The Rise and Fall of the Wim Hof Empire

I was practicing the Wim Hof method uh ended up having a hypoxic blackout underwater no life support for 4 weeks when he did pass out under the water and no one noticed about approximately 30 minutes later that he was found and he was in like a um a meditative position underwater heart's beating but you know there's just no brain activi he was sure enough a goner anybody taking whims work and going into a pool in hyper venan you're just playing roulette there is no amount of money that can truly comp say for the death of the child but this is a $67 million case there's nobody in that organization currently that understands the physiology I don't think they have a grasp on it orders do not talk to the Press people could have died people have died I never wanted to tell this story about Wim Hoff instead for years I've told you about how his breath work and cold exposure techniques helped hundreds of thousands of people develop resilience and control their anxiety depression and autoimmune illnesses this indomitable iceman has smed millions of devotees to his practices myself included in 2016 we climbed shirtless up Mount kilan gyro together while the temperature dipped to Min -30° I can honestly say that I love his method and think that whim is one of the most inspiring people I've ever met we've been good friends for a decade primarily because he understood that I would always tell the truth no matter what and that is why I feel so conflicted about what I'm about to tell you what you probably know about Wim Hof is a comfortable myth it is a story that recounts all of the most amazing things about the ice man and his Methods at the same time that it masks underlying problems within his organization and whims own meteoric rise into the Limelight after 10 years practicing his method and writing numerous articles and books that contributed to that myth I've come to the inescapable conclusion that it's time for me to report the full truth about how neglectful and deceptive activities at Wim Hoff's organization in fire as well as as what I believe is whims own culpability repeatedly teaching a dangerous breath work technique that has now led to the suspected deaths of at least 12 people this story is complicated but the most important thing to remember is that whm Hoff is best known for two techniques hyperventilation breath work that allows a person to hold their breath for seemingly superhuman amounts of time and Ice immersion when practiced separately these components components add up to the remarkable benefits that have changed our scientific understanding of human biology when they're practice together they can turn into a toxic brew that can make a person pass out in the water and drown it doesn't help that Wim Hoff used this hyperventilation technique to set a Guinness World Record for swimming under sea ice even though he almost died the first time that he tried to do it don't just take it from me that this is dangerous I showed a video of whim teaching this techniques to cardiologist Rohan Francis who immediately recognized the danger there is a well recognized physiological response that uh hyperventilation followed by breathholding can trigger uh loss of consciousness and coupling that with immersing yourself in water then there is a risk of blacking out and and potentially drowning even in a small volume of water the phenomenon is called shallow water blackout and we'll get into the physiology later but know for now that it's intensely dangerous not only that but the phenomenon is made all the more dangerous when followed by a f long inhale something that looks like this which is what whim is teaching far too often while official whm Hoff channels include a few warnings against hyperventilating in water whim has never stopped te teaching the practices despite knowing that people were dying while practicing his method as far back as 2014 since then I've done a deep dive into the available news reports and discovered at least 11 cases where Wim Hoff method practitioners have drowned most likely because they were following whims example lest It Go without saying do not try this at home here he is teaching the exact method in an online course available on his website do the breathing go into the water keep on with the breathing keep on being focused are you said you immers you focus and you stay in the water the L Community has not been open to talking with us about this um they refer us to their website where they encourage people not to do it in water but we still see people doing it in in the water so how come on one end they're saying we don't encourage this but on another end we're seeing fatalities due to what they say they're not encouraging a disclaimer mentioned on the website is not enough when the leader of an organization presses a different message in person when I've asked whim about why he continues to teach these practices he's responded with well I think we need to get into that a little bit later because his response touches on deep problems where this entire organization is really going and it's just as concerning as the deaths themselves in order to understand what is happening right now we need to go back in time to how this all started in 2013 I traveled to Poland on a mission from Playboy magazine to debunk whm Hof as a charlatan Guru selling snake oil meditation practices that promised people false superpowers at the time I was making a career out of these sorts of stories and even ended up writing a book called The Enlightenment trap about the danger of intense spiritual seeking I thought whims mix of inspiration and limit pushing was the perfect recipe for a cult leader but after a week with the inveterate Iceman I came away with an entirely unexpected opinion much to my surprise his method worked I learned to hold my breath for 3 minutes at a stretch I meditated in the snow as Steam wafted up off of my body and I climbed an icy Mountain without a shirt I wrote an article that ultimately helped launch his career and soon after my article came out Vice followed up with a documentary where they talked about how my change of heart provided the foundation for Hoff's credibility Scott County is an investigative journalist he came from America to this place to cut through the crap and the charlatan business and all that and that was me and now he's uh you know he wants to write a book and bring it to America and everything it's hard for me to express how much meeting whim changed my life as far as I was concerned the method was nothing short of miraculous and whim deserved the accolades a few months after the episode on Vice Joe Rogan brought Wim Hof on and soon it seemed like the whole world was singing the same song of breath work and inner fire you have the longest time of holding your breath and swimming under ocean ice