#1 Russell Brand

I got Russell Brand, man. This, he is the Reverend, I'm the Iceman coming together. It's like Superman and Batman come together and what do they do? They just fight for the good.

He holds 26 world records for achievements that for most people seem impossible and dangerous.

The cold is my teacher. To me, it's like God.

He might well be one of the most unique humans Wim Hof is changing scientists' understanding of how the body works.

I created a method. The components are breathing, mindset, and cold.

Wim Hof, the Iceman.

Hi guys, I'm Wim, Wim Hof, and every time I go into the unknown, through my podcasts, exploring, exploring life into the depth, breaking the ice to go where nobody has gone before.

You're listening to the Wim Hof Podcast, a Monk Studios original.

And on my side, my son Einar. He's here to keep me on track, which he's not able to do, by the way, but He will try it, and together we got a great chemistry. And we got Anne, our producer. She makes things really work.

So I'm Anne, and we're recording from the beating heart of the Wim Hof Center in Wim's enchanting greenhouse, surrounded by a lot of beautiful plants. And our first guest is a well-known comedian, actor, best-selling author, a public thought leader, a passionate mental health advocate, and above all, a good friend of Wim's, the one and only Russell Brand. Guys, what's your connection to him?

He invited my dad like a year and a half, 2 years, just before Corona to come over to do a podcast.

But have you been—

have the both of you been to his house?

Yeah.

How was that? Yes, his house. He's just got a marvelous place along the river. I like a place like that. You know, you can jump into the cold river all year round. It's like my swimming pool here, but it's not the Thames, of course. I only use it in wintertime, not in summertime. In summertime, I think it's warm like pee, but in the winter, it's cold, freezing cold. I go in and I feel cleansed. So he's got the Thames over there. He's got a great place, a great family, and he made us lunch. Yeah, the ice tank. He made us lunch. It wasn't just the podcast. It was like a very nice— I mean, it's coming together. It's like, I think he knows to bring home back to everybody in the world and discuss about why, where is the love? And because that is too simple, that's why he challenges everybody in the world to talk about it and to go deeply into it. It's a great man and a good pal. So we went into the ice tank together, into the sauna, into the Thames, talking about, making jokes, getting into his eloquence of speech. And then I find, because I resonate I got eloquence myself, man.

I'm just thinking you went into the sauna with Russell Brand. Like, that's every girl's dream.

Oh, really? Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, nice. Let me come out of the closet. I like Russell. Oh, no, it's not true. I mean, I love him. And yeah, and he wrote a book, Russell.

Yep.

And I mean, my lucky number is 7. Best chapter of the book. That's— and it's actually— it was chapter 7. It's Wim Hof. It's not that he wrote a book. He like, um, it's a— on Audible, an Audible original. Yeah, that's it. Read the book, especially chapter 7. Listen to the book. Oh, listen to it. Yes, listen to me. I recognize his soul. It is pure. It's out there. It's expressed. It's beautiful, amazing colors, amazing speed. There is Russell Brand.

Hello, beautiful man.

Hey, you! Yeah, magnificent, beautiful, brilliant man. I call you the Reverend. Reverend Brand.

I take that, man. I'll take that from you, Wim Hof.

Thanks.

It's so lovely to see you. And I'm honored to be your first guest, Wim Hof, after I've learned so much from you and enjoyed your company so much.

Well, I got a sort of a song right now. It's an ode to you. I was sitting on the chair and this came up. Hey, hey, hey, wanna fly away. Being with my bro, way to go. Reverend Brand, God sent, he's in the house. He took his vow. Transcending zone, words from the heart. And that is his song, and that is his song. I'm welcoming your soul, bring light to us all. Bring light to us all. Bring light to us all. Yeah, man.

Hey, thank you. How lovely for you to serenade me, to give me this beautiful ode, to put your incredible attention into that lovely endeavor. That's so lovely. It made me feel like, um, that we once again created a spiritual community on Earth and that people spoke to each other in a sacred way and honored one another through play and through song and through love, and that all our relationships weren't always materialized and desacralized. Very beautiful. What a beautiful, beautiful, unusual, strange, brilliant, strong— let me say strange again— strange, wonderful man you are.

