Speaker 1: If this is the Meat Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear.
Speaker 2: Listening to podcast, you can't predict anything presented by First
Speaker 2: Light creating proven versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers
Speaker 2: to technical outerwear.
Speaker 3: For every hunt, first Light go farther, stay longer. Everybody.
Speaker 1: You might be listening and thinking that it sounds a
Speaker 1: teensy well, you probably had enough time to determine this,
Speaker 1: but by now you're picking up that it sounds a
Speaker 1: teensy bit different than normal because we're not in our
Speaker 1: normal studio and we're not with our normal stuff.
Speaker 3: We're in Colorado.
Speaker 1: That doesn't that doesn't matter so much as we're in
Speaker 1: someone's kitchen recording with best selling author Scott Carney. How's
Speaker 1: it going, Scott damn Man, Nice to see you again.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: The reason we're here it is we're out on we've
Speaker 1: been out on a book tour and I'm here with
Speaker 1: Brody and we've been going around, uh, promoting the new
Speaker 1: book Catch Crayfish, count Stars and bouncing around from city
Speaker 1: to city as they're working on stuff and doing events
Speaker 1: in collaboration with Shields, who's been phenomenal group of people
Speaker 1: to work with. As we've gone from city to city,
Speaker 1: the main thing we've talked about I've become a student
Speaker 1: of this is, Uh, anytime you're in like a large
Speaker 1: city by a airport, the ambulance chaser lawyers, they're billboards.
Speaker 4: Frank Azar here in Denver.
Speaker 1: We saw one the other day. It's the lawyer on
Speaker 1: the billboard holding a sledgehammer.
Speaker 3: There's one called jungle law.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: There's one where the lawyer is on a Harley.
Speaker 1: And I think the thinking is that people are like,
Speaker 1: what do I think of When I think of a
Speaker 1: tough person, I think of a biker. So when I
Speaker 1: think of a tough lawyer, it'll be a lawyer on
Speaker 1: a bike. There's a put the woomack on him as
Speaker 1: a law as a lawyer slogan.
Speaker 3: So we've been checking out, uh, checking out that a
Speaker 3: whole bunch. Also.
Speaker 1: Uh, it was funny going around cause we did a
Speaker 1: show and or did a book signing in Texas where
Speaker 1: we signed and all the events we've gone to. I
Speaker 1: signed two guns in Texas where you just wait in
Speaker 1: line with your gun. It's so funny. A dude comes
Speaker 1: out to me too and he got. A dude comes
Speaker 1: out to me and he's showed me a turkey he killed.
Speaker 1: So this guy comes up with his wife's like ten
Speaker 1: feet away. His wife's ten feet behind him, so like
Speaker 1: waiting for him to like obviously ready to leave.
Speaker 3: And he's shown me a picture he killed.
Speaker 1: A wild turkey that had four spurs.
Speaker 3: So I had two spurs on each leg.
Speaker 1: So I said, I hope you saved it, and he said, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: I got a full mount. And I says, his wife's
Speaker 1: like ten feet away and she looks at me and
Speaker 1: goes full mount. It so funny, man, A quick follow
Speaker 1: up on something. Where's this thing we're gonna talk about.
Speaker 1: We're not gonna talk about too much.
Speaker 3: We're gon we're gonna get in it.
Speaker 1: We're talking about This might not be a like totally
Speaker 1: normally show, but so so turn it off unless you
Speaker 1: might hear about something super interesting. This is the interesting part.
Speaker 1: We're gonna get to that. We're gonna get something super
Speaker 1: interesting in a minute. But we covered, meaning, talked about,
Speaker 1: laughed about this. The latest Yellowstone National Park scandal where
Speaker 1: a gentleman gentleman or a gentleman he okay, so a
Speaker 1: bunch of buffalo go across the river. I came in
Speaker 1: with the hell river. Do you remember what river? A
Speaker 1: bunch of bikes across the river sounds like they became
Speaker 1: of a joke, and and a calf doesn't join him. Well,
Speaker 1: it's too chicken ship to swim the river. So this
Speaker 1: gentleman goes down and they just take off is leave
Speaker 1: it sitting on the bank of the river.
Speaker 3: This guy goes down and he.
Speaker 1: Like for whatever reason, kind of grabs it and scurries
Speaker 1: it up to the road, thinking he's gonna save it.
Speaker 3: So he gets in.
Speaker 1: All kind of trouble and find for all this, and
Speaker 1: then it becomes in the news. How since he touched it,
Speaker 1: they it was abandoned by its mother.
Speaker 3: Wait what so he got his human smell on it,
Speaker 3: and now.
Speaker 1: He's caused it and had to be euthanized and the
Speaker 1: blood is on his hands.
Speaker 3: Okay. A couple of people wrote into this. A person
Speaker 3: that raises.
Speaker 1: A person that raises bison wrote in to say, this
Speaker 1: is the stupidest thing he's ever heard. Basically, they handle
Speaker 1: them cabs all the time, and the mothers are fine
Speaker 1: to pick them back up. But most convincingly, Jim Heffelfinger,
Speaker 1: our resident biologist from Arizona State Fishing Game Agency. He's
Speaker 1: been on the show a number of times. Rights in
Speaker 1: he heard this story too. He says, I heard this story,
Speaker 1: but this is the first I heard the NPS say
Speaker 1: it was because someone touched it. Total bullshit, he says,
Speaker 1: if that was true, Kevin Monteeth, Randall Kaufman, Randy Larson,
Speaker 1: Brock McCollen, And he's naming all these researchers who do
Speaker 1: a lot of studies by putting GPS collars on ungulates.
Speaker 1: Goes say, they handle ungulate calves all the time. They
Speaker 1: tranquilize them, catch them, handle them, put collars on them.
Speaker 1: They stand back up and go right back to their mother,
Speaker 1: he said. Had He goes on to point out that
Speaker 1: if this was true, none of their research would be
Speaker 1: of any value because they would all be abandoned, when
Speaker 1: in fact, they're not abandoned. He's all for getting people
Speaker 1: to respect wildlife and not pick up bison calves, but
Speaker 1: come on, you don't need to lie to do it.
Speaker 3: He had a good joke.
Speaker 1: The mother simply crossed the river and then looked back
Speaker 1: at her young male calf that couldn't make it across
Speaker 1: a strong current and said Bison, huh.
Speaker 3: Good one tuple fingers. Yeah, he's good. If you made
Speaker 3: If you made that up, that's good. Another craction from
Speaker 3: a past show.
Speaker 1: I Okay, I feel like I'm wrong anytime I see
Speaker 1: that someone has like a math formula to crack to me,
Speaker 1: I'm like, maybe I was wrong, But I don't know.
Speaker 1: Maybe his math is wrong, he said. I wanted to
Speaker 1: point out an inaccuracy in me Eater podcast four four four,
Speaker 1: where a pair of ink and mummies are described as
Speaker 1: having been freeze dried in the same sense as a
Speaker 1: freeze dried meal, meaning that they were frozen solid in
Speaker 1: an environment where the pressure was low enough for sublimation
Speaker 1: phase change from solid directory to vapor. He goes on
Speaker 1: to say, these mummies were found at twenty thousand feet,
Speaker 1: where the atmospheric pressure is about forty one.
Speaker 3: I don't know what kPa is, Okay.
Speaker 1: Atmospheric pressure is about forty percent of sea level, the
Speaker 1: triple point for water see attached phase diagram that intimidates
Speaker 1: the shit out of me too. I didn't even look
Speaker 1: at that phase diagram. The point where the pressure is
Speaker 1: low enough for sublimation to occur is roughly a sixty
Speaker 1: seven times higher vacuum than the atmosphere where the mummies
Speaker 1: were found. Therefore, he goes on to say, that's not
Speaker 1: what happened. They were not sublimating that. I was equating
Speaker 1: it to your freeze dry meal that you eat when
Speaker 1: you're backpacking.
Speaker 5: Um.
Speaker 1: He's like other sources have attributed the preservation of these
Speaker 1: mummies to the extreme cold and dry air. He says, also,
Speaker 1: I believe that they were not entirely desiccated. But he
Speaker 1: does goes on to point this out. Here's a quote.
Speaker 1: The mummies were an exceptional condition when found. Reinhardt said
Speaker 1: that the mummies appear to be the best preserved Inca
Speaker 1: mummies ever found. For context, I went to see one
Speaker 1: of these mummies in Salta, Argentina, also saying that the
Speaker 1: arms were perfectly preserved, even down to the individual hairs,
Speaker 1: The internal organs were still intact, and one of the
Speaker 1: hearts still contained frozen blood. Because the mummies froze before
Speaker 1: dehydration could occur, the desiccation and shriveling of the organs
Speaker 1: that is typical of exposed human remains never took place.
Speaker 3: He ends an undercomment, Well.
Speaker 6: A little educational b bit.
Speaker 5: The kPa is a kilo uh, pardon me, a kilo pascal,
Speaker 5: which is a unit of pressure, and it's used basically
Speaker 5: in countries where the metric system is followed, so it
Speaker 5: replaces pounds per square inch.
Speaker 3: Oh got it, Steeve.
Speaker 4: I feel like, you know, just hearing you you say
Speaker 4: this now, I feel like you should have gotten that
Speaker 4: right the first time.
Speaker 3: It's not so simple as it's embarrassing. No, he's a
Speaker 3: nice guy.
Speaker 1: I'm sure he's a nice guy, he says, thanks for
Speaker 1: all the great content, John, Thank you.
Speaker 3: John.
Speaker 1: All right, So Scott, let's walk through the I want
Speaker 1: to touch on the books you'd done, because the books
Speaker 1: you've done have a big bearing on what we're going
Speaker 1: to talk today.
Speaker 3: So want me through your titles. You did went on
Speaker 3: organ trafficking. M hmmm. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I was called the red Market on the trail of
Speaker 4: the world's organ brokers, bone thieves, blood farmers, and child traffickers.
Speaker 4: I invented clickbait.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 4: Maybe not, but yeah, so I you know, I spent
Speaker 4: six years wandering around the world looking for uh, you know,
Speaker 4: interviewing people involved in buying and selling him and body parts,
Speaker 4: not mummy body parts, but like you know, kidneys, bones, hair,
Speaker 4: surrogate wombs. I was tracking down kidnapped children from India
Speaker 4: to the United States and that's sort of the where
Speaker 4: I made.
Speaker 1: My bones as a journalist. So that was my first book. Well,
Speaker 1: you know that, I don't know if I feel like
Speaker 1: it's is it ever true? Like you know, like the
Speaker 1: myth of like that you wake up in a hotel
Speaker 1: room and a total bullshit, your kidney's gone, that never missed.
Speaker 3: Start with one of those guys.
Speaker 4: No, what usually happens, like the law of organ trafficking,
Speaker 4: is that you find like a world class medical institution
Speaker 4: located next to abject poverty, and you and organ brokers
Speaker 4: appear out of the ether to harvest organs. You know,
Speaker 4: usually with payments. It's way easier to pay someone like
Speaker 4: fifty bucks or five hundred bucks for a kidney than
Speaker 4: it is to kidnap them and cause a police case.
Speaker 1: But what I do, so you're saying, so this is people.
Speaker 1: When you were focused on this, you were looking at
Speaker 1: people who.
Speaker 3: Were buying.
Speaker 1: Sort of like illicitly buying organs for people waiting for transplants.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's one of them, but I was also looking
Speaker 4: at you know, so for for kidneys. Yeah, I was
Speaker 4: looking at the organ brokers, so the criminal side of that.
Speaker 4: I was interviewing the criminals and I was interviewing the victims.
Speaker 4: So you know, we had like national geographic cameras come
Speaker 4: in and get like eighty women all line up, where
Speaker 4: every woman in a village had sold their kidneys to
Speaker 4: the hospitals. And these would go mostly to the domestic
Speaker 4: markets in India, but also abroad as.
Speaker 3: Well, So this was most common in witch countries.
Speaker 4: Oh, it's all over the place. I mean I focused
Speaker 4: primarily in India, but if you're talking about kidneys, you're
Speaker 4: talking in the Philippines, India, Egypt, Brazil, a little bit
Speaker 4: of Mexico, South Africa, Indonesia. I mean, it's a giant trade.
Speaker 4: And what I was trying to understand was not only
Speaker 4: how the illegal market works, but the patterns in all
Speaker 4: the organs, in all the body parts that are sold.
Speaker 4: And I was also looking at blood and how people
Speaker 4: have their blood like this was messed up. I went
Speaker 4: onto the border of India Nepal where there's a blood shortage,
Speaker 4: and I met this guy who used to be a
Speaker 4: dairy farmer who would go to the bus station find
Speaker 4: someone who was like addicted to heroin or something like
Speaker 4: that offered them like a thousand rupees fifteen hundred rupees.
Speaker 4: It's about thirty bucks for a pint of blood. But
Speaker 4: he drained four pints of blood, so they were minially conscious.
Speaker 4: And he kept him there for six months, eight months
Speaker 4: at a time until they died or were about to die.
Speaker 3: Only like harvesting now.
Speaker 4: Seriously seriously, like it was. It's a I mean, the
Speaker 4: rule of organ trafficking is once you start thinking about
Speaker 4: the body as a commodity, like it's the same rules
Speaker 4: as Nike shoes. At the end of the rules, well,
Speaker 4: you know it's going to be you try to buy
Speaker 4: low and sell high and you minimize your risk. And
Speaker 4: you know, the more you think about body parts as
Speaker 4: just things, the more you treat them like things.
Speaker 3: M okay, then your next one.
Speaker 1: That you know the problem with that is that makes
Speaker 1: me not want to read that book because because I
Speaker 1: feel like, like if someone tells me that they like,
Speaker 1: if you told me right now, I've thought what was before,
Speaker 1: but if you told me right now that your kidney
Speaker 1: was failing, I would think my kidney was failing, my
Speaker 1: kidney would start to hurt me. Oh man, So that
Speaker 1: like when someone's like, I got poison IVY, I instantly.
Speaker 7: Is sympathetic sympathetic disease.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like if you said, man, I got a bad
Speaker 1: poison ivy case, my waistline would start to it. Yeah right,
Speaker 1: I'd like reading that book made my kidney ache.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's the nocebo effect. And I write about that
Speaker 4: in my book The Wedge. But yeah, my second book
Speaker 4: was called The Enlightenment Trap. And that's in a way
Speaker 4: how this conversation sure and Els is starting. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: where you know, I was investigating these Charlottean gurus around
Speaker 4: the world, and I was looking in particular about Tibetan
Speaker 4: Buddhism and like Americans who go to India and Tibetan
Speaker 4: come back in red robes, and the sort of insanity
Speaker 4: that occurs when someone declares themselves as enlightened. And i'd
Speaker 4: seen you know, the book start.
Speaker 1: So you're in there, you're focused on sort of like
Speaker 1: enlightenment as something specific, Yeah, as.
Speaker 4: Like attaining a final state.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it'd be the same in pursuit of
Speaker 1: us of a I don't want to call it like
Speaker 1: a confined to a particular religious perspective, But you mean,
Speaker 1: like like enlightened in the definition that would be of
Speaker 1: Eastern religious thought or Eastern spiritual thought.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, for sure, specifically I'm talking about people
Speaker 4: who see themselves as a Tibetan Buddhist bodhisatta, right.
Speaker 3: But the.
Speaker 4: I mean it applies to anyone like it applies like
Speaker 4: if you're talking to God, I'm thinking that there's some
Speaker 4: sort of more mental problem here. Then I'm seeing God
Speaker 4: actually talking to and if he is talking to I
Speaker 4: want to see some really good proof I want to see. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And then this is what the Tibetans would talk about.