ocean ice too right yes ocean ice have been [ __ ] incredibly cold water where salt water freezes over right I continued my journey with Hoff and wrote a book called what doesn't kill us that ended up on the New York Times bestseller list I became one of Hoff's Chief evangelists going on almost 300 TV shows podcasts news articles spreading Hoff's message the entire time and I practiced the ice bathing and his hyperventilation techniques almost every day as a result an autoimmune illness that had plagued me since childhood cleared up and I was taking control over my life in a way that I never had before I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that his method worked for me and hundreds of other people that I met who had similar experiences honestly there are hundreds of thousands of people who have directly benefited from this method and we can't discount that but there was something that needled me that whole time yes Wim Hoff might have been an icy Prophet who opened the door to these practices for millions of people but he was also a mad man I like to think of him as crazy in a good way it takes someone a little crazy to actually want to make ice water a lifestyle the flip side of that equation though is knowing that when the tendency towards crazy crosses a line when you're supposed to back off and I was seeing more and more of his crazy every single month he peppered interviews with things that science just couldn't back up his stunts had almost killed him on several occasions and even left him permanently scarred maybe even disabled when I followed whim up Mount kilamanjaro without a shirt at the conclusion of what doesn't kill us his focus on achieving some IL defined record led the group to mutin against him when he said that we should push on to the final Ascent without food we had a little uh disagreement uh about an hour ago and most of the group stayed behind they wanted lunch which you can't really blame him his poor judgment and a focus on quote pushing past perceived limits which is the subtitle of a book that he put out in 2011 had time and again turned a wonderful practice dangerous I constantly worried it would lead to either whim or his followers getting injured or even dying after all there are certain limits that you won't push past and live to tell about whim appeared on hundreds of celebratory news programs podcasts and TV shows and somewhere along the way the public perception began to be that whim had invented the method out of thin air this was fueled not only by the media's glorification of him but also by the fact that whim stopped talking about his trips to India in the 1980s where he learned impressively long Sanskrit mantras and even wrote a book on yogic techniques very few people have mentioned that whims signature breath work almost exactly resembles yogic breathing patterns called nasheka rashaka pranayama and ostria kumaka pranayama also absent from the conversation was the use of hydrotherapy in the late 1800s and profry ivanovs whose icy religious movement was wildly popular in Russia and Europe until his death in 1983 we ignored the teachings of the stoics in ancient Greece who philosophized that man could only get stronger by pitting themselves against the harshness of Nature and we seemingly forgot how Friedrich nii reinvigorated the stoic methods in his book thus spake Zara thra when he wrote quote with a wickedness I do begin every day I mock at the winter with a cold bath for almost 8 years the media neglected all of that history and placed Hof on an almost impossible pedestal as the creator of cold exposure most of the features done on him built up the myth that whim was a breathwork founder and expert without reporting on his ballooning ego and the deadly effects and consequences of his actions his followers started to look at him as an infallible Guru not a flawed person who merely opened the door to a beneficial practice I am far from the only person who has noticed this change in whim over the last decade a few weeks ago I spoke with a neuroscientist AO music at Wayne State University who fits in with this pattern in 2018 music published an ofen cited paper about Hoff's ability to willfully control his autonomic nervous system viim Hof anybody can do that my problem with with Rim Hof that they say oh it's magic and it's it's kind of you know unique you don't need Rim Hof you don't need to go to the snsh it kind of lost its purpose it just becomes a business and I don't want to be associated with that music went on to say that his paper doesn't only apply to the Wim Hoff method but also just about every other Environmental Training technique out there to quote him again many techniques do the same thing but inner fire wants to present it like their method is somehow special the results apply to anything that causes hormetic stress unquote in other words the Wim Hoff method's benefits aren't nearly as unique as whim claims they are when all of this started for me at his dilapitated farmhouse in the backwaters of Poland I came with the intention of debunking a cult leader before he turned into a danger to himself and others now I'm starting to wonder if maybe I got to my assignment just a little bit too early I was dazzled by the mindboggling effects of the method but hadn't for foreen how the Future Would unfold now that whim is properly famous the alarm bells are going off maybe it was just destiny that things would eventually go off the rails so here I am at the beginning once again as strange as it might sound my purpose for being here today is that more than anything else I want to save the reputation and future of the breath work and Ice training from what I think could be the impending collapse of the organization that has promoted it for the last decade you could say that I'm trying to save whims teachings from whim the icon and return to the spirit of those early days when everything was magical the the man is more important than the method I'm I'm getting hints of like Guru Worship in what you're saying 100% this is 100% is what's going on and it's funny because you get like you get them you get people talking about oh I'm not I'm not the guru or I'm not you know the gurus is in you and it's like yeah you're literally setting this up for you to be the guru that was Brian McKenzie and like me he has been part of the Wim Hoff story for close to a decade he even got close to forming a partnership with whim in a plan to release an ice work and breath work business across America we acknowledged that there were some things a little bit off about whim and the organization around him but at that time we thought that the message would ultimately Prevail despite some initial concerns and I'll be honest I was guilty of this too when I put out what doesn't kill us my editor and I had a Frank conversation about what we should do with