Understanding The Iceman: The Complete Wim Hof

Living a life in full is a conversation you always wanted to have with that person who gave an amazing TED Talk or the author of one of your favorite books, or that inspirational Olympian you always wanted to know more about. It's graduate level conversations with those making a difference in the world and in the lives of others. This show brings you new ideas and approaches so that you can live a life in full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout and I hope you enjoy this episode. This episode is brought to you by the new Fellowship and certificate programs now being offered by the center for Global Initiatives. As you may know, the center is an all volunteer organization and the same is true for the faculty in these programs. So all the tuition goes to support the work of the center. It has always been our ethos to open source humanitarian intervention and these programs use the same approach in that all the materials we use are freely available all the time to anyone, everywhere, even if you don't take a course. We have built a world class faculty and contracts with other universities, medical schools and partnered NGOs. There are two fellowship tracks, one for those wishing to start their own nonprofit or non governmental organization and one for those seeking mentorship for career development and advancement and humanitarian work. Our initial certificate programs include humanitarian intervention, social entrepreneurship and global health practice. Please consider taking a world class masterclass with us. Visit alifeinfull.org and click on the CourseWorks tab to learn more. Thanks welcome to another episode of Living a Life in Full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout. Today's episode requires a little bit of a warning label for listeners to not recreate or reenact any of the activities we'll be discussing without first having proper training or medical clearance. If you're dealing with a serious medical condition, please consult with a healthcare professional before attempting any of the techniques we'll be discussing in this episode. Don't be a knucklehead. Having said that, I am very excited to have Wim Hof as our guest. Unless you've been living under a rock, you've likely heard of Wim and his work. He's a Dutch extreme athlete, also known as the Ironman for his ability to withstand freezing temperatures and environments. In terms of Guinness World Records, he has set over 20 including farthest swim under ice of 57.5 meters. And by the way, the day before in preparation for this, his cornea started to freeze so he was swimming blind under the frozen surface. He also set a record for the longest time in direct full body contact with ice for I believe A total of at least 16. He still holds the record for running the fastest half marathon above the Arctic Circle while barefoot. He recently did the horse stance for three hours in the snow. And it's quite something to see. I saw it on YouTube and he is hung by one finger from a rope tied between two hot air balloons over a mile high. And just wearing shorts, of course. And we'll put in links to all this if you want to check them out for yourself. And I'm sure I'm probably missing some other amazing kinds of records that he has as well. If that's not enough, he's also climbed to an altitude of 23,600ft on Mount Everest wearing nothing but shorts and shoes. Two years later, he reached the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in two days wearing only shorts and shoes. He ran a full marathon in a desert in southwest Africa without water. Wim is the developer of the WIM HOF method, and he credits that approach to all of these achievements. His fan base includes a diverse group of who's who, like Laird Hamilton, Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss, Russell Brand, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jesse Itzler, and the list just goes on. Wim has 1.4 million Instagram followers and runs sold out seminars throughout the globe. The yes Theory documentary on him has over 11 million views and a Vice documentary has over 6 million views. So after all that, I feel like I need to take a deep breath whim. So welcome to the show, my friend.

Thanks, Chris, for having me. Sounds like a well thought through introduction to the Iceman.

Oh, yeah. Well, welcome, welcome, welcome. So it's out of great respect and admiration. So you have set obviously a number of world records and done just really amazing kinds of things, but you've done them not in the context of like David Blaine, magic stunts or anything like that. You've really done them as like demonstrations of what's possible. Is that right?

Absolutely. My drive was and is to show that the human mind and the human body is capable of more than we have stated within medical science. When I was 12, I saw in the world depression, disease and the sorrow, the pollution or whatever was going on in the world. And I thought, this is not healthy. I'm gonna do something about it. Well, how, I don't know, but I made that statement when I was 12. Wow, that's 40, 49 years ago. And from there my journey only began. And very soon I reached five years later, I got into the cold, I met the cold water spontaneously. I went in and I Felt this is it. And from there I began to develop. Every day in every winter in the Netherlands, it's like Pennsylvania, Michigan, it's cold, it's cold outside. And so every winter you could find me in free over frozen lakes or channels, making a hole and entering in it and doing breathing exercises while being in the snow in my bare Chester. So just in short, and that for 25 years, alone, fully alone, because or was not knowing you, you talk about

that in your book, which I want to do a deep deconstruction of because the stories and the experiences are just, just amazing. And what I think people mistook. You did a, an event in New York some years ago that you talk about in the book and people had sort of misperceived that this was, your approach was like based upon some, you know, Tibetan approach to breathing and whatnot. And it really wasn't. So what spurred you at that young age to say, hey, I think I'll go bare chested and, and go be in water and go experience the cold as you did? What was the germ of that thought?

I was already into yoga and karate and kung fu and those things. Esoteric disciplines into traditions, books, languages, religions, etc. Belief systems and so forth. I was debatering my head and then I, I felt this attraction just to go into the water. And there I found that the debating stopped, full stop. I had to deal with survival. And it gave me that insight in the momentum in the here and now deeply. And that was exactly what I was looking for.