Yeah, I had, um, I listened this morning to our podcast when I was in your beautiful house near the Thames. That makes really beautiful. I would jump in every day there, and you know, we did things there, and we met, and it's all spontaneous. Yet we have very serious research done within ourselves, emerging in this society, coming in and trusting everybody, and then getting fucked up, and then getting unfucked, as you say, you know, in the 12 steps, which is a great way to get out of here. And now we are talking from the future into this moment. And this is what you have been showing to me in the book. By the way, when I came to chapter number 7, man, I was honored, of course, of course. But you know, revelation time, that's you. You are the reverend. You are great. Great with words. It's like music.

Thanks, Wim, because what I'm trying to live— come in if you want— what I'm trying to live is a sort of a sacred and religious life right now. What do you want, little person? I found a way in from the bathroom door because Tamaya's locking that big door. You're very clever, so you found a different way in. That's what we must do. If people block our passage, we must look for different ways. We must always investigate new pathways. There you go, you've found the egg. You took the journey, you made the decision, and you were rewarded with the egg. Perhaps, Wim, we can learn nothing more than if we are willing to pursue our ingenuity, if we are willing to look for the second door, if when life fails you, if when life lets you down, if when the material world fails you as the material world must, you look for a second door, a second route, then it is possible that you will find the egg, the great symbol of rebirth and change. Your section of my book Revelation, Wim, was the first thing that I wrote. The intention with Revelation was for it to be a kind of compendium of spiritual teachings received from great masters. I was going to go around, you know, I started with you, I was going to go meet other people, Amma, Dalai Lama, whoever, you know, like sort of like the top people and really get there and really experience it. That is Daddy's got to do a little work. Do you wanna do a drawing? Do you wanna take over?

So lovely. I got, you know, I got a 3-year-old myself and they are right now in Australia. Just 2 days ago they went and because of the corona and all that nonsense, sorry, it's maybe political, but look, that is not political. What you got right there, that is not political, that transcends any politics and bollocks, et cetera. They are telling simply from the innocence here and now what to do. We have to open up the second door, the second door, which is new, innocent, now, fresh. And that sacred energy you are explaining so well through stories and you weaving it in. And I love to listen. Man, I'm not a reader or listener, I'm not a listener to any books, but hey, you opened it up again. Thanks for that.

Thank you. Look, what I think is important, and I think what you're doing with your work, is sacralizing the experience of life again, making it sacred. We evolved from cultures— excuse me— where everything was regarded as sacred, where our relationship with the land was sacred, our relationship with sex was sacred, our relationship with one another was sacred, and we've made everything commodity. Sex is a commodity. Our relationships are a commodity, food is a commodity. We have extracted sacredness from everyday life. And, you know, obviously I know you, and I write in, in Revelation about your story, and it seems like— it seems significant to me that your personal revelation and epiphany came after great pain and personal tragedy, and from that place you were able to find your own understanding of God. And I think that's what we all have to find. I think that one of the challenges is, is that, you know, all of us have an individual path. All of us have a different journey, but there are ways we can teach and help each other. And to see the kind of explosion of awareness around breathwork, at which you're the forefront— I spoke to a guy called James Nesta on my podcast Under the Skin a couple of weeks ago, you know, and we were— and I was wondering, you know, when your name was going to come up, because we're talking about breath from a scientific perspective. He's talking about freediving, then eventually, sure enough, he talks about you, talks about Wim Hof and how you're bringing these techniques back to the forefront, how effective they are. You know, I you use your app regular, not every day, but like, you know, normally by round 4 or round 5, I can get to 4-minute holds with him. And I remember the first time we did it, like, on my podcast, I could only do— I could only do like a minute, you know.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now I can do like 4-minute holds. And of course, like, what I think this is, is awakening anatomical systems, is awakening biochemical systems, but clearly too is awakening deeper systems, you know, systems, systems that are hard to track, hard to observe. There are dormant systems in us that we don't know how to interact with, and it seems that the kind of work that you're doing helps us to access them.

I'm doing top research right now with, on the DNA and depression in San Francisco, and it's going to be getting out in June. So they see it, these top researchers, really the top of the top in the world on the DNA. They see it as an absolute new way for humanity to exercise deeper systems to be awakened and activated. Like, hey man, we are now in anxiety and the immune system, and both we can tackle easy within a quarter of an hour just through controlling the life force. And how difficult it is, 20 years of training like a yogi. No, it takes 10 minutes. In 10 minutes, we are able to tap deeper than people doing 4 hours of mindfulness for years. And that is because the breath is the alchemy, and we are able to touch it. And now beyond speculation, we are able to reveal the secrets of the past, the secrets of the esotericism, and the heart opening up to the way nature meant it to be. And there we are up front. And I salute you as singing praise of that what is possible, of that what should be. And I endorse it out of nature, evidence-based, through science. Nature has got all the answers we as humans cannot come up with. We can shoot people to the moon and Mars, but we cannot make happiness, strength, and health happening. And that is love. And that is what I want to give to that little innocent, beautiful being and my little son and all the other sons and daughters in the world. And with that, all the living beings and in harmony with nature. We are going to shift science and we already actually did that. And we both advocating therein. Now it is, in Dutch there is a saying and it says, "You can be right, but it still needs to be acknowledged." And so we need to get to the masses. And I, with you, I want to find out in this episode, this podcast, whatever it is, it's a medium, I wanna find out what is the synthesis in power that makes us able to get to millions— no, not millions, billions of people, because that's my target.

