Why I fell for Wim Hof and Andrew Huberman

why did I fall for Wim Hoff and Andrew huberman it's a question that honestly recently I've had been doing a lot of soul searching over because my career has been you know largely based on at first debunking charlatans looking at conspiracies looking at problems in big Pharma uh writing about them writing about organ trafficking writing about cults and then I found these two people who seem to be sort of revolutionary in their ability to open my understanding about the limits and the the possibilities of the human body and I have endorsed both of them very strongly um whm Hoff in my book um what doesn't kill us uh that sold roughly 300,000 copies around the world and then the wedge where I endorsed Andrew huberman uh went to his lab and I and I sort of credited him for opening my eyes up to the scientific principle um that I've come to call the wedge or at least the some of the the physiological mechanisms that that make that work and to some degree the placebo effect work and you know we live in this world right now which is incredibly incredibly confusing we have billions maybe trillions of dollars in uh sort a medical industry um that has really serious ethical problems to it uh that has uh you know obviously we have the the the the sackers we have pain management we have this this chronic illness industry that doesn't seem to fix things and I'm I'm me just like you were I'm looking for answers uh trying to find like natural ways to deal with the body and you know when I find something that's really promising that opens my eyes that changes my like way I view the world I get excited about it like when I met whim I was expecting him to be a charlatan Guru who was to get people killed because he was promising them superpowers that was basically the plot of my book The Enlightenment trap where I looked at sort of Tibetan Buddhist teachers who were teaching you that you could do crazy insane sort of spiritual Feats with your mind and prayer and meditation it turned out really bad for people in that book and and and whim was offering the same thing essentially from the outside it looked like the same thing sitting on icebergs whatever um the short of this and many people probably already know this story as I went out I I met him I tried his method and my life changed in an instant I climbed up um mountains in my like underwear I I I sat at nice baths and did all these things that were pretty big and lifechanging and afterwards like I had this autoimmune illness that like went away uh I kind at Mount kilamanjaro uh in negative3 Dee weather like there was some sort of like real kernel of Truth here something that really worked and I was just so excited and I wrote you know eventually what doesn't kill us uh I did like 300 interviews um in support of Wim Hoff I was you know I was on Dr Oz which which is his own like sort of crazy thing that that happened but it did uh and and I was like his number one fan in the world and the and with Andrew hubman I I wasn't as responsible uh for his rise like with Wim Hoff I was like the first guy to like really seriously take him seriously and push the health benefits with Andrew hubman I did WR about those things um but I didn't start this Cascade that that sort of put him on Joe Rogan and then you know made him blow up I was sort of incidental but I was a strong proponent of both of them and I knew them personally I saw their flaws and and actually maybe I mean that's part of it with whim his flaws were so damn obvious I mean he speaks like a crazy guy he's got this big nose that that's obviously this alcoholism background uh I mean I also saw him blackout drunk so obviously alcoholism um smoked like a chimney ate like trash and um and he had the story about the the the near fatal enema right where he he sat on a a fountain and and eviscerated himself and he abandoned his children and there's all these bad stories about Wim Hoff and I figured that maybe if if if if if people like understood what Wim Hoff was really about that they would know that they would never want to be him they would never put him on a pedestal they would never make him a guru uh they would they would see him as the guy who opens this door to this really cool thing and then go on their own journeys of health and self-discovery I I I really did have part of my mind dedicated to the idea that that he was so obviously flawed that he couldn't become a cult figure what I didn't understand in 20133 was like how I guess social media uh might play out in this how money can absolutely corrupt people over time uh and you know these are sort of age old like at least money that's an age-old problem like here's the thing with whim and I guess to some degree Andrew huberman when you start to if you have this kernel of like revolutionary awesome wisdom which is is so important and obviously true and and and changes people you can put that out there but this the attention span of social media goes away really quick right you you try some I spast your life changes but then what's next and what's next and what's next and what I've seen is that even though there's amazing science to the Wim Hoff method and then Andrew hubman talks about his amazing um scientific research eventually you sort of run out of steam