Influence Your Own Physiology - with Wim Hof | The Empowering Neurologist EP. 108

Hello everyone, I'm Dr. David Perlmutter. Welcome once again to The Empowering Neurologist. You know, a central theme of our program has always been to really give you tools so that you can do your very best, so that you can achieve what you want to achieve in life. And I think with this theme in mind, we're going to welcome our guest today. His name is Wim Hof, and Wim Hof has dedicated his life to learning tools not only for his own achievement, which we're going to talk about, but really allowing others to share in the ability of the various tools that he has identified to achieve their full potential. Many of you, many of you have heard of Wim Hof. He's been called the Iceman. He's the recipient of 26 world records. Many of them have to do with exposure to ice, being under the ice. He has been engaged and had world records based upon his feats of endurance. And again, many of them have to do with exposure to cold. He climbed Mount Kilimanjaro wearing shorts and shoes. He ran a half marathon in the Arctic Circle. And he was recorded Standing in an ice-filled container for more than 112 minutes. So he has got a lot of records. In March of 2000, he set a Guinness Book of World Records for the furthest swim under ice, a distance of some 188 feet. He has really mastered and manipulated the incredible natural power of cold exposure and has done his very best to bring that information, what he's learned, which is quite a bit, to the attention of really anyone who's willing to, to learn about that, to participate in that. He is, as we would say, on a mission to share his discoveries with the world, and as we're going to learn today, with very good reason, because he's uncovered quite a bit. You know, we tend to believe that we have this autonomic nervous system, this nervous system that is autonomous and it behaves in such a way that we don't have control over it. It just goes on its own. And he has challenged that. And, you know, there's been a lot of science exploring his method that has really validated his challenge to the notion that we cannot change our— the function of our autonomic nervous system and even our immune responsiveness. And especially these days, it's certainly very important. The benefits of his methods, which are now practiced by millions, have been validated by at least 8 university research studies, and he has received worldwide attention. He's been on programs like the Discovery Channel, Vice Media, the BBC. He's been interviewed by luminaries in the podcast world, including Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss, and the School of Greatness podcast as well. His new book, have it right here, The Wim Hof Method. And I love the subtitle, Activate Your Full Human Potential. Isn't that what it's all about? So without further introduction, we're going to jump right in. Well, welcome Wim Hof to the program. How are you doing today?

Uh, like every day, I make the best out of it, and the best is coming.

Yeah, I want to tell our viewers right off the bat that before we went live just now, or we started recording, You said you wanted to break new ground. I'm all in, man. That is awesome. Where I want to start, though, is many times people have seen your story about how you started, how you went into the ice early on in life. That's in your book, your new book, which I think is fantastic. I have it right here, oddly enough.

Thanks.

Terrific book. I've been through every bit of it. But what I want to get to, because people can read about your early life experiences, your bike ride down to the coast of Spain, and the traumas of your early life as well. And I think what's really, really meaningful are the ways that you interpreted all of the events that occurred to you early in life. But I want to get to a place and have you explain what motivated you and how did it happen that you felt that it was more than just about you, that you wanted to get this information out to other people because it might be helpful. How did that all come about?

Hmm. In 2000, what was it? 95. My wife jumped from 8 stories down. That is traumatic. I was left behind with 4 children. She was the love of my life, so to speak. And she was at that moment. I was to stay with her and forever and Yeah, that's it. And then suddenly she was ripped out of my heart, my life, and of my children. All that trauma that was inflicted at that moment, we only could survive at that moment. And I had to go on because society keeps on going. If you miss the train, you're just left behind. So I could not— I had to go with my children. There I learned how to deal with trauma. Trauma is a heartbroken reality. It is neurology. It's interior horror going on and nobody gives a shit. Only you experience it. And in the meanwhile, you have to take care of 4 kids in a society with little money, very little money. And there I was. So what I always say is that my children made me survive, but the cold healed me. It gave me the time to stand still because when you go into the cold, one thing that it does, it shuts up your thinking. You are into survival, deep emotional connection with Yourself. You become tranquil. The stillness of your mind is suddenly happening. That gave me a relief, a relief of this endless suffering, this ongoing agony of emotional trauma, which is— it has its grip on your mind, on your physiology. And there, at that moment where you go into the cold water, It just breaks, it's over, it's gone. And that made my body being able to restore, to repair, to go break the loop and go into deep relief within myself. And that motivated me to keep on going. So that is one of the reasons.