In a sense, gosh, it's like a second Tower of Babel, you know. Once we had a common language and now we are scattered around the world all speaking different languages. I feel that sort of perhaps the task of those of us that are gently, slowly awakening, those of us that are dealing— I'm speaking myself with my own madness still, my own fallibility, my own impatience, my own fear, my own desires. Like, those of us that are on this path, it's our job to see how we can communicate it. And I think the best way to do it is authentically, by owning the fact that we are compromised, that we're not trying to be perfect, that we're animals and we have animal impulses in us. We have sexuality, we have violence, we have appetites. We are these evolved apes with access to divinity. I feel like the way that, you know, you have very practical techniques that are changing people's consciousness. I know that I can participate in terms of the oratory and the speaking and with my own willingness to be vulnerable about where I've been and what I've done and how it didn't work for me. It didn't work for me to, you know, be famous and to live that life. You know, it was exciting and distracting and I'm glad it's over. The things that have worked for me are connection to nature, inner nature, my real nature. Like that, you know, when you talk about those systems that are accessed through the breathwork, the things that you are, you know, that I'm glad to hear that there are scientific studies taking place now in San Francisco, but the things you've approved in immunology, I would suspect have correlatives in psychology that we live in a certain tier of our consciousness and through breathwork and yogic techniques we can drop into into or elevate into different levels of consciousness. When I do your breathwork, I suppose what I feel is I feel more energized and more awake. There are other things I do, different kinds of chanting, different kinds of physical movement, or your made-up spontaneous improvised tai chi that you did on the banks of the River Thames in the video. Anyone who wants to see that can look at my YouTube channel now to see Wim Hof improvising tai chi. And I said, what is that? Is that tai chi? And Wim said, I just made it up. You know, like, you know, like we can, we can find an expression of who we are. We have a material nature, we are made of cells, but within this cellular physical body there is another component. And it seems to me that the more we analyze and look at the material world, the more we discover there are aspects of it that are very difficult to understand. And how these as yet unknowable component of the physical and material world might intersect with that other great mystery, consciousness, is, um, this is part of the deep, deep mystery, the deep mystery that we can explore not only using scientific techniques and technologies which are magnificent, but also ancient arcane yogic technologies in the laboratories within.

Exactly. So I hear from India, the people, uh, they want me over there. They say We don't like you, we need you. It's like, you know, the wisdom no longer comes just from the old India or the Aztecs or the Mayas or the Africans. It's now within us. We have been so aggressive with our colonialism and taking over the world and making people think that goods are the best to purchase within your mind and your body that we lost the connection connection with our consciousness, which is neurology in the end. Consciousness is like abstract awareness, and then you get its perception, and then neurology. And that neurology now proven in science with the same goods, the material goods like measurement devices like fMRI and brain scans and so forth. Shows that we are able to replace the magic of placebo, as you well mentioned, the magic of placebo, a sugar pill, without the sugar pill, we are having the power of intention to rule over our bodies. That is top-down regulation. Yeah, I was talking about the 6th sense, the 7th sense, and the 8th sense, and you are talking about all of this in your way, and that's all beautiful. If I'm talking like that, nobody listens. If you are talking, everybody listens. That's our difference. So I went into the cold water. I went on the Mount Everest and then coming back into brain scans and all, and I flabbergasted the psychiatrists, professors by showing that we are able to top-down regulate. Something we did not learn in our schools, which every kid should learn to be happy, strong, and healthy. They are not stupid, but we get to be stupefied. And we are waking, wakening up the people. They're in revelation time right now. To me, you are like a reverend You are not like the church and this or the temples or this or that. You are the reverend of a— the temple of the whole world. And me too. I come from a different— I'm the chaplain. You are the reverend. Hey, but you need the chaplain and you need to— you need a good team to get in, change the minds of the people and to have them have a pure mind undisturbed by a wrong biochemistry caused by the wrong wrong thinking, and that's what we do. So I want to cut through the chase now and say, yes, guys, any listener here, I got Russell Brand, man. This, he is the Reverend, I'm the Iceman coming together. It's like Superman and Batman come together, and what do they do? They just fight for the good. And what is good? Well, that what should be unconditionally every day in our homes, sacred being, because life is too short to be not in sacredness every day. And here comes revelation time. Here come me talking to Russell Brand, man. I'm talking to Russell Brand. Yeah, right on. So all the love to you, all the admiration, and The work you do is amazing. Yeah. Oh yeah, I'm sorry, I'm eating the microphone. Do you still hear me, Russell?