Wow.

So from there I began to build a deep experience of insight, of deep physiology. And that was really the answer. And from there I only developed more and more and more and more. And then like 30 years later, I met science. After doing a lot of records with the television, with Discovery Channel, National Geographic, all over the world, record after record after record after record. Because I learned that on my own 25 years of lonely practice. And then the scientists came in, they saw me doing stuff on TV which they considered to be impossible. And then they asked me, could you come and partake as a test subject in a cold physiological experiment? I did that and I flabbercasted all the parameters of the existed medical scientific understanding of what people are able within freezing temperatures. And then it only started there.

You know, I love that I've written a great deal about replication in science and difficulty in doing that and a lot of evidence based practice kinds of things. Medicine and you know, I think it's, it's people like you pioneering, you know, Like n of one kinds of approaches. But you, I guess a couple of things with that. You, you're not without your critics. So that's why I think it's nice to have, you know, legitimate science and universities, you know, hook you up and test you out and stuff. And a few episodes ago on, on this show I had a friend of yours, Scott Carney on and he was, he's an investigative journalist and he was out to kind of see what's, what's this whim stuff all about and wound up doing of a couple of chapters on you in his latest book, but did an entire book on you and his experience. So tell the audience what that was like, why he connected and then what happened after that.

Actually he was to debunk me because he just had written about a meditation practitioner of a school, a group of schoolers from the US going to India and was one girl who. They all went from there for the, you know, for the guru stuff, the, the meditation in the ashram. And it was one girl who committed suicide there. So he made a book out of that about that trauma, how things can go wrong when you are Ms. Lat. You can people drive to the depths if you mislead people. So he was coming to debunk me to show that I'm a fake. So he came all the way from where he lived then, that was California, to Poland in wintertime to be with me and to test me out and all. But two days later, Scott Carney, the anthropologist, also known anthropologist and investigative journalist, he was doing the same as everybody because he saw it works. He saw directly with this very critical mind and mindset coming that this really works. This is legit. And two days later, he was doing a horse stance for 45 minutes with me outside in barefoot and bare chested, outside in the snow singing Kumbaya, you know.

Yeah, yeah. And, and he went. You guys did Kilimanjaro together too, right? Shirtless.

Yes. We became sort of friends and we told stories and he wanted to complete it all by coming to the Kilimanjaro and to climb it. Not within two days, within 20 and a half hours.

Oh gee.

So 28, 28 and a half hours. We did it.

Wow.

And this is normally a mountain that can only be conquered five to seven, five to nine days. Yeah, that only 40% summit. That's the score. And a full dressed, fully dressed, we all went bare chested in our shorts up in 28 hours. You know, the oldest, the oldest person who was with us and that group was 76 years old. He was suffering from Lyme's disease.

Wow.

And he did it at 31 hours. In short, no former experience in mountaineering. You have to ask yourself, what is that? Now, just before entering in this conversation, we talked a little. But it is hormesis or mises and that is acute conscious stress inflicted upon your own body. Works like a vaccine. Suddenly the body becomes much more effective and much stronger. And that all consciously done. So it is within your willful control. That together with the manipulation of the biochemistry through certain kind of breathing techniques, by the way, anybody can do this. Then suddenly we are able to shatter all the physiological standards of what people are able to do. Say for example in high altitude, high altitude disease, how to accelerate and you know, shatter all the charge. Boom. That's what we did.

Wow. I, I did killy. Gosh. I think in 92 Wim and I took the five day route and I had. I remember.

That's good.

Yeah. Well, thanks. Yeah, you're very kind. I did, I kept my shirt on, but I can't like I. What I remember and this is obviously decades ago and it was very vivid and clear. I remember going from like that last little base camp at 16,000 to summit and my water bottle would freeze. You know, I had like a little, this is older tech, it was like a canteen kind of water bottle and I had to put it, you know, inside my Gore Tex jacket. If it would have been, you know, externally exposed, that water would have frozen. And I just, you know, and we had people, a person had to be emergency taken down. They had acute mountain sickness ams and you know, so this, this aspect, I do not take it as any kind of, you know, trivial matter that someone could do it and do it, you know, with, without, you know, layer of, you know, fleece and Gore Tex and boots and everything else. So it's, it's quite an amazing kind of thing. And then when you say, you know, you've got somebody that's, you know, in their 70s and suffering from Lyme disease, that sort of a thing. So these, all of these folks. So the audience knows it wasn't just, you know, kind of one and done in terms of training, but these are folks that went through the WIM HOF method, you know, with you in a very, you know, controlled. You were supervising, mentoring them during that process. Is that right? Is that how they prepped for it?

Yeah, sure, sure. Everybody needs to know what was proven by then in the university, how to manipulate the biochemistry, how to manipulate the high altitude adaptation. And to accelerate what? The way deficit, oxygen deficit is built up through ascending too fast in high altitude, that creates oedemia. I mean, if you go too fast and you keep on going, you get brain oedemia or lung oedemia, that means liquids, because of inflammation caused by the lack of oxygen outside. And we are just not able to maintain functionality up there. But with these breathing techniques, suddenly they were. And I tested them on four occasions, four afternoons. In four afternoons I had them trained and I said, hey man, you better do your homework, do it every day, go into the cold showers, etc, otherwise you're gonna suffer on the mountain. Yeah, you don't want that, I say, and I explained it well, everybody was more than prepared. So that, that is a very, very important matter to be very motivated.

