, but being like, oh, I did it for everyone so everyone could see what they're capable of.
Like, no, you didn't.
Yeah, I'm glad no one died this time, but that may be evidence of the fact that like Kilimanjaro is a mountain that you can get away with that on, as opposed to Everest.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
Someone would die or like K2 or whatever.
Oh, yeah.
So send him up K2.
That's a challenge we're throwing down for.
Shirtless.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You think you're hard?
Oxygen Saturation Limits00:15:50
From 2000.
Listen, actually, you know, first off, James, you know who is hard?
People who buy the products from these.
Yeah, because we've got dick pills.
That's right.
We do have dick pills, God willing.
You know, we'll get more dick pills.
Yeah.
So hopefully.
Yeah.
Grab some dick pills, grab some trucker amphetamines, and, you know, grab some gas station, create them, mix them all together.
See what happens.
Yeah.
You know, run up and back.
That's how that guy did it in six hours, man.
Yeah.
You know how, you know, how weightlifters talk about muscle confusion?
Confuse all of your organs.
You know what?
Just take every pill in the gas station and see what it does to you.
That's the key to some world records for sure.
You sure will.
Highest heart rate by you.
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.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
He related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Moda.
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 to 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 Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
So from 2014 on, Wim's fame picked up by leaps and bounds.
Inner Fire became a popular lifestyle wellness brand for celebrities interested in pushing the extremes of human capacity.
Harrison Ford bragged about taking his classes on a live talk show appearance.
And he was far from the a lot of celebrities are into Wim Hoff breathing, have done his stuff.
Wim was a regular guest on the Tim Ferriss show.
That's one of the big things that made him huge.
Tim Ferriss is the four-hour workweek and the four-hour body.
He does all of these like hacking, like body hacking and productivity hacking.
Is he the bulletproof coffee guy?
No, no, no, that's a different guy.
That's it.
But I think that guy's been on Tim Ferriss's show.
Okay.
Yeah.
And one of the claims that Wim made on Tim's show was that he could speak 10 languages fluently, which is an impressive.
I've known some people who are that kind of polyglot.
I've had some fixers who were that kind of polyglot, you know?
Vict Vic to boot.
Famous multiple language guy.
My Arabic teacher, like learned Mandarin over the course of a year as like a side hobby, like the way some people would get into like basketball or something casually.
Yeah, having things out of fluency.
Yeah, because he's a language genius.
You know, some people are like that.
That's an enviable skill.
It's the most enviable skill in my opinion.
And I can't say that Wim can't do this.
I don't know if Wim can speak 10 languages fluently.
I do know that Wim stretches the truth about a lot and he's probably stretching the truth about this.
But because Tim Ferriss is also, one fan describes him as a language hacker, he asks Wim, how did you learn 10 languages?
And Wim answers, just be open and love to learn.
And that's it.
I had no real teachers, you know, people in the street.
And sometimes I had to look for a teacher, like a Japanese teacher here in Amsterdam and a Hindu teacher.
So yeah, I was just interested.
If you are interested in life and you get to know and you never stop learning because you love it, I don't think he speaks English fluently.
Yeah, that's that's that's that's not a coherent statement.
Yeah, I think he meant Hindi and not Hindu.
I was wondering what was going on there.
Yeah, so anyway, but that's understandable, right?
If he's like, if he's not his language, English isn't perfect.
Maybe we might mess that up.
So appearances with Joe Rogan and other extreme sports-affiliated media personalities followed.
And Wim's portfolio of braggadocio expanded too.
Kilimanjaro was always one of his chief claims to fame, but he soon added the claim that he had broken 26 world records.
This is again untrue.
He currently holds one Guinness World Record for that half marathon, but it is easily Wim's most boring lie because there's not even a fun story here.
He's just full of shit.
But papers, including an enema in a while, buddy.
Yeah, he needs to get an out.
That'll clean the truth up here.
But like a lot, I found like Rolling Stone and Guardian articles, all sorts of articles that will just repeat the 26 world records thing.