Yeah, I hear you. I hear you very clearly. And in— yeah, enthusiasm, I think, is a Greek word that means the energy of God present. So it's an important thing. So like, um, I am— yes, thanks a lot for that, mate. I'm gonna take that nickname and I'm gonna run with it. I love that Reverend idea, and I agree with what you're saying, that this has to be collective, you know, that we have to do this, all of us, that it has to be absolutely inclusive. I love to hear you speak so positively and kindly about me, but of course I continue to be aware of my own fallibility. I know that on a daily basis there are times when I feel lost and confused and fraught, when I'm walking around thinking, am I being effective in my life? Am I being the best father I can be, the best husband I can be? Am I still imprisoned by selfishness and greed? Do I still care about my own ego and other people's Do I still sometimes put my own wants ahead of what I could be doing for other people? And the answer is yes, the answer is yes I do. I still have selfishness in me, I still have greed in me, and I know that what I need for me to be a better man, for me to be the man that I was intended to be, and I've always understood the word, I was taught that the word recovery, in my case recovery from addiction, is to recover the person you're intended to be. This talk that you, the way that you talk about light I think is very important that there is light in us. Literally, there is light in us, a flash of light at the moment of conception. That Christ talks about light, that Muhammad, peace be upon him, when he has been depicted in medieval art, depicted as a blue flame, as blue light. I feel that this light that is within us, we have to awaken, and the light is beyond the language. That the language and the culture and the conditioning sits here encasing, enshrining, binding our true nature. And I feel that, you know, if your voice and my voice and the voice of your dear sidekick there can collaboratively be woven into a new truth, a tapestry of new truths, then we'd like have a chance, you know. And part of what my book Revelation was intended to be was to meet great people with great methods and great techniques. And you, Wim Hof, were the first, and as it turned out, only person I met, because then lockdown happened, a pandemic happened, travel became impossible. And so my journey of revelation and discovery of the sacred became one that was undertaken in a more prosaic, everyday, ordinary way. I was in Australia, like your partner there, when this began. We were staying in a community called Mumbai, beautiful down there near Byron Bay. Everyone's a hippie, no one's wearing shoes or socks. I remember the first day in that town of Mumbai, I was like, hmm, no one's wearing shoes or socks. That was on the Monday. By the Wednesday, I was not wearing shoes or socks. I was wandering the streets free from footwear myself. I met this woman that lived in the woods, Wim. Like, she was like elsewhere in culture, you might find someone that had stepped off the grid classified as somehow homeless, destitute, lost. This woman, Anatar, she had like chosen to live in a forest and she was making that shit work. There was a Mad Max component, i.e., like she had a laptop, she had somehow found a way of getting electricity in there, she was making her own kombucha obviously, she was drying some substances that looked interesting to me on her makeshift kitchen work surface. When I saw that what this woman had done is had stepped outside of culture, so many of us are spilled by culture, you know, the the sin of destitution that some people are regarded as economically not viable and are cast out, you know, a kind of a new class of untouchables across our culture. But whereas it is possible to live adjacent to the culture, you and I, we're hooked in still to the economics, we're making podcasts, we're making content, you know, we're finding ways of how can we mobilize this stuff and use it and get it into the mainframe. The mainframe Media is powerful though. There's powerful information coming through media. There's powerful economic ties that pin people down. I feel that what we will be doing as we build this new collective is establishing communities. And I know people are already doing it because like I'm talking about Anatar in the book Revelation. I know there are people that are further down the path. This is where the growth will happen in countries like yours, in countries like mine, in countries like Australia, people establishing new communities. Is where we respect the land, where we respect consciousness, where we respect one another. We respect that different people want to live in different ways now, but that there are sacred principles that all of us can adhere to. Like you said, be strong, be healthy, be happy, and respect the strength, happiness, and health of others. In this time of increasing— well, not increasing diversity, increasing awareness of diversity, because there has always been diversity It's become obvious to me now that the behemoth of a nation is no longer something that we can sustain. You can't have one centralized government controlling the lives of 60 or 100 or 300 or a billion people. You have to allow people true democracy. It seems that what you are working in is discovering that there are techniques and methods that helped us evolve out of apes into hunter-gatherers in harmony with nature. You know, and it feels to me that we have to respect anthropology. We have to regard that the same way as we should be eating the things that grow around us when they grow around us rather than things concocted in laboratories or even grown in farms where it's convenient to make them en masse. We have to, we have to regard our minds in this way. We have to regard our societies in this way. What is this machine evolved to do? Is it evolved to live in cities of 10 million people eating food that's been grown in laboratories? Mangled with, messed with, adjusted and adapted? What kind of content are we supposed to consume? Where is joy? Where is connection to nature? Where is the reverence? So I feel that what the future holds for us is not revolution how I used to think about it, not picking up arms, but picking up shovels, growing our own food, creating our own systems,— you know, for me that's going to be challenging because I'm, you know, a prisoner of luxury. I've been very poor when I was younger and now I have comfort and for me to transition to a life where I live, okay, I'm just a member of a community, I like some comfort, I like it, I like having access to technology and I hope that there's a way where we can sort of still do that but I know that the future is about establishing autonomous communities. That are truly democratic, where people can actually control their own lives, where we're not just atomized cells that just, you know, if you want to feel happy, buy this, watch this, shut up. Where increasingly you're invited to be passive in your own life with no power, with no agency. You know, one of the things I enjoy about your work is the way you talk about how the pharmaceutical industry in particular places itself between our conscious awareness and our health, like that we have to buy stuff to be healthy. There's no doubt there's been many miraculous achievements in the field of medicine, medicine. No one's denying that. But similarly, you can't deny that the world of pharma operates primarily for profit, controls substances that could advance human health in favor of others that can advance their profit and their own ends. It's the ideology that must change, and I don't see how we can do that by any other means than awakening ourselves and practicing it personally.