the stories about Wim Hoff that didn't reflect him in the best possible light after all when I when I first met whim I noticed that he had a large bulbous nose that resembled the noses of Alcoholics I'd grown up around I'd seen him black out drunk on several occasions and he smoked like a chimney despite presenting himself as a paragon of human health but it wasn't only those superficial aspects of his daily habits that concerned me Hoff also embodied the worst possible model for Parenthood that any of us could imagine after his first wife Hoff committed suicide whim abandoned his four children at a squat house in Amsterdam and took up with a woman who I'll just identify her by her first name which is Caroline in another city he left them in poverty alone without any support at all this is Marcel Hoff his brother whim wasn't there and he he made the choice for uh for Caroline it's it it was another nice relationship finally it came to an end it did did pretty long like a or 10 years and I think during that period he didn't saw his uh own family much a lot of wine involved a lot of uh alcohol it was this that way of suppressing his feelings clearly those weren't the kind of stories that fit with the Superman image that the media was pushing add to this that whim often made claims that were far beyond what science can muster like suggesting that his method can cure cancer covid and even AIDS having chemo having cancer you are able to make the absolute difference he has adopted a decidedly conspiracy theory forward stance on vaccines fouchy and how a shadowy new world order controls the world's medical system and governments on several occasions he said to me that if he wanted to he could stop breathing with his mouth and lungs all together and instead breathe exclusively out of his anus at the time my editor and I decided that since the book was about the health benefits of cold water and breath work that including more details about his actual history might undermine the message that we were trying to get across and this was the same choice that just about every media outlet that covered him also made we focused on the inspiring message of self-mastery and minimized the madness in light of recent events I need to tell you everything that I know so that there's a complete record the only way that we can really evaluate the best parts of whm Hoff is to also understand and look at the less than Savory side with clear eyes if we take it all in the good and the bad and the deadly I think that we'll all see that on the balance whim is an exceptionally fascinating and inspiring person whose method need needs to be taken seriously but will also have the context to understand what his own limits really are and how much Faith any of us should put into that man himself and the organization that enables him now before I get into these details I want to pause for just a second and ask you to do me a favor for reasons that you'll understand soon certain individuals associated with with the Wim Hoff method are afraid of the truth coming out and never want my work to see the light of day I've received threats and harassment pretty much continually for the last several months since they can't actually counter the facts in this video they are attempting to use YouTube's terms of service in what seems like an unfair Way by claiming that I am violating their privacy by merely even mentioning their names most recently Wim Hoff's son what you you are seeing right now includes some blurred images and some beeps when a certain name is mentioned don't worry you can probably figure out who it is anyway he is after all a very well-known person who doesn't have a problem being public in TV shows and other YouTube videos and podcasts and other places like that but for some reason he feels very strongly that his privacy has been violated by being mentioned here and there's a chance that this video and even my entire YouTube channel will be removed from the internet quickly based on their complaints since I want to be able to tell you the story in full and keep in touch I would really like you to sign up for my newsletter in the description down below besides regular Hoff updates I also send out updates on Consciousness meditation Cults and history so please hit that link and let me show up in your inbox from time to time and since I don't know exactly how things will pan out I've also started a new podcast called Scott Carney investigates that you can find on all of the normal channels and I'm also mirroring all of my content on Rumble so that if this video does disappear you can still share it with people who need to watch it the most okay with that out of the way let me tell you a story that I think perfectly encapsulates whims Madness was yeah yeah this also this EX you know where he almost his stomach was totally open he almost died perhaps you've noticed the scar on Wim Hof's abdomen it's not a small one you can see that his belly button protrudes outwards and there's a triangle that seems to be gouged out in the whole area well the way he got that scar tells you a lot about the man it started back in 2008 Wim Hoff had not seen his youngest son in almost 10 years but he was starting to get some recognition for his Feats in the ice and was making a little money doing so he wanted to make amends for his 10 years of absence so he set a time to meet his son at beatric Park in Amsterdam whim arrived a little early and perhaps because he was nervous he decided to calm himself by going for a swim in the Park Pond while he was waiting he paddled out to a fountain in the center and well I'm just going to let whim describe this part it's just a fountain and I put it up my ass and I cleans cleanses all my uh [ __ ] in my intestines and you [ __ ] it out like that and all goes and you feel good I had done it already like 100 times so he positioned himself over the spout and the pressurized water cut through his intestines Like a Knife I sat on it with my pants but it got through my pants and uh through the the [ __ ] up into the intestines and it just cuted and I got my stomach or my intestines full of uh dirty water knowing he was seriously injured whim managed to make it to the shore just as his son arrived a few minutes later whims first words to his son was that he needed to go to the hospital and fast now after whim first told me this story in 2013 I asked him if he wanted to hurt himself intentionally in order to show his son the depth of his grief uh you get a feeling you want to kill yourself you want to end the story but not not deliberately but unconsciously sort of yeah stop this stop this [ __ ] even if I have to die almost I want to stop this something like that was going on this was a hard time in his life his marriage Mar to Caroline in a nearby City had broken up and he was $30,000 in debt to the government he