Right?

Because the motivation is a willful mindset, how to rule over your body. That's called interoception. You learn to message signal into your own body. Let me tell you what kind of power that is. If I show in brain scans while being exposed to cold water and being motionless, just using my mindset and the cold water then is not able to make my skin temperature going down, means that that mindset is beating the physical stress inflicted. And that is our power of our mind. So I tell them, be motivated, get your mindset together, don't be a half and think that I'm gonna do it because I'm not your guru, I'm not your teacher, I'm not anything, I'm just a messenger from nature and I tell you how it works. And then I got with them on the mountain and everybody did it. Everybody did it. And young, old, with conditions with arthritis, with Crohn's disease, with cancer, they all did it. Beating the odds, all did it. So what is that? That should be much more investigated because we directly go into the white cells and the red cells for oxygen and how to interfere and influence into those metabolic processes was unknowing. And still it is unknown. And it should be. The world should have been alarmed, you know, the medical scientific world. But still it's all there and it's all done. It's all evidence based on. Yeah, I want the studies for that done in 2014.

Yeah, I want them.

Yes.

Gosh, that's. This is so rich with a variety of things. One, I want to get to those studies because I think that, you know, really helps, you know, kind of convince some of those, you know, folks that say, well, this isn't science or this is some kind of trick. So I want to Definitely go into those in depth. But. But the other part of it is, it's that.

I think so too.

Yeah. Well, a lot of, you know, like kind of what you're saying, if again, for the skeptics in the audience, you know, a lot of this is, in a sense with mindset is like what sports psychologists do. You know, anybody else, you know, no matter if you're running, if you're just a weekend warrior running a 5k, it's the same kind of thing. If you talk yourself into, I'm going to, you know, have a horrible time running this 5k or I cannot climb Kilimanjaro, you know, wearing swim trunks, then chances are that's going to be what's going to happen versus having that, you know, more positive mindset. So I think if people think about it that way. Yeah, yeah.

And now, Professor Music from Detroit, Wayne State University Psychiatry. He tells. After testing me in brain scans, Wim Hof has found the secret of placebo. The power of suggestion.

Yeah.

The power of suggest. If somebody gives you a sugar pill but you think it is a real one and it cures you, what the heck? What is that? That is not something abstract. That is a reality. Only now I put a finger on it, I say that reality, you are able to activate it, you by yourself and you can increase it even. That's the power of placebo.

Yeah. And you've demonstrated that as well with these studies because again, the natural thing to say is, well, Wim special. Wim's got some kind of whims, you know, got some metabolic, biological, you know, kind of thing that that very few other people have or that no one else has. So of course Wim can do all these things. But then you said, well, okay, let's teach it to other people. And then you did. I don't know if that was a. One of the studies at Wayne State or if that was one of the ones in the Netherlands, but yeah, tell us about that. How did you train, folks? And then you guys were given a talks.

There it is. So 16,234 people are being experimented within the endotoxemia model experiment. That is endotoxemia's E. Coli, part of E. Coli bacteria, which makes the immune system, the innate immune system really activated. That means that he interleukins say number one, number six, number eight, number ten, number eleven. And the tumor necrosis factor, it all works on those. It's inflammation that normally is caused by the injection of an E. Coli bacteria. A controlled experiment wherein people become sick between three to six hours. So 16, 16,130 people, 34 people became sick with that model. And then suddenly I came there and I didn't show any inflammation. And then I said. Then they said, but you are an anomaly. You are an exception. That confirms the rule. I said, okay, that's not true. What I can do, anybody can do, I will show you. Give me a group of people. Finally they gave me a group of people. And we did a comparative study with 18 people I trained and 12 people who were not trained. And 12 people of my 18 people were randomly chosen. So 12 people got the endotoxemia and the control group also got endotoxemia. Injected. The 12 injected did not became sick. And the 12 who got the injection all became sick. And then they looked inside the blood and then they saw that the interleukins so the inflammatory markers were all suppressed because of these breathing techniques activating the adrenal axis, the epinephrine. The epinephrine so much directly within a quarter of the E. Coli bacteria reaction upon the innate immune system, the inflammation. This so called cytokine storm. By the way, the damaging factor of COVID 19 is the cytokine storm. We got that cytokine storm suppressed within a quarter of an hour. 100% score. And that was not shown in medical history before. It was not only that the cytokine storm was being suppressed at will, they saw that the auto. The autonomic nervous system was being activated. And that related with the immune system is a far deeper control over our physiology than ever in medical science has been showing. And now it is important to show the world. We already did it and we published in the best of papers and there was. But they. They should bring this widespread to everybody because everybody is able to do this. It's not so difficult.