Speaker 4: They'd say, look, if you think you're enlightened, you go
Speaker 4: up to the top of the temple. And they say
Speaker 4: this all the time. It's really funny. Go up to
Speaker 4: the top of the time. I want you to see
Speaker 4: you pee off the top of the temple, and before
Speaker 4: the urine hits the ground, I want you to suck
Speaker 4: that urine backup into Urethra as proof that you are enlightened.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: This is a test that they tried many times in
Speaker 4: ti Bet. Because you want to prove if you're if
Speaker 4: you're actually that's that's that's I specifically talk about that
Speaker 4: particular miracle on two different occasions.
Speaker 3: Here has pulled it off.
Speaker 4: Well they say they have, but you know, the sources
Speaker 4: are all medieval and there was no cameras. But you know,
Speaker 4: here's the thing, like when you get enlightened and there's
Speaker 4: and I think this is particularly relevant to what we're
Speaker 4: gonna talk.
Speaker 3: Like we felt that word around big time.
Speaker 1: Now yeah, yeah, right, but not even I know what
Speaker 1: we mean when we say it. Well, the words i'd say,
Speaker 1: like I was enlightened, I switched to fry my fish and.
Speaker 4: Port I like that version of enlightenment. Actually that's my
Speaker 4: I can relate to that. But you know i'd seen
Speaker 4: so I had a student, so I was you know,
Speaker 4: at the beginning of my career, I was getting my
Speaker 4: PhD anthropology and I dropped out right at the dissertation.
Speaker 4: I was leading these abroad programs around North India and
Speaker 4: on a seven day silent meditation retreat, my best and
Speaker 4: brightest student, woman named Emily O'Connor. You know, she was
Speaker 4: like this type aid super driven personality. But we're silent,
Speaker 4: you know, in meditation. You're meditating on like in this tradition,
Speaker 4: we're trying to find silence in ourselves and bliss and
Speaker 4: nirvana and all these good things that you can think of,
Speaker 4: and also our own deaths, because it's a big thing
Speaker 4: you do, you meditate on death. Last day of silent
Speaker 4: Meditation retreat, she climbs up to the roof of the
Speaker 4: retreat center and jumps off to her death, taking her
Speaker 4: own life. And I'm I'm like a twenty seven year
Speaker 4: old kid at this point, and I'm tasked with recovering
Speaker 4: her body and figuring out why she killed herself. And
Speaker 4: her journal, her journal, the you know, I reprint a
Speaker 4: lot of it in that book, but essentially it says
Speaker 4: the last words or I am a bodhisatva, meaning that
Speaker 4: she had, in the course of that meditation retreat, learned
Speaker 4: all of the sacred teachings, knew everything about this, and all.
Speaker 3: She had to do was all her body.
Speaker 4: Well it was suicide.
Speaker 3: I mean she didn't think that, but no, okay, but.
Speaker 1: She knew that she was going to have physical death,
Speaker 1: or she thought that she was going to pull a trick.
Speaker 3: Like pulling your urine back up. No, no, she knew
Speaker 3: she was getting physical death.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I mean one of the lines in the
Speaker 4: book in her journal was, you know, I know there's
Speaker 4: gonna be a lot of pain, uh, and you know
Speaker 4: we have to go through it. So, you know, the
Speaker 4: conception of death was maybe a little different because she
Speaker 4: thought she would become essentially a Tibetan Buddhist angel.
Speaker 1: I thought, you meant like when you know how someone
Speaker 1: might you know, there's been cases where someone's on like
Speaker 1: LSD and they jump off a cliffs.
Speaker 3: They think that something else is going to happen, other
Speaker 3: than what you'd think was going to happen.
Speaker 4: No, I you know, she she knew what was She
Speaker 4: knew what this was for. And I think what it
Speaker 4: was when you're meditating, when you're taking on a new
Speaker 4: spiritual practice, there's this law of you know, so we
Speaker 4: call it the law of diminishing returns, but it's also
Speaker 4: the law of speedy gains, right. It's the idea that
Speaker 4: you start meditating and and everything starts getting better. You know,
Speaker 4: you start feeling these really positive changes and and it
Speaker 4: can feel very enticing. Time speeds up, it slows down
Speaker 4: the quality of the light changes, You have these realizations
Speaker 4: about how your mind works and you want to grab
Speaker 4: onto that and you don't want to let it go.
Speaker 4: And I think at that point she saw death as
Speaker 4: a way of holding onto it because she knew that
Speaker 4: those even those realizations were starting to slip from her fingers.
Speaker 3: Huh.
Speaker 4: And then well, and then you know, then she jumped
Speaker 4: off the roof of the retreat center and died. And
Speaker 4: that that sent my life on spinning on an entirely
Speaker 4: different trajectory. I mean, you know, we talked about my
Speaker 4: book on organ trafficking that originated out of this moment
Speaker 4: because I had spent six days with her body one
Speaker 4: hundred and six degree heat trying to preserve it, and
Speaker 4: we had to bring it back to the States, and
Speaker 4: I was suddenly looking at a body as responsibility. I
Speaker 4: was the director of the program, let's see. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: I spoke Hindy and I, you know, I could actually
Speaker 4: navigate the police system that no and no one And
Speaker 4: we had two other director there, but I was the guy.
Speaker 7: Did law enforcement or the state department or anything like
Speaker 7: that get involved.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I was dealing with the cops continually.
Speaker 4: Uh and uh, you know, I initially they thought it
Speaker 4: was a murder because the extent of her injuries, and
Speaker 4: they asked me if there was an enemies and it
Speaker 4: could have gone really, really bad, but the the journal
Speaker 4: pretty much showed what her mental state was.
Speaker 1: Oh man, uh, how old are you? And I haven't
Speaker 1: I was about twenty seven years old. I think when
Speaker 1: you did that book, was it did you start? Do
Speaker 1: you think looking back on it now?
Speaker 3: Was it was it like a like a form of therapy?
Speaker 1: I think, I mean, was it like a thing stuck
Speaker 1: in your head and you wanted to start writing about it?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: I mean it's the theme that connects all my books, right,
Speaker 4: and I actually recount that story. I think it appears
Speaker 4: in four of my books, and like, you know, diminishing
Speaker 4: ways as I go. But uh, yeah, I mean I
Speaker 4: was dealing with two questions right at first. I wanted
Speaker 4: to know about the material nature of the body. How
Speaker 4: we certainly turned flesh into commerce, because you know, they
Speaker 4: were taking pieces of her brain and liver and stuff
Speaker 4: and send it all over for various tests and things.
Speaker 4: And I wanted to think about that question of like,
Speaker 4: you know, there's a body and it's special, it's alive.
Speaker 4: I don't know, is there a soul and I don't know,
Speaker 4: but like then then it becomes property of the state,
Speaker 4: and there's and and things alter. And so that was
Speaker 4: the book The Red Market, like it was all coming
Speaker 4: out of that event. But here's the other question that's
Speaker 4: going on my mind, like was she enlightened? Like what
Speaker 4: was going on? Is there a connection between spiritual attainment
Speaker 4: and madness? This is what I wanted to know, and
Speaker 4: I you know, I spent about another six eight months
Speaker 4: interviewing lamas, you know, these sort of Tibetan Buddhist monks
Speaker 4: and you know, the Dialama's teacher and oracles, all sorts
Speaker 4: of things. I'm trying to figure out what was she enlightened?
Speaker 4: And then the consensus is no. But it that led
Speaker 4: me down this thing. Look, okay, what is it about
Speaker 4: intensive spiritual seeking that can drive you mad? And I
Speaker 4: wasn't interested as much as the depression. You know, your
Speaker 4: first hypothe is was she'd like suicide asn't depressed, But
Speaker 4: I want to know what is the thing where a
Speaker 4: positive can make you do something that's incredibly dangerous and bad. Uh.
Speaker 4: And And that that leads into this book The Enlightenment Trap,
Speaker 4: where I look at her case but also cases of
Speaker 4: people who go to India and just go crazy, something
Speaker 4: called India syndrome where they believe they're Krishna or they
Speaker 4: believe they're Shiva. And about one hundred Westerners a year
Speaker 4: end up in mental asylums in India and you have
Speaker 4: to get sent home.
Speaker 1: But you know, when I look at a lot of
Speaker 1: that stuff, people that are really and we're gonna get
Speaker 1: into this and we get into the whim Hoff and
Speaker 1: the yeah, you know, ice frozen water and hyperventilank and
Speaker 1: all that.
Speaker 3: I think that curious what you think about this.
Speaker 1: I think that there's like people that are looking for
Speaker 1: a fix, so something that's going to go and study.
Speaker 3: And I'm just picking on Buddhism cause we're.
Speaker 1: Talking about Yeah, they're they're already fragile and vulnerable. Okay,
Speaker 1: when they hit what they think is enlightenment or whatever truth.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's whatever truth you're getting from spending a bunch
Speaker 1: of time in icy water, whatever the hell you got
Speaker 1: going on. You're already fragile and vulnerable. The euphoria that
Speaker 1: you get when you find a solution, like a new
Speaker 1: diet that you can believe in.
Speaker 3: You know, if I only eat ligament, if.
Speaker 1: I only eat, if I only eat vegetables, if I
Speaker 1: only whatever. Right is, you're feeling an alleviation in the
Speaker 1: symptomology of being lost and weak. So you're euphoria. You
Speaker 1: think I'm cured. It's just an alleviation of symptom, but
Speaker 1: you're already terminally You're you're terminally lost, you're terminally weak.
Speaker 3: You get a little break and you think it feels good.
Speaker 1: But that's why so few people are who are vulnerable
Speaker 1: and lost stay fixed for long.
Speaker 3: They're always looking for a like I feel like that.
Speaker 3: You find some people that like, they don't stay fixed.
Speaker 1: They like you're you're a drunk you have a religious epiphany,
Speaker 1: And I'm like, yeah, we'll see, Yeah, we'll see, because
Speaker 1: I got a feeling that that you have an alleviation
Speaker 1: of the symptom.
Speaker 3: But it's going to creep back on you.
Speaker 4: I mean, you're right. I mean, look at how many
Speaker 4: chronic alcoholics suddenly find Jesus and then get like drunk
Speaker 4: on Jesus.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: I mean that this is a thing. You're describing, something
Speaker 4: that I think is out there, sort of the conversion symptomology.
Speaker 4: But I will say that's a high rate of recidivism.
Speaker 4: I think that is the way you said a high
Speaker 4: rate of return. But I do think I wouldn't just
Speaker 4: throw all of those infanies under the bus. I mean,
Speaker 4: sometimes one of them, a lot of them. Sure, there's
Speaker 4: it gonna be a percentage, right, we could, we could,
Speaker 4: we could study it like a drug. But sometimes you
Speaker 4: need structure, you need control, and taking control of one
Speaker 4: thing in your life can generalize out to controlling other
Speaker 4: things in your life. Right, Like if you have a
Speaker 4: technique and let's say, let's say was meditation, right, and
Speaker 4: meditation gave you a stable point and the technique to
Speaker 4: help yourself, and then you did other things too to
Speaker 4: help yourself. It can be very beneficial. But if it
Speaker 4: becomes the only thing that that that is your solution,
Speaker 4: well then you know, I know, I you know my
Speaker 4: book The Wedge, I was somewhat friends with Andrew Huperman,
Speaker 4: who's this big you know, podcaster now on Neuroscientist, and
Speaker 4: his definition of addiction was really interesting, which was addiction
Speaker 4: is the progressive narrowing of the things that give you pleasure.
Speaker 4: And if that is what you're doing, then that's a problem.
Speaker 4: And all you're doing is like you're putting a shell
Speaker 4: game with your addictions. But if instead you can take
Speaker 4: something and it gives you a stable like an anchor,
Speaker 4: and then you can do you can like jump fraug
Speaker 4: to something else, well, then you can have a beneficial transition.
Speaker 4: But it's not like it's a one size fits all
Speaker 4: for anyone. Like you got to do the work, and
Speaker 4: you've got to realize that the work is not just
Speaker 4: like tripling down on what your guru is telling you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess I have I need to develop this more.
Speaker 3: I just have a I need to make a name
Speaker 3: for it and build it up better. Uh, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I feel that humans are just from my experience and
Speaker 1: things I've seen that I feel like humans are are
Speaker 1: someone you're kind of cast. Yeah, you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: Like you're thrown from the womb as a as a something,
Speaker 1: and that thing generally winds up being pretty consistent. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, people break it, but it's like they break it,
Speaker 1: but it's it's a little bit nature, the nature nurture thing.
Speaker 1: I think there's like a fund mental tenacity that that
Speaker 1: that a lot of a lot of people have, like
Speaker 1: a fundamental tenacity a fundamental survival mentality, and they kind
Speaker 1: of go on, Yeah, if they hadn't done one thing
Speaker 1: and found success, it would have done some other damn
Speaker 1: thing and found success.
Speaker 3: Or if they had, you know, they.
Speaker 1: Would have found some level of peace or some level
Speaker 1: of contentment.
Speaker 3: And you could have put them in any situation they
Speaker 3: probably would have.
Speaker 4: It's interesting. So you're kicked out. So you're a Calvinist.
Speaker 4: I guess you're you're you're you're someone who believes that
Speaker 4: there is destiny and somehow is your genetics, I guess,
Speaker 4: or somewhere else I don't work.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, I think you're cast. I shouldn't say
Speaker 1: from the womb. I don't know, from some young age.
Speaker 1: I don't know what it is. Maybe when you're ten,
Speaker 1: I'll start watching my kids and find out when they
Speaker 1: look when they seem cast.
Speaker 3: Well, my thirteen year old, I feel like he's cast.
Speaker 1: Okay, So whatever happened to him between genetics and upbringing,
Speaker 1: I feel like now he's like, you know what didn't
Speaker 1: didn't the don't don't the Jews have something like once
Speaker 1: you're old enough to like a buttered bread or something
Speaker 1: like that.
Speaker 3: What is it?
Speaker 5: I have?
Speaker 3: Oh? Well, it doesn't matter what I think. I'm not.
Speaker 8: I don't.
Speaker 3: I don't have a bunch of books about this stuff.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is gonna lead us into where this is
Speaker 1: gonna lead us in the where we're going where things
Speaker 1: get really interesting. Then you did a book What Doesn't
Speaker 1: Kill Us right, How freezing water, extreme altitude, and environmental
Speaker 1: conditioning will renew our lost evolutionary strength, which was largely
Speaker 1: about a feller.
Speaker 3: Name wim Hoff. That's right.
Speaker 1: So if back of your head you're like, you think
Speaker 1: about wim Hoff. If you're wondering, why have I heard
Speaker 1: that name, I'll explain it. If you haven't heard that name,
Speaker 1: but you're familiar with the recent you know the recent
Speaker 1: trend around ice baths and breathing techniques, that's wim Hoff.
Speaker 1: That's where that's where that's originating from. Okay, so from
Speaker 1: our guests here, this is from Scott's on writing.
Speaker 3: You find this writing on his website, but it's just
Speaker 3: a paragraph here that paints the picture. Okay. Scott says
Speaker 3: his workshops like the.
Speaker 1: Small one I attended, would grow into a loose following,
Speaker 1: meaning this guy does these breathing workshops in ice bath
Speaker 1: or ice and breathing endurance workshops.
Speaker 3: Physical Endurance would.
Speaker 1: Evolve into an international organization which would explode into what
Speaker 1: some people have called a cult.
Speaker 3: Inner Fire.
Speaker 1: That's the name of the organization run by Hoff's son,
Speaker 1: anam As I supposed to name anem anem owns all
Speaker 1: of the trademarks of wim Hoff's name, as well as
Speaker 1: the property and income of the Hoff Empire, which has
Speaker 1: a declared value of eighteen million. Hoff has routinely taught
Speaker 1: his method to crowds that number in the many thousands,
Speaker 1: sometimes spreading his message of ice and breath work for
Speaker 1: two hundred dollars ticket price. His international best selling book,
Speaker 1: The whim Hoff Method has been reprinted in twenty one language.
Speaker 1: Gwyneth Paltrow's The Goop Lab series on Netflix did a
Speaker 1: full episode on him. The BBC ran a full series.