had abandoned his children and hadn't seen any of them in 10 years but think about all of this in the context of the movement that's grown up around him he is a man who was clearly Reckless with his own life and whose own subconscious desire to die actually led him to almost actually dying would you put your life in the hands of a man who makes decisions like this would you follow a general into battle who had a death wish all right well let me give you another example one of the things that whim is best known for is a now broken world record for swimming the longest distance under sea ice but all was not as it seemed in his first attempt to make the crossing he abandoned the safety protocols that he had established and tried to Sprint twice the distance as he had planned originally and he had warned the crew about in the book becoming the Iceman he wrote that his corneus froze in the water and he went blind Marcel Hoff his brother was with whim for the record attempt and he remembers whim hyperventilating before his underwater swim deeply in and let him go deeply in all the things he did for years and he's still doing not different but I think maybe he took it a little too far and then there's a point yeah the oxygen is gone the energy is gone then you let go and I think he reached that point whim passed out and only survived because of the quick action of a rescue diver whim went on to break the record the next day the footage of him being under the water ended up in a TV program for the Discovery Channel and it was one of the ways that he first started getting recognition for his abilities shouldn't we remember how he almost almost drowned on that initial attempt before we offer up accolades about his superhuman abilities these are just two examples of Hoff's General lack of good judgment we only tell half the story there are at least a handful more that I can think of yet these stories get sidelined in favor of the myth that we want to believe well not many people are going to follow his example and clean out their bowels with Fountain spigots the story about swimming under sea ice is Central to the image that his 8 million social media followers see the way he presents that message could well be what is leading people to die now that's a big statement so I need to give an example in 2018 I shared a stage with Wim Hoff in Los Angeles in front of a crowd of about 300 people I was pretty excited to cross-promote my book with whim but more importantly it was a great way to see how Wim Hoff actually teaches his method to a crow crowd in America the session included the usual bits of whim revving up the crowd with a Litany of records that he achieved as well as the promise that would only take them an afternoon to learn the tricks that gave him such amazing Powers the whole crowd breathed in deeply in unison for 50 deep breaths under his Direction This was enough to get people's fingers and toes tingling some would have felt lightheaded then as he was giving these instructions the movie screen behind us flipped over to that famous footage of whim swimming under the ice and then he told everyone to hold their breath for the entire duration of his swim he took about 10 Strokes underwater covering what he estimates was 70 M the whole crowd strained under their urge to gas it worked on a theatrical level the people found that it was relatively easy to hold their breath for the minute or so that it took we whm to paddle across the screen but I was in shock because no one should ever practice the Wim Hoff hyperventilation breathing method in water period warning labels in my book as well as all over Wim Hoff's own site repeatedly caution people that hyperventilation is not a free diving technique and yet here whim was in front of a crowd implicitly saying the hyper ventilation will help them push past their perceived limits and swim underwater just like him now if you're new to the world of breath work you're probably wondering why I'm making such a big deal about this it would seem that a technique that allows you to hold your breath for a long time would also be useful swimming indeed in my book what doesn't kill us I wrote How The Big Wave Surfer lired Hamilton briefly Incorporated a similar hyperventilation technique and breathhold in his xpt training program but lir and pretty much every other breath worker changed course when a pair of Navy SEALs died of something called shallow water blackout in a pool in the midwest in 2015 anybody taking whims work and going into a pool in hyperventilate you're just playing roulette you're almost guaranteed at some point to go out when you do that newspapers began running stories about extreme fit swimmers suddenly drowning now the danger comes from the strange and unintuitive mechanisms of the mamillion respiratory system when you hold your breath the urge to gasp doesn't come up because you've used up all the available oxygen but because of the buildup of the gas that you exhale which is carbon dioxide in the lungs and bloodstream the gasp sensation rises in lock step with with CO2 levels until you feel well like you're going to pop Wim Hoff style hyperventilation blows off all that CO2 and confuses the body's alarm system to temporarily shut off this is why people can hold their breath for 2 or 3 minutes doing the method unfortunately just like when you remove the battery from a smoke detector when the toe starts to burn the margin that you bought yourself comes at a price the gases get so mixed up that you can use up your O2 and pass out before you feel that Sensation that you're in trouble and it gets even more dangerous when you want to maximize your breath hold with a full lung inhalation of air at the end of that hyperventilation what happens then is that you have so little CO2 in your body and so much volume of air that it's almost impossible for you to detect any Sensations at all that you might pass out it is a deadly combination now if you're lying down on dry land it usually isn't a problem you faint and your body hits the reset button and you just start breathing normally but if you're in water that reset means you're going to drown so hyperventilating is more likely to make you pass out in the water because you just shorten the reflex to breathe longer which creates an illusion that you can hold your breath longer you blow off all the oxygen in the red blood cells and it depletes it and your brain and nervous system protect you by shutting you down very quickly whim knows that this is dangerous he is well aware that people have drowned doing his method in water this knowledge alone should have been enough for whim and the organization around him to set up a firewall where he never endorsed these sorts of techniques publicly in any way ever there should never be confusion about it as far as I can tell there's not even any benefit to learning