Sometimes they hedge their bets being like, he claims to have won this, but rarely do they actually dig into the fact that, like, no, we didn't.
He just didn't.
He just didn't do this.
Yeah.
Now, many major outlets have often been willing to lend credence to Wim's claims.
By far the greatest ally he's had as a grifter are the podcasts of guys like Joe Rogan.
Probably my favorite example of this is quite mild by comparison, but I found it funny.
In one talk with Rogan, he was making his usual bold claims of having gained control of his immune system.
And Joe asked, You're able to deal with malaria?
And Wim responded, Yes, he was.
And further, he would be willing to get infected with malaria for science to prove his resilience.
And all I got to say is, please, let's do this.
Let's get a shot full of malaria.
Let's do it influencing Wim.
Get the number one killer of human beings across the eons of time that we've existed and infect yourself as a bit.
Jesus Christ.
As someone who's had fact, you do not want to do that as a bit or not.
That will, again, it's like fucking with Mount Everest.
Like, you just don't want to do that, right?
Yeah.
You can fuck around with like, you know, when they're doing these studies, they'll inject him with a little bit of poison, right?
To induce basically a mild flu.
You don't fuck around with malaria.
You don't even fuck around with malaria pills, like with the medicine that you take to avoid getting it has pretty serious side effects.
Yes, it does.
That stuff is, I have seen some sunburns.
Yeah, but yeah.
Yeah.
Where did Rogan plug that one from?
The guy's like, oh, yeah, I can control my immune system.
He's just like, yeah, you want to do malaria?
Do you want to take some malaria with me?
So, oh, God, the good that would do to the world if we could get both of those men to a malaria challenge.
Yeah, both get them to take it.
No, man, if you really want to DMT's pussy shit, if you really want to like learn some stuff about yourself, bro, you got to take malaria, homes.
Like, that's how you fucking learn your tough.
Ah, like my Joe Rogan.
I really, I really fucking hated that.
And the listeners don't get the horrifying visual of you with that coming from your face.
It's just, yeah.
Oh, it's beautiful.
Ruining a good thing, okay?
So, yeah, you've ruined malaria, Robert.
How dare you?
Jesus.
Malaria is going to get canceled now.
Yeah, Chicken Gunya is right there wanting to take its spot the whole time.
I was going to go with the sleeping sickness.
Yeah.
So like that.
Much of Wim's success with shoddy journalists and podcast hosts lies in the low level of scientific literacy in this country and his skill at pulling out techno-babble that would make a Star Trek writer blush.
One of Wim's favorite claims is that his hyperventilation techniques allow someone to reach levels of oxygen saturation above 100% in their blood.
No, James, no!
Neither of us are doctors here, but can you pick out where the scientific irregularity might be there?
Yeah, I think it's right around in the notion, the notion of percentages is a thing.
I think in this next section, we should have James read the part of Wim.
You're right.
You're right.
James, we're going to read a transcript from that October 2016 interview on the Joe Rogan podcast where he makes this claim and Joe questions him.
I'm going to be Joe Rogan.
Okay.
Oh, I love that for you.
Okay.
And you'll be Wim.
All right.
So Sophie's going to send me.
Am I going to do my Dutch accent?
Yeah, do your Dutch.
No, be real offensive with it.
I'll do my offensive Joe Rogan accent.
Yeah, I'll just say, what is it now?
It's called from a chimney.
People who don't understand the Dutch tradition of Schwarter Peep will not understand that joke.
Here we go.
Here's me as Joe Rogan.
But there is nothing more than 100%.
They had a level that they thought was 100%.
And then they said nobody had reached a higher level than this.
So it must be what 100% saturation looks like.
Yeah, exactly.
It's not that you got more than 100% saturation.
It's that you achieved higher levels of saturation than they thought possible.
Yeah, exactly.
They did it with a laser on the chest, and then they were able to measure the mitochondrial oxygen tension.
They're able to receive more oxygen.
That's a great finding.
It shows we can have more oxygen inside.
