Full transcript: Wim Hof on London Real
3:30 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Wim Hof, the Dutch athlete, breath work pioneer, and global phenomenon known as the Iceman. For decades, you pushed the limits of the human body and mind, setting world records, transforming cold exposure science and inspiring millions to take control of their health, stress, immunity, and inner power. Since you were last here, the world has changed dramatically from global mental health crises to new breakthroughs in neurobiology, stress adaptation, psychedelic research, trauma healing, and human longevity.
4:06 Today I want to go deep on the truth behind breath work, cold exposure, the nervous system, emotional control, and what it really means to reclaim sovereignty over your own physiology. Wim, welcome back to London Real.
4:22 Thank you, Brian. That was a great intro.
4:24 Wim, it’s great to have you here. I still remember 10 years ago you were here in London in our studio. It was an amazing episode. It was great to finally meet you and in the last 10 years, you’ve just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. I want to know what’s going on with you.
4:42 How is Australia? Is it true you were helping out Conor Benn on his rematch with Chris Eubank, this big boxing match we just saw a week or two ago? Tell me, what have you been up to? Yeah, I, you know, I get these big fighters, they come and they see that the breathing learns people to control their stress and emotion when it comes to the point where you [clears throat] have to be ready for the match. And then with all the audience and the cameras and all that influences on you on the nervous system and that drains energy.
5:24 So it puts you in a different state of emotion which normally you don’t have. It’s already enough that they have to be ready at the point that they go into the match. So this breathing that causes the fighters to feel completely stressless
5:49 Before they go into the match, into the ring.
5:54 It’s like the world is not affecting them anymore in their feelings, their emotion. And once they get into the ring, they can switch it on 100%. And that is by which the energy is not drained before the match is actually beginning, because it has an absolute influence. And with the guy who was going to do the boxing match. Yeah.
6:26 I got a phone call and with that phone call I said, “Hey, I can help you, cuz I got, I’m very experienced. I know what kind of stress you are to meet all about and I have seen so many fighters fully in control before a match and when they have to do the match, fully in control over 100% of who they are and what they are, because you can be overwhelmed in the emotion. There’s also the opponent. It gets to you all and the breathing is able to bring you down.”
7:07 M, wow.
7:09 So, so you worked with Conor on his breathing to get him ready to walk out for that match.
7:15 I told him, I told him, get into it. Get into the breathing. Get into this, what I’ve been doing with a lot of fighters and you will see, you will feel, feeling is understanding.
7:33 Okay. You will feel that you have much more hold over your emotions, over your energy.
7:42 Wow. Okay. Amazing. Because it’s interesting because Conor Benn won that fight and the fight before with Chris Eubank. And by the way, I’ve had both of their fathers on the show.
7:54 So I had Nigel Benn, his father, and Chris Eubank Senior on London Real many years ago. So it’s very strange to see them both in the ring with their sons. But, you know, you could see that Conor Benn this time was much more in control of his emotions. The last time he was fighting with anger,
8:12 Maybe he was a little nervous and he wasn’t as effective in the first fight, but this fight you could tell he was calm and he boxed intelligently and he won.
8:23 Yeah, that’s it. That is the difference. And that is also very good then to know that these breathing techniques make people act more from a distance to stress because stress happens every day. So you better learn to not be entangled by the stress and overwhelmed because you don’t know, but it drains your energy and then it’s more difficult to function. So why not do breathing that brings down the nervous system and then you feel you are in control and you stay in control.
9:09 That is what conscious breathing does, right?
9:13 And this is what I train people. So, I still remember when you were here 10 years ago, afterwards, I actually went to the park and I started doing your breathing techniques pretty much every day and it completely changed me. Um, I still take cold showers every morning. I do your breathing technique two or three times a day. And here’s something crazy, Wim.
9:35 I had my first boxing match this year at 54 years old. I fought this 19-year-old kid and I’ve been practicing these diaphragmic breathing techniques now to stay calm and to get myself oxygenated. So, it’s really powerful and it’s helped me a lot in fighting as well.