Right. So when someone. When someone's prepping to do Kilimanjaro or someone's prepping to be part of a controlled trial, do they like. Is it. Does the person need to practice the breathing method like X number of times? Do they do the breathing method during the process of being injected and after being injected or as they're going up the side of the mountain or.

Nope, nope. Of course you need a normal basic condition, but then you need your motivation. Let's get back to the motivation. The motivation is ability to signal your own physiology in the depth that is interoception. I showed that in Detroit, but it's commonly known as motivation. Being motivated. That's it. It's commonly known as mode. No doubts. Notice where it's neurological investment that is motivation. Okay, so there it is. That is number one. And then if you do the breathing, if the people who are listening now, if they only do once this breathing technique, then they really feel that there is a new understanding, that there is a new way to hack into your own deeper physiology. Deeper than was considered possible. And it's all evidence based. I can begin the story about all these papers. How it affects the endocrine system, the. How do you say the, the brainstem, the periaqueductal gray hemisphere, how to tap into the lymphocytes how to tap into the white cells, the T cells and B cells in the bone marrow into the lymphatic system, etc. It's all there. We found a way to go there. Where earlier thought within medical paradigm it was impossible for humans to go to. And there we are now. And everybody is able to do it like in, in an hour.

Wow. Well, it's one hour.

Everybody is able to show themselves to go deeper than they have gone ever before.

Wow. Well you, you know there's. There's been these, the, the articles and they've been published in. We'll. We'll probably get into citing them too. But they've been published in very respected, you know, high impact journals and you've, you know, there's been books written about you and stories written about you and just a recent issue of Outside magazine. Wonderful profile and documentaries and all that. And it seems like I want to talk about your book and this and because a lot of these things are kind of unpacked in there. The new book is called the WIM HOF Method. Activate youe Full Human Potential was the genesis about the. Behind this to kind of put it all together in a. In one volume rather than people having to go research it themselves. Well, congratulations because I think you've, you've nailed it. And again because I've been following your career and your work for a number of years. I found out. Thank you. Absolutely. I found out quite a few things that.

And I can sense, I can sense you are also critical. So you know how to look things to, you know, with the usage of the lamp. That means with your mind, with your analytical mind. You got it. I, I can sense it.

Well, thanks.

No, no nonsense book. Yeah, no bullshit. The real thing, it works. Here it is. Keep it simple and just do it. Then you don't need to buy anything of me. Just do it and experience it by yourself. We have developed A free app and it doesn't cost anything. And we put a lot of money inside to develop better, to make it better and better to make sure that everybody free is able to take this on. There we are.

Well, it's also nice your book, Pardon me has a kind of an autobiographical. Pardon me. Autobiographical part that I think a lot of the other articles and books and documentaries and things don't quite go into as much. And I think it's sort of also nice the way that you talk about these things in a very transparent. I mean, literally, you go back to your birth and relationship with your mother and how, you know, life sort of unfolded with that. So it really is a. An origin story.

It is nice because we all come from our mama and we are all the same. We are like one family on this whole world. And all our difference. It should shut up, it should be cut out, because we are able to show biochemically that we are looking for the same thing, and that is happiness, strength and health. We want our soul and it's time. We are showing how the soul is being reached through studies that show within the DNA how the building stones of life, how everything is built up logically and understandably, transparently and accessible. And this is what I'm doing. I come from nature. I came from nature, I come from Mama, and I grew up. I went into Mother Nature and I came through science. And now I come to tell this works. It's not me, it's from nature. And there is more where that is found. And it's for everybody. Plenty. So let's share it.

Well, you. It's. It seems like there's a variety of different kinds of applications of this. You know, we'll. We'll get into maybe, you know, I think all of them. But let's start off with looking at it in the context of athleticism. I mean, you've. You've, you know, obviously climbed and taught other people to climb in in very harsh circumstances and conditions, and you've run in, in the super cold and the super hot. But you've also done Navy SEAL training, you' trained MMA fighters, things like that. So the application of this. Let's talk a little bit about how you've seen it be applied to whatever practice meditative or athletic, and how does it work for someone that wants to either manage their environment better or improve their athletic performance?