Suddenly, we're able to get into the cell and influence the energy production.
If it is anaerobic, it is like two molecules able to produce.
When it becomes aerobic, then it's 38 molecules they can produce.
What happens?
What happens with a cell that is deprived for 48 hours of 35% less oxygen?
It becomes cancerous.
As simple as that.
Have you ever worked with cancer patients?
I want to, but it's very complicated.
Thank God for that.
I got to tell you, none of that means anything.
That's bullshit.
Yeah, that is not science.
They have talked to medical experts.
They have talked to doctors.
Fucking Scott Carney had to try to get this like translated.
It's nonsense.
Those are two people using words that they think mean something that don't mean what they think they mean, but they've properly learned how to pronounce them and are just using them in ways that don't actually make sense.
Princess Briding is what we call it.
Yes, it's inconceivable and nonsensical.
Well, Joe, and Joe is even a little worse there because he recognizes as soon as Wim makes his first set of claims that they've achieved, he says like we had oxygen saturation of 103%.
Joe knows that's impossible.
So he's like, you meant this, right?
And then Wim like just goes off on a limb using techno-babble that like, again, does not, is not accurate.
This is not what is happening.
This is not what happens with people who do his breathing techniques.
But it does show kind of the degree of, I would say, like collusion that Rogan has to try to protect his guests.
Yeah, he's trying to insert a narrative being like, no, we have to make this credible.
Like steer in this direction.
Yeah.
But Hoff is resolutely sticking to his absolute bullshit.
Fucking nonsense.
Yeah.
Absolutely not being made credible.
Refusing to do.
Wim's dedication to this bullshit has caused consternation to some of the honest researchers who studied his techniques for years because they were impressed with some of the benefits that those techniques might have had.
Scott Carney quotes Brian McKinsey, a breathwork expert who worked with Wim for years before being turned off by his pseudoscientific claims.
McKinsey says that in his opinion, no person at Inner Fire has a meaningful grasp of the physiology behind their techniques.
Wuder van Marken Lichtenbelt, a professor of health at Maastricht University who has studied Hoff, terms his scientific vocabulary gallimatius, a rare word for nonsense.
Quote, he mixes in a nonsensical way scientific terms as irrefutable evidence.
That's literally what I just said.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wooter just uses a fancier word.
Yeah.
Sophie's been silenced by Wood.
Literally what I just said.
I'm a professor of absolutely nothing.
You're all right.
That's right.
That's right.
Now, Wooter wrote that article in the Journal of Temperature that I quoted from earlier.
And he has explained scientifically how some of Wim's most apparently impressive accomplishments are less than what they seem.
A good example is his famous ability to remain submerged in ice water for significant periods of time without shivering.
Wooter notes that upon exiting the ice, he does shiver like anyone else.
And that while he has adapted to the cold to a degree most of us would find impressive, many other people have shown similar capacity without following his methods.
Quote, the conclusion must be that nothing miraculous occurred.
Although a non-shivering thermogenesis of 40% is considered as high, it is not that extreme.
I think Wim Hoff withstands the cold in the ice cubes through a combination of several factors.
An increased heat production, non-shivering thermogenesis, brown fat activation, contraction respiratory muscles, efficiently increasing body tissue insulation, vasoconstriction, thereby reducing heat loss and conserving the body core heat content.
And finally, perhaps not unimportantly, he used his well-trained mental ability to endure the cold, change of mindset, as he calls it.
As soon as he steps out of the ice, he starts shivering just as everyone else, due to the redistribution of the cooled blood from his limbs to the body core, also known as the afterdrop effect.
Now, one of the things Woo will note is that there is evidence in some of these studies that the people who train with Wim show benefits beyond those normally associated with GTAMO breathing.
Those benefits, though, are in line with the fact that he is very good at motivating people.
He is a good teacher in his ability to make people excited and feel both comfortable and safe and good about themselves so that they will explore pushing the limits of their bodies beyond what they might normally do.