how to do this sort of method in water at all after the conference in Los Angeles I reminded whim about the dangers of shallow water blackout and well he Shrugged it off saying that there were warnings on his website about not mixing his breath work and water indeed a full two years before we went on stage together a Dutch newspaper connected four deaths of Wim Hoff practitioners to hyperventilation and even got the CEO of inner fire Wim Hoff's son to comment here's the quote that ran in the newspaper it's pretty lame but then you shouldn't do the exercises underwater everywhere on our site and with all our Expressions we warn people we can do no more well I don't know if lame was quite the word that I would have chosen but at least it was an acknowledgement that inner fire is aware of the problem and this is what had me reeling why weren't they doing more to address the problem than just slapping a disclaimer on their website and why was whim still making a connection between his breath work and the water on stage I asked Brian McKenzie about this the last time anybody wanted to take responsibility for having a catastrophic problem with something they created is I I don't recall many instances of that Ian maybe Brian was right just maybe whim didn't want to change course on something that he has been doing all along could it be that he's simply Too Proud to admit that he's got something wrong in fact after I start poking around I learned from one of the 1500 Wim Hoff method instructors that one of the courses that innerfire sells on its website includes a week of hyperventilation in a cold shower while standing up with the same full lung exhale that can make someone pass out I know several people who have tried this exact maneuver and ended up bruised on the floor and then on week eight of the course whim leads a lone student into the water hyperventilating and dunking his head in the text next to the video there is a bizarre disclaimer that reads the guy in the video is Guided by whim to learn to deal with the cold he is not doing the breath retention and then putting his head underwater okay so that's the disclaimer but these are the instructions that whim is giving in the video do the breathing go into the water keep on with the breathing keep on being focused and you sit you imerse you focus and you stay in the water 20 seconds 25 30 35 doesn't matter he this is the exercise and then he gives the instructions again withh holding breath is control and then in ice cold water at the end of the video after after he's given these instructions several times someone offs screen's voice appears and reminds whim to uh mention the potential dangers to which whim says that water is dangerous but that people should trust their own senses and don't overdo it because you know the battle with in nature you always will lose finally because there is no competition keep to your feel to your sense and to your logic and see how much you can do and uh witness and then surprisingly you will see you can do a whole lot my guess is that the disclaimer was a lazy after the fact addition to avert liability once they realized it might give people the idea that it was okay to hyperventilate in water because the video clearly shows the opposite that's whim hyperventilating in water in general I'd say that inner fire does a pretty bad job warning people about the potential side effects and dangers associated with the method they've been reticent to mention the abnormally High numbers of people who report getting long-term ttis after a few rounds of breathing I did a video about that a few months back that was temporarily removed from the Internet by Inner Fire even though I eventually reposted a modified version that is still somehow miraculously alive the truly insane thing about this well one of the truly insane things is that hyperventilation doesn't do much of anything to warm you up in fact for most people it actually lowers their core temperature that's the wrong way to do the Wim Hoff method in the snow it's only going to make me colder this is why when he first taught me the breath work in Poland in 2013 we practic it in our sleeping bags to stay warm despite this whim teaches workshops where he tells people that the breath work will heat them up um there's nobody in that organization currently that understands the physiology I don't think they have a grasp on it whim is just wrong studies on the whm Hoff method adjacent yoga technique concluded that suyaa pranayama increased energy expenditure as reported earlier to perform various vital functions optimally without increasing the body temperature from what I've been able to understand from the science of it whims breath work triggers the sympathetic Pathways in a way that will make you colder in the short run it's only after you learn to relax in the stimulation of cold stress that you build up endurance in the ice and start to warm up after what I'd witnessed on on the book tour I felt that was only a matter of time before something bad happened on an official whm Hoff method Expedition so even as I continued to practice his methods daily I kept my eye out for any breaking news involving whim and his method well no one has drowned at an official Wim Hoff event the global body count has continued to tick upwards over the years no no one keeps official records on this sort of thing but I wanted to find out exactly how many deaths there had been so earlier this year I started looking for news reports that specifically mentioned a connection between drowning and the Wim Hoff method and I found 12 of them as well as several accounts of people doing his breathing and blacking out in water only to just barely survive Britt Jackson at the organization shallow water blackout prevention that tries to raise awareness of the dangers of this little known condition says that an increasing number of people that she learns about have a connection to practicing the Wim Hoff method I showed her a video of what whim calls a baptism at one of his many icy ceremonies and this is what she said on one end they're saying we don't encourage this but on another end we're seeing fatalities due to what they say they're not encouraging are people doing this on their own this video would suggest differently that they are actually teaching hyperventilation before submersion which is the recipe for a shall blackout in January 2022 Christopher koven was just one person who was confused about whether or not to do the Wim Hoff method in water Chris he did this often in which he would go to the gym and he would sit in the hot tub um and he would practice breath fling he would do whm Hoff prior to going under the hot tub water he would time himself and so there was a clock on the wall and he'd go under and he'd count in seconds and so he was always trying to increase his breath holding