Yes, we are built from the prehistoric physiology to endure the environmental stress that has built up our bodies, to be able to adapt, that adaptive power is a great power, and it Revises every time it is stimulated. The whole body, the neurology, the physiology, the cardiovascular system, the whole thing. While living in a comfort zone behavior we actually alienate from that stimulation. And thus the deeper physiology is like dormant, it's on a standby. It's like a muscle that is not trained anymore. And logically the effectivity of your performance will go down. And only doing sports is not enough to get into athletic high performance levels and improve that. You need the mind, you need the biochemistry within your control. And I've been showing that how to do. If you make your body more alkaline in the muscle tissue, then people just by changing 30, 40 breaths, doing them deeply inside out, then blowing off. So with empty lungs in retention, stopping of breathing, refraining of breathing, and then do push ups. You would do more push ups than you would be able to do normally breathing and all. And you would sense no fatigue, you just keep on. Why? Because our angle to control our biochemistry has changed completely. And then suddenly our will is. The neurology of our will is signaling. We want to do the best. This is what I say to these people. Within two minutes you only give your best, then the best will come because you are built to be the best of yourself and to be within your control. Only we got alienated from our biochemistry because it is sort of dormant, but now it is fully activated through this breathing. And then suddenly like Scott Carney, the investigative journalist who could barely do 20 push ups, he did 40 push ups that said that day when he said I can barely do 20, that's all. So and at this long time that I did these push ups, so it will probably be less. I say do this breathing. And he did this breathing like 30, 40 deep breaths, letting go fully in, letting go and just following that. And now you give it all after the. You stop your breathing after the exhalation. And he did it and he went like a machine. What is that? That is performance. Yeah, that's performance. That's the way the 76 year old man suffering from limes was able inshores to climb the Kilimanjaro in 31 hours. 76 years old, no former experience in mountaineering. Gosh, what is that guys? That is our deep possible control awaiting for us. Get into this and you through the free app and prove it to yourself. Feeling is understanding.

Yeah. Scott has become really kind of, you know, from being, you know, investigating things and really I think being kind of, you know, shown what could be done and understanding it from as you've described really Kind of a physiological, biological, you know, scientific basis. I saw he was on the Dr. Oz show a while back and did, did that exact experiment that you were talking about with Dr. Oz and with two random people from the audience. And they all very surprisingly sort of outperformed themselves in terms of what they were thinking of what they could do. And I'm a practitioner, it's part of my daily routine. And one of the things that you talk about in that is that it's sort of like there's no other animal that. That purposely kind of goes through this oxygen deprivation, so to speak. And as you coach a person through the practice, I find it very helpful to kind of you talk about the whole breathing approach, which we don't need to mimic right now. But there's part of me that when I do it, you have sort of this psychological thing of like, oh, I'm not breathing or you've got the tingling feeling, that sort of a thing. And then, then if you. For me, and I don't know how generalizable this is, but maybe five seconds past that, then it's fine. It's sort of like that back to the hormesis, the managing of discomfort, knowing that everything's fine. I'm not like you, Wim, under an ice floe freezing my corneas. But I'm in my house. I'm going to be okay.

I was just a guinea pig.

I appreciate you doing that.

Yeah, yeah. I had to go as far to. To beat myself, to beat my own condition mind. And then finding out the way, it's like dialectics. It's not this, it's not this, but there I need to go.

Yeah.

Then it's not this. It is not this. There I gotta go. Because I had to go into the unknown to find out what is a possible cure for so many problems within the human race about related to happiness, to health and to strength. I had to go into nature. So I went far and then finally I came out. And now it is simple, it is simplified and strong and evidence based.

Speaking of the mental and the psychological, do you feel comfortable talking about your chapter six story?

Oh, yeah, anytime.

Okay.

He said that about my wife.

Yes.

95. Yes. She just one. Just before she jumped down eight stories down and she kissed her babies goodbye. I had four children with her. I still have them and I work with them right now. We got a great company together. We love each other. We got a very deep tie, very effective, great chemistry. But back then we were the victims of the contemporary psychiatric understanding of what Schizophrenia or manic depression was. And back then I had no power. Now I'm working with the best psychiatrists and they say this is a transformational technique that will change mental health care. I now know how to regulate the mood, how to enter into the deepest part of the brain all at will and show it in brain scans. But back then I was torn in my heart after her passing in situations of life in the depth where I had absolutely no control over. But then the journey began and the seeking began and the agony began and the healing began because I had four children with little money and I was left back then.

Well, I just want to applaud you for the strength that must have taken and I am so sorry for, you know, the impact that that had on you and your life and your family. And, you know, it's also sharing those kinds of things. I think these absolutely. These days, people, I think too often, you know, suffer in silence about this and the fact that someone of your exposure and caliber can kind of bring light to it and talk about, you know, here's, you know, there is hope and there are.

Let me tell you, let me tell you. I'm a dropout of school. But a man, a simple man who is a father of four, only wants his right to live and to serve. Don't mess with a person like that because he's going to stand up, he's going to overthrow the psychiatric way of approaching people with all these ailments. I will show how to bring down depression. And I'm doing this right now in cooperation with the University of San Francisco and Detroit. I'm doing it. It's happening right now in December. We get the results, so it's coming out anyway. We will beat the mind, the terror of the mind, in any shape. I will show how to regulate, how to have and develop in no time in absolute sense of control over how to regulate your mind. That is only natural. It's logical.

The studies you talked about with the inflammatory markers, I'll put links in the show notes for this were published in. I said we would probably get to it. And here we are like we're talking publishing them in Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and for those non academics in the audience, those are probably, again, some of the highest prestige, high impact scientific journals. Studies do not just fall into that and get published. They are gone through a rigorous peer review for solid methodology and analysis and stuff. So again, I have to tip my hat to you on that, Wim. And now with these upcoming studies that are more psychologically oriented. Tell us a little bit about what's going on with those and what we can expect.