And that is to the extent that there's anything extra going on with Wim's training, it's that he's really good at making people feel comfortable experimenting and taking risks they might not otherwise take.
The Body Count Reality00:07:59
And on the level of that, where it doesn't go badly, it has a pretty profound impact on people, right?
When you are convinced to try something you didn't think you can do that is difficult and uncomfortable and a little scary, and then you succeed, you feel great.
Yes, super empowering.
It's very empowering.
When you do it with a group of people, you can become very close to those people, right?
And if there's someone who leads you through it, like that person can become a guru, right?
It can engender an almost religious mania.
This is why a lot of we talk about like all these different kind of cults and stuff that have, they'll get people in a group and have them like yelling and insulting and attacking each other, or they'll all focus on like abusing one person, which is a lot less healthy than kind of the way Wim does it.
But the goal is the same, right?
To have an intense extreme experience that pushes people beyond some limit they had set for themselves.
And that can cause them to have a degree of like almost religious faith in the person who led them through it, right?
It's guru syndrome, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
You see it in all kinds of things.
And it's why it can be so empowering.
Like it's why we run like outward bound programs for people with disabilities or people with injuries.
Like I've worked on some of those and it's one of the coolest things to do if you stop before you turn into a total piece of shit.
Yeah.
And that's the problem with Wim, right?
Because, you know, a lot of aspects of what he's doing are certainly healthier than, I don't know, the kinds of like training that some of these like weird drug abuse cults and stuff would do where they'd have everyone shouting at each other in a circle.
Sure, a lot less toxic than that.
But there is an alleged body count to the way Hoff's training works.
Before we get to that, we are building to that.
There are a couple of other lies I want to bust of his first.
One involves the claim sometimes made that he summited or at least got close to summiting Mount Everest in shorts.
Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.
Yeah, you'll hear that sometimes.
He aborted his attempt at Everest slightly past base camp because he got frostbite.
Because again, he tried to do the shit he's done other places.
You can't fuck around with Everest.
It's Mount Everest.
It kills you.
It kills people all the time.
It doesn't give a fuck.
The other is his claim that he holds the world record for longest swim underneath an ice flow without breathing equipment.
Here is a segment of his response to a 2022 Guardian interview that gives you an idea of how that one tends to sound.
There was a moment swimming under the ice when I found myself.
I lost my way because my corneas froze underwater.
I had no goggles on, just shorts, holding my breath.
I was under a meter-thick layer of ice in Finland, lost and blind, but I never felt like I was drowning.
No panic or pain.
I felt at peace and in control.
That experience brought me so much.
In the end, a safety diver brought me back by pulling me by the ankles to the exit hole, which I'd passed long ago.
I did a huge gasp for air when I came up.
In that moment, I conquered the fear of death.
Now I'm not afraid of dying.
I'm afraid not to live.
Fucking of course, first off, he didn't need to do that.
Second, like every other fantastic claim Wim makes, his recollections here do not jive with the record.
And it's here that I'm going to return to Scott Carney's Mia Culpa write-up.
All was not as it seemed that day.
In the 2011 book, Becoming the Ice Man, Hoff wrote that he almost died on his first attempt under the ice.
On that try, he ignored his own safety protocols and tried to sprint twice the planned distance without telling anyone on the crew.
Afterwards, Hoff claims his eyes froze under the water and he lost his way, and that he was lucky a rescue diver found him after he blacked out and brought him to the surface.
His brother Marcel, who was standing on the ice above him that day, remembers it differently.
He took it too far and blacked out, Marcel says.
He recalls Hoff performing his staple breathing exercise of his method, deliberately hyperventilating, just before his underwater swim.
According to Marcel, it's just as likely that Hoff experienced shallow water blackout as his failure was to frozen eyeballs.
There's no reason it couldn't have been both.
Yeah, that's, I mean, if like, I don't know if this is a spoiler, but like hyperventilating will cause you to have shallow water blackout, and so will sprinting underwater.
Yeah, which is why you shouldn't do it.
Yeah, absolutely do not do this shit.