and hold it longer just for the fun of it and the skill of it that's his girlfriend Cara Spencer Christopher dreamed of becoming a Navy SEAL but washed out during the intense screening session called buds still he always wanted to find new ways to push his limit he had probably done it over 20 times you know with nothing happening but um when when he did pass out under the water and no one noticed qan hovind spent 20 minutes under the water before someone raised the alarm according to the list that I collected at least three people died under similar circumstances in 2022 alone I mean I I think it's um putting people at risk for sure because you can never ensure that the same person who watches the YouTube video is also going to catch some information on another site talking about how you shouldn't do something and even so if you're doing one thing and then saying another creates a message that's really confusing and ultimately I think the person that's going to go with I probably do whatever whm Hof the master of this method method is doing himself because it seems like if he's doing it then the implication is it's safe enough another case this one out of Southern California Andrew and Cenas drowned on Labor Day in 2019 my brother Andrew was a very Avid whm Hoff follower uh watched all his YouTube videos it was always something that you know he's done in water he's done in showers and on the Labor Day weekend in 2019 there was my brother in the shallow end and he was in like a um a meditative position underwater passed out so I came out I jumped the pool fence lifted him out of the pool started you know delivering CPR he got his heart beating when he got to the hospital they said hey his heart's beating but you know there was just no brain activity he was sure enough a goner they rushed Andrew to the hospital but it was already too late I asked Yama akabari the cardiologist at UCA Hospital who ultimately declared Andrew brain dead to describe exactly what happened while he was hyperventilating he had less blood flow to his brain he basically got dizzy it's like putting somebody in a in a choke hold he fell down and unfortunately if he would have been in in not in water he probably would have started breathing again in this case he had he had um fluid in his lungs so he probably while he was semi- passed out he probably tried to take a few breaths underwater and I mean you don't need much you know even if it's as as shallow as this if you go face down you're breathing water in another case out of New Zealand a young man named Hamish Jameson did several rounds of whmh half breathing in a community pool and passed out in June 2020 I was practicing the wimh half method ended up having a hypoxic blackout underwater unnoticed for 8 minutes I had CPR and five defs to get my heart going again and I ended up on EO life support for four weeks yeah I I didn't know the risks feel very grateful for being here but the only way that I found out that he was doing the Wim Hoff method in the water was because he survived and that a newspaper then covered his story as part of a local inquest even famous people have gotten into trouble with the Wim Hoff method in water two years ago Josh Watkin uh the kid from the movie Searching for Bobby fiser who is an avid whm Hoff method practitioner told the author and podcaster Tim Ferris that he enthusiastically tried to prolong his breath holds underwater by doing what he says was whm Hoff inspired breathholds in a New York City Pool he passed out for 4 minutes only to be rescued by a fellow swimmer given the proliferation of cases and the fact that whim continues to teach the dangerous combination of breath work and waterw work it's no no surprise that some people have opted to pursue legal Solutions no more Young Americans should die doing the whim Hof breathing methods which we've seen have a proven track record of leaving deaths and drownings in their wake the amount we're seeking is going to be very significant there was a legal complaint filed in Los Angeles County court on December 21st 2022 about the death of high school senior meline Rose meter according to the complaint meline had practiced the Wim Hoff method for about a year finding it helpful to regulate stress and anxiety that morning it was a Hot August day she had an argument with her mother on the phone she then put on a bathing suit and went out to the pool and practiced Wim Hoff breathing at which point she passed out and drowned in the shallow end the complaint goes on to say that she was a strong swim swimmer her father Raphael Meer who is a personal injury lawyer filed suit against his ex-wife Tammy for introducing meline to the Wim Hoff method as well as Wim Hoff himself and inner fire BV this is a $67 million case the lawsuit claims that the Wim Hoff method has no proven health benefits and that inner fire knowingly teaches a dangerous breath work practice in the water without adequate warnings the first and Prime Ary goal of the litigation is to obtain an injunction that will enjoin whm Hoff from marketing his deadly breathing technique in the United States when I approached Hoff for a comment on the lawsuits just before the publication of this piece he responded with this message which well I think I'm just going to let speak for itself do real research covid and origin of the Wuhan gain of function research vaccine lies and death death medicine side effects deaths and permanent disability Epstein list Ukraine proxy war environmental damage accidents coverup politics etc etc I help millions of people you do not seem to be interested in I work with seven universities now do real investigative research instead of these tendous questions cannot cooperate with magazine per se wanted to open dialogue but there seems to be none of real value here that to me seems like just a list of conspiracy theories and a deflection against what are important allegations and things that whim should respond to as of June 15th 2023 neither whm Hoff nor Inner Fire have filed an official legal response to the complaint in the LA courts all of the people on the list were whm Hoff method practitioners who died in water most likely I believe because of shallow water blackout there are some caveats of course no one can say with 100% certainty the exact events that led to each death and coroners don't even have specific codes to identify shallow water blackout however these numbers are indicative of a trend I believe it's likely a radical undercount of the real problem since most people who drown never end up generating news stories even though the data set is small four of those people died in 2022 the first death that I have a news report for is in 2015 which to me indicates that the pace is picking up indeed even as I began reporting this story I added two more bodies to the total there are a few reasons for this