Well, you know, it's— we understand how traumatic events, especially early in life, continue to inform us day in and day out. They continue to serve as a template through which we are able to experience our day-to-day lives. And I think, you know, there's a lot of research being done right now in terms of how can we contextualize events that occurred in our lives. And that's where things like meditation come in. And, you know, it's been said about your technique that it is like meditation amplified to get to the results that we are looking for a lot more quickly.

This is what— David, this is what the psychiatrist professors tell me in Detroit after we did brain— how do you say—

Imaging.

Yeah, yeah, brain imaging. And they saw me activating parts of the brain which was never been seen before. That means the, the endocannabinoid system that creates the opioids, the cannabinoids, at will. At will, that is. So when people are in depression or misery or feeling bad, And then if they are able to bring down the pain through the opioid activation and bring euphoria instead, then, then the problem is solved. So they told me this is a transformational technique that will change mental healthcare, and we are doing the research right now in San Francisco. Wow. on this method with UCSF, with the best researchers in the field.

What we're talking about though is the Wayne State study from 2018. That's what you're referring to.

Yes.

And you didn't hear this, but in the introduction, I was talking about how we assume that we have an autonomic nervous system that we can't have any influence over that. And you've proven via the Wayne State University study that indeed we can. And the area of the brain that was activated was called the periaqueductal gray. Now, that's not going to be on the test. You don't have to know that for our viewers. But the point is that's sort of a gating area for pain, for nociceptive or uncomfortable experiences, and plays a role in our emotional responses. Right. What we're hearing from you now is that you were able to jump into that area and influence how that worked. I think the implication, at least in the study, was talking about how this may play a powerful role, your technique, in terms of people, for example, who have chronic physical pain. Yes. In America, We're suffering through an opioid crisis with people addicted and losing their lives from opioid addiction. I don't want to get into how and why that happened, but the point is that's a huge issue, not just here but in other developed countries as well. And you're offering up the tools, the keys to the kingdom here for dealing with pain with tools that we all have.

Exactly, exactly. To learn at will to activate robustly the parasympathetic nervous system. Periaqueductal gray is learning to activate opioids at will. So when pain, uh, when pain occurs, how do you learn? The logic is simple. If you consciously go into cold water, then your consciousness, your perception, your neurology is changing. It's making connection with the periaqueductal gray, with the brainstem. It prepares itself for the jump into the icy waters. We We never do this because we live in comfort zone behavior and we want everything nice and warm when it's cold and cold when it's warm and a car so we don't need to walk. We forgot to stimulate the deeper parts of our brain which are there to serve us in case when it is necessary. So when there is pain inflicted, We have a great system, which is the brainstem, the periaqueductal or endocannabinoid system, and to have even a great time while the pain is being inflicted, you increase cannabinoids coming to your perception, you feel great while the pain is being suppressed. Wouldn't that be great, guys, if that would be there? And you say, The keys to the kingdom. Yes, we are the kings if we master our own brain, the seat of the mind. Then the corona, the corona, I mean the crown will be upon us. And we have never learned how to do these things. But now I come here and nobody was listening, but because I went to science, in various angles, various disciplines. I showed that inflammation can be brought down at will, and regulating your own mood is very, very possible now. And who wouldn't choose the path to at will activate its own mood, good feeling, his own happiness? This is what we are offering.

Well, it's interesting that this periaqueductal gray is in communication with our more sophisticated interpretive areas of the forebrain, the prefrontal cortex, and that the connection— Got it. You're going to love this. The connection between these deep centers to the more peripheral centers of the brain is called the corona radiata. It is indeed It is indeed the crown.

Bang, bang! So, Corona Radiata! Whoa! Shine on, man, shine!

Ginormous. I love it. So, uh, our listeners probably have a sense that what we're talking about here is quite similar to what we talked about. You mentioned earlier you had heard of Brainwashed, the book that we had written, which talks about the relationship between a deep brain center called the amygdala, a fear center, and the prefrontal cortex, this relationship. And just like you're talking about with your method, you can cultivate a better working relationship and choose how our more sophisticated brain responds to the input from our more reptilian inputs in the case of periaqueductal gray. Before we leave that topic, and maybe we don't ever have to, we talk about it all day long, I would like to know Have you seen any gender differences in your technique? Because there is some literature that suggests that the immune responsiveness of cells in the periaqueductal gray is different between males and females, and also the function of these what are called mu opioid receptors is different between men and women. So when you have large groups of people practicing your method, or you receive their emails, etc., Are you noticing any difference in how men and women respond?