Speaker 1: His Instagram feed has grown from a few thousand people
Speaker 1: when we met in twenty thirteen to more than three
Speaker 1: million today, with similarly impressive numbers on YouTube two point
Speaker 1: four million followers. There are seventy one videos about Haff
Speaker 1: on YouTube, with more than a million views each in
Speaker 1: one hundred and forty six thousand videos. Overall, The video
Speaker 1: giving instructions for his basic breathing method alone has more
Speaker 1: than sixty four million views. A search of the newspaper
Speaker 1: archive of over sixteen thousand publications shows his name has
Speaker 1: appeared on twelve front pages with more than four hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty nine mentions overall. He's also about to get
Speaker 1: the Hollywood treatment. A movie about HAFF starring Joseph Fines
Speaker 1: reportedly began shooting in November twenty twenty two. So that
Speaker 1: guy uh Howe, tell how you.
Speaker 3: Became aware of him, because this this is w ends
Speaker 3: up being.
Speaker 1: What you were doing when you became aware of him and.
Speaker 3: What you're doing now is very interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 4: So I was the first person to learn about wim Hoff, right,
Speaker 4: but first person, No, that's not true. I was the
Speaker 4: first serious journalist to write about wim Hoff. And I
Speaker 4: had just written this book, The Enlightenment Trap, and I
Speaker 4: was really interested in people who were seeking superpowers, trying
Speaker 4: to seek things that were bigger than themselves. And one
Speaker 4: superpower which is very well known in the Indian tradition,
Speaker 4: which is going on to a mountaintop in a wet
Speaker 4: robe and meditating until all that robe is dry and
Speaker 4: we're talking to the Himalayas, so it's very cold out
Speaker 4: and it was a it's a technique called tumo. But
Speaker 4: there's also this other thing called a Sydney. A Sydney
Speaker 4: is a miracle. And and wim Hoff was teaching that
Speaker 4: he could sit on an iceberg and heat himself up,
Speaker 4: and he could get control his immune system and doing
Speaker 4: all these things that were not backed up by science.
Speaker 7: Can you can you give the listeners like the thirty
Speaker 7: second breakdown on who the guy is?
Speaker 3: Though, yeah, I know, but like, where's how old is.
Speaker 4: Like wim Hoff. Wim Hoff is a Dutch fitness guru,
Speaker 4: former like stunt clown man, you know, was known for
Speaker 4: like Guinness books of world record feats and.
Speaker 1: The things that had not that he's but okay into
Speaker 1: world record feeds that no one had currently held.
Speaker 4: Well, there's a.
Speaker 1: Question hanging from a hot air balloon or something by
Speaker 1: a finger or whatever.
Speaker 3: There's a question about his feets, all right, But at that.
Speaker 4: Time, he claimed, you know, some somewhere around twenty to
Speaker 4: twenty six world records.
Speaker 1: Including long like at the time like the longest under
Speaker 1: ice swim, so swimming from one hole in the ice
Speaker 1: to another hole in.
Speaker 4: The ice exactly, the longest under ice swim, also the
Speaker 4: longest ice bath. At one point he held that and
Speaker 4: he climbed up a lot of everest in shorts before
Speaker 4: he got frostbite. He was when I had met him,
Speaker 4: most of the world thought of him as sort of
Speaker 4: a clown in a way. You know, he was a
Speaker 4: guy who did these like stunt freak things. But he
Speaker 4: was just about to teach this new method, and he
Speaker 4: was going to show people his tricks for do for
Speaker 4: being in the ice and controlling his mind. And I
Speaker 4: was like, I'm going to debunk you as a charlatan
Speaker 4: as I had these other people, meaning that.
Speaker 1: He could through the sheer force of his mind, yeah,
Speaker 1: and breathing, HM be like, oh, I'm sitting in ice.
Speaker 1: I should be cold, but I will make my mind
Speaker 1: not just think I'm warm, but warm me up.
Speaker 3: More or less.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well there's more to it than that, but let's
Speaker 4: just go with that for now. And and he could
Speaker 4: do these like superhuman seeming feats of endurance, and I
Speaker 4: was like, that's bullshit. I'm gonna go and show the
Speaker 4: world you're bullshit. Because there was also like this cachet
Speaker 4: to him, like I could feel the cachet. Just looking
Speaker 4: at that photo of him sitting like half naked on Iceberg,
Speaker 4: I was like, people are gonna love this, and I
Speaker 4: want to get ahead of it because you're gonna get
Speaker 4: people killed, just like I'd seen other people die doing this.
Speaker 4: And but I went out. I went to his training
Speaker 4: center in Poland. I tried his method, because you know,
Speaker 4: the way I do journalism is I I you know,
Speaker 4: I get in, I try stuff, and you know, I
Speaker 4: give people a fair shot.
Speaker 7: Did you go in as a journalist or did you
Speaker 7: go in like incognito?
Speaker 4: No, no, he knew I was there. I was there
Speaker 4: as a journalist. I talked with him. I'd be like, Hi,
Speaker 4: I'm writing for you know, a Playboy, and you know,
Speaker 4: actually what was rich with details, the magazine article moved around,
Speaker 4: not exciting. Eventually, was for Playboy.
Speaker 3: And you didn't go and say like I'm a vulnerable
Speaker 3: lost American.
Speaker 4: No, no, no, no, I don't do that. That's I
Speaker 4: have like an ethic, Like I don't do that with
Speaker 4: organ trafficking either. When i'm track an organ track, I
Speaker 4: always tell him I'm a journalist and I get him
Speaker 4: to talk because I just I just ask them why
Speaker 4: they're doing it, you know, and and and people do talk.
Speaker 4: So I went, I tried his method, and here's the
Speaker 4: crazy thing is it worked like it's so you know,
Speaker 4: in a in a in like a day, I was
Speaker 4: hyperventilating and holding my breath for like two three minutes
Speaker 4: at a time, which I'd never done before. I doubled
Speaker 4: the number of pushups I could do, and then very soon.
Speaker 1: Well I get the I get the breath hold because
Speaker 1: I uh, I've been learning spearfishing and free diving. Okay,
Speaker 1: so but that's not I mean, that's just the thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, anybody could have told you that, Like, there's
Speaker 1: a way you can breathe, Like when you feel the
Speaker 1: need to breathe, you think that you're breathing because you
Speaker 1: think you need oxygen, you're breathing because of a trigger
Speaker 1: from carbon dioxide. And there's a way you can breathe,
Speaker 1: like your fisher called free diver. You breathe up, yeah,
Speaker 1: and then you dive and you get a way longer
Speaker 1: dive than you would if you didn't breathe up properly.
Speaker 1: But you didn't need to go to poland have a
Speaker 1: dude tell you that. But tell me about what made
Speaker 1: you do more push ups.
Speaker 4: So it's the same thing, right, So I'm not I'm
Speaker 4: not a free diver. And when you say breathe up,
Speaker 4: I have questions in my mind about what you mean
Speaker 4: by that. Are you are you scrubbing? Are you hyperventilating
Speaker 4: before you do this? And the way you.
Speaker 1: Want long deep breaths and then like carbon dioxide purge
Speaker 1: breaths and then you but you go down on a big,
Speaker 1: full breath. Yeah, so that's pointing to my kid, I
Speaker 1: sold breathe so deep that you're filling your scrotum with air.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Well, that's super dangerous, and we're going to get
Speaker 4: into it. It's not we're gonna we're going to get
Speaker 4: into why. We're going to get into why that's super dangerous.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Sure, Yeah, there's people that have shallow water right, right,
Speaker 1: there's such thing as shallow water blackout, but that is general.
Speaker 3: That is generally. I don't care if you're going down
Speaker 3: twenty feet on thirty.
Speaker 1: Feet shoot fish, It's just there's a big difference, Yeah,
Speaker 1: between there's a big difference between jumping off a boat,
Speaker 1: swimming over some we're real fast and going down and
Speaker 1: what you're going to get for a breath hold then,
Speaker 1: and what you're going to get if you go somewhere,
Speaker 1: hang grab onto something or float, relax every part of
Speaker 1: your body and do like a breathing sequence and then
Speaker 1: going to It's just different the same way that if
Speaker 1: I told you to run down the road and stop
Speaker 1: and hold your breath, you're not going to do as good.
Speaker 3: If you went in your couch and held your breath.
Speaker 3: You're just not. No, you're right.
Speaker 4: So here's here's the problem with shallow water.
Speaker 8: So if we're going to talk about the physiology here,
Speaker 8: but no, no, no, because you.
Speaker 3: Still want to hear about whim hall.
Speaker 4: All right, right, well we'll get into this in a second.
Speaker 3: I have you why do we get on there?
Speaker 4: I have some notes, but you asked me.
Speaker 3: You started how he got you doing a bunch of
Speaker 3: pushing right.
Speaker 4: So at the point I could do about twenty push ups.
Speaker 4: That was what I could do. And then you hyperventilate.
Speaker 4: And when you hyperventilate, you blow off your c of
Speaker 4: two and and and your sort of gasping reflex is
Speaker 4: connected to this and when you god, how do I
Speaker 4: describe it? When you do this hyper vent when you
Speaker 4: hold your breath, the alarm bells for when your fatigue
Speaker 4: is hitting sort of turn off, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 4: you've unlocked this extra capacity that you that you have
Speaker 4: in you. And it's not like my muscles grew bigger.
Speaker 4: It was just I didn't realize that that my where
Speaker 4: my limits were, because the hyperventilation changes that chemistry in
Speaker 4: the body.
Speaker 1: Even on something like see, I didn't know that, even
Speaker 1: on something like the feeling of I've done too many
Speaker 1: push ups.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, yes exactly, or or maybe it's the feeling
Speaker 4: of like I have to stop now. If you hyperventilate,
Speaker 4: hold your breath, exhale, hold your breath, do your push ups,
Speaker 4: you're going to do more than you could normally. But
Speaker 4: there are problems with this, and we're going to get
Speaker 4: into exactly what the problems are soon. But here's the
Speaker 4: other crazy thing. You know. Then I hiked up this
Speaker 4: mountain with whim and you know, and this cold training,
Speaker 4: cold exposure we're standing in like you know, Polish winters,
Speaker 4: the winter that stops the Nazi army. Like it's cold
Speaker 4: and I'm in a bathing suit and brayerfoot and the
Speaker 4: first time I do it, it's really painful, really hard.
Speaker 4: Second time I do it's way easier. Third time I
Speaker 4: do it like this is fine. And eventually I climb
Speaker 4: up a mountain with whim and this and a shirtless
Speaker 4: of course, and it's I think I think it's two
Speaker 4: degrees fahrenheit out. It takes about seven hours to get
Speaker 4: to the top of this mountain. And I'm fine. I'm
Speaker 4: totally fine. And I was shocked because I came to
Speaker 4: do the story about why the guy was getting to
Speaker 4: get people killed with his methods, and instead his methods
Speaker 4: are working, and it changes my life immediately.
Speaker 3: You become like his disciple.
Speaker 4: I'm like his chief disciple. I wrote What Doesn't Kill
Speaker 4: Us that becomes the New York Times bestseller. I hicke
Speaker 4: gop Mount Kilimanjaro with him, and we get down a
Speaker 4: negative thirty We do it in a very fast time,
Speaker 4: twenty eight hours to the top shirtless again. And this
Speaker 4: book goes everywhere, and mean I sell two hundred fifty
Speaker 4: thousand copies of it. It's a you know. And the
Speaker 4: other amazing thing about the wim Hoff method, it's not
Speaker 4: just these feats. In fact, the feats are just sort
Speaker 4: of like a great way to market a cool technique
Speaker 4: that the real benefits is actually autoimmune helps and anxiety help,
Speaker 4: where there's like he's one of the only one of
Speaker 4: these fitness Gurui people who frequently goes into labs and
Speaker 4: get studied, and he was able to show that he
Speaker 4: was able to turn off his immune system in a laboratory,
Speaker 4: which you would think, well, why would I want to
Speaker 4: do that? Well, if you have an autoimmune illness such
Speaker 4: as lupez Crohn's arthritis, something where your own immune system
Speaker 4: is attacking yourself, it's really really beneficial to turn off
Speaker 4: your immune.
Speaker 1: How how does one prove in a lab that your
Speaker 1: immune system is turned off?
Speaker 4: Yeah, So the way you do it is it's called
Speaker 4: the dtoxin experiment, done at Radbound University in Holland, and
Speaker 4: so he trained two groups of people. One was the
Speaker 4: control group they didn't do much, and one was the
Speaker 4: people who did exactly what I did in Poland, which
Speaker 4: was hang out with whim, breathe a lot, hang out,
Speaker 4: climb up a mountain in your bathing suit, you know,
Speaker 4: learn his method. And then they took him to a
Speaker 4: lab and the person who designed the experience, the same
Speaker 4: person who designed the test to see anti rejection drugs.
Speaker 4: So if you get a kidney treating a transplant, right,
Speaker 4: if you get that kidney transplant and you don't take
Speaker 4: any drugs, your immune system would be like, fuck that kidney,
Speaker 4: I AM going to eat it and destroy it, and
Speaker 4: then you get the organ rejection.
Speaker 3: So the way what you have to do is you
Speaker 3: have to take.
Speaker 4: Immune suppressant drugs to turn off your immune response. And
Speaker 4: so he designed the test for those immunosuppressant drugs. And
Speaker 4: the test is you inject somebody with endotoxin, which is
Speaker 4: basically E. Coli bacteria that has been killed in a
Speaker 4: lab by heat, so that when it injects into your bloodstream,
Speaker 4: you have a primary immune response, which is so the
Speaker 4: equalized dead so it's not going to do anything, but
Speaker 4: your immune system recognize the cytokinde, so the chemicals on
Speaker 4: the walls, and it says this is a foreign invader,
Speaker 4: and you immediately get your.
Speaker 3: Fever, your aches, your chills.
Speaker 4: These are all your like your primary basic immune response
Speaker 4: that you just use generally for anything. Now, the test
Speaker 4: was if you inject with endotoxin and you don't get
Speaker 4: those symptoms, that means you turned your immune system off,
Speaker 4: and that's what happened both Whim did this in a
Speaker 4: single test on his own and then in a lab
Speaker 4: they all of these college students, they didn't have any
Speaker 4: serious reactions to the endotoxin, showing that they had turned
Speaker 4: off their immune system.
Speaker 3: And they did this by breathing in a particular way.
Speaker 4: Well, it's it's an interesting combination. It's it's it's the
Speaker 4: breath work, it's the cold exposure and learning in those environments.
Speaker 4: And this is what I call the wedge, and I
Speaker 4: wrote another book about called the wedge.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: What it is is you get into these environments and
Speaker 4: there's this external stress coming at you, whether it's cold
Speaker 4: water or that feeling of I have to breathe in
Speaker 4: the hyperventilation. And what you're doing is you're teaching yourself
Speaker 4: to calm yourself in that environment. Either the internal hypoxic
Speaker 4: which means low oxygen environment or the external cold water
Speaker 4: is telling you you have to fight or flight right now.
Speaker 4: But instead you're going to say, no, I can chill here,
Speaker 4: I can relax, and I can find some other way
Speaker 4: to heat my body. And that is what has the
Speaker 4: audioimmune benefit. It's not this, it's not all the other flash.
Speaker 4: It's just a really good technique and an easy technique
Speaker 4: to learn to have that mental resilience. And this is
Speaker 4: what you were saying earlier, you know when I called
Speaker 4: you a calvinist. Now, people are born some way and
Speaker 4: they can't change. Well, this is one of these beachhead
Speaker 4: techniques that I really believe in. I'm born certain way, yeah,
Speaker 4: I ten, they become a certain way. And but this
Speaker 4: is one of those things. It's like a beachhead like you.