So in Detroit, there is a study on people who have a bipolar mental disorder. So it's ongoing and it looks promising. The other one is in San Francisco. It's on depression. And also that one looks very promising. And then we have another study on the DNA. How to influence the DNA positively, the telomeres, which is about the longevity and the cell division within the cell, and then how to protect the cell of inflammation and oxidative stress. This is going to be a game changer. And it shows a new direction for medical science to explore. That is called horosis. Horosis is a short period of exposing yourself to acute stress, all consciously done. Like going into freezing water for a couple of minutes or everybody is able to do it. It's not nice to experience it as a person, but the feeling afterwards is amazing. Why? Because the person goes with this conditioned conditioning into the water. And then suddenly the adaptive power of us, that is through the hormonal system, it is the adrenal axis is able to set in, make the body so strong that he is able to sit within freezing water and be relaxed. That means he accumulated a great force inside that is as strong as the freezing water upon the body. At that moment, the immune system is highly alert. Then bacteria and viruses, really, they have no chance because the high alertness of the immune system through the acute stress upon the body, activating the adrenal axis to a state. I mean, they took the blood of people doing this and they saw people doing this or the breathing exercises. It's both hormesis and it showed that the level of adrenaline spiked more than somebody going into its first bungee jump.

I'll be darn. Wow.

You see?

Yeah.

That is a reset of the body. It's a new area and there is so much to gain there. And let me tell you, every person in the world is able to do it because it's not about forcing. It's not about pain at all and overcoming more and being tough. No, it's about awakening a deeper, stronger connection with our own physiology. It's there and we have found a way to get into it and to make it your own. Anybody can do it.

So I know some scientists along the line have said, well, back to the. A little bit of the, you know, whims unique. And there are some studies about adipose body fat, dark fat. And people said, well, people of wims age typically like wim's got that Level of physiology like a teenager would or someone in their 20s. So someone said, well, aha, then this is it. This is how he's able to do that. But then there's this kind of nice handy DNA companion subject. Tell us about Andre.

Yes, Andre is my genetical identical twin. So he should be able very much to do what I do because I'm an anomaly. I'm the exception that confirms the rule. But he is not able to do it because he is not trained. He is not trained as I am. I expose myself to cold water. I do these breathing exercises. So. And that I do this on regular basis. So I am allergic. Within my body, that becomes my conditioning. And that conditioning suddenly is having an immune system that never gets sick because it's much more alert. So he is not able to do what I do simply because he is not trained. Now I got a group of people who were not my twins. We had no identical genetical relationship whatsoever. And within four days I made them able to do what I was doing. And they got the injection and they showed also that they were able to tap into the autonomic nervous system, into the innate immune system, into the endocrine system. All thought of inaccessible by humans at will. And now it was all there. It doesn't depend on genetical twins or this or that. It's not dependent on a specific physiology or something. Anybody can do this.

That's, I think, one of the things that's appealing and compelling to me that the, you know, the. I know that there can be a risk. And again, this is why we have the disclaimers, you know, the shallow water blackouts and stuff of people doing dumb things with good techniques. But the, the, the aspect of, you know, like someone, you know, there's a lot of fringy folks out there doing biohacking that, you know, they're doing DNA hacking and, and you know, their own little crispr tests and their CRISPR modifications that are all in my book, you know, quite.

That is that, that's a nice area. The crispr.

Yeah, yeah, I think there's.

Yeah, that is, that is the new thing out of 1987 or something. And crispr about cutting and pasting sort of.

So, right.

That's a simple way right out of their own bone marrow. Now let me tell you, through these techniques, you get into the bone marrow, you will activate the T cells and the B cells, you will go into the lymphatic system and create lymphocytes. Freedom. That's the, that is this technique all about it. Is we don't need CRISPR if we get into this because we are our own Doctors, our own CRISPRs inside with the ability to enter as deep.

Yeah.

So it should be much more investigated. I only gave a couple of indications of how it can work. I gave a direction. But there is a whole vast new map go there. It's a new world world. And that new world should be absolutely investigated by real investigative spirits. It's like the new West. Yeah, the new west.

That's right.

It's the promised land.

Yeah.

I think we promised land and I. We are the ones.

I think, you know, there's a, maybe a more open mindedness to looking at things because people are looking at and seeing to issues of health and depression and mental health, you know, issues of exercise and issues of diet and issues of microbiome and these things. And I think this is like one of those components that goes right back into it with little side effect, you know, if tweaking other kinds of things, you know, can be perhaps a little bit, you know, dangerous for people. But I know, I believe, I know. So clarify for me that like some of the contraindications for the WIM HOF method might be pregnant women are there. Is that correct? And are there any, anybody else that