Yes and no. Yes.

Love that answer.

Yes.

You can't lose and you can't win.

Yeah. Or you can both win. True. You know, yes, in the sense of, of course, there is a hormonal difference. We are doing right now a study on 140 women in San Francisco on this method. We got great results. And normally studies are done on men because men have no fluctuations of hormonal periods and things like that. But that deceives our understanding of what is a woman's reaction and of a man. They are not equal. So women take it on different as men. Men have— they— most of the difference is the attitude, the mind. The men are much more reactionary than the women. They are much more receiving, like they have to go into labor. They let it go. They learn to let go. What I teach people is learn how to let go, because you cannot fight. You cannot fight to have control over the fight and flight. You better learn to let go. Let go, surrender. Then the body is suddenly able to emerge and to defy the impact coming on the body from within. If you begin to think, you lose. If— because thinking was the prefrontal, that is the neocortex. No, you gotta go to the deep brain. Therefore, let it go. Then your blood flow is able to go to the deep brain, and there we are all the same. So on the surface, in the mind, we are different, but in the depth, all the same.

I would agree. And I think that what happens, however, is that, you know, with time, through neuroplasticity, we access and amplify and turn down what the influences of certain deep brain parts. And, you know, I think that we now understand that through neuroplasticity, our behaviors can change Which areas are more functional, which areas we choose to be less functional. Otherwise, it just happens, and we experience a traumatic event, as you described, and that continues to be a recurring circuit that we cannot break. And I'd say that the value of meditation— let me get back to something I mentioned earlier— is certainly well described. We describe it in our new book. But I think people are looking for a fast track. Yeah. That's why there's such interest right now in hallucinogens, for example, because many of the descriptions that you provide that relate to your change in awareness, your sense of connectedness to the world around you, your ability to distance yourself from previous trauma, people are talking about in the context of a hallucinogenic experience. We've had guests on the program who've talked about that, but what I'm hearing from you and what you've written about is This is available today to any of the readers. And I don't want to go into all the nuts and bolts of how to do the cold water immersion. You cover that in the book. We don't need to waste time with that. But, you know, the point that you bring up is it is initially uncomfortable. It's a shock to the system, but it exercises, if you will, the muscles surrounding the vascular system. And that's— Yeah. necessarily a good thing. And you really bring to our attention this notion of low-grade stress actually being good for us.

Yes, it's called hormesis, hormetic stress, and it is a short-term, acute, deep stress. If you do the breathing exercise, for example, then it shows in scientific comparison of studies, blood proof, blood samples. People doing this breathing, they are lying on bed and, uh, doing the breathing, and they are kind of high. Now, it has been compared with people going into their first bungee jump. So the blood samples show that the people doing the breathing exercises, they have a higher level of adrenaline Peak, peaking higher than the ones going for the first time into a bungee jump. Imagine the reset of the body and the deep brain, the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, adrenal glands at work at will through this exercise more than somebody who is in fear going into its first Bungee jump. That is profound. That is one. That is to reset the brain and body. That is one. 2, meditation. They have been comparing scientifically also meditation and brain scans and this with brain scans, these breathing techniques. It shows that people doing these breathing techniques, they go deeper inside the brain than people who are practicing mindfulness for 4 hours for years. They go deeper within 10 minutes. And that, that explains the effectivity and the shortcut, which is in our society, uh, the one to take. People have no hours to do meditation and learn to bring the blood flow to Areas of the brain. No, it needs to be done through acute stressful activity, which is the breathing exercise. And you feel kind of high, you feel kind of high, and you experience— the body experiences deep, deep stress. Because we can go without food, we can go without a lot, but if we go without breathing and we do it not stressful, without force, then in the, in the primitive brain, it's reactionary. Then suddenly, bang, bang, bang, the buttons are being, uh, pushed in and things happen profoundly. And this is what we look for in this society. Besides of that, it brings down inflammation. For people talking about COVID virus and bacteria, it causes inflammation. This has shown itself within a comparative study to bring down inflammatory markers, all kinds, the whole range. So it should be investigated more and more and more. People should look into it.