Speaker 4: You start doing these these sorts of things, and honestly,
Speaker 4: it doesn't need to be ice water and breathing. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it can be a lot of other strong stimuli that
Speaker 4: make you want to fight or flight. And you say,
Speaker 4: you clicking over into that other rest and digest.
Speaker 3: But here's where I don't want to do. There's so
Speaker 3: much ground, we gotta.
Speaker 4: Cover so much.
Speaker 3: But I want to ask qu a question here.
Speaker 1: The thing about a difference I see with cold water
Speaker 1: is you're you're aware, Yeah, okay, you're aware.
Speaker 3: Of your bodies. You're aware of what your body's telling you. Right,
Speaker 3: It's like get out of the damn water. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: whatever whatever's going on.
Speaker 1: You're extremely fatigued, you're like, Okay, I'm feeling the extreme fatigue.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do mind over matter whatever. I'm gonna come
Speaker 1: up the other side. Uh, your immune system is not
Speaker 1: consulting with you. You're not thinking I need to attack this,
Speaker 1: I need to attack this bacteria, I need.
Speaker 3: To attack this virus. I'm going to tell myself not
Speaker 3: to do it.
Speaker 4: Well, I think you might be a misunderstanding. When you're sick,
Speaker 4: you're not supposed to jump into ice water, right. It
Speaker 4: is this trick that you use to calm yourself, and
Speaker 4: it is a generalizable effect. I wouldn't if you have
Speaker 4: a flu ice waar ain't gonna help you. It's going
Speaker 4: to make you sicker, for sure. But training regularly in
Speaker 4: ice water, when you're healthy and you're not fatigued, you're
Speaker 4: not messed up, you're not expending extra energy. You actually
Speaker 4: are talking with your immune system because your immune system
Speaker 4: is connected in your body. You know, when you're when
Speaker 4: you're climbing up Mount Kilimanjaro in your bathing suit, your
Speaker 4: immune systems walking up there with you. And if you're
Speaker 4: dumping adrenaline and cortisol and all that into your blood
Speaker 4: stream through your hormonal channels, your immune system is also
Speaker 4: doing that. And like the the if you think about
Speaker 4: what a you can just look at this in a lab.
Speaker 4: You take a macrophase, which is a big immune cell
Speaker 4: of the front line immune cell, and you dump adrenaline
Speaker 4: on it. It's a little flagella are gonna go everywhere.
Speaker 4: It's gonna go crazy, and if you don't, it's gonna
Speaker 4: be chill. And the way I like to think about this,
Speaker 4: the metaphor that I use is if you think that
Speaker 4: your immune system is a pack of wolves, right, it's
Speaker 4: going out there, it's trying to eat all the bad stuff.
Speaker 4: Then what this method is is like giving those wolves
Speaker 4: chew toys, so that we have this huge epidemic of
Speaker 4: autoimmune illnesses in the in the world. And it's where
Speaker 4: it's it's where your immune system literally attacks.
Speaker 3: The stuff it's not supposed to.
Speaker 4: If those wolves are bored and if you hop up
Speaker 4: your wolves on adrenaline or you know wolf PCP, you
Speaker 4: know those wolves are gonna chew things they're not supposed to.
Speaker 4: So what this does from an evolutionary perspective, and we
Speaker 4: could you know, I've done three hundred podcasts on this.
Speaker 4: We can do that that podcast.
Speaker 3: No, I don't want to.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but you know we could. Like what it's doing
Speaker 4: is it's sort of training your immune sism not to
Speaker 4: freak out. And and you know, you know, I would
Speaker 4: think that your audience gets out of nature more than
Speaker 4: the average audience. I'm just going to go out on
Speaker 4: a limb here. Well, a lot of people don't. A
Speaker 4: lot of people stay in static environments all the time.
Speaker 4: And that static environment is you know, it narrows the
Speaker 4: range and where people can be comfortable. You know, if
Speaker 4: you're going out. You know, right now we're in my
Speaker 4: comfortable house in Denver, but you know, you also dragged
Speaker 4: a buffalo out of Alaska. You have range, and that
Speaker 4: probably has an immune benefit in addition to the other
Speaker 4: benefits that comes with you. It probably also has an
Speaker 4: a you know, you find that you go out of
Speaker 4: nature you feel good. Well, that has a psychological benefit,
Speaker 4: immune benefit. It connects you with nature. It's all part
Speaker 4: of it. And the whim Hoff method is one way
Speaker 4: into that stuff. Uh And I frankly a pretty good
Speaker 4: way because it's pretty efficient, especially for someone who you know,
Speaker 4: when you have that strong stem as you jumping into
Speaker 4: ice water, your brain's going to pay attention, like you
Speaker 4: don't get into ice water and you start thinking about
Speaker 4: what should I how should I manage my taxes this year?
Speaker 4: I think that maybe I should take a deduction, maybe
Speaker 4: the standard deductions. You're not thinking that shit, right, You
Speaker 4: are thinking, I am in ice water, and I'm either
Speaker 4: going to levitate out of that ice water and get
Speaker 4: out of here. You can't levitate, or you're going to
Speaker 4: relax into it and you're gonna and you're gonna find
Speaker 4: that the people who have the ability to stay in
Speaker 4: that stressful, automatic, stressful environment are the ones who can relax.
Speaker 4: And you know, I've done a lot of ice feeds. Now,
Speaker 4: I've done like half an hour and thirty to thirty
Speaker 4: two degree water and I lived right. But you know,
Speaker 4: if you think about what most people would think that's insane. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And I think find that as like this is something
Speaker 4: that's really good and it's actually a type of meditation.
Speaker 4: You know, you think about meditation as a you know,
Speaker 4: some one sitting on a mat in a Buddhist temple
Speaker 4: and like lotus position. But this is another way to
Speaker 4: force your mind into a place where it has to
Speaker 4: think in a totally different way.
Speaker 1: Uh, where were you. Brody's asking you like, lay out
Speaker 1: the basic So you went there and you became an acolyte.
Speaker 3: Is that the right word? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a good one.
Speaker 3: Wrote a lot about them. Yep.
Speaker 1: Now I want to return to because we're gonna start
Speaker 1: getting into what we're getting into now, Uh you go,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna read another passage.
Speaker 3: There are some things that you found when you were
Speaker 3: writing about him. There were some things you.
Speaker 1: Found that you included in your book and then decided
Speaker 1: to not put in the book.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I share one of those.
Speaker 4: No, please do.
Speaker 1: Okay, And then I want to talk about why you
Speaker 1: didn't include this. So this is again reading from our
Speaker 1: guest work. One story begins in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: when Hoff had not seen his children in almost ten years.
Speaker 1: That decade had been rough on the family. Hoff's wife, Oleah,
Speaker 1: Is that right? Elia Oliah committed suicide by jumping from
Speaker 1: an eight floor balcony in Pamplona in nineteen ninety five
Speaker 1: after a long struggle with many mental illness, leaving him
Speaker 1: to raise four children on his own. After his wife's death,
Speaker 1: he began a relationship with a woman in another city
Speaker 1: and left his kids to live alone. In a squat
Speaker 1: house in Amsterdam. The eldest Annam is that right Anem.
Speaker 1: Anem was only fifteen years old when he became the
Speaker 1: family's surrogate dad. Eventually, Haff's relationship with the woman ended
Speaker 1: and he found himself with what monetary symbol is at that?
Speaker 5: You're a.
Speaker 1: Thirty thousand year tax debt. That seemed to be the
Speaker 1: impetus to reconnect with his family. Hoff asked his second son, Michael,
Speaker 1: to meet him, and they set it time to vous
Speaker 1: at Vandel Park in Amsterdam. Haff arrived early and went
Speaker 1: for a swim in the park's pond. While he was waiting,
Speaker 1: he paddled out to a fountain and positioned himself over
Speaker 1: the spout to give himself an enema that he thought
Speaker 1: would cleanse all of his intestines or, as he often
Speaker 1: likes to say, get the shit out. On a recording
Speaker 1: of one of our conversations in twenty thirteen, Hawf recounts
Speaker 1: that he had done that He had done the park
Speaker 1: fountain enema at least a hundred times before, but that,
Speaker 1: unbeknownst to him, the park service had changed the spigot
Speaker 1: on the fountain to create a more impressive spray.
Speaker 3: The narrower gage sent water.
Speaker 1: Cutting through his intestines like a knife, filling his bowels
Speaker 1: of dirty water. He managed to make it back to
Speaker 1: shore while blood and feces leaked from his rectum. Hoff's
Speaker 1: first words to his son in a decade or that
Speaker 1: he needed to go to a hospital.
Speaker 3: Why would you? Why would you in writing about.
Speaker 1: A health phenomenon, a health phenom and a guru in
Speaker 1: your own guru, tell me the impulse to not to edit.
Speaker 3: That out of the work.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so this is the impetus for the video that
Speaker 4: I've just put out right, so my YouTube channel, the
Speaker 4: Rise and Fall of the whim Hoff Empire. It's been
Speaker 4: so hard for me to do this right because when
Speaker 4: I was writing this book, originally in my conversation with
Speaker 4: my editor at Rodale, you know, we didn't want to
Speaker 4: necessarily present Hoff as a complete madman, right, We didn't
Speaker 4: want to show but we're like, look, we're talking about ice,
Speaker 4: water and all of these benefits that go to this.
Speaker 4: It's not the only character in this book. We're trying
Speaker 4: to show that being in environments can change the way
Speaker 4: your body works, and we want that positive news. But
Speaker 4: if we had shown if we had used this story,
Speaker 4: a real story about this guy and the fact that
Speaker 4: you know, I call him a madman in the book,
Speaker 4: but I don't tell him everyone exactly why. And it's
Speaker 4: stuff like this, it's stuff that he does that is
Speaker 4: so damaging that, you know, I was worried that people
Speaker 4: would see this and they wouldn't take the ice water
Speaker 4: stuff seriously, they wouldn't take the practice seriously. And well,
Speaker 4: the problem is is that by the time we get
Speaker 4: to now, now hoff is uber famous. Then he was
Speaker 4: just like sort of a side show. Now he's really
Speaker 4: really famous, and he teaches things that are getting people hurt.
Speaker 4: And I feel like I'm back at the beginning. I'm
Speaker 4: like that kid who was who was at haff Center
Speaker 4: the first time, being like, oh my god, this is
Speaker 4: You're going to get people killed. But then I found
Speaker 4: this thing about him which was amazing, which legitimately is amazing.
Speaker 3: But then now you're back to but you are getting
Speaker 3: people killed.
Speaker 4: But you are getting people killed, right, And the reason why,
Speaker 4: the fundamental underlying thing is actually he hasn't changed so
Speaker 4: much as a person, but he has gotten really famous.
Speaker 4: And you read that passage or he's on Goop Lab.
Speaker 4: He talks with Russell Brand all the time on his
Speaker 4: podcast see Jordan Peterson. He has a feature film coman.
Speaker 4: Everyone says the same story that I did. Here's this
Speaker 4: awesome kookie iceman who does these kookie things in ice water,
Speaker 4: and he's smarter than science, and you should listen to
Speaker 4: basically whatever he says. And that's the message that gets
Speaker 4: out there, and we as in the press, have continually
Speaker 4: reinforced that story without showing a full picture of Hoff
Speaker 4: And you know, I saw this occurring. I saw him
Speaker 4: go from like two thousand followers on Instagram to what
Speaker 4: four million or three million or whatever he has right now,
Speaker 4: And we're putting him on that same stage of as
Speaker 4: a guru as these people that I was writing about
Speaker 4: in The Enlightenment Trap. And the problem with gurus, the real,
Speaker 4: the fundamental problem with gurus is that usually they do
Speaker 4: start something that's really nice, really good and beneficial to people.
Speaker 4: But as they get as they declare themselves enlightened or
Speaker 4: for other reasons that they may get isolated, they don't
Speaker 4: have any peers anymore. They sort of sit on this
Speaker 4: pedestal someone who's enlightened. There's like, well, you're not enlightened.
Speaker 4: So I am the only one who knows the ultimate truth,
Speaker 4: so you just have to do what I say. And
Speaker 4: this led to lead to sex scandals and all these
Speaker 4: you know, fun things with wim Hoff. He is so
Speaker 4: famous now when so many people have told him he's
Speaker 4: right all the time, that we do not see him
Speaker 4: for who he is, which is a dynamic person who
Speaker 4: has these really dangerous parts of his personality. These you know,
Speaker 4: the worst father around right, abandons his kids in a
Speaker 4: squad house for ten years.
Speaker 1: I could see the argument that that's irrelevant if you're like,
Speaker 1: if you're focused on the if you're focused on.
Speaker 3: The health benefit of what he's changing.
Speaker 4: Sure, and.
Speaker 1: I could see that someone who is sort of like
Speaker 1: interested in learning cold tolerance, learning endurance, I can see
Speaker 1: him being like, uh, well it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3: For instance, the Heimlich maneuver.
Speaker 4: Yeah, who knows what Heinlich was up to.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, I'll tell you someth worried about him.
Speaker 1: But the Heinlich maneuver, he could have abandoned every damn
Speaker 1: kid on the planet.
Speaker 3: Sure, but it's still a great way to dislodge food
Speaker 3: stuck in your throat.
Speaker 1: But he's got a little bit of like what he's
Speaker 1: got a little bit of what the picture you start
Speaker 1: to painting about this Feller because he later in life
Speaker 1: started thinking that it fixed things that it didn't.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, Oh no, he later in.
Speaker 1: Life got to be like, oh, yeah, if you're having
Speaker 1: an epileptic seizures, happing with the I don't know if
Speaker 1: that in particular, but he wanted feeling that the Heimlich
Speaker 1: maneuver was applicable to all these other issues. Just in
Speaker 1: this you know, it kind of like tarnished his own reputation,
Speaker 1: like he kind of went went crazy with the Heimlich
Speaker 1: But point being, well, was up to and I don't know,
Speaker 1: idea what he's up to as a parent, what he's
Speaker 1: up to as a parent has no bearing.
Speaker 3: It's a great way to dislodge.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I amlick someone one day and it
Speaker 1: was astonishingly effective.
Speaker 3: I don't care what the hell the guy did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the like the fountain animal stuff like that starts
Speaker 1: to paint like a really yeah, that paints a different picture.
Speaker 6: People people do that. It's called rectal douching, and apparently
Speaker 6: it's like, I mean, I know somebody who does it,
Speaker 6: but apparently there is uh. You know, you feel lighter
Speaker 6: and you feel cleansed, and then there's some kind of
Speaker 6: idea of it affecting your whole sense of self.
Speaker 3: Is it common ad at the town pond?
Speaker 6: No?
Speaker 7: Was there like how long did it take you to
Speaker 7: come full circle on him? And was there other alarm bells?
Speaker 7: A lot like was it sudden or was it like
Speaker 7: a thing that just built up over the years.
Speaker 4: It's it's been a slow process. Because here's the thing.
Speaker 4: I'm very conflut for getting this story out in the
Speaker 4: first place, because I really see value in the practice.
Speaker 4: But I feel like my role right now is to
Speaker 4: in a way save the practice from the man. And
Speaker 4: he is getting to a point where you just like Heimlich, Right,
Speaker 4: if Heimlich had a podcast that was huge, right, and
Speaker 4: Heimlich was like a man Heimlich had millions of If
Speaker 4: Heimlich had the million followers, you know, you can be like, look,
Speaker 4: he's got this great method for dislodging stuff from the throat,
Speaker 4: but he also thinks that the Heimlich will cure cancer
Speaker 4: or will let you fly or whatever it is that
Speaker 4: Heimlich might have gone off on.
Speaker 1: And then he says, try it underwater, right, And try
Speaker 1: Buddy of Heimlich underwater Exactly.