Yeah.
B, again, the water, a lot like Mount Everest, deserves your respect.
We're not supposed to be there.
Yeah.
We are particularly not supposed to be underneath ice sheets.
It's very alien to us.
You must be extremely careful.
Yeah.
I've watched Avatar 2 Wave the Water and I understand that.
I understand a lot more now.
But yeah, you are not welcome.
Well, the water is a lovely place and people should go underneath it, but like, don't be pushing your limits and hyperventilating.
I take a course from some carefully qualified.
Take training, go with a group, have rescue equipment available.
Lots of safe ways to be in the water.
Yeah, lots of ways to mitigate risk, you know, in the water.
Yeah.
Yes, if he hadn't had not just a buddy, a whole team of people with significant equipment, like a diver in gear underneath ready, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he still very nearly died.
Yeah, this is where people, I don't know if he took a rope, but like people traditionally free diving for records, like rope dive down.
Yeah.
And then they have safety divers at every height to accompany them in case they black out.
But because he's going twice the fucking distance.
I don't know whether he did that or not.
Like, yeah, you will die.
Yeah.
So this and numerous videos of him enduring ice water baths, spending time fully submerged in ice water, all that kind of shit.
This is all critical to the Wim Hoff legend and also the deadliest part of it.
And to introduce this segment, I'm going to quote from an article by Outside Online.
August 10th, 2022, a Southern California lawyer named Rafael Metzger was at his home in Long Beach with his 17-year-old daughter, Madeline Rose Metzger.
After a busy afternoon of phone calls and work, Raphael left his home office to start dinner.
He searched the house for Madeline, eventually walking to the backyard to see if she was taking a dip in the family's swimming pool.
He saw her laying face down in the water, motionless.
Raphael attempted CPR, but to no avail.
Paramedics later arrived at the house and also tried to resuscitate her, but she was gone.
Two days after the accident, a medical examiner from the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office told Rafael that Madeline had died of accidental drowning.
Her toxicology tests were clean, they said, and there was no sign of physical abnormality, like a heart arrhythmia.
Madeline put on her bathing suit, went to the pool to cool off and to reduce anxiety following an argument with Tammy Metzger, and she did Wim Hoff breathing, the suit states.
She became hypoxic and thereupon drowned in the shallow water, despite being an excellent swimmer.
The lawsuit from the Metzger family accuses Tammy and Hoff of negligence in Madeline's death.
It also levies charges of fraudulent concealment, unfair business practices, and false advertisement against Hoff and Inner Fire.
Defendants were either aware of or culpably indifferent to unnecessary risks of injury.
Rafael Metzger is seeking $67 million in damages and also asking courts to require Hoff to post warnings on his website and promotional materials that the method is dangerous and should never be done in water due to the risk of drowning and death.
We were shocked to hear that such a young girl drowned, and Inham Hoff told outside, shocked by the allegations, which don't make any sense to us.
I mean, yeah, it's going to kill you.
Yeah.
It's somewhat remarkable that I know he has a body count.
I guess it's very hard to tell how many people have died hyperventilating in water, right?
Like, yeah.
Yeah, he died swimming and free diving often.
Yeah.
And it's hard to know the exact potential body count.
I think there are something like 14 or 15 people alleged in lawsuits against Hoff's organization currently.
You'll hear numbers between like 12 and 15.
We're going to read one more story, but first, you know what never gets anyone killed, James?
I don't think we can safely say that.
Hyperventilation Fatalities00:03:19
Well, is it the dick pills again?
Because they've got a body count.
I mean, look, can you call it living if you don't have dick pills?
That's a good question.
You know, you got to, sometimes it's better to have lived the days that you did have.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which is why, again, go to the nearest truck stop, buy every pill they have, and just mix them with like some Everclear and some some high C, you know?
See what happens.
Yeah.
You'll learn a lesson about yourself.
Or someone else will.
Yes, someone will learn a lesson, one hopes.
Lessons will be learned.
Yeah.
You'll contribute to humanity's knowledge.