Well, let me tell our viewers that we will post on our website a very interesting study of your method that appeared in the journal PNAS in 2014. comparing 12 people who did the Wim Hof Method versus 12 who did not. And then interestingly, what they did was after a 10-day period, injected these people with something called LPS or endotoxin to create inflammation. And the results were— in the context now, we'll get to COVID in just a moment— the results were amazing in that the degree of production of these inflammatory mediators like interleukin-6, interleukin-8, tumor necrosis factor alpha were dramatically suppressed in those people practicing your method, and the level of something called interleukin-10, which tends to calm down inflammation, was higher. Now, there are drug trials right now in an attempt to do just that for people in the hospital with COVID Why? Because those things I just mentioned are called cytokines, and those Those are part of what we call the cytokine storm, the TNF-alpha, for which people are receiving antibodies either to TNF-alpha or the receptor of TNF-alpha in an attempt to keep this storm— in an attempt to keep their bodies from basically catching on fire. You showed this 6 years ago that by engaging your breathing techniques and exposure to cold water, you have a dramatic effect when these people are challenged by endotoxin that creates inflammation. Why is it important even beyond COVID? We'll get back to this in a moment. It's important, and all of our viewers know exactly where I'm going with this, because TNF-alpha upregulation, increase in this pro-inflammatory cytokine, is seen in coronary artery disease, in type 2 diabetes, in Alzheimer's disease. So we've got to do whatever we can to keep these cytokines Even aside from COVID we have to keep them in check. And when I read the report from 2014, again, in PNAS, we're gonna put it on the website, and all I have to do is practice breathing techniques and immerse myself in cold water, it's very empowering. I want you to know there's a lot of gratitude right now in my voice because it's non-invasive, it's not prescription, It's ahead of the game. It's not reactive, it's proactive. It's keeping people healthy from the damaging effects long-term of inflammation, which are myriad, which are the cornerstone of the number one cause of death on planet Earth right now. It's not COVID, it's these chronic inflammatory conditions. Interestingly, another study that just came out in April of this year, 2020, showed that The activation, what you just mentioned, of the sympathetic nervous system is specifically in vivo, in humans, what does this to the cytokines, these inflammatory markers. And even in the laboratory, in human white blood cells, same thing happens because of the production during your breathing exercises of pyruvate and lactate. So it all comes together. At the end of the day, I like to offer all of our viewers right now great information, interesting stuff, but it's got to be supported by peer-reviewed science. And that's what we're seeing right now. So, man, this is some amazing stuff.

Amazing. Thank you for sharing this with the audience and with the public. And thank you for your expertise and understanding and therefore supporting. What we want to bring is a very accessible, scientifically endorsed, effective method that works. And if we compare it, for example, to COVID, COVID is 1,200,000 or 500,000 deaths. Every year, people die of inflammation, inflammatory markers, disease caused by inflammation, by 60 to 70 million a year. And we found a key to bring down inflammation. I'm going to do the study. Very soon with several universities in the U.S., very renowned universities, and after it's gonna come. But we are already doing the study on DNA, and it shows also on level of the DNA inflammation. If it doesn't get to the cell, then the cell is able to rejuvenate. The telomeres go on. The gene expressions they rehabilitate a restoration within the cell. related to trauma, proteins, closed-up genes, is suddenly removed. Things like that happen. Besides of that, because of the direct acute inflicted stress through the breathing exercise, which is not breathing, and everybody knows it. My oldest participant is 98 years and they love it. It's a mammalian natural thing, it is. And it keeps people not only alive, Their quality of life goes way up, and their understanding and control over their own mood and bringing down inflammation is there. I want to bring this to the people, that the gravity is still misunderstood for the masses. It's getting out there for millions. We heal hundreds and thousands of people who adopt this, who understand this. Very simple principle. The good thing I did was bring it to science and show it beyond any speculation and doubt, rigid cold data. It works and it is there for you. And we are— I'm not talking about love, but I bring love. Love constituted by the control over our hormonal system Which is able to— the regulation of our mood, the hormones, the health, which is the regulation of our immune system in the, in the depth, and the strength, the energetic metabolic processes, as you call it, lactate, pyruvate, the Cori cycle, going into anaerobic dissimulation. All those things are there. And this is what cancer doesn't like. It doesn't like a body which is alkaline. It likes a body that is deserted of oxygen, and then it begins to anaerobically grow. It's all natural, but now we found a natural way again, and it's going out in nature. Don't see the cold as something negative. It's negative as anything that you take too much. We took too much comfort. We gotta go a little bit out of— in nature to use it as a vaccine, as a natural vaccine like homeopathics. A little bit of something activates our system to the depth, and there is the innate capacity to deal with stress, inflammation, to deal with energy. It's all there. And so simple. So—