Speaker 4: It's phenomenal. This the this is the problem and and
Speaker 4: and what has happened is that so this organization that
Speaker 4: is built up around wim Hoff, Like if you're just
Speaker 4: hanging out with whim it's a great time. He's a
Speaker 4: good guy, genuine you know, he's got his highs and
Speaker 4: his lows. But like you, he's different than most people
Speaker 4: I know. I don't think he's personally influenced by money
Speaker 4: at all, which is really unusual, like most people I
Speaker 4: know are really influenced by money. But he does love
Speaker 4: the adulation. He does love people like being amazed by
Speaker 4: what he's got. You know, we all like adulation. But
Speaker 4: then he's getting infinite amounts of it, and he wants
Speaker 4: to give people more and more. So you want to
Speaker 4: push the techniques. You want to push a little further.
Speaker 4: And the subtitle of one of his books is pushing
Speaker 4: past Perceived limits. Well, if you're pushing past perceived limits
Speaker 4: in a very controlled environment, that's one thing. But if
Speaker 4: you're pushing past your perceived limits to your eight million
Speaker 4: followers everywhere, and that's your method, you can keep on
Speaker 4: doing it. You could do it you're the ultimate authority.
Speaker 4: You're doing this stuff. Well, you're going to get people dying.
Speaker 4: You're gonna get people who take his message and push it.
Speaker 4: You know, he's the iceman. He swims underwater and gets
Speaker 4: these get his spoken world records. It's cold exposure, it's
Speaker 4: breath work. Why not mix the two. Well, it's very
Speaker 4: clear you should never, under any circumstances hyperventilate and submerge
Speaker 4: yourself in ice. It's here's what's going on.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, let's talk about the deaths.
Speaker 4: Let's talk Well, yeah, so I started learning about deaths
Speaker 4: back in twenty fourteen. People were doing his method in
Speaker 4: various water situations, and he was teaching actively, you know, scrubbing,
Speaker 4: which is hyperventilation, taking out all that co two, putting
Speaker 4: your face in the water and holding it as long
Speaker 4: as you can in various levels. And other people are
Speaker 4: doing this too, like you know, I'm friends with a
Speaker 4: big wave surfer, Laired Hamilton, and he had this XPT training.
Speaker 4: When I went out to go hang out with him,
Speaker 4: we did a similar version of that, and we didn't
Speaker 4: really know the dangers. I think people did know the dangers,
Speaker 4: but we hadn't fully so you're.
Speaker 1: Talking about full hyperventilating, not like like not taking elements
Speaker 1: of like a couple hyper ventilating breath.
Speaker 3: You're talking sustained hyper ventilation.
Speaker 4: You can get you can get into a shallow water
Speaker 4: blackout situation as little as five or ten breaths. Wim
Speaker 4: Hof breathing is often a lot more, and there are
Speaker 4: warning do two or so brass just so we can
Speaker 4: hear it, something like that, But there's you know, you
Speaker 4: can do various patterns of this in general, because your
Speaker 4: body senses the urge to breathe by the build up
Speaker 4: of CO two, right, So it's not like low oxygen
Speaker 4: you feel that popping sound like I gotta breathe because
Speaker 4: I have little oxygen. Instead, it's the build up of
Speaker 4: CO two in your lungs. So when you hyperventilate, essentially
Speaker 4: it's like cooking in a kitchen and taking the smoke
Speaker 4: detector off the wall. There's no alarm system here at all,
Speaker 4: and you can depending on how you do it. And
Speaker 4: any sort of hyperventilation water is dangerous well known. You
Speaker 4: can pass out before you sense any urge to breathe,
Speaker 4: which means your own internal recognition, your own inter receptive
Speaker 4: idea of where you are is just not working and
Speaker 4: you pass out underwater. Now, I've done this on dry
Speaker 4: land with the push ups, like, and it's incredibly dangerous
Speaker 4: if you take a full long breath of air at
Speaker 4: the end and then do your push ups because you'll
Speaker 4: get more push ups out that way.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: I hit eighty once doing that on a breath hold
Speaker 4: on a breath hold. Yeah, and because you've blown off
Speaker 4: all the co two, you've confused all the systems and
Speaker 4: then you know, I hit eighty and then boot passed out,
Speaker 4: hit the floor, which on dry land, I got a
Speaker 4: bruise in the water. You die because when you pass out,
Speaker 4: your body just resets and you start breathing, and that
Speaker 4: gets into your lungs and well, long.
Speaker 3: Tangles by before you start breathing.
Speaker 4: It could be various ways. Yeah, the reset could be
Speaker 4: different than not in a long time, minutes go by, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: depending on factors, right, you know for me, you know, yeah,
Speaker 4: there's a lot of physiology to talk about there. So
Speaker 4: we knew in twenty fourteen this was happening. Whim there
Speaker 4: are four A newspaper in Holland had disclosed four deaths
Speaker 4: with the wim Hoff Methode wim Hoff method practitioners dying
Speaker 4: in water. And then there were some warnings everyone who
Speaker 4: was doing this hyper ventilation stuff. You know, there's a
Speaker 4: big warning in my book, there's warnings on wim Hoff's website,
Speaker 4: there's warnings. You know, XPD doesn't do it anymore. But
Speaker 4: like everyone knows, the word got out. A couple of
Speaker 4: Navy seals died doing shallow water blackout and there are
Speaker 4: a lot of news stories about it.
Speaker 1: They were trying to use this to get a better
Speaker 1: underwater breath wall.
Speaker 4: I don't believe they were doing. I don't know for
Speaker 4: sure what they were doing, but it was shallow water.
Speaker 4: They were competing against each other and they both drowned
Speaker 4: at the bottom of a pool at a naval training center.
Speaker 4: And then people started to become aware of it, at
Speaker 4: least in my circles.
Speaker 3: Like people, you know, people die during.
Speaker 1: The shallow water background blackout every year, right, tons of them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, whether or not they're practicing something particular or.
Speaker 4: Now there's a whole society called the Shallow Water Blackout
Speaker 4: Prevention Organization. I mean, it's out there, it's known, and
Speaker 4: but what need to happen at this point.
Speaker 1: Can we talk first about just some people understand why
Speaker 1: we're talking about this? Yeah, why it's called shallow water blackout? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so like you generally like it generally hit happens to
Speaker 1: people forward the surface, right, I mean, well.
Speaker 4: It could happen anywhere. I mean, it has to do
Speaker 4: with this this carbon dioxide blowing.
Speaker 3: But I've always been confused. Why is it called shallow
Speaker 3: water blackout?
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's actually a surprisingly good question that I don't
Speaker 4: have answered for. I think it's because people can drown
Speaker 4: in surprisingly shallow amounts of water.
Speaker 1: We're talking about I hear from like when I'm talking
Speaker 1: to people that have experienced it and with friends that
Speaker 1: have had it. Like free divers for whatever reason, tend
Speaker 1: to be like very near the end of the dive,
Speaker 1: probably because you're you're at the end of the you're
Speaker 1: near the end, right, right, You're near the end of
Speaker 1: the dive, right, And I thought, for some reasons related
Speaker 1: to that, that doesn't make me send.
Speaker 4: Now, I think I think it has to do what
Speaker 4: you know, the nomenclature. I don't know, I think, but
Speaker 4: I think it has to do with like you can
Speaker 4: drown in any body of water and free divers. There
Speaker 4: are a lot of free divers.
Speaker 3: You drowned a hot.
Speaker 4: Tub and drowning a hot tb gotcha. And and one
Speaker 4: of the things that I want to point to is
Speaker 4: that the wim Hoff method is you know the ice guy, Like,
Speaker 4: look at the cover of my book. Here's the ice
Speaker 4: guy getting into the water. And we know he's a
Speaker 4: breathwork guy and he's famous for swimming underneath ice. And
Speaker 4: that message is out there, and it's super easy to
Speaker 4: get confused without knowing anything about the whim Hoff method. Right,
Speaker 4: You're like, oh, I do the hyperventilation and I could
Speaker 4: hold it for longer, and it makes sense I could
Speaker 4: do it. And yet every time you do it, it's
Speaker 4: really really dangerous because you've knocked off the alarm bells.
Speaker 4: Scale that up to eight million peace people, you've got
Speaker 4: a real problem. And that's so that's something that I
Speaker 4: feel like can be dealt with warnings. And they an
Speaker 4: Inner Fire has warnings to their credit all over the place.
Speaker 1: Will they put warnings over videos of people doing the
Speaker 1: exact thing they're warning them not to do? Well, that's
Speaker 1: now here's where we came out in a knife juggling video,
Speaker 1: and there's a sign next to it and said, don't
Speaker 1: juggle knives.
Speaker 4: Right, So when you watch so watch my video right,
Speaker 4: it's it's on my YouTube channel, and you'll see that.
Speaker 4: Wim Hoff sells this course on his website for ninety
Speaker 4: nine dollars. And when I was talking with them in
Speaker 4: twenty seventeen, they told me that they were making a
Speaker 4: million dollars a month selling this course. So I don't
Speaker 4: know what's that like? Ten thousand ish courses a year,
Speaker 4: a month. And in week eight of their ten week course,
Speaker 4: there's wim Hoff saying, here's what you do. You breathe
Speaker 4: keep on doing the breathing, Keep on doing the breathing,
Speaker 4: Go in the water, immerse in the water, and hold
Speaker 4: your breath for as long as you know ten second
Speaker 4: I'm just trying to paraphrase here, thirty seconds, and see
Speaker 4: how far you can go. And he says this three
Speaker 4: times in his in that one video, and then next
Speaker 4: to it in a warning that's just right next.
Speaker 3: To it says what your don't believe.
Speaker 4: You're lying eyes wim Haw. He doesn't say that, but
Speaker 4: it says what you are seeing is not wim Hoff
Speaker 4: leading someone in nice immersion. It is him teaching cold tolerance,
Speaker 4: so never do this in water. So there's a big
Speaker 4: juxtaposition between what whim the Madman is teaching and what
Speaker 4: the Inner Fire the organization is trying to present to
Speaker 4: the world. And it's not just that incident, it's also
Speaker 4: and that course is still available as far as I'm
Speaker 4: aware on the wim Hoff website right now, but it's
Speaker 4: also I was on stage with him in twenty seventeen
Speaker 4: teaching the wim Hoff Breathwork to a group of about
Speaker 4: three hundred people. You know, I'm talking about the book,
Speaker 4: and he's talking about the breath work, and all these
Speaker 4: people have never done the breath work before, and they
Speaker 4: all hyperventilate, and then he says, hold your breath, and
Speaker 4: then he plays on screen behind me a video of
Speaker 4: him with his famous swim under there is conflating the
Speaker 4: water and the breath work. And there's also and more
Speaker 4: and more, and I've collected a bunch of these videos
Speaker 4: and showing how he is ignoring his own warnings and
Speaker 4: people are dying.
Speaker 7: Are the warnings there because his lawyers are making him
Speaker 7: put him there? Or like obviously he doesn't.
Speaker 3: Would they be there if it was up to him
Speaker 3: as what a mask.
Speaker 4: Well, wim T has told me that he's never even
Speaker 4: been on his own website, so I don't think he
Speaker 4: cares one way or the other. What's there, Wim is
Speaker 4: the madman and the prophet, right, That's what I call him.
Speaker 4: He's a madman and a prophet profit because he has
Speaker 4: his cool method, not because he's God, but madman because
Speaker 4: he's all over the place, like he's he's way out there,
Speaker 4: and I think he wants to impress people. He wants
Speaker 4: people to think that they can push their limits to
Speaker 4: like crazy spots, and he wants to please people. And
Speaker 4: by doing that, he conflates repeatedly these dangerous but these
Speaker 4: dangerous practices, and the organization might be maybe it's just
Speaker 4: a callous legal thing. Maybe it's they're scrambling to do
Speaker 4: what they can to control Whim. Either way, he's still
Speaker 4: teaching hyperventilation in water despite knowing about this, And I
Speaker 4: talked to him about this in twenty seventeen. I was like, Whim,
Speaker 4: you cannot do this, like you cannot teach a people
Speaker 4: are dying, you know they're dying. And he's like, yeah,
Speaker 4: there's warnings on my website, So I guess he had
Speaker 4: been on his website, so it's where there were one.
Speaker 3: Then someone in the organization call it not a bomber
Speaker 3: what they call it.
Speaker 4: He said, it's lame. Yeah, ainam Hoff says, yeah, I
Speaker 4: know it's lame. And then but we have warnings all
Speaker 4: over our website. What more can we do? And well,
Speaker 4: you could stop teaching hyperventilation and water would be one
Speaker 4: thing that you could do. And this is there's just
Speaker 4: so much confusion just because of who he is and
Speaker 4: and the two pillars of his practice that this is
Speaker 4: becoming a real major problem. And you know, and people
Speaker 4: are you know he's you know, there's currently a lawsuit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to get into talk about some of
Speaker 1: the deaths they have the lawsuits attached to him.
Speaker 4: Well, let me tell you about one of the butt
Speaker 4: shows a very clear connection. Right, there's this guy named
Speaker 4: Andrew and seen as he's in Orange County, California, and
Speaker 4: he's super wim Hoff practitioner. Go Getter wants to push
Speaker 4: his limits like he's one of these guys who who's
Speaker 4: type A and loves it. And he uh watched all
Speaker 4: the videos on YouTube, maybe downloaded the course, maybe not
Speaker 4: couldn't confirm that.
Speaker 3: How was he cast?
Speaker 4: Yeah, a Rufio maybe a karate kid. I put him
Speaker 4: like a was it Michael Rufio? So he he's a
Speaker 4: tech entrepreneur, has a social media think game going on.
Speaker 4: He goes it's labor day and he's says, hey to
Speaker 4: his brother. Adam's like, I'm gonna do some wim Hoff
Speaker 4: in the pool, because he does it, and we have
Speaker 4: videos of him doing wim Hoff in the pool. He
Speaker 4: goes to the pool and passes out. And a few
Speaker 4: minutes later, you know, Adam, his brother goes and sees him.
Speaker 4: He's in a meditative position under the water, and they
Speaker 4: pull him out. They do CPR, he gets his heart started,
Speaker 4: brings him to UCI Medical Center, brain dead on arrival.
Speaker 4: He's an organ donor a few days later, and you know,
Speaker 4: it's just clear that he was doing wim Hoff method
Speaker 4: and water dies, and you know, and that's where he is.
Speaker 4: And the lawsuit is from another sort of similar case.
Speaker 4: Seventeen year old Madeleine Rose Medsker, you know, has been
Speaker 4: practicing the myth hot wim Hoff method for a while,
Speaker 4: accessing it on the computer fathers at their house in
Speaker 4: Long Beach, California. He doesn't see her for a little while.
Speaker 3: Long later, you.
Speaker 1: Had a detail where there he was arguing with his
Speaker 1: ex wife about what algebra class.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I know that there's an argument over some sort
Speaker 4: of higher mathematics, which you and I are both not
Speaker 4: good at math. We've already established this.
Speaker 3: There's just a snapshot of life, right, like, like what's
Speaker 3: going on in her, right, I don't know, but she's not.
Speaker 4: The ongoings of a family, right, And she's known for,
Speaker 4: you know, using tech these techniques for calming her nerves
Speaker 4: because there's this big anti anxiety effect to the wim
Speaker 4: Hoff method. He finds her.
Speaker 3: Passed out in the pool.
Speaker 4: She does usually doesn't use the pool, and he assumes
Speaker 4: that she was doing the wim Hoff method in the pool.
Speaker 4: But this is a problem with these cases, right when
Speaker 4: someone drowns and there's no witnesses and there's no video,
Speaker 4: how do you know what they're doing in the water?
Speaker 3: And then she had like wim Hoff tabs.
Speaker 4: You're saying, yeah, I mean this is what the lawsuit
Speaker 4: of ledges, you know, and and and this is one
Speaker 4: of the big problems actually, you know, I started trying
Speaker 4: to investigate how many people have drowned. No one's there's
Speaker 4: no Bureau of wim Hoff Drowning Statistics.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: This is me on Google trying to find the news
Speaker 4: articles that pop up saying, hey, this person passed out
Speaker 4: in water and drowned. And I was able to find
Speaker 4: thirteen cases just from the Google search saying the wim
Speaker 4: Hoff practitioner drowns in water and we're pretty sure this
Speaker 4: is this is how it happened. And you got to
Speaker 4: think that that sample, well, that's pretty you know, that's
Speaker 4: pretty small. Like I've been a reporter for a long time.