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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.
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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.
They 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.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolfe, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
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.
Stoicism and Breathing Techniques00:10:10
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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
So I'm going to read one other story of an alleged Wim Hoff training victim.
And this is from Scott Carney's article.
On Labor Day in 2019, Andrew Incenas, a 27-year-old social media entrepreneur, shuttled back and forth between his new office to set up his desk with a fleet of new computer monitors and the party at his brother's house in Anaheim Hills, California.
Like his business idol, Gary Vaynerchuk, Incenas thrived on the challenge of starting a new business and constantly looked for ways to optimize his performance.
His favorite technique for dealing with stress was a breathwork and ice immersion protocol called the Wim Hoff method.
Around 6.30 in the evening, Incenas made his last trip back from the office.
His brother Adam invited him in for ice cream and a football game on TV.
Sure, he said, but first I want to do my Wim Hoff in the pool.
He asked to borrow a pair of swim trunks.
This wasn't unusual.
Over the years, Incenas had learned that the Wim Hoff method had an almost miraculous calming effect on his nervous system.
He watched videos of Hoff swimming under Arctic sea ice and teaching influential social media stars to hyperventilate to the point of passing out.
Incenas preferred to practice alone and often did four or five rounds of breathing in a single day.
Video of Andrew doing the breath work in the water a few months earlier focused on the peaceful expression on his face.
He texted his friends that the method works really well in the cold.
A few minutes after Andrew went in the pool, Adam started to wonder when he would finish up and rejoin the family.
Then, according to the coroner's report filled in Los Angeles County, children at the party noticed Andrew appeared to be sleeping in the shallow end of the pool.
Adam ran outside to find his brother in a meditative position underwater with his hands clasped in front of his chest and unresponsive.
Adam dragged Andrew out of the water and performed CPR to get his heart beating again.
But when we got to the hospital, there was no brain activity.
He was already a goner, says Adam and Sinas.
So don't do this stuff.
Yeah.
Do not do this.
Folks, be very careful.
Don't do it anywhere near water if you're going to experience with like these tummo breathing techniques.
Do them nowhere near water and put a lot of time in between doing them and getting in the water.
Yeah, yeah.
Don't even do them like if you said if you scuba dive, right, like you shouldn't be doing any of this within a couple of days of scuba diving.
No.
Care.
Take care.
So Wim does warn on his site and in videos.
These two techniques, the breathing and the cold water immersion, which make up the majority of his teachings, should never be combined.
But he also shows off video of himself submerged in water or swimming constantly.
And both water and GTUMO breathing are key components of his shtick.
This is a big part of why reputable scientists and quasi-reputable reporters like Scott have backed away.
I don't have a lot of respect for Carney after the role he played granting credibility to Hoff, but I will note that his article on the man is about as complete a rebuttal of him as you are going to find.
And it does a good job of showing how Hoff's claims that Innerfire warns students away from mixing techniques together do not hold, well, water.
And I'm going to quote from that article again.
Hoff's website and YouTube videos do in fact include prominent warnings against performing the breathing method in water.
One typical example, a YouTube video that gives Hoff's basic breathing instructions and has 66 million views, includes this warning in its description.
Exclamation point, exclamation point.
Don't do the breathing exercises in a swimming pool before going underwater, beneath the shower, or piloting any vehicle.
Always practice sitting or lying down in a safe environment.
And Ham Hoff, Wim Hoff's son and the CEO of Innerfire, is adamant over email.
Within the Wim Hoff method, we never teach people to do our specific breathing exercises before submerging in water.
We are very careful and protective in teaching people the Wim Hoff method so they practice in a safe environment.
Now, even in places where warnings exist, Hoff simultaneously teaches a veritable recipe for blacking out in water.
In numerous instances, he conflates water work and breathwork and abandons safety protocols that he explicitly states are necessary.
According to a Wim Hoff method instructor, the training center that Innerfire operates in Poland lacks even basic safety gear like AEDs in case someone's heart stops during his intensive workshops.