Well, I'm all in, you know, and, uh, this checks all the boxes. And I think for our viewers, what you're seeing right now, this demonstration from Wim Hof, is empathy. It's empathy for all of us, giving us, um, a real gift. I want to, I want to tell you an experience that I had because, uh, I've been involved in, in hyperventilation and breathing for a long time because I'm a freediver, so I'm well familiar with the drive to breathe coming from carbon dioxide levels, why we hyperventilate before we freedive. I want to tell you one quick experience. I think you'll get a kick out of it. I was with other people boating in British Columbia. The water was, I think, 42 degrees Fahrenheit, so it was cold. Something happened underneath one of the boats, and somebody had to go underneath to take the kelp out of the intake so that the engine would work. And I got elected for that. I drew the short straw, as they say. So I knew— I, I got in the water and I hyperventilated because I knew I had to go under the boat and do this work. I didn't have a tank, so I hyperventilated. And it was very challenging, the cold. But once I got underneath the boat and I was extracting the kelp out of the intake I suddenly felt very, very comfortable and very comfortable, and to the extent that I became afraid of that because I thought I was about to pass out and just you know I didn't know what was going on. But I will admit that so I got the job done quickly. I came out behind the boat, and I will admit that you wear

you wear the tank.

No tank.

No, you.

Oh no no no.

You were the tank.

Oh, I was the tank.

Yeah, strong.

Got it. But, um, but it was, uh, uh, thereafter, uh, I, I, when I got out, I realized how cold I was. I took a hot shower, you know, the drill that most people have, have to do. But I will say that now that we're doing cold exposure, I don't feel cold when I get out of the water. I strangely sometimes feel warm. And I noted that there was an experiment with you in which they put you into a cold— basically an ice bath, and they measured your core temperature, and it actually goes up in an ice bath. So, you know, that is a degree of control over an autonomic process that I think we've never seen before.

It is so, and I congratulate you with your going past your fear. Being, uh, selecting the, the, the straw, going down there, doing the work, get that fine. The cold has so much more in store than we know. I'm only scratching on the surface right now, but I'm opening up the scientific world to complete different physiological mind-body connections, uh, possible through showing me going into the cold. For example, the way I began to go into the cold was 80 minutes, 80 minutes I went into icy water, icy, ice up till here, and they took blood, a lot of blood, and they measured my core body temperature. My core body temperature did not go down, it only went up. My skin temperature went down, went down to almost freezing, to almost— 40 degrees. Yeah, freezing point. Like, what is it in Fahrenheit? 32. 32. That's 0 degrees Celsius. It was like 5 degrees Celsius, like 7— 32, maybe 40 degrees skin temperature, but my core body temperature remained the same. That was something unseen, never seen. 1 hour, 20 minutes. I had a great time. Right, fully in control. But then they took the blood out of me, and then they exposed it ex vivo in a laboratory setting to E. coli bacteria, which normally makes the immune cells react very aggressively. And now there was zero, zero reaction. That means zero cytokine storm. Wow. Zero reaction. The innate immune system was not at work. You know what was at work? The specific immune system that deals directly with the virus, directly with the bacteria, directly with the inflammatory markers. Like in the beginning, it gets on the cell membrane, apoptosis, it's dead. And this is— I had so many new insights. First, they thought I had a lot of brown fat, but that is not the case because my brown fat, of course, through regular ice bathing, it is up and it was before considered not present in adults. Yeah, logical, because you don't use it, you lose it. If you dress up all the time, it goes down. It's like atrophy on a muscle if you don't use it, something like that. And then, but what they then saw was a new phenomenon that was the intercostal muscle activity they had never seen. You don't need to do anything. My brain is able to command my body to work without contraction of any muscles of mine. It just happens and it creates 4 to 5 times more energy than normal. And this has been in 2 studies verified. It's— these are new phenomena. Once you begin, the thing is this, it's not about the cold, it's about using the cold to activate our deeper systems, which also works in any for any stressor that comes to us. That could be emotional, mental, bacterial, viral, whatever stress in the end is cell biological stress. And we are at will able to activate our deeper endocannabinoid system, the adrenal axis, all at will to deal with whatever stress is coming to us. And that is the beauty of the coldness. That it taught— it's my teacher. It taught me how to activate and neurologically connect with the stress mechanisms the way nature meant it to be. The way nature meant it to be is to make us happy, strong, and healthy. The rest is not logical, doesn't make sense if we have no sense or no control anymore. We should have control All the time when we need to have it. And that one we got.