really don't go into the activation or deep activation of the adrenal axis when you are pregnant? What happens if a wolf, when a wolf is hunting sheep, then they get spontaneous abortions. While running. While running. That is our nature. But when something is going on, danger from within, that means autoimmune diseases, depression or we need to performance. It's all the fight flight danger is coming. Then I know how to get into that. For those who have these conditions, I say still you have a way to obey a temper third way of the WIM HOF method. Exercising you will be able to get all the benefits. To those women. I say don't do these deep breathing exercises only when you birth the child. But while, while you are pregnant you can do conscious breathing. Means more oxygen is coming in and it will benefit the fetus. It will go into the blood and that will enter into the womb. That is one thing. And to those women who are pregnant, please do cold showers because the blood flow will be helped by exercising, stimulating the millions of little muscles around her arteries, capillaries and veins throughout the body. And that will benefit the blood flow going also to the child with all the vitamins and the nutrients and the oxygen. So please do that. It brings your heart rate also down because all These millions little muscles will help with the blood flow so the heart doesn't need to compensate for a lower condition of the millions of little muscles. And what it results in is that you learn to deal with pain. Cold is pain, but you learn to deal with it and it becomes really addictive. Then your stress levels go way down because your heart rate goes down with 20 to 30 beats a minute, 24 hours a day. And then the energy goes up, up because the nutrients, the oxygen and vitamins are being transported a lot better through the system and reaching the whim. So I to those people, I don't go into this kind of breathing because that's for when you get the baby, right? Get the baby.

So you. You have mentioned that there are a variety of different kinds of tools available for the WIM HOF method. And I know the app. I have the app, the book which I also have. There are retreats, there's online courses, there's even people that are into it and then want to help share the news and share the approach of trainer certification. Can you talk about those? Like if somebody. Someone's kind of WIM HOF method curious, where's a good place for them to start?

First to start with feeling, experiencing it for yourself. You need to convince yourself through your own experience. If you don't see an experience, a sensation or a feeling happen which is completely different, more than significant like in science, more than is significantly shown before now it is changed. Now that is evidence. Find the evidence you for yourself then any then come into the community. If you got something, a condition then There are about 150,000 people who healed of their ailments and they have shaped up like a. A free hospital, open hospital with all the advice coming from their own way how they cured and everybody every, you know, from arthritis to cancer to asthma, Crohn's disease or ulcerosis or depression, it doesn't matter. Any ailment is there been experienced by people and they will talk about it. It's not that you got to do this otherwise you don't become better and things. No, it's open, it's free, it's nice. It's natural wisdom we share with each other. Quite logical. And there it is. That is a community there for all your questions there is a answer then of course we do sometimes retreats, retreats where you can meet me and I talk. I talk because I believe in this. I believe in this and I'm developing every day and you hear me talking. I talk sense. But I was a dropout and now I'm working with the best professors and doctors in the whole wide world. And that is because I did 40 years of field work outside. And it needs to be collected it through rigorous science and the scrutiny of science and comparison because it's so rich, it's so there. And that is what we got inside. So sometimes people want to experience it with me. So what I do is make you able within a couple of days to go in a freezing mountain climbing with deep freezing temperatures because of wind chill and all in your short and then having a great time. If you want that, hey, that's okay. Come. But let me say there is a free app and there is a book and if you if you had enough, because there is a plenty inside you can experience by yourself that it's okay that you are able to have a much better control within yourself. If you want more, there is more. But it is to experience more with me and to do a retreat, have some fun, play music, sit around the fire and talk about the sense of life. I love it.

That's great.

Anytime. Welcome.

Well Wim, this has been great. I just have a few more questions if you don't mind. They're kind of in no particular organization but if

I do mind if you haven't any questions.

Okay, well good. Then this will be wrapping up for me. So like I know that like we talked about the ice exposure world record stuff in the. In the intro and I know that I think there's been a couple of folks that have, you know, exceeded that. Do you know if they're using a similar technique to your method or do you have any knowledge or data on kind of how it is that those folks have managed that?

I always said what I can do, anybody can do. But you have to follow my steps. Because what I found I found out by myself by as early here mentioned like dialectics. Oh, not this way, not this way. Oh, this way. Not this way, not this way, this way. You know, with falling I learned to walk my my way and then get far. But you have to try once. And then in those footsteps those people came in and now they have become even better. Like exceeding my limits. Not all of them of course. I'm very multiple. I went a lot of areas into running, into swimming, into plugging, into standing in the ice, into going into the desert. I mean all the extremes and more. I did it.

Yeah.

And then sometimes one guy in one discipline is able to exceed me. But before that he had to go within the steps I already took.

Got it.

So that's great. It's great that that is done well.

And, and I think that maybe leads up to maybe now I have the answer to what was my next question. It seems like obviously you're nicknamed the Iceman. And a lot of the things with dealing with cold and cold, extreme environments, it's sort of like, I mean any of us just about can go turn on a cold shower, take a cold bath or get an ice bath or whatever. It's harder to do that with heat. It's not like someone can just turn up their furnace or hop in their oven or something and do that. But it seemed like, like your waterless desert marathon. I was thinking originally that if cold was part of the secret sauce of the WIM HOF method and hormesis, my question was why the desert? But my guess is the answer because of hormesis as well, that the desert provided a different kind of stress, a heat stress instead of cold stress.