the first is the most obvious in the last few years Wim Hoff's popularity has absolutely exploded there was a TV series in the United Kingdom and he's appeared on goop with gwenneth paltro and makes regular appearances with Russell Brand there are hundreds of YouTube videos explaining how to do his breathing technique and there's a movie in the works about whim a biopic meanwhile whm Hoff continues to conflate breath work and waterw work at this year's winter travel event in Poland a hundred people paid about $3,000 each to spend a week with whim pushing their own boundaries on the last day they jumped off a 30ft waterfall one by one all 100 of us jumped the fall so to answer the question if all of your friends jumped off a cliff would you do it too that that's Ricardo bengoa who was at the event and right after that whim got the idea after they all splashed into the water that everyone would come together with him and take a right of passage that he calls a baptism and then he just said okay we're gonna breathe 10 times and um we're gonna hold our breath for 20 seconds you know underwater Ricardo benoa enthusiastically joined the circle and one of the members there later posted a video of the whole ceremony on the internet it shows whim leading the whole group in a series of 12 deep breaths and then a full inhale before submerging their heads together in the water now while I doubt that anyone in that particular video would be in danger of drowning in this instance the problem is that wi is spreading a message that is okay to connect these two practices at all they're starting to seem like a guru sort of thing where um anything that he says is going to be right as I've said before I greatly admire whim in many many ways since our first meeting he and I have been on friendly terms we send text messages back and forth about the science of breath work and funny pictures of our pets but after I started collecting information that connected whim breath work to Deaths whim started to get defensive his answers over text message were characteristically odd he wrote to me that 28,000 people drown every year and that I was blaming him for all of their deaths and then well he wrote this I'm going to quote him here look into baptism the real meaning of it you might learn something I know what I do baptism the real one is shutting down our over controlling mind and activate deep healing mechanisms in the body not going to explain this physiologically to you not into competition Sports here which is entertainment since the Roman Empire who killed an innocent man called Jesus now I have trouble telling you exactly what this message specifically means except that it has a certain air of whim comparing himself to Jesus I don't know about you but this is the sort of message that I would expect from the leader of a cult indeed this message along with the one that he sent me after I asked him about meter's death pretty much devolve into a Litany of conspiracy theories and deflection and don't appear to take the gravity of the situation seriously and this leads me to another aspect of inner fire which is is whm Hoff's organization and it Bears a second look since it might color the way we collectively understand what's going on like other groups that I've written about before while covering up the insular politics of spiritual Pursuits inner Fire's first reaction to anything that contradicts the image that they want to present inevitably leads to a knee-jerk instinct to cover up the truth they pull from the same Playbook even against instructors that they have a falling out with well whim doesn't play much of a role in the day-to-day operations his son yes one of those children that he left homeless for 10 years is CEO and manages everything with a characteristic aggressive Mo uh they take an awfully big cut of what you are doing and they threaten you on a regular basis with lawsuits he'll yell like he'll yell at people to get his own way he'll bully people to get his own way and he'll use the cake if it seems right but really he's just going to tell people you're doing it my way or Not by his own words enam doesn't practice the method himself you know I don't practice his method right he's also clear that his decision to rekindle things with his father after 10 years of absence didn't necessarily stem from an enduring and deep bond 19 years ago I saw a opportunity with my dad I I haven't I didn't spoke to him like for 10 years or something I made my little website blah blah he broke up with his wife uh in those times and I saw an opportunity I grabbed it you know because he was famous as the icem man wh of method did not exist it was like but he did have a lot of attention towards him now let me tell you a story about back in 2018 I'd begun reporting on a story that I'd heard about that 38 whm Hoff method instructors and training got stuck on the top of a mountain in Poland during an ice storm they weren't wearing shirts and the situation was Dire but maybe not deadly still three instructors ended up with body temperatures of just 90° F flirting dangerously close to death they had to be taken down the mountain by polish search and rescue the weather could have been a little bit worse and it could have been way worse for for everybody so people could have died that's Steven pner who was on the mountain that day fortunately everyone was ultimately okay yet Adam's reaction wasn't to admit that there had been a problem but instead to cover up the event lest it make the organization look bad from orders do not talk to the Press designed a cover story he said they'd pin it on this other group of shirtless hikers in Poland that was scheduled to be here the next weekend and he told everyone to convince the media that it was that group not a Wim Hoff method group that had run into the trouble what we were do told this to say is it was Mountain Rescue was called for that group when I got wined that something was strange that happened to a large group of instructors I messaged on WhatsApp and he sent me 13 screenshots of information claiming that my journalism was irresponsible and that it was this other group that had gotten into trouble all along he fingered a man named mate and I'll include a link to all the screenshots of that below so you can see his exact words I also did a video on this that I'll also link to told that same exact story to everyone who asked my name is Ma shishka I'm a breathing train and physiotherapist next day television come to my house and stuff like this so so it was really bad it is hard to even imagine mate had no idea what was happening when polish television Crews arrived on his doorstep after all his group hadn't even started climbing the mountain yet but within minutes of the TV story airing his phone started ringing off the hook as 250 people had signed up for his expedition they all