Speaker 4: I know that most drowning desks don't generate news articles,
Speaker 4: let alone make connections for what was happening when there's
Speaker 4: no video, no major evidence. I'm thinking that that sample
Speaker 4: is incredibly skewed to small that many people. It's very
Speaker 4: easy to get the wrong idea about the wim Hoffman.
Speaker 4: And how would you know if somebody just is swimming
Speaker 4: and it's like, hey, I'm going to hyperventily in the
Speaker 4: in the water now and they just drowned as a drowning,
Speaker 4: and you know, I will say that my sample, it's
Speaker 4: a global sample. I got thirty teen names. Four are
Speaker 4: in California and seven are in the United States. So
Speaker 4: are we thinking that Americans are particularly prone to shallow
Speaker 4: water blackout? Or perhaps maybe that that that that the
Speaker 4: the way I collected information, the way it's available, it's
Speaker 4: actually a much smaller and skewed sample because of that. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Uh. But if he's like, how much did in your book?
Speaker 3: How much did you push what he's pushing in water? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Oh, I mean no, no, never.
Speaker 3: So your book's clear about it.
Speaker 4: My book is clear about it. I talk about the
Speaker 4: deaths at that point, there were fewer. Uh, and you know,
Speaker 4: there's a big warning at the front of my books,
Speaker 4: and you know, always to consult a doctor, you know
Speaker 4: that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you pointed to you said, how they're in
Speaker 3: the front of your book.
Speaker 1: There he is in the ice and he's a breathing actually, guy,
Speaker 1: So I don't know if you feel complicit.
Speaker 4: Well, I I what I feel. And the reason why
Speaker 4: I'm so out about this right now, and why you know,
Speaker 4: honestly the whim Hoff community does not like me at
Speaker 4: all right now is because I do feel complicit.
Speaker 3: I was.
Speaker 4: I'm his chief alcoholic, whether he likes it or not. Right,
Speaker 4: I've been doing this for ten years. I am a
Speaker 4: daily practitioner. I did my ice bath today, I did
Speaker 4: my breath work today. I love that method. I've done
Speaker 4: three hundred news programs on Doctor Oz. You know, I've
Speaker 4: been on Ben Green. I haven't been on your podcast
Speaker 4: until right now, but I have been spreading his message
Speaker 4: for a long time. I know that, you know, two
Speaker 4: hundred fifty thousand people read this book. That's at least
Speaker 4: a quarter million. How many of those people got the
Speaker 4: wrong idea? And I feel like if whim is still
Speaker 4: conflating and still teaching this practice, still selling that dangerous
Speaker 4: conflation on his website, I have to go out and
Speaker 4: we have to tell the true and full story because fame,
Speaker 4: I mean, it accentuates mental illness, right, Fame is isolating.
Speaker 4: Fame will will accentuate your negative aspects. And when you're
Speaker 4: doing something which is potentially dangerous and then you're telling
Speaker 4: people to push there them that said, we're going to
Speaker 4: have fallout. And this is where I'm at the beginning again.
Speaker 4: It's like I'm in Poland, I'm meeting him again for
Speaker 4: the first time. And if I feel like if I
Speaker 4: had written that story initially right now, like if I
Speaker 4: was on assignment with him right now, I would write
Speaker 4: a very different story about who wim Hoff is.
Speaker 1: That was the thing I thought about when I was
Speaker 1: reading it, when I was reading what you'd.
Speaker 3: Reading, what you'd written.
Speaker 1: About your falling out with some of the teachings, is
Speaker 1: that you went originally to debunk something. Yes, became a convert,
Speaker 1: and like you said, you're now back around to where
Speaker 1: you were, but.
Speaker 3: Not necessarily for the same reasons, for.
Speaker 4: Very different reasons. Yeah, And it's because the hard thing
Speaker 4: is because like this stuff does work, and the but
Speaker 4: we are putting too much faith into an individual, right,
Speaker 4: That is the dangerous thing with all these cults. It's
Speaker 4: like you give away your control over to some sort
Speaker 4: of figurehead and you let them run that conversation of
Speaker 4: your life and you follow them as an example. And
Speaker 4: the thing I loved about whim when I first met
Speaker 4: him is like you meet him, You're like, well, I
Speaker 4: would never follow this guy's example. Like just look at him.
Speaker 4: He's got this big alcoholic nose, he's a smoker. He's
Speaker 4: like he's you know, obviously like maybe the worst father around.
Speaker 4: I looked at him, I was like, look, he has
Speaker 4: all these obvious flaws and yet he's got this this
Speaker 4: awesome thing. And I thought that was a really good
Speaker 4: combination in a way, because his flaws were out there.
Speaker 4: He wasn't pretending not to be who he was. And
Speaker 4: I feel like it's not totally his fault that it
Speaker 4: has gotten to this way, because when you speak with him,
Speaker 4: he's still very genuine. But there's a business. It's an
Speaker 4: eighteen million dollar inner fire business run by his son, AmAm,
Speaker 4: who was one of those abandoned kids who does not
Speaker 4: practice the method, who who basically you know, you'll you
Speaker 4: can look in my video.
Speaker 3: There's that I have.
Speaker 4: I have a video of him saying, you know, I
Speaker 4: hadn't seen him in ten years and he was getting
Speaker 4: quite famous, and like I was, you know, I thought,
Speaker 4: you know, essentially he could make a lot of money
Speaker 4: doing this. Essentially he could take his take his father's
Speaker 4: image and build an effective social media, breathwork and ice business,
Speaker 4: which is exactly what he did. And that is I mean,
Speaker 4: I mean, hell, anyone can do commerce, like it's not
Speaker 4: bad to do commerce, and and then you spread the message,
Speaker 4: but it doesn't feel genuine and it feels like.
Speaker 3: It's moved away from what I.
Speaker 8: Have loved about this method, how do you you might
Speaker 8: you might be equipped to answer this.
Speaker 3: You've used the word cult and even inner fire.
Speaker 1: Is like it's like, I don't get you could take
Speaker 1: any cult in American history and he could have called
Speaker 1: it interfire and like yeah, and dude, like I don't, like,
Speaker 1: I don't you know I'm learning right now?
Speaker 3: I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't have any I don't have any history. Sure,
Speaker 1: I never heard of interfire until I was reading your stuff.
Speaker 1: I didn't know about it. But it just has like
Speaker 1: a funny has like a culty flavor to it.
Speaker 3: But how do you.
Speaker 1: Get Hey, if someone has a fitness break through, health breakthrough,
Speaker 1: whatever it is, okay, someone discovers something that's beneficial, how
Speaker 1: do you get where the person is bundled with the thing?
Speaker 1: Meaning why did Heimlick? Why are we not talking about
Speaker 1: Heimlick as a cult figure?
Speaker 3: Yeah, he didn't have a podcast.
Speaker 4: I guess YouTube wasn't around, But how does it happen?
Speaker 1: Like, for instance, and as poorly as I understand it,
Speaker 1: Like I said.
Speaker 3: My journey into my journey into free diving.
Speaker 1: It's like I spend some amount of time on it
Speaker 1: over the last some odd years, I hang out with
Speaker 1: people who just because of the good fortune and circumstances
Speaker 1: of my life, I'm able to hang out with.
Speaker 3: People who are really good at it. Sure I'm not.
Speaker 1: The things I learned from them would be like I've
Speaker 1: learned things from them that have very much not pushed
Speaker 1: my limits, but have made it be an educated way.
Speaker 1: I can do things that I couldn't do before. Sure,
Speaker 1: I didn't understand how to properly clear my ears in
Speaker 1: the way that didn't create big ear problems. I didn't
Speaker 1: understand how to that never occurred to me to land
Speaker 1: the surface of the water and completely relax imagine completely
Speaker 1: relaxing every muscle in my body and just blowly breathing
Speaker 1: for a while, right and getting like everything relaxed, and
Speaker 1: going underwater and staying calm and fighting that like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, A'm out of the water, feeling right. And
Speaker 1: I learned all the stuff, and now I can go deeper,
Speaker 1: I stay down longer. I can do things I could
Speaker 1: I always wanted to do and couldn't do. But I
Speaker 1: don't attach that to a figure Kimmy Werner, Greg Fonce.
Speaker 1: I don't attach it to them being like where I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go like my love of the knowledge. Just as
Speaker 1: much as I love those people, my love of the
Speaker 1: knowledge is not extend to them as being like a leader.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, or you.
Speaker 1: Know, I don't go and a and I'm like, Greg,
Speaker 1: what do you think I should do about my marriage?
Speaker 1: It's like, I just don't. He taught me some really
Speaker 1: cool stuff, right, he learned it from someone who learned
Speaker 1: it from someone and he's translated it to me, and
Speaker 1: it's it's taken me beyond my limits.
Speaker 3: But there's no CULTI factor, like how do you who?
Speaker 3: How did he become bundled?
Speaker 1: Like why is it not he has these ideas, These
Speaker 1: ideas travel around and why does it not be that
Speaker 1: people want to put their hands on them, they want
Speaker 1: to stand in a circle around him. He needs to
Speaker 1: say the most guru thing in the world, which is
Speaker 1: I'm not your guru.
Speaker 3: It's just like the most guru thing on the planet.
Speaker 3: I never have occasion.
Speaker 1: I mean no, I'm not your fucking guru, you know,
Speaker 1: which is like very guruy, right, I'm just from inner fire.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean this is exactly it, like like the
Speaker 4: cult of personality around him. He is a charismatic I
Speaker 4: don't know why he's charismatic. Is not a good looking
Speaker 4: like and also people look at him now and they're like,
Speaker 4: he's a he's an athlete, but like he's not an athlete.
Speaker 4: He's got this huge star out of his navel where
Speaker 4: they had to do surgery to read stitches and testines.
Speaker 4: He's he's fat. He's got like this big bulb of
Speaker 4: his nose, and people are like, oh no, we'm off
Speaker 4: is an extreme athlete, Like he doesn't have any records
Speaker 4: anymore other than the I think he is a barefoot
Speaker 4: marathon record in the Arctic half marathon half marathon he
Speaker 4: did like I want to say, six hours. It's not
Speaker 4: that great of a time, but maybe no one else
Speaker 4: tried it, right.
Speaker 5: I.
Speaker 4: Mean, you know it's he has He is an impressive guy, right,
Speaker 4: he has done impressive things, but people have for some reason,
Speaker 4: haff has gotten to a point where where people's just
Speaker 4: blinders go up. They're like, oh, well, he has this
Speaker 4: science behind him, so he must he must be right
Speaker 4: about almost everything.
Speaker 7: And is there an aspect because like in the wellness industry,
Speaker 7: you see like I see some of that, right, So
Speaker 7: is that like CULTI personality thing? Kind of tied to
Speaker 7: the wellness industry and like totally does the wellness industry
Speaker 7: like feed that well.
Speaker 4: I mean his method is good for a lot of
Speaker 4: like chronic conditions, when the wellness industry loves the chronic conditions.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: You know, you don't go to the wellness guru if
Speaker 4: you have a broken leg, right, you go to the
Speaker 4: wellness guru because you have a gut something you can't
Speaker 4: quite put your finger on, right, And the actually is
Speaker 4: good for that stuff, like, and a lot of stuff
Speaker 4: is good for that stuff. It's not just the woman
Speaker 4: like that. You know when I said you put your
Speaker 4: your your tent pole down. This can be a thing
Speaker 4: like a beach head to actually help you work on
Speaker 4: a lot of different things. And I think the Wimhuff
Speaker 4: method is a great beachhead. But then when you have
Speaker 4: that beachhead, some people, not everyone, but some people are like, well,
Speaker 4: what else does whim do? He's such a great guy.
Speaker 3: Oh, I love it.
Speaker 4: He's funny. He's got a YouTube channel, he plays guitar.
Speaker 4: He talks in nonsense on stage because he says stuff
Speaker 4: that's way beyond the science. He says, you know, when
Speaker 4: he's on Rogan and he's also said this to me, like,
Speaker 4: you know, I get above one hundred percent oxygen for
Speaker 4: the first time. They proved it in the lab above
Speaker 4: a hundred percent oxygen if hyperventilate, and and of course
Speaker 4: you can't get above one hundred percent hundred percent and
Speaker 4: you you.
Speaker 1: It's like the amplifier and spinal tap that goes up
Speaker 1: to eleven.
Speaker 4: Right right, and he is that amplifier. He is spinal
Speaker 4: tap here and and people like let him get away
Speaker 4: with it, and then he'll throw out these sort of
Speaker 4: nonsense scientific phrases to explain what it is. And maybe
Speaker 4: they're like they sound well, is that plausible? Is that
Speaker 4: not plausible? But you'll be talking to him in a
Speaker 4: podcast or whatever, and you can't sit in fact check it.
Speaker 4: You can't be like, what are you saying? So you know,
Speaker 4: there's this one quote on Rogan sixty I don't know,
Speaker 4: some some number on Rogan where we can just read
Speaker 4: you won't read that quote. Well, you do your best
Speaker 4: whim Hoff if you can.
Speaker 3: And I can't.
Speaker 1: I never I haven't said and I'm just finding all
Speaker 1: about this. It's interesting me because but I can't do it.
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not I'm like, not familiar. Well, and
Speaker 1: I hope that's coming across to listeners, and I'm not familiar.
Speaker 3: I'm just I'm into this whole thing, though.
Speaker 4: Well, you know you have that.
Speaker 3: He says this.
Speaker 1: They did it with a laser on the chest, and
Speaker 1: then they were able to measure the mitochondrial oxygen tension.
Speaker 1: They're able to receive more oction oxygen. That is a
Speaker 1: great finding. It shows that we can have more oxygen inside.
Speaker 1: Suddenly we were able to get into the cell and
Speaker 1: influence the energy production. If it is anaerobic, it is
Speaker 1: like two molecules able to produce. When it becomes aerobic,
Speaker 1: then it's up to thirty eight molecules they can produce.
Speaker 1: What happens what happens with the cell that is deprived
Speaker 1: for forty eight hours of thirty five percent less oxygen,
Speaker 1: it becomes cancerous. As simple as that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, does that make any sense to anybody here? Like,
Speaker 4: you know, he throws it out with a sense of confidence.
Speaker 4: And so I actually spent a little while on this paragraph.
Speaker 3: Right, Like, I called two doctors over.
Speaker 4: At Harvard and I was like, is there anything No
Speaker 4: one was the Harvard was at Stanford, and I was like,
Speaker 4: is there anything to this that backs it up? And
Speaker 4: they're like, well, you know, maybe oxygen could you know,
Speaker 4: deprivation might be cancerous but like I was like no,
Speaker 4: but specifically our eight oxygen molecules on this hemoglobe and whatever.
Speaker 4: And they're like, no, this makes no sense. This is
Speaker 4: all just just crazy talk.
Speaker 3: And there's a word.
Speaker 1: Another there's a word another researcher uses Brian McKenzie.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: Brian McKenzie, a breath work expert, an author of the
Speaker 1: book Power, Speed and Endurance. Uh calls some of the
Speaker 1: language they use.
Speaker 3: What's the word he has for it, actually galamataeus. So
Speaker 3: so just to.
Speaker 4: Correct you here so we don't have to get that
Speaker 4: correction later. What mackenzie says is that no person the
Speaker 4: organization understands the physiology and the person uh you know
Speaker 4: it's actually market Well. Walter von markin Liechtenbelt, who's a
Speaker 4: scientist who has actually studied uh haff in a lab
Speaker 4: who says that basically, uh whim scientific of acabula Larry
Speaker 4: is galimatis, which is and he wrote that in a
Speaker 4: in a scientific article which I read again this morning,
Speaker 4: and and galamatis basically means gobbleybook.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: He goes on to say he mixes in a nonsensical
Speaker 1: way scientific terms as irrefutable evidence.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and we see that a lot on the internet
Speaker 4: these days.