So what you're getting at, I think, is something called this evolutionary mismatch whereby, you know, we talk about the paleo movement where we're trying to emulate the diet of our ancestors because that's what they ate and that allows gene expression to keep us healthy. And, you know, you say that we live a life of comfort. That's not what our ancestors lived through. And you bring up this notion of stressing ourselves to some degree to take advantage of a hormetic response. So this is right in line with that. We are directly speaking to our DNA when we engage in these periodic stresses of one sort or another, be they caloric restriction, fasting from time to time, or exposing ourselves to extremes of environment, whether it's cold or even saunas and heat, and certainly this hyperventilation. You know, by bringing our pH up to, you know, a high level, 7.75 or whatever it is, is a stress. 8. And there's great value in that. And I try to explain it like this: when you go to the gym and you do curls, you're tearing your biceps muscles to a very small degree. In the healing process, that biceps muscle will heal, and then a little bit more to protect you moving forward Same thing with what you're talking about here. You get protection, but a little bit more so that next time you're experiencing a stress of one sort or another, you're in a better position. So you're really amplifying resiliency, the responsiveness to environmental stress.

Yeah, exactly. That's, uh, that is one. It's called supercompensation. That is one. And, uh, the other one is through the cold, I learned to, uh, own neurologically at will parts of my brain I was never schooled in. We learn, we learn in our schools how to do mathematics and history and language, but we don't learn about what is happiness, what is strength, what is health, and how to maintain it. And now we can see and bring people to their innate capacity, and we need not to estrange therefrom or alienate. We need to connect from the start. Like my little child— I got a 3-year-old. My oldest is 37, youngest a 3-year-old. He's sleeping outside now with mommy, just telling stories. Very nice. And when he was young, 1 year, every, every day in the winter Barefoot outside on the lawn. He was already waiting at the door to get out with me on the frozen lawn barefoot. And what we do with our children is, put your jacket on or you'll get sick. Now the paradigm will be, get your jacket off, otherwise you don't become strong and then you become sick. That is the new paradigm. We are born with the capacity to have a much deeper control over our endocrine system, immune system, and our metabolic processes in the cell creating energy. We got it. Happiness, health, and strength is all ours. And there it is. In the past, in the prehistorics, we, uh, we endured it. Now we completely alienated they're from, but we still have that physiology. So we better get a connection with that, and it doesn't need to be all the day. It's every day, a little bit is enough to have a connection with that what is able to confront itself with stress. So if that comes, you got a much better life. You can choose your life. You want to be happy, strong, and healthy? Then learn to deal with the stress mechanisms the way nature meant it to be. It's all there. It's very simple. Like these people in 2014, all these doctors said, ah, but you are the Iceman. That's why you are able to defy endotoxin injected and you don't become sick and thousands became sick. You will not show different. I show different— oh yeah, but you are the Iceman. I said, no, no, no, I'm a human. I'm a nice man. I'm a human. I'm humble, but I want to change the world and this paradigm. And then give me a group. They gave me a group, and within actually not 10 days but 4 days, I made them able to get into the autonomic nervous system, into the immune system, into the endocrine system, Much deeper than the existent medical paradigm. There it is.

I want to just really clarify that so there's no misunderstanding that the 2014 study in which the endotoxin was given intravenously, that wasn't you. That was people who had just learned your technique, and they were randomized to either do your technique or not. This is everybody like you, like me, Rather not you, but this is all of us. These people were taken and look how they changed their immune response in terms of cytokine production. And I would submit, who would not want to do that these days, not only with reference to COVID, but in the broader picture with reference to any of the chronic degenerative conditions that are plaguing mankind, which I will submit, as you have said, represent a mismatch in terms of our current lifestyles being so— Toxic. comfortable and what our genome is wanting to respond to. You mentioned that you're going to have your telomeres tested. I'll be very interested in seeing what happens with that test, but more importantly, like the endotoxin test, it's going to be very interesting to see what happens over time to people who have a certain telomere length, engage your program, and then are reevaluated after several months. what happens to their telomeres versus those who do not start the Wim Hof program. That's going to be very, very telling.