wanted to know if he was going to put them in danger the money that he was Raising for a sick child that was in Jeopardy of just disappearing they put it on me lied and he told other people to lie on his behalf not only that but just didn't stop at denying that something happened but actively sought out a rival business and said it was them all along this is the face of an organization that is so caught up with the myth of an indomitable Iceman that the truth no longer matters it's a sign that they will do whatever they can to control the message and go to Great Lengths to hide any of their own missteps I reached out to over email to comment on what I found during my reporting he sent two emails in response the first was to deny that Hoff ever teaches hyperventilation in water that he was unaware of the pending loss suit that whim and his sisters share equally in the company profits and that there was no coverup on sneska when I presented him with additional evidence to my claims he responded with this you have follow-up questions with lies supporting them they make no sense this is not journalism but just dumb silly actions of yours you should be ashamed of yourself I didn't lie to get success I Amon honest I give you honest answers and have nothing to hide you at the other hand just come with lies to try to get a reaction of me this will be the last time I spend some energy on you personally I just checked your videos and the only way to get views is to use our name that's because of our work and dedication you profited from a lot don't you feel embarrassed that you cannot get views of your own in your own ways do something constructive man you're just sinking lower and lower just a little free advice for you now whim and you have seen my evidence you can decide for yourself what you think the truth really is to some degree whim knows that his son is a liability to the reputation of the organization and a potential stumbling block for spreading the message around the world while might have been the right person to start the method initially his actions make inner fire look corrupt what needs to happen is need to step down from his pedal Stone there being so pedantic about what he what he is doing and that he thinks that he is the man and in power and thing is the we won't change and change needs to happen I feel awkward within the own organization the way it has been handled like I don't care guys you do this and I do this right and for the rest I have never been on my own website I don't you know I let it go feel endorsed for going for the good yes love on the other hand it strikes me that is also in a difficult position the disclaimers on the website and his occasional interruptions of whim speaking engagements to remind people of the potential dangers of following all of whims instructions to the letter might be the best that he can do to control the craziness of his father looked at from this perspective really has an impossible task he's been on the ground level of building a profitable business around his father's Charisma and Madness and now whims words carry so much weight that cannot control the outcome anymore I think these are all signs about an untenable tension at the heart of the booming Iceman movement or as Wim Hoff's brother Marcel observed and if we become too dependent on a person who is leading and that is the old Paradigm it doesn't work anymore when I stood shirtless next to whim at the base of Mount sesa 10 years ago I knew that there was a chance that this could be the beginning of a quasi religious movement that was destined to go off the rails I'd seen it before in my book The Enlightenment trap I wrote that gurus go through different stages of development at first they brim with enthusiasm and have a message that spreads in the world because it is legitimately beneficial to their flock but over time money and worldly considerations eventually stem the groups growth and a minor Scandal can upend the entire facade there comes a predictable pattern of deaths coverups and lies until ultimately the organization Falls to Pieces the reason that my initial reporting didn't bang that drum was because at the same time I knew there was potential danger there was also an amazing opportunity to spread a method that would let just about anyone find find happiness health and strength I chose to take the most optimistic Outlook because I did and still do believe that these methods offer very important benefits to the world I continue to be a daily practitioner of breath work and Ice immersion even though that I'm bringing out a story that no doubt will anger some people in this community this is because as a journalist I have a belief that the best way to make a path to a productive future is taking a long hard look at the facts we have to follow the truth no matter where it leads us I don't know what the Fate will be for whatever Wim Hoff does in the future I have hope though that things can turn back but it would take a fundamental change in the organization's practices and in our Collective desire to foster a myth around a Madman this is something that we can do we can appreciate how whim opened the door to a great set of practices without turning him into a guru whether he wants this role or not whim Hoff leads by example the cult of personality around him puts him on a pedestal that underplays the questionable parts of his past while overemphasizing the greatness of his achievements it is possible to hold these two opposing ideas in our heads at the same time but we need to accept whim as a prophet in the same breath that we know he's a Madman in my mind it's the only way to save his message otherwise it's likely that the suspicious deaths of 11 people in shallow water is only the beginning of another darker story thank you so much for watching this video you've been here with me like for more than an hour and you are a hero for sitting through my whole Exposition about the Wim Hof method however I want you to be sure and I want you to understand that Wim Hoff is still a huge part of my life and I love the method it has changed my perspective on everything so if you're still into watching a little bit more go check out this video about what 10 years of the Wim Hof method has done to make me feel well pretty awesome in just about everything that I do and again thank you for being [Music] here

Channel: Scott Carney

Views: 237,304

Keywords: Wim Hof Breathing, Outerfire, Is Wim Hof breathing safe, IS Wim Hof legit, is wim hof breathing dangerous, Is Wim Hof Legit, cults in america, cult podcast, yoga, breathwork, Innerfire, Enahm Hof, Brian Mackenzie, Medlife Crisis, MEdlife Crisis Wim Hof, Laird Hamilton, XPT Training, Wim Hof Method Science, Wim Hoff Breathing, Wim Hoff

Id: eu5CkkaHB1A

Length: 66min 35sec (3995 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2023