The disconnect between what the Hoff organization says in its official capacity and the actual teachings Hoff gives can be jarring.
Take, for instance, the eighth week of his $99 class 10-week video course.
After almost two months of training in breathwork and cold exposure, which work up from very mild practices to ever more intense variations, Wim Hoff stands in front of an icy waterfall alongside an eager, shirtless student and gives some simple instructions.
Go into the water, he says in the video.
Keep on with the breathing.
Keep on being focused.
Then you sit.
Then you immerse.
Focused and you stay in the water.
Hoff gives similar sets of instructions various ways three times over the course of the lesson, ultimately hyperventilating in his own characteristic way and then dunking his own head under the water and staying for about a minute.
A strange disclaimer in the comment section next to the video appears to contradict what Hoff is doing on screen.
It reads, the guy in the video was guided by Wim to learn to deal with the cold.
He's not doing the breathing retention and then putting his head under the water.
At the very least, the juxtaposition between the written warning and Hoff's own words is confusing.
At worst, it's a dramatic acknowledgement of the sort of negligence that could get someone killed.
And that's the Wim Hoff story, James.
Magnificent.
Wonderful stuff.
Yeah.
Don't be doing this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good times.
Man, it's just so like...
It's such a sad condemnation of this whole industry, right?
Like, here's a guy who will teach you how to breathe.
And people have paid for that.
And sadly, people have died.
Yeah.
It does, it is very calming.
I like to free dive.
It is the closest.
Yeah, I just do a bit of Wim Hoffing and then off I go.
It's the closest human beings can ever get to flying, I think.
But no, I do not Wim Hoff.
It is bad.
It's like a joke.
It's a standing joke.
If you go free diving with someone new for the first time, you go out there and you start going, just watch a dude look at you like, what have I got myself in for, you know?
So, James, I wanted to end by reading a couple little things I found in this listicle about Wim Hoff facts because there's some fun ones in here.
I can't wait.
Number one is the claim that Wim learned to control his heart rate in university.
Quote, and it wasn't even part of his curriculum.
Here's a quote from this very reputable article, James.
When the Reddit user Futbucker2424 asked Wim when he learned, asked Wim when he learned to control his heart rate, Wim replied, in university by measurement.
Can you picture it?
When most students were desperately trying to make their way through an economics textbook or recover from a grueling hangover, Wim was spending his days learning to control his heart rate.
Futbucker.
Very impressive, Futbucker or Futbucker.
Yeah, Futbucker.
Thank you.
Thank you for that question.
Number 13 is Wim doesn't need psychedelics because he can trigger his own DMT gland.
In Wim's AMA, he was asked, hi, Wim, do you or have you ever used any kind of drug to find deeper consciousness in order to control your autonomic nervous system?
His response, no, not at all.
I can trigger my own DMT, a hormone driven from the pineal gland.
I know how to get there and can do that all the time.
You have better control over the hormonal system.
You don't need drugs to be drugged out by yourself in a natural way.
Fuck me.
Wim, I will take DMT with you, and I guarantee it will fuck you up in a way that you cannot fuck yourself up.
I will promise you that, my friend.
Where do you think the DMT comes from, Rob?
You got to harvest it from the gland.
That's right.
That's how I get it.
From the gland of a giraffe.
Yeah.
Oh, you're going to get it giraffe.
I'll kill a Dutchman instead.
Much more ethical than a giraffe.
There's plenty of Dutchmen.
Yep.
They're not a rare species.
Yeah.
No shortage.
Hand-harvested DMT from the D stands for Dutch.
Yeah.
Yeah.
M stands for man.
I don't know what the T stands for.
Yeah.
I do.
I hate the author of that stupid article, John Brooks.
I do want to read you his bio, even though it's a little bit of an aside.
John Brooks is a stoicism teacher and crucially practitioner.
His stoic meditations have accumulated thousands of listens, and he has created his own stoic training program for modern day stoics.
Well, it's one of the things about stoicism is they really thrive on how many people download their podcast.