Wow, yeah, that's great. A good revelation. Uh, yeah, I think technology.

I mean, I spoke for a while there. Yeah, it's time for a sip of kombucha and to see what the great Iceman has to say about it all, surrounded by dreaming dogs, a wonderful sound sidekick, an incredible gong, and a pink guitar. Now this is how I will see you in my visions and dreams.

That's amazing. I, I told my little one, who is now to Australia, he told me earlier, "You can reach me. You can reach me every time when you go to bed and then you step into dreamland and there is a purple dragon and we are both— I'll be waiting on the back of the purple dragon to go anywhere we like because there is no distance there. It goes with the speed of light." And I made this story together with him, but it is very near to the truth, the truth of our abilities mind, to learn to own our own mind, autonomy, autonomous processes in the brain related to mood regulation. Depression, go. Inflammation, suppressed. We are the alchemists. We are there. So technology is great, but guys, if you're not happy, what do you got with a big dildo looking like a rocket to the moon and to Mars and then coming back and, wow, And still there is poverty and still there are wars, et cetera. The woman or the mother in Tehran is the same as in New York. They want prosperity guaranteeing happiness, strength, and health for their kids. And as long as that is being blocked by this masculine or whatever patriarchal or whatever name it is, God, I don't care, politics, Bible, It has stopped. It needs to stop. It's going to stop. And we are coming in. We are fathers. We are fathers taking our ability to respond. That's called responsibility. And we have the power of the unlimited power of the mind to do so because we are in favor of the soul, the right for everybody to connect with and to make it flourish. The flower, the Garden of Eden, Sweden, the whole world. And it transcends religion and religious differences. It is now up to science, and we did the science and we showed it that we are able to control, say, in our brain 100%, like we said in the last podcast. It's all there. Autonomy is all there. And the revelation is, You gotta go like a mantra. Bang, bang on the door. Bang, bang on the door of the past. Go away. We want the second door. We want the innocence. We want Daddy is taking care of me. Trust back in who we are and what we are unconditionally. That's the way we are born. We are born with the innate capacity to deal with anything that comes to us. It's a great machine. It's a great body and mind. It's unlimited in its power. And I want to know before I go what it is all about to pass it on to my kids and all the kids of the world and all the living beings in harmony with nature. So Dad, this utopia Russell is talking about, it really sounds like the Garden of Eden project. Project you are doing, and we're building 15 water wells for this. Can you say something about that? Yeah, right now I'm doing a project with 3,500 Maasai people, and they are, you know, the people who have no fear because they have no religion because they have the lion. And when you are in the lion and you say, oh God, please don't bite me, he sees you as a beefsteak. The thing is, you gotta learn to be fearless. And you can only be fearless if you are connected to the soul. But if you ask me what kind of utopia, I would say I want to make a prototype of the Garden of Eden project, it's called, wherein people come and within a couple of days are able to roam freely together with the rangers, the Messiah Rangers, The two strangers who have only a spear to throw out the country of the lion of the fear and become Imaracamba Simba. The one who is stronger than the lion is the one who has conquered his fear and reached his soul. And that is my utopia. And to make that a prototype and then bring it to every national reserve until the whole planet is a national reserve, a Garden of Eden where we live in peaceful interaction with the animal life, in harmony with nature. 'Cause the trees give us oxygen, we give them CO2. We are one, and that should be recognized. My utopia is over there, and I think we are on the way.