because there's only so many revolutions that one person has has in them at a specific time and we see uh you know whim you know could have just been like look ice B change my life my anxiety is so much better uh I can do really cool things and let's go let's do breath work let's do ice baths and let's go into it but it sort of metastasizes into this stuff can cure everything like there's some science that we can prove and the science study the scientific studies on whim take you know took at least two years to really complete to go from exper to publication but the appetite of social media is let's go let's go let's go let's go let's keep on pushing the envelope and there is a requirement on the internet to always put out new stuff and I think the inevitable trend is as you're when you're on that that rise that you are forced forced by the algorithm forced by the attention spans of humans to push credibility to push more extreme things to push um uh to push an image that's not actually attainable by by humans and at the same time you can't show your negative aspects right you can't show weakness like Wim Hoff has these huge sort of like manic awesome episodes and everyone loves hanging out with people who are manic um but the depressive side no one wants to hang out with them but on social media you can just show the manic side you can just show the fun side you can just show the the overcoming side and you don't see the downsides of it and I think as both of these people gained prominence they started to lose credibility at least in my mind like Andrew huberman you know you can W look at this article by Andrea love who's an immunologist and a PhD talking about all the flimflam science that Andrew H huberman talks about you know when he started he was like dissecting the optic nerve on his Instagram feed and then he started pushing like why you shouldn't take the flu vaccine and sort of really sketchy uh takes on uh diabetes uh you know obviously his like cold research really does not Jive at all with my experiences and the science that he endorses does not seem very good but um honestly the Andrea love article is great U so you know go check that out you can look at all of the places where he sort of pushes credibility and then these people start making a lot of money like a lot of money now you can look at records uh through the Dutch government to see that inner fire which is Wim Hoff's organization earns about $18 million or has $18 million in assets U when I spoke to whm Hoff's son Anam is his name uh he was telling me that they were earning about a millionar a month selling video courses and that's a lot of reasons to keep on pushing a certain narrative right like if you're on social media and you're pushing um and and your your business model is to sell video course in Andrew huberman's case it's a supplement called athletic greens and matcha and there some other things like that if you're pushing that stuff you have every incentive to do things to gain more attention to have more people look at you just you get more people into your funnel and then sell more of your product and I and I've seen with with whim who started out as a guy who really didn't seem to care about the money to becoming a guy who brags about how we can do speaking engagements and get paid $50,000 an hour in Andrew huberman's Case um I know that he was getting paid $300,000 an hour to talk um to give speeches and that's a lot of incentive to get people to keep on coming back to you and the bigger a claim you can make the more likely they're going to going to want you you can't really make measured claims because if you actually follow the scientific method you can't just say actually let let's stop let's let's be more measured people want fast Solutions and both Wim Hoff and Andrew hubman are offering fast Solutions and I wish they didn't I wish they offered Solutions up until the point where the science stops and then say hey look I'm going beyond the science now and this may not work for everyone because we haven't done the studies that we need to um that's not what whim does what whim just does is is talks about he just like throws out science sounding words and then you're supposed to believe him because he's so charismatic with Andrew um it's it's actually sort of similar like he throws out scient sounding words like this you your your dopamine is going to go up your testosterone is going to go up your all these these various biological markers are going to change but that stuff doesn't actually mean that much like it doesn't dopamine is going up and down all the time testosterone's going up and down all the time and and they don't have these direct um straight lines to Performance or or brain power or or whatever else um there it's just a way to make you think that they're talking scientific truth so yeah I have this tendency to endorse people when they're really promising and then things go wrong and I am sorry if I have pushed you into them and it doesn't mean that everything that they have taught is wrong and that's the really hard thing to grasp here like not everything they've done is wrong but sometimes like let's say like you're 20% wrong and like 80% truth that 20% is actually super super dangerous especially when people follow your advice and and and