Speaker 1: The only uh the only real for me personally, the
Speaker 1: health and wellness things that make sense to me are
Speaker 1: thing are things.
Speaker 3: Like, uh, work out like a lot, eat a very diet. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I like that, Like things you want to get good
Speaker 3: at doing a whole bunch. Yeah, you know, stuff like that.
Speaker 1: But uh, like I'm always like half hearing this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. And we never did it, but I was
Speaker 1: we were gonna make a thing recently where it was, uh,
Speaker 1: we're gonna.
Speaker 3: Make a I only made the book cover.
Speaker 1: I made a we made a book jacket called lard man.
Speaker 3: It was gonna be like I wanted to like compile
Speaker 3: like the.
Speaker 10: Gobblely goot yeah about like if you only eat lard,
Speaker 10: And I wanted to come up with all of the
Speaker 10: language it explains all the health benefits and what it
Speaker 10: does to your mitochondrial DNA.
Speaker 1: You should that and just make like an insane paragraph
Speaker 1: of like shit that comes from eating lard and make
Speaker 1: it be like people be like damn that sounds like
Speaker 1: a good idea.
Speaker 3: You should do that.
Speaker 6: So that you can say to other people that I'm
Speaker 6: not your guru.
Speaker 3: So we made the book cover it's called lard Man.
Speaker 4: Personally, I think that you should get into the lard
Speaker 4: and the coffee business, like, because lard will definitely supercharge
Speaker 4: your Yeah.
Speaker 3: No, I think we had it was a guide, an
Speaker 3: ancient pathway to but this is only the farthest we got.
Speaker 1: On my Instagram at Steve Marnella, you'll see my Lardman
Speaker 1: book cover. It's called lard Man, an Ancient pathway to
Speaker 1: more muscle, slickerball movements, and better sex. And it was
Speaker 1: because it was just it came from us, sort of
Speaker 1: like listening to health advice from every place, that's like
Speaker 1: ultimately contradictory and as often I've found weirdly reflective of
Speaker 1: people's reflective of people's ideologies. Meaning a person that is
Speaker 1: going to extol the virtues of eating a vegan, how
Speaker 1: good they feel on a vegan diet, that diet probably
Speaker 1: appeals to some sensibility they held right. Another person like
Speaker 1: oh no, I only eat meat and I feel great, right,
Speaker 1: probably appeals to a sensibility and and the you know,
Speaker 1: there's this thing.
Speaker 3: That that we talked about this past.
Speaker 1: Overwhelmingly a right leaning person likes enjoys meat rarer than
Speaker 1: a left leaning person.
Speaker 4: Now is that a scientific fact?
Speaker 1: Overwhelmingly the right leaning person enjoys the taste.
Speaker 3: How your taste receptors are tied to your pol they
Speaker 3: just are or a thing I always bring up.
Speaker 1: Left leaning people are much more inclined to have gluten intolerance.
Speaker 4: Is that true?
Speaker 3: Yes? So?
Speaker 4: Wait?
Speaker 3: Is that yes?
Speaker 7: Or is that you're.
Speaker 3: Seventy four percent?
Speaker 1: I can't remember what it was, Spencer, You're seventy four
Speaker 1: percent more likely don't want a medium rare steak if
Speaker 1: you lean right?
Speaker 3: Wait? Will you be my guru? All right? That's what
Speaker 3: That's all I want to know.
Speaker 4: So I'm on the lookout for the guru.
Speaker 3: Can you remember why Spencer reported on this? Okay? Like?
Speaker 1: Like, I was surprised because the most common way to
Speaker 1: order a steak in America is medium rare, which I
Speaker 1: would have thought it was medium. Medium rare is the
Speaker 1: most commonly ordered steak in America, and it's overwhelmingly when
Speaker 1: you get a steak if your right wing, you want
Speaker 1: to cook less?
Speaker 4: Wait, but I'm I'm left leaning, but I also order
Speaker 4: steaks medium rare. Do I have to start cooking them longer?
Speaker 1: You're one of the twenty four, you're like the other
Speaker 1: end of it, point being, the point being only that
Speaker 1: the reason like one of the ways I sort of
Speaker 1: like watch one of the areas in which I'm interested in,
Speaker 1: like wild health things, sure, is that there's so often
Speaker 1: a reflection of current cultures. There's aspects of it that
Speaker 1: are reacting against things. There's things that seem appealing that
Speaker 1: there's things that would that would like. There's like I
Speaker 1: could come to you with two equally valid sounding hell
Speaker 1: things and I and you might be able to make
Speaker 1: My guess is they're gonna they're going to like the
Speaker 1: sounds of this one.
Speaker 3: I think you're going to make some sense to them.
Speaker 4: I think you're hitting on actually a very deep and
Speaker 4: interesting topic, which is that and I touch on this
Speaker 4: in a lot of my of my books that are
Speaker 4: the environment that we exist in changes changes our physiology. Right,
Speaker 4: if you live in a varied environment, like you know,
Speaker 4: you're able to go out into the wilds a lot
Speaker 4: and you're able to change to interact with the cold
Speaker 4: or the heat or the stress or the New York
Speaker 4: City streets. All of those external influences literally change your physiology. Literally,
Speaker 4: there's a connecting pathway between you being comfortable in Times
Speaker 4: Square or you know, in the Adirondacks. Right, there's a
Speaker 4: there's some sort of connection with and it's also goes to,
Speaker 4: no doubt, the political environment that you live in, the
Speaker 4: social media environment you live in, and all of those things,
Speaker 4: Like for that information to come into your senses, it
Speaker 4: wires your brain in different ways, and that wiring the
Speaker 4: brains releases different cocktails of hormones and proteins, genetic epigenetic responses.
Speaker 4: It's all connected. So it doesn't surprise me actually that
Speaker 4: you might say that rarer meat does correlate with maybe
Speaker 4: a conservative ideology. Maybe there's a way that works, And
Speaker 4: I think I think that it probably does through these
Speaker 4: sensory pathways like maybe liberals, you know, maybe maybe like
Speaker 4: the vegetable is more salient to somebody who's left leaning
Speaker 4: because that sort of broader cultural meme. And I'm talking
Speaker 4: about that not in a like an internet meme, but
Speaker 4: there's an anthropological idea of the meme that that actually
Speaker 4: translates into our physiology because we are intimately connected with
Speaker 4: our environment. You can't really think of a human not
Speaker 4: in their environment.
Speaker 3: Who would you be?
Speaker 4: Who would your ten year old child be without all
Speaker 4: of the experiences prior to it to that? And who
Speaker 4: would that child be without all of your experiences that
Speaker 4: led to that child being born in the first place.
Speaker 3: Yeah, picture that.
Speaker 1: Picture that you've always like. Your parents' eyes made you
Speaker 1: eat a lot of steak and stuff. You could only
Speaker 1: ever think about the cow. You always felt a little bad.
Speaker 1: You understood that it was really important to need a
Speaker 1: very diet. It always nagged on you, the welfare. And
Speaker 1: then one day you meet someone who's like, man, I
Speaker 1: don't eat I don't eat any meat, and I feel fantastic.
Speaker 1: That person then cuts meat out of their diet. They're like, god,
Speaker 1: I feel so much better.
Speaker 4: Well, sure, and humans, And I'm not even saying it's
Speaker 4: not true. Homo sapiens are omnivorous and highly varied. Right,
Speaker 4: So from my anthropological training, you know there isn't an
Speaker 4: ancestral lifestyle, right, But I will say that it's not lunchables, right,
Speaker 4: It's not going to the grocery store. The ancestral lifestyle
Speaker 4: had to do with the environment, that we inhabited. If
Speaker 4: you are a coastal tribe with a rich mollusk access,
Speaker 4: you survived on bivalves because that was available. You varied
Speaker 4: with the seasons. And I don't know if there were
Speaker 4: true vegetarian groups.
Speaker 3: But there may have been.
Speaker 4: There could have well been a tuber centric tribe out there,
Speaker 4: and they probably survived just fine, because one of the
Speaker 4: evolutionary advantages of humans is that we are incredibly adaptable
Speaker 4: to a highly varied environ.
Speaker 1: Do you feel that you are susceptible to something like
Speaker 1: whim Hoff because you you're a searcher, so like you
Speaker 1: got you went into Betan Buddhism, got into it, presumably
Speaker 1: not as into it now you got into wim Hoff,
Speaker 1: you got out of it. Do you feel that you
Speaker 1: have like a searcher mind and you're susceptible to gurus. No,
Speaker 1: I don't think I'm as susceptible to gurus. Actually, I
Speaker 1: think that I am very skeptical by nature, and I
Speaker 1: have a real you know, a bug in my bonnet
Speaker 1: for truth, right and one of the reasons why, and
Speaker 1: I have meditated for years, but I've never followed, like,
Speaker 1: never gotten guru afide right, I was leading that a
Speaker 1: broad program, but I wasn't a Tibetan Buddhist.
Speaker 4: I don't have a lama or anything like that. What
Speaker 4: I'm interested in is the intersection of complex cultures and individuals.
Speaker 4: And I'm really you know, I think that if someone
Speaker 4: lies to me or I feel like there is something
Speaker 4: that's untrue or that I need to investigate, my nature
Speaker 4: is to investigate. My nature is to go like a
Speaker 4: bloodhound on a story and find out what the truth is.
Speaker 4: And I realized that maybe that is a personality flaw
Speaker 4: because I'm always digging around in things that maybe don't
Speaker 4: even matter in the end. Right, maybe no one needs
Speaker 4: to know what the Buddha was saying eight hundred years
Speaker 4: ago that led people to commit suicide, right, Like, maybe
Speaker 4: that doesn't even matter. But I have this just impulse
Speaker 4: to sort out bullshit from reality.
Speaker 1: Did you when it came to too going after like
Speaker 1: in pointing out the risk and the you know, you've
Speaker 1: identified thirteen potential deaths here, did you initially think that?
Speaker 3: Have you in the past gone to Inner Fire or
Speaker 3: gone to wim.
Speaker 1: Hoff and said, listen, there's like a problem and we
Speaker 1: should read you guys should redo a bunch of stuff
Speaker 1: and clarify this point. And and that just didn't doesn't
Speaker 1: get traction.
Speaker 4: Four years, I mean, this has not been a new thing.
Speaker 4: Like in twenty seventeen when we were on stage. The
Speaker 4: first thing I said to him after we were on
Speaker 4: stage was you can't do this, and he was like, oh,
Speaker 4: they're warnings, don't worry about it. And and I have
Speaker 4: been a a you know, I don't. I didn't talk
Speaker 4: to Himhoff for a few years after the book came
Speaker 4: out after that moment. And I also don't really like,
Speaker 4: have you ever tried to change someone's mind? You know, like,
Speaker 4: have you ever been successful at changing someone's mind?
Speaker 3: With at that?
Speaker 4: With oh you have? Okay, well, oh just buying a
Speaker 4: little thing. But not but like you're doing something wrong right, Like.
Speaker 1: You against dishwashers and I've gotten into dishwashers.
Speaker 4: Okay, but did you yourself by who with the dishwasher
Speaker 4: change your mind?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 3: My wife and my friend honest, okay, well those people.
Speaker 4: You know, it doesn't sound like a deeply held reb
Speaker 4: but I can no, No, it was. But there's no
Speaker 4: way in the world that I could convince you that
Speaker 4: animals need to be protected under all conditions and uh,
Speaker 4: and never be hunted. Right, there's no there's no combination
Speaker 4: of words that leave my mouth that go to your brain.
Speaker 4: You're like, wal Scott, you got a point. I'm going
Speaker 4: to be a vegan. I just don't see that happening.
Speaker 3: I think, yeah.
Speaker 4: And it's the same thing with Whim. He's been doing
Speaker 4: this for so long. He's been doing these feats. He
Speaker 4: believes in what he does and and he just doesn't
Speaker 4: hear things that contradict that. And you know there's this
Speaker 4: one quote you can bring that up. Uh, just search
Speaker 4: for Jesus.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 4: So I started asking him, like, what is.
Speaker 3: The what is the command key for search?
Speaker 5: Control F?
Speaker 4: Control F.
Speaker 3: That's why they were goal M. That's why I was
Speaker 3: thinking control.
Speaker 4: So I approached him during the reporting of this story.
Speaker 4: This was like a month or two ago, and I
Speaker 4: was like, look, you know, you have people drowning and
Speaker 4: uh and and there's some problems here and it's roughly
Speaker 4: the stuff that we were talking about here. He follows
Speaker 4: my you know, Instagram post, and he knows that I'm
Speaker 4: you know, causing trouble.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 4: And you know, he wrote to me twenty eight thousand
Speaker 4: people drown every year, and that I was blaming him
Speaker 4: for all of their deaths, which I wasn't. And also
Speaker 4: it's two hundred and eighty thousand people that drown every year.
Speaker 4: And then he wrote me this, well, so I was
Speaker 4: talking specifically about I read Yeah, I read it like
Speaker 4: five times. So just to give you some context. At
Speaker 4: a recent Whimhoff event, he teaches something called a baptism
Speaker 4: where peop will hyperventilate, they take twelve very deep breaths
Speaker 4: and then all put their face in the water together.
Speaker 4: And there's this video. It's very culty, very you know,
Speaker 4: it's intense. And then here I asked him about that
Speaker 4: and he said, look into baptism. This is my Wimhoff impression.
Speaker 4: Look into baptism then the real meaning of it. You
Speaker 4: might learn something. I know what I do baptism. The
Speaker 4: real one is shutting down our over controlling mind and
Speaker 4: activate deep healing mechanisms in the body. Not going to
Speaker 4: explain this physiologically, not into cut competition sports here, which
Speaker 4: is entertainment. Since the Roman Empire who killed an innocent
Speaker 4: man called Jesus. Now, I don't know what this means,
Speaker 4: all right, I really don't, but it does.
Speaker 3: Look, he's inviting you to go to the Bible.
Speaker 1: And look into the real meaning of baptism, which in
Speaker 1: his starting of the Bible he has found it that
Speaker 1: what Jesus was doing when he baptized his disciples, as
Speaker 1: he was shutting down their over controlling minds and activating
Speaker 1: deep healing mechanisms in their body.
Speaker 3: I don't I'm no uh theologian, but I don't think.
Speaker 1: That that's what Jesus is saying when he teaches baptism.
Speaker 4: No, but it does seem that's what is saying exactly.
Speaker 3: But he's not.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you asked what he's so he says, I'm
Speaker 1: not going to explain this physiogical.
Speaker 3: He's not.
Speaker 1: He doesn't want to explain a physiology. He's not into competition.
Speaker 1: He's not into sports because sports is entertainment. Since the
Speaker 1: Roman Empire killed an innocent man called Jesus, sports is entertainment.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you're gonna you're gonna run in circles here, man,
Speaker 4: I don't.
Speaker 3: Know where you're going. I'm trying to understand the passage.
Speaker 1: You know, in college they toss a good trick when
Speaker 1: you're reading something. If you when you read a sentence
Speaker 1: that you feel as total bullshit. M hmm okay, and
Speaker 1: you're like, I've read the sentence a home times, I
Speaker 1: don't know what it means. There's a good trick. Add
Speaker 1: the word not into it, put the word not somewhere
Speaker 1: in the sense anywhere, and then read it again. Wait
Speaker 1: there be like wait a minute, that's the opposite. Or
Speaker 1: you're like, well, no, that didn't change anything.
Speaker 4: But there already is a knot into it, not not
Speaker 4: into competitions for it.
Speaker 3: Is a double I'm saying.