Yeah, I like that. And I also acknowledge that there's a kind of what would be regarded by our perhaps overly civilized and sophisticated minds as a kind of brutality. It's not sentimental. I, you know, for me that sounds sort of fierce and amazing. I know to go there I would have to let go of a lot of stuff, you know. I know that it would be a great awakening for me to spend time in that community, but I know also that I've lived latter, in the latter part of my life, a privileged life, and I've always thought that success was about being able to wrap things around you. If I'm gonna do this, I need coffee, I need this, I need this here, I need this, you know, but really all of these things things become a prison. To go somewhere and have only a spear and to know that on the other side of that is potential death, that it's beyond civilized mentality, that you have to learn to live in harmony with nature. I love what you said there about death, that when you die you're hung out and you are food now. Your body doesn't belong to you anymore. That's over. That story is over. We sentimentalize death, we conceal death, You know, I heard someone say once, we're able to see everything except where dead bodies go, where waste is disposed of, where food is disposed of, and where our meat is prepared. Everywhere else there's cameras all the time. No one likes to look at death. No one likes to understand what death is. It becomes this sanitized process. You're in a box behind some flowers in a car. No one wants to acknowledge death. I feel that this pandemic has caused— and Charles Eisenstein wrote very beautifully about this— You know, like it's brought death into our faces. It's more like, okay, people die, you know, it's something you have to face up to. It can't be sanitised, it can't be cleaned away. How about thinking of the quality of life, the quality of our experience while we're here? Healthy people that know how to breathe, that know how to eat, instead of more financial opportunity for people that already have a lot of financial opportunity. I think that the kind of values that we are discussing here, Wim, might be difficult to scale, you know. I feel that it's possible to have a relationship where you— with a community where you know that we all look after each other, but none of us are that important. We're all important, but none of us are that important, that when you're sick and when you die That's it, that's the deal, that's the deal here. You know, when you live in a culture that overly celebrates the individual, you know, or certain individuals, what happens, you know, when with the inevitability of death, with the inevitability of sickness, there is no sense of shared communal values and togetherness. I think that you can do, you are doing a great job of bringing a positive masculine aspect back into the field of spirituality so that spirituality doesn't just become about wellness, individual wellness. It becomes about collective wellness, communal wellness, and that it's challenging. Like, if you awaken spiritually, if you even try, it's not something you're going to do on your own. It's going to do— it's going to affect your relationships with everyone. It's going to affect your political perspectives. It's going to affect the decisions that you make.. It's not about further individual advancement. This is another place where I'm challenged because, you know, I'm an only child, I grew up in the '70s under Thatcherism in the '80s, you know, I became famous after poverty and addiction, then fame. It gives you such a sort of a sense of I'm what's important, you know, I am what matters. And like this whole part of my life is about about you are just a member of a community, you're irrelevant, you're, you're waiting to be eaten, you're waiting to— sooner or later you're getting eaten by either microbes or preferably a lion. I think I'd rather be ate by something that seems glorious like that, you know. So yeah, I think it's difficult though to impose those values at scale. This is, I suppose, so when we talk about utopias or community, there are clearly examples already around us. The many people of this world that live harmony with nature. But we can't dial back the clock on individualism. We can't dial back the clock on technology. Perhaps what we can advance beyond is the materialist, individualist, rationalist mentality that is very useful for scientific advance, not so useful for spiritual advance. So another important thing you're doing is looking for quantification and qualification in these very difficult worlds to navigate. The world of awakening, the neurological aspect of spirituality, I suppose, is important because we do need a Rosetta Stone, a shared language where we can say, look, at the moment you value your material life, you value your individual life, Russell, but there is a way, there is a way where you're going to be so much happier on the other side of this if you can let go of your vanity, your narcissism, your need for pleasure, food, sex, whatever it is you're fixated on, there is bliss awaiting for you. But that does involve a kind of death. And you know, that's what another thing I write about in Revelation is, the number of deaths I've had to experience, the things I've had to let go of, the beliefs I've had to let go of. And this for me, Wim, is an ongoing process. When we've hung out, I think, wow, Wim Hof seems like he's rooted now. Me, I'm still like, I've got a lot of, I've still got a lot of antennae open, a lot of stuff, you know, it's very hard for me to stay grounded, you know.