Very stoic.
Nothing more stoic than noting your thousands of listens.
You're getting that ad revenue.
God, I've never seen stoic used more in a sentence.
Three times.
Yeah, well, you got to get the SEO up.
It's another big element of Stoicism.
It's one of those things like Stoicism.
You want to read like ancient Greek Stoics.
Perfectly fine.
People who talk about being Stoics 100% of the time, very frustrating human beings.
Yeah, yeah.
This is like people who talk about reading infinite jest.
Walk away.
Yes.
Or people who like call themselves utilitarians.
Like, oh, yeah, that's a ball end.
Someone says that to you, that is true.
You are not talking about the actual attempt to determine the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
You are trying to justify cheating on your girlfriend.
That is what's going on in this story.
And hopefully someone plays football with your head too, as they did to Jamie Bentham.
Yeah.
Anyway, James, anything to plug?
Well, after that, buddy, not holding your breath underwater.
Yeah.
Don't hold your breath underwater.
Don't hyperventilate, you know?
Yeah, you can hold your breath underwater sometimes if you do it the right way.
Takes sensible.
Yeah, there's a FINA.
Justifying Ethical Cheating00:02:12
FINA offers one.
Had he offers one.
FFI offer one.
Free diving classes.
You can take them.
Yeah.
What else do I have to plug?
Yes.
I have a book already, and you can find it by going to the library and saying, This dude, James Star, has written a book.
It's called The Popular Front of 1936 Popular Olympics, and they will order it for you, and you won't have to pay.
And yeah, on It Could Happen Here, you can hear in a few weeks, I will do a podcast which involves me talking about holding my breath underwater in a non-fatal way.
Yeah.
And going to the Marshall Islands to do it.
Yeah.
And you can find me when I eventually have my fist fight with Wim Hoff.
Yeah.
In Mark Zuckerberg's garden.
In Mark Zuckerberg's garden.
I'm betting on you, Robert.
Thank you.
Yeah, we all are.
I'm betting on malaria to be the real one.
Yeah.
That might be if he gets infected, you know, that might be me too.
Yeah.
I know.
I've seen how you deal with someone who's in the grips of gastrointestinal distress, Robert.
I think you could.
Yeah.
Robert and I have had some times.
You should have bought that second charm, James.
Yeah, I should have done, man.
I didn't have enough meteorites on me that day as a result.
Yeah.
One of the worst days of my life.
Yeah.
That was funny.
Those were not familiar.
Robert and I went on a reporting trip to Thailand to cover the Civil War.
After like two weeks, I was like, you know what?
I'm going to get us a nice night at a very nice hotel, La Meridian, in Bangkok.
You know, we'll have like a little bit of luxury on our way out.
James gets sick on the way in and just hurls in the parking lot of one of the nicest hotels in Bangkok.
And you both were separately messaging me about it.
It was so funny.
The tone.
It was like James is like, I don't think I'm going to die.
And Robert's like, he fucking did it.
He made it.
It was the nicest hotel.
I'm so proud of him.
It was beautiful.
And then Al Gene waiting for them to give us our roof.
It was so funny.
Journalism in Thailand00:02:55
I got it.
I'll give it up to them.
You know, the La Meridian staff must have seen some shit because they didn't.
Nada.
Nada didn't idling with fashion.
And then, but I think the best part of this was that Robert had thought we'd got a suite with two rooms.
In fact, it was one big room with a frosted glass bathroom.
So you have to watch my shadow hurting.
That's karma for you being a stop at auction.
Yeah.
Shout out to the old lady who gave me a shopping bag because I filled up all the vomit bags on the flight.
Yeah.
What a gee.
Jesus Christ.
The things we do for journalism.
The things we do for journalism.
Anyway, like and subscribe.
Yeah.
You can go to Cooler's Own Media to get this without ads.
You can buy my book after the revolution.
It's wherever books are.
Or you can get it free at a library.
Or you can find it free at ATRBook.com.
Whatever.
Live your life, motherfuckers.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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