It was the logic temperature stress, thermal stress. Thermal stress. So that is done by the hypothalamus. Hypothalamus is a thermal regulator in the body. So if it is good that I'm able to stay with the right core body temperature in very cold, harsh outside temperatures upon my body and stay with 37 degrees, you know, like warm blood, a constant flow of the right temperature within me while being exposed. Then, then I asked myself, after doing the. The full marathon beyond the polar circle, mid January, in short, when I did that, I said I did everything in the cold. Let me go now into the heat. And if I'm able to maintain core body temperature in the cold, that is thermal control, that I should be able to do that in the heat as well. It just popped up as an idea half a year later. I was in the desert, Namib Desert, and I did it without drinking.

Yeah, that is just. Gosh, I just kind of have to get my head around that. I know from, you know, some sports medicine, there's also been some sad circumstances. I remember there was a course I took and they were talking about a fellow. The theory, the, the thinking at the time scientifically was that once, this is horrible, but once a person passes away that their body temperature will start to drop for obvious physiological reasons. And there was a fellow, very sadly, I think it was the Boston Marathon who had. It was a really horrible year for heat. And he had collapsed and was taken to an emergency room and had a thermometer internally placed and sort of forgotten about in again, a morbid sad sense. But then someone came back to you know, his body and found that his temperature had continued to increase even post mortem. So it never really occurred to me, you know, in the context of what you're talking about, of maintaining constant. I'm always thinking about staying warmer in cold as opposed to, you know, moderating that in a heat, extreme environment. That is just really fascinating to me. So thank you for that clarification. I also just have to ask, do you ever get sick?

No.

It shouldn't surprise me.

Wait a minute. Wait a minute, Chris. I get sick of that question.

Okay, touche. All right, fair enough. Fair enough.

I love laughing. I love laughing. And good old bad daddy jokes.

So speaking of good stuff, then maybe we can wrap up on some other high notes. You. I believe so. Correct me if this is incorrect. You donate funds like when people come join you on Kilimanjaro climbs. And presuming when things maybe get a little bit more back to whatever, you know, normal is. And was that the funds from that go to be donated to local residents in that area is. Do I have my facts straight on that? Is that right?

Yes. Yes. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I'm only starting with. With that, with the Garden of Eden project.

Oh.

And they are right now drilling for water because what is life together with the circle of life. The circle of life are the, you know, the hundreds or the millions of zebras and wildebeest, elephants, giraffes, etc, they produce a lot of. A lot of. And that is a fertilizer once it mixes with their water, but there is no water. So we drill for water now and that gives water not only for the. All the zebras and the wildebeest and the fertilizing, so grass will come in the circle of life that is Kenya and Tanzania, but also the Maasai with their cattle. So they live in harmony with the circle of life with the elephants, the lions, the zebras and all. And everybody is then happy. It's the Garden of Eden.

That's great.

I want to bring. I want to bring tourists over there. And then without a car, they will go into the land of the lion together with the Maasai warriors.

Wow.

And that.

That.

That is the way the Bible explained we are the Garden of Eden, where everybody is at peace with each other. That is possible. And I'm going to create it. I'm doing this right now. And we are going to climb the Kilimanjaro with 32 people. And they all pay like 12 and a half thousand euros a person. So we can do like 20 of these wells. And that will bring prosperity. It will bring water. Water is life and that's the Garden of Eden. So. But another thing is I want to finance a orphanage forever. Like not like a hundred of years. That's my is another goal, you know, offline.

You and I will have to connect again because I founded a kindergarten in Tanzania as a result of my climbing over there. So I think we've got maybe kind of some overlapping circles and interests and maybe even some friends and colleagues. So I'll do a one on one follow up with you after this. We'll have to talk more about that. I did not know about the Eden Project. That is just wonderful. So. In closing, what are the best ways for our audience to connect with you, to learn more, to do some self exploration with the method?

Please find that you are much more than up till now was thought possible. Go into the free app and do it. Just do it. Don't think too much about it. Just do it.

Just do it. Good.

All the science is done so you don't need to mind about it. Just do it and you will find out how much more beauty there is inside of you. Just do it.

Yeah, I love it. So in closing, I just want to say I've read that you have been said to be a counterculture hero and that your work helps to challenge our self limiting beliefs and that we're capable of more than we think and fundamentally. Wim, I want to thank you for for that and just for being so generous with your time and your materials and the wonderful work that you do. Thank you so much my friend.

Great. You're also great man Chris, for bringing us to all all these beautiful people.

All right, thank you. Until next time. Thanks Wim.

Right on Chris. Great going.

Living Life Alifein Full is a production of Stout Media, a subsidiary of Gordian Knot LLC. Assistant producer Gracie Wong Music Dan O' Brien executive producer and host Dr. Chris Stout to learn more, stop by our website at lifeinfull for show notes and please recommend us to your friends and subscribe on your favorite platform. And as for the obligatory disclaimer, this podcast is for general information uses only and does not constitute the practice of psychology, medicine, nutrition or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical or psychological advice. No doctor patient relationship is formed. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I take conflicts of interest seriously. For all of my disclosures as well as show notes, please see livingalifeinfull.org podcast and my LinkedIn profile. Thanks. And until next time,