Yes, I can tell you, and I hear these things already, the telomeres are simply lengthening. And that is because the inflammation is no longer able to get into the cell as much, as much, as well as the oxidative stress. What it means is that the cell suddenly goes from war mode, like defense mode, into repair mode. When the energy is no longer needed to defy inflammation coming into the cell, then you get repair. You get parasympathetic nervous system activity. You get repair, restoration, regeneration. Regeneration in the cell means that the telomeres are lengthening. Mm-hmm. And not only, now comes, you have been talking about the prehistorics, about the prehistoric people. They are still within us in our DNA. They are in our DNA, and anything inflicted in those times, an unsolvable trauma, has been passed on, and we got that. And now we have found how to remove those proteins those who are blocking gene expressions. This is because of trauma, and they were thought of impossible to be removed or influenced. And now we found we can influence them and we can take it away, not only the trauma of this life but also of past, uh, past lives. And that makes it so profound And I, of course, I want studies. I love studies. I love the criticism. It polishes the diamond of the truth. No speculation. But there is no pharmaceutical industry or company which is going to endorse this because this is a natural method that suddenly makes pills and medicines superfluous. And this is big words. Oh, what are you saying? What are you saying? I say we have much more power innately capacitated by our birth, and we have a birthright to know it and to exercise it, and it should be taught in schools. Because a disease-free world wherein the quality of life is much more guaranteed through much deeper control within— who does not want this? Why is that bad?

Where we're going with our conversation is what I think the future may hold for Wim Hof, and that is, how does the Wim Hof Method change gene expression? That's really where we're going. We know that it changes physiology. It changes activity in parts of the brain. It changes cytokine production. For the better, but what does it do to gene expression? That is another area that when I was in medical school, no one would talk about. The idea that we have control over the expression of our life code was really considered blasphemy. We wouldn't ever consider that, right along with the idea that we can grow new brain cells and establish new connections and different unique wiring patterns. No one would consider that, but I think in moving forward, it's important to understand that our life behaviors affect the expression of our DNA, and that the changes are passed on to next generations.

Exactly.

It is so far out there. It's mainstream science now, but back in the day, that was laughed at, that whole notion that we can pass on— that there are inheritable changes to DNA that were induced. you know, was demonstrated in the mouse model and now we see it in humans as well. So it's a lot to take in. We want to— we're going to follow you very, very closely because I think the Wim Hof story has only just begun. I think there's a lot more to— a lot more books, but a lot more education. I think you're going to have a lot more to share as you learn more about what you're doing, about your, you know, what the Wim Hof Method is doing at More deeper levels like genetic. And I'm— what I'm asking you for is we need to do another conversation at some point in a year or two. I can't wait.

Just short about the genetic gene expressions. We influence absolutely positively through hormetic stress the transcription factors like NF-kappaB. We also influence the messenger RNA. Ribonucleic acid, which is temporary, which is the ability to go into the permanent DNA, into the DNA. So we found the key how to get there and make the right influences, to make the right changes, to do the restoration, the reparation, the regeneration. It's all— it's only beginning. And— but we found the keys. As the, as the professors in Detroit say, we now have the compelling evidence of the key components of the autonomous processes in the brain related to mood regulation. How big could that be? Who does not want to be happy? We found the keys. We want to hand them over and enter into Your beautiful temple, everybody.

Keys to the Kingdom.

Yes, sir, as you began. That's a great way to enter. Yes.

Well, listen, thank you for your time, and definitely thank you for your work. And I am telling all of you out there, you won't regret reading this book. It's a game changer. There's no question about it. And there's nothing to buy. You know, you're going to learn about cold water and you're going to learn about how to breathe. And the very important third part, third pillar of your program is dedication. And, uh, you know, that makes the other two things work. So thanks again for being with us today.

Right on. Thank you, David.

Cheers.

Talk soon again. Yeah, bye. Good luck.

What an interesting interview. Man, oh man, what an interesting man. What an interesting endeavor he has engaged for so many years. And, you know, challenging some of our long-held beliefs about immunity, immune function, about the so-called autonomic nervous system. And, you know, these 3 pillars he talked about: the breathing exercises, exposure to cold, and the 3rd pillar— I think that's valid no matter what you choose to pursue— And that is diligence, sticking to it, sticking to a plan that you have identified seems to be working for you. Thank you for watching The Empowering Neurologist today. I'm Dr. David Perlmutter, and we will be back soon.