bad things happen and like they follow your advice and they stop taking their cancer treatments and die or uh in wiim Hof's case there are 32 people who have drown by following his direct advice that he directly teaches in his ecourses and on videos and I know that there's warnings and stuff and you can go watch my inner fire playlist and we can have a whole conversation about that separately but people are dead and bad things happen and there's this other thing that people will often come out and say against me is that that I'm a bad friend right because both Andrew huberman and Wim Hoff I considered them friends at some point and there's this sense in the in the world that you should be loyal to friends like if you've if you've gone into the friendship and you and you were honest with that person then you would stick by their side through thick and thin and I feel like this is not that's not the way I I view truth as a journalist I I I just have to tell you my own experience I have to tell you what I've seen and I will not follow someone blindly in something that I consider toxic loyalty I am loyal to the truth and I'm not loyal to a per a person and that's the problem with putting people on pedestals is like you start to credit Andrew hubman or whm Hoff or um you know like so many other of these people you you start to credit them for opening your eyes to a technique that maybe was beneficial to you but it's not them it's it's the things that you try they don't have magical powers so I will absolutely tell the truth every single time and that will look like to you it may look like to you like I'm betraying a person and I can feel bad about that I can feel bad about inter's feelings or whims feelings but I feel like my responsibility is to you and and here's one more thing that's that I've decided to change about myself going forward so that you know that I am truthful in everything that I do or at least as as truthful as I can be as truthful as I as long as I'm not deceiving myself which is is always a problem always a potential problem if you want to spot a charlatan on the internet this is the trick see what products they are endorsing and to see if their advice directly pushes you to purchasing those products and then figure out how much money those people are making selling those products so for a few years I ran occasional training course around my book The Wedge right I occasionally would have people over for sauna and ice bath I would charge them uh roughly $500 for to spend like half a day or a day with me to go over my techniques uh that I had learned over the years that I thought were beneficial I considered by doing an ecourse uh and uh for about a three-month period I I uh got a commission selling um not selling yeah for every moraz for which is a type of ice bath that sold I got a commission from that uh and for about a year I also uh had affiliate marketing links on my website selling the Wim Hoff method uh courses all of those things I have shut down um at various points like the Wim Hoff courses and the The Ice baths were several several years ago like four or five years ago that's all gone and I'm no longer uh going to be offering any sort of training courses uh in person and the reason for this is that I want you to be able to take me credibly and say that I don't have any conflicts of interest um I haven't made that much money doing this stuff maybe the total for all of that stuff is let's just say it was $20,000 over the last like five years um I'm not going to do that anymore because I think it is a conflict of interest and and that's a problem like you know Andrew hubman is making about $20 million zero or so I am told selling athletic greens Wim Hoff has an $18 million net value uh and makes about eight so and makes about $1 million a month selling his courses those are actually conflicts of interest now you can say that it's good or bad or whatever I don't care I'm not going to be involved in that anymore I'm not going to do imperson trainings um I will however do paid speaking gigs and I will um sell my books when I sell a book I get about $4 to7 per book that's not a huge amount of money uh and I feel like for a journalist it's pretty wellestablished um business uh path so that's going to happen but I will I will no longer be supporting any um sponsored products on this channel so if you support what I do and you think that I'm I'm being honest you are welcome to support me on you know I have this patreon thing um you know there's a newsletter and there's other stuff I'm going to try to keep as much of it as free as possible and I I want you to know that I'm thinking about these things very very seriously and I take people's Health seriously and I I I take your viewing me and talking to me and listening to me I take that all very seriously so thank you so much for for just listening to how I got taken in by charlatans and I'm going to try to do better in the future and try to spot these patterns before I go out on the record I I hope I really hope that it doesn't happen again from pokey bear LLC in Denver Colorado this was Scott Carney investigates

Channel: Scott Carney

Views: 11,742

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Id: K6WiWWG93-4

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2024