So Russell, can you share a couple of practices that work for you?

Well, when Wim said the, when Wim said about be healthy, happy, strong, what it made me realize is that like to have any chance of health, happiness, strength for me, it requires this kind kind of committed connection to the moment. I do various meditation techniques, Transcendental Meditation, I do different breathworks, you know, I do Wim's work, I do Biet Simpkins' work, I do Alan Dolan's work, I look at like, I love respiration and breath and different approaches to that. I do Thich Nhat Hanh meditation, I do, um, Muji meditations, you know, I'm really interested in these various techniques and methods. But what I'm mostly learning is that it's what happens when I'm not meditating that's important. Sometimes for me when I'm meditating or chanting, it takes a long while before this shuts up, you know what I mean? Look at me talking now, both me and Wim talking big long chunks of language. This is going on all the time for me, like all I have to do at any point, you know, it's there. This is always there. There. And in meditation, a lot of it for me is getting to a place where it stops, and I feel it happen. I did a meditation, a Thich Nhat Hanh meditation today, where I felt myself drop behind that and I could truly watch it. I could truly just watch the thoughts and the activity the same as if I was looking at any other view. And, you know, and then, then for me, the challenge comes: how am I going to cope out in the world? How am I going to cope when I do I do an interview and the people want me to do a bunch of stuff, like it was for Hot Ones, you know, like you eat a bunch of spices, it's sort of crazy, it's good fun, you know, but they sent a load of stuff to the house and like people want to bring it, I'm like, no, I don't like this, this is complicated, you know, suddenly I have preferences again, like make this simple, make this simple, and then after I've done the interview and they talk to me a long time and they ask a lot of complex questions about culture and culture wars and cancel culture. How am I right now? I've got to carry that. And when you're talking, Wim, about the lion and that, you know, where I need to have the sort of a lion ferocity is, you know, I'm not out in the jungle surviving by killing stuff. I live in Henley-on-Thames in England. It's gentle here, you know. I mean, people might look at you strange, but that's as bad as it's going to get. Wim, half, just walking through the fields near our house, caused people's boats to tip over just with his breathing and the way that he says hello to people, you know. So for me, it's like, how does this meditation translate into the way that I am for the rest of the day? The way I treat the people I work with, the way I treat my children, my ability to observe. Because I am— I don't know about you guys, but I experience strong energy come through me. Like, I I have a big appetite. That's why I was a serious drug addict. You know, like, I have— there's something in me that wants to eat the world, that wants— and like, for me to be able to sort of not let that dominate me, to be able to watch that, takes a lot of, um, it takes a lot of work. So I do a lot of breathwork, including Wim Hof. I do a lot of chanting, Kundalini yoga. I do a lot of Transcendental Meditation. I do Brazilian jiu-jitsu when it's legal to do so. I do all of these things because for me, you know, I like, you know, the same way as we're now understanding we'd probably be healthier if we ate foods that were available and grew in the place that we're in at the time that we're in it in the correct season rather than eating something made in a laboratory or grown under lights or whatever it is. I think the same is true with the way we treat the body. Try to replicate what this body evolved to do. It needs to move, it needs to do something. And that's what I feel like when I first spoke to Wim, I remembered a time that I jumped into cold water, like, you know, maybe 5 years earlier just to sort of see what it was like. I was curious about it. And when I jumped into the cold water, I heard myself go, Oh my God, I've never heard that noise come out of myself before. You know, like there's this stuff in me that I'm never using. There's this— I'm never using it. Like my body's capable of it, but I'm not doing it. And like, so, you know, I think if you don't explore those territories, which could be mapped as neurological, which could be mapped as psychological or spiritual, it doesn't matter how you map them. It matters that you know there are these terrains that are not being utilised within you because the cultural experience— culture means guide, manipulate, manoeuvre— like, it will have a mirror in your mind if you watch certain TV shows, if you watch certain news, if you eat certain food. It will have a mirror in the pathways through your mind. You're living on a few little tracks in a few little grooves, and when you feel the cold or you feel the breath, it breaks out into new dendrite spikes, new experiences, new realms. And suddenly you think, well, who was I anyway? What am I? My memory? My appetite? My impulse? My preferences? My likes and dislikes? Can I just let that die and just put it like, oh, it's dead. I'm not that anymore. That guy's dead. But for me, it seems that it needs to keep happening. At a very fast rate. So I need a lot of spiritual practices, the same way as I needed a lot of drugs, the same way as I needed a lot of sex. I need a lot of God, a lot of God. In fact, I need all God. I don't mind what everyone else is doing, there's enough God to go around. But I just mean I can't have anything else. If I try and swap God for chocolate, problem.