Speaker 1: But in this case, since the word not is in there,
Speaker 1: pull the word not outa read the sentence that you
Speaker 1: think is horseshit and feel like did.
Speaker 3: It did it fundamentally change for you?
Speaker 1: And when I do that exercise, it doesn't fundamentally change.
Speaker 3: Its correct because it was not going to do it.
Speaker 4: That is a good trick.
Speaker 3: It doesn't help you know what they're talking about.
Speaker 1: It just helps you go like, even when I add
Speaker 1: the knot, or in this case, I take away the
Speaker 1: knot and I read it, it.
Speaker 3: Doesn't fund It doesn't fundamentally change.
Speaker 7: Mind, it remains gobblly gook.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like it doesn't. Yeah, it's a way it's
Speaker 1: a trick. It's a thing to go like, is this
Speaker 1: sentence bullshit? I'm going to add the word not somewhere
Speaker 1: and then read it again, and then I still look
Speaker 1: at it and I'm like, no, just as full shit
Speaker 1: as it was a minute ago.
Speaker 4: It's well just to me. To me, what this looks
Speaker 4: like is like wim Hoff comparing himself to Jesus. It
Speaker 4: looks like he has gotten to the point where he
Speaker 4: is in the enlightenment trap. And the enlightenment trap is
Speaker 4: when you start believing all your own shit because you
Speaker 4: have talken to angels, are talking to your Buddhist angels.
Speaker 4: And in this case, I don't think women as a
Speaker 4: Christian in particular, but I do think that he does
Speaker 4: a lot of water work, and he has a spiritual
Speaker 4: bent to the things that he says, and I like spirituality.
Speaker 4: It's great to a point. And I think that he
Speaker 4: is so isolated now that he is comparing himself to Jesus.
Speaker 4: He sees himself as infallible to some degree, and that
Speaker 4: when confronted with the little evidence of deaths and of
Speaker 4: sixty seven, a million dollar lawsuit that we haven't talked
Speaker 4: about yet. Oh we did a sixty seven million dollar lawsuit.
Speaker 4: He's still diverting in some sort of spiritual bypassing framework.
Speaker 7: Has he ever, like, in any way acknowledged that people
Speaker 7: have died doing his deal?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 4: Yes, in this passage, he's like, are you gonna blame
Speaker 4: me for all the twenty eight thousand people who have drowned?
Speaker 4: And they do have warnings on their website, and the
Speaker 4: warnings were placed there in response to deaths, perhaps, as
Speaker 4: you mentioned earlier, for a legal reason. But he knows
Speaker 4: this is going on.
Speaker 3: He is well aware of it.
Speaker 4: Whether or not he believes he's ultimately responsible, now that's
Speaker 4: a different question.
Speaker 3: Hmm.
Speaker 1: So what what's going to happen to you?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 4: Oh my god, Well, I'm already getting a fair amount
Speaker 4: of attacks by the sort of there's a lot large
Speaker 4: group of people who subscribe to the wim Hoff method,
Speaker 4: and most of them are very sane. You know, the
Speaker 4: wim Hoff instructors that I've known, I will to their credit,
Speaker 4: I've never met one of them who says hyperventilate and water.
Speaker 4: And there's like, I guess, eighteen hundred wim Hoff method instructors.
Speaker 3: So the people who teach.
Speaker 4: This method, who I have met, seem to be doing
Speaker 4: the good work and are understanding what's going on. There
Speaker 4: are many people who are, I believe, hooked into this
Speaker 4: idea of wim Hoff as not their guru, but really
Speaker 4: might their guru. And I see a lot of people
Speaker 4: whove been very angry at me for putting this out
Speaker 4: because you know, as his essentially his chief alkholite for
Speaker 4: ten years, you know, been doing his method for ten years,
Speaker 4: been doing videos about him for a while.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you gotta admit it looks like I'm just it
Speaker 1: looks suspicious.
Speaker 4: What do you mean what you're doing?
Speaker 1: Why is that because you were like his disciple? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and now you're going against him. It's like it's got
Speaker 1: like a Star Wars you kind of groove to it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's like a whole part of like like
Speaker 1: a like a mentor has like a mentee has to
Speaker 1: turn that. It's like some kind I can't remember how
Speaker 1: that there's like a like a mentee. We will eventually
Speaker 1: have to bypass. And but you're not looking for the
Speaker 1: crown though.
Speaker 4: No, I don't want to be whim Hoff. I want
Speaker 4: to do other things. I'm writing a book on napping
Speaker 4: right now, like I am so done with this.
Speaker 3: If you look if you're.
Speaker 1: Looking for the crown, if you were looking for the crown,
Speaker 1: it would be very suspicious, right. But I could see that.
Speaker 1: I could see where someone might look. If someone came
Speaker 1: to me and said, hey, man, there's a guy. There's
Speaker 1: a writer. Okay, oh right, uh.
Speaker 3: Like everything. Let's return to Apocalypse now.
Speaker 1: In Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard, they come to Captain Willer.
Speaker 3: Who's nuts.
Speaker 1: Willard's nuts, and they come to them and say, we
Speaker 1: need you to go kill the nuts guy, right, Colonel Kurtz.
Speaker 1: So he goes up the river to find Kurtz and
Speaker 1: kill him. When he gets to Kurtz, he for quite
Speaker 1: a while. You can tell what's turning into his head.
Speaker 4: Is I kind of see where he's coming from.
Speaker 1: He's like, this guy's got a lot of good points. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's intoxicating. He meets a photographer, Dennis Hopper. Dennis Hopper's like, listen,
Speaker 1: I'm really crazy. I can't go tell them what a
Speaker 1: genius he is. You need to go tell him what
Speaker 1: a gene you're here. You don't know what you're here.
Speaker 1: You think you're here to kill him, You're here to
Speaker 1: tell the world.
Speaker 3: What a genius he is.
Speaker 1: He knows how to win the war, but then he
Speaker 1: chopped from ote the machete, so he doesn't do it.
Speaker 3: In the end.
Speaker 1: But I'm saying, like, it's like a mini version to
Speaker 1: be that you went to like debunk him, became an right.
Speaker 4: So wait are you so is this the guy?
Speaker 3: Am I supposed to get.
Speaker 4: A machete here?
Speaker 3: But you spent longer in the temple. Okay, you spent
Speaker 3: longer in the temple. Now you're going to get him
Speaker 3: with the machete.
Speaker 1: So I'm just saying, yeah, if people are mad, I could,
Speaker 1: like if someone came to me and sketched out like
Speaker 1: there was a writer that went to debunk Guru and
Speaker 1: became a disciple of the guru and then later went
Speaker 1: to like debunk the Guru, I would just I would.
Speaker 1: I would think of apocalypse now. So for people to
Speaker 1: be mad, I'm not surprised that they're mad, but they
Speaker 1: still have to they still have to wrestle with what you're.
Speaker 3: Laying out exactly.
Speaker 4: And my feeling is that I am here to tell
Speaker 4: the truth and that was the way I started. I
Speaker 4: haven't changed all that much.
Speaker 3: You still like the method.
Speaker 4: I still like the method. I'm still trying and I'm
Speaker 4: trying to save the method, and I don't want to
Speaker 4: run the method that's not my.
Speaker 3: Make is such a better story, Okay, And.
Speaker 4: Now the disciple has become the no. I mean, I
Speaker 4: have do my own things and uh and he can have.
Speaker 3: Is that that whole world.
Speaker 4: I just don't want people dying. And I also want
Speaker 4: them not to actually take any gurus. I want them not.
Speaker 4: I'm not your fucking guru. Whim's not your fucking girl.
Speaker 4: You're not their fucking girl. You're not their fucking guru.
Speaker 4: No one's a fucking guru. You have to do this yourself.
Speaker 4: And we do not give control over to other people
Speaker 4: like this and I and I feel very sad for
Speaker 4: Whim that he has become so isolated by this organization.
Speaker 4: And I would like to see the beauty again that
Speaker 4: was there at the beginning, where it wasn't so commercialized,
Speaker 4: where it wasn't such a big business, and you could
Speaker 4: be like, hey, we're taking anice bath. Were pushing our limits,
Speaker 4: and it's rational because that is where the the that's
Speaker 4: where the magic is. It's confronting your own self in
Speaker 4: these environments and.
Speaker 3: It is the heimlich maneuver.
Speaker 4: It's the Hindlick maneuver, not hindlick heim Lick heim Lick.
Speaker 3: It's the maneuver, not the man.
Speaker 6: So.
Speaker 7: I mean, if you could like break it down to
Speaker 7: like one thing that you would want people to do,
Speaker 7: it would just be do the method, but don't do
Speaker 7: it in ice water.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that would have made this podcast much shorter.
Speaker 1: Brod should start a podcast where it's a really quick podcast.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: His Watergate investigation would be they went into a building
Speaker 1: and stole some stuff, and.
Speaker 4: The president.
Speaker 3: It turns out they all do. Yeah, I tell me
Speaker 3: real quick in clothes talking about napping, Oh man, you
Speaker 3: got it. You give me a napping good. You're gonna
Speaker 3: come over your house and fall sleep too. Dude. I
Speaker 3: so want that.
Speaker 4: I so want that role. That's the role I want.
Speaker 4: I want to be the napping No. I love naps.
Speaker 4: Naps are the best.
Speaker 3: I could pay you two hundred bucks to go nap
Speaker 3: at your house.
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, you're already here. There's a blanket on this
Speaker 4: table in front of us. I mean, we're ready for you.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 4: Napping like are so They're so restorative And you know
Speaker 4: I've been doing all this extreme stuff for a while,
Speaker 4: putting myself in extreme environments, and that's cool. You learn
Speaker 4: to relax in the extreme environments. What I what I'm
Speaker 4: discovering with napping, and this book's not out yet, it'll
Speaker 4: be on September. What I'm discovering with napping is that
Speaker 4: you can actually get outcomes out of naps like you can.
Speaker 3: You can.
Speaker 4: I'm going to use this very still environment to also
Speaker 4: change my physiology. It's like, you know, there's the fight
Speaker 4: or flight, there's rest and digest. I've explored fight or flight.
Speaker 4: Now I'm in rest and digest and there's so much
Speaker 4: cool stuff in it. You can change the way your
Speaker 4: memory works, you can change the way you react to
Speaker 4: to external stimuli but in your brain world. And here's
Speaker 4: a We're just going to leave you with some crazy,
Speaker 4: crazy thought.
Speaker 1: Okay, I leave you with something you probably missed out on,
Speaker 1: all right, talking to Turkey hunters. Because the nap, the
Speaker 1: psychological transformation that happens in your late morning app on
Speaker 1: a turkey hunt, you need to talk. You need to
Speaker 1: interview Turkey hunters about that. You're right, I actually like,
Speaker 1: how could fifteen minutes be so transformative? I'm actually sort
Speaker 1: of curious, depressed.
Speaker 3: I thought we'd never get a turkey not fired up.
Speaker 4: I mean, yeah, there's something to that.
Speaker 3: It's transformative.
Speaker 4: But here's the thing, Like you already.
Speaker 3: Recognize yourself when you wake up, and then that.
Speaker 4: In your brain, all right, in your brain, you experience
Speaker 4: the world a fifth of a second behind real time.
Speaker 3: Okay, is that right?
Speaker 4: This is true? Is it comes in through your nerves,
Speaker 4: your eyeballs, The signal has to transfer, and what your
Speaker 4: brain does is it speeds up the world. It makes
Speaker 4: a whole simulation of the world and speeds it up
Speaker 4: five seconds to sort of figure out how the world is,
Speaker 4: which means we are essentially living in a simulation created
Speaker 4: by our brains. Right, this means because of this transition,
Speaker 4: true consciousness, What the truest form of consciousness is what
Speaker 4: happens when your brain is not having stimulus from the
Speaker 4: outside world. It happens when you're dreaming than naps.
Speaker 3: Mind blown. I am your guru.
Speaker 1: Have you gotten into I imagine in that work you
Speaker 1: probably got into it, and that where you've gotten.
Speaker 3: To sleep in general?
Speaker 1: Yes, of course, Okay, I've been like running around not
Speaker 1: broadcasting this publicly because I don't and please don't think
Speaker 1: I'm doing it now, but I's been running around conversationally
Speaker 1: half understanding something I read.
Speaker 3: Have have you is there?
Speaker 1: Like a is there any basis too to dementia in
Speaker 1: lack of sleep? Meaning like like people who were chronically
Speaker 1: chronically one sleep deprived?
Speaker 4: So much science Matt Walkers, Why we sleep?
Speaker 3: Just read it?
Speaker 4: Yeah, dementia.
Speaker 3: I keep telling people.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I think I heard something about it made
Speaker 1: me feel like because I sometimes when I sleep, like
Speaker 1: if I sleep eight hours, I'll be like, are you
Speaker 1: lazy bastard? But then now I feel better about it
Speaker 1: after reading that. Yeah, no, start, there's something there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's a lot to it, and and that will
Speaker 4: be our next podcast.
Speaker 3: Because I because you're thinking about it.
Speaker 4: In fact, if you're thinking about it, can you have dementia?
Speaker 3: Mmm?
Speaker 1: So there is like more, there's more than just that
Speaker 1: you feel real rest, that there's more stuff going on.
Speaker 4: Yes, Oh, I mean because sleep is an active state.
Speaker 4: It's not like you turn a slight switch off and
Speaker 4: like it's not like evolution put sleep. You know, animals
Speaker 4: are vulnerable when they're sleep, right that that you can
Speaker 4: get killed, you can get eat and you're not. You
Speaker 4: have no defenses. You can't run away. Evolution put that there,
Speaker 4: not because it was like, hey, this is a great
Speaker 4: idea for a vulnerability. It did it because it was
Speaker 4: important to the physiology and every creature on the planet
Speaker 4: down to like protoplankton sleeps. So it's it's an essential
Speaker 4: part of consciousness and interacting in the world, and evolution
Speaker 4: would not have put it there if it was not vital.
Speaker 1: And if you're a great way to think about it,
Speaker 1: because you know I talked about you feel guilty sleeping
Speaker 1: mm hmm because you think of it as I guess
Speaker 1: maybe culturally we think of it as not doing something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: m hmm, I'm going to not do something, yeah, and
Speaker 1: go to sleep. That has been the mod to be like, no,
Speaker 1: I need to do something for my productivity.
Speaker 3: I need to go to sleep. Yes, yes, no, that's true.
Speaker 4: You you you put a sign on your door say
Speaker 4: I'm working here and take a nap. M That's that's
Speaker 4: one of the takeaways of the book. Maybe you don't
Speaker 4: need to read the book. We can have you.
Speaker 3: For us right now.
Speaker 7: Sure feel better after I take a nap?
Speaker 3: All right, man? Well, thank you?
Speaker 1: So if people want to dig into this more. Tell
Speaker 1: people where to go find stuff.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 4: So I have a podcast called Scott Carney Investigates. It's
Speaker 4: on the same platforms maybe that you're listening to this
Speaker 4: on and my YouTube channel which is called Scott Carney
Speaker 4: or something like that.
Speaker 1: I have a lot of books, yep, what doesn't kill us,
Speaker 1: Big mega best seller, Enlightenment Trap, Enlightenment Trap, the Wedge,
Speaker 1: and the Vortext. There's a lot, and the then you're uh,
Speaker 1: the Red Trade and the Red Market, the Red Market
Speaker 1: and soon Time to Nap or whatever I'm gonna end
Speaker 1: up calling that book Time to Nap. I like that
Speaker 1: one man. All right, thank you very much for coming out.
Speaker 3: Man, it's been great.
Speaker 4: Appreciate it. Oh A ride on.
Speaker 5: A seal gray shine like silver in the sun.
Speaker 3: Ride ride on along, sweetheart.
Speaker 9: Were done, beat this damn horse to death, taking a
Speaker 9: new one rid We're done beat this damn horse today,
Speaker 9: So take your new ride on.
Speaker 3: H