Holy cow, that was in your book, and about Anata and about Oliver I read it all and very nice that you, you know, I was the only one to be in your place and then the lockdown came and so you made it, uh, pro-Zoëk, you know, around here, beautiful about just the experiences I was having. Yeah, and that's where the beauty is. We don't need to go to Tanzania, Kenya, or the Mayan culture, or ayahuasca, or China, or Japan, Budo, and all these I found it in the backyard of my house in the middle of the city in a park. It was the cold water that brought me directly back into the deep physiological consciousness. Is it the belly, you know, the cognitive cells of the gut? The God, where is God? I was looking for all that past the abstract. Being which is so modulating us all day. During the day we should be unconditionally there. Happy, strong, healthy, not as subjects, just be unconditionally there. Simply there. That is the greatest power of our mind to be just simply witnessing. If you take Patanjali, the author author of the aphorisms, he says, "Atayoga nusasanam yoga citta vritti nirudhah tad adhrastvah svarupavastanam." And that is the first sentence in his book. If you understand that sentence, then the rest of the book is not needed to be read. And it says, this is an explanation on yoga. Yoga, by the way, means connection. So this is an explanation on connection. Deconnection. Yoga is the silencing of the modifications of the thinking brain, then the seer appears. Oh wow. And when that happens, you are behind the curtain. You are behind what the chatterbox and whatever the chatterbox is looking like, it's dominating us, it is being able to be manipulated, we don't like it, and there we are, set in, and now we bring the message, the revelation that we are able to shut it down. Or in other eloquent ways, shut up brain inside. I don't want to be schooled in happiness language and history no more, to settle into a system that is sodomizing the planet, polluting it and all. I want to be here and now, now happy, strong, and healthy. And that for every person in the world. You are doing great work therein. I do my share, and we come together from time to time to become timeless.

Hey, Wim, do you— like, maybe we should do an event. Maybe we should do an event, like, you know, where we do— you do your breathwork, I'll, you know, talk. That's what I do. You know, we'll do an event somewhere, wherever you— you know, we're doing Holland, we'll do it in England, we'll do it in America or Australia. Maybe we'll tour. We'll become a caravan. We'll find a few other people, some jiu-jitsu people, some yogis, some teachers, some dancers, some singers. We'll tour, tour the world, leaving communities in our wake like the rock stars used to of old, but this time positive communities in our way, positive communities of enlightened, awakened people in humble service with acknowledgement of our own failings.

And there is Utopia, and Utopia is here now. Let's I love it! Yeah! Together with Russell, the Reverend.

Yeah, man! Russell, thank you so much. Before you leave, can you tell the listeners where they can find your book?

My Revelation is an Audible Original, only available on Audible Original in audio form, although I did send Wim Hof a written copy because, you know, he's Wim Hof. My podcast Under the Skin is available on Luminary, and my YouTube channel is available available for free. 3 videos a week, some on meditation, breathing, and I hope to have Wim Hof on a guest— as a guest on all of these formats. And I write about Wim in Revelation. If you can afford stuff, get the stuff you can afford. If you can't afford stuff, enjoy the free stuff.

Thank you. All the love, all the admiration is there, and let's hit the road.

You can find short videos of this conversation on the Wim Hof YouTube channel. If you're looking forward to the next episode, don't forget to hit subscribe. Thank you for listening to the Wim Hof Podcast, a Monk Studios original.