9:56 Wow. Yeah. The proof is in the pudding and the proof is feeling. Feeling is understanding. And for those who never did this and are listening now, just try it out once.
10:12 If it doesn’t work, blame me. But if it works, pass it on.
10:18 What’s the best way for people to try, Wim? Obviously, they can go to your website, they can go to your YouTube, there’s so many videos out there of you teaching people the basics. Should they try with the cold shower? Should they try with one minute of breathing techniques? What’s the best way for them to get hooked on Wim Hof breathing?
10:37 First of all, let people understand, or the listener I’m addressing you right now, know that you can be much more in control over your nervous system in the depth, which is controlling your emotions and with that you are able to bring it down and look at it. It gives you relief, gives you a sense of control, gives you a deeper sense of yourself. It’s almost spiritual and, but absolutely you will be able to control your energetic body much better. So what does it take?
11:21 Very little. Just relax. Know that you are made by the laws of nature to have control over your emotions, over your energy. That is not the way we live in this modern society with all kinds of stresses coming to us, all kinds of information and this and that lines there and that line so and so. No, [clears throat] relax.
11:49 Go on a sofa, on a bed when you just wake up and learn to go into the depth with easy breathing. We got these tutorials. It’s all for free. All is there on internet. It’s like over 100 million people downloaded, and 20 million there and 70 million there.
12:13 It’s there in all the languages. So once you do that you will see before and after will be a great difference. It makes you able to control to the autonomic level. Autonomic is outside of our will. Suddenly becomes willful control over our peace inside.
12:41 And we cleanse through this breathing. Very simple. We cleanse the lymphatic system [snorts] by which we feel wow, nice, unconditionally. Okay. So what does it take?
12:59 On a sofa, on a bed, safe environment, because you go deep with 30 deep inhalations and letting go. Inhalations, letting go. And the last breath is fully in and let it go and stop after the exhalation because now you change the alkalinity, the pH level, by which the breathing trigger is not there and thus you are able to stay at least one minute after exhalation without breathing and feel peace. And with that suddenly your bio pack in the depth of the brain but also into the blood flow, in the blood itself, you are changing the pH.
13:49 It becomes much more alkaline and with that the electricity of the nervous system, neurotransmitters, suddenly work a lot better. If you do two rounds like that, two, three rounds in the morning, you will be cleansed. You will feel peace. You will feel, I’m ready. I’m ready for the day.
14:12 Let it come. Cuz you cleansed yourself of all the neurological stress accumulated from the day before in the sleep. It’s been worked out, but the residue is still there. And you cleanse it and thus you are ready for the day because you are empty. You are clean and that sense is [snorts] an absolute sense where you are not disturbed or deblocked or interfered by your own chemistry.
14:48 It’s clean and suddenly you get this sense of control over your body and that is the natural way.
14:58 It’s so that is that and then we have the cold shower. You got to shower anyway. Take a cold shower. It’s a [snorts] it’s a cardiovascular fitness workout. The best 125,000 kilometers of vessels inside everybody of us, capillaries, arteries and veins, and they contract when you go into the cold shower.
15:26 But what contracts also goes open, wide open, and you thus the endothelium, which is all the muscles around the veins and the arteries, they become stronger and thus the blood flow during the rest of the day goes better. So it is amazing how it then goes better because of the muscle training. It’s called the endothelium, by which the blood flow goes a lot better and thus you get a lot more energy. It’s logical because the transportation is better, the oxanization is better just because of a cold shower.
16:10 It’s quite amazing, very simple. Cold shower, couple of rounds of breathing makes you able to reset the body to the laws of nature, the way physiology actually is within us, being able to be controlled by us willfully. It’s an amazing technique, Wim, and what I do now is I wake up in the morning and I have a cold shower first thing, I do your breathing, then when I go to the gym later I do the cold shower. I do the breathing in the gym. Everyone thinks I’m crazy because I sound a little crazy in the shower.
16:48 And then when I come home at night I do it as well. I haven’t had a hot shower, I think, in a year. And I will tell people, it’s incredible how effective this technique is. You could be having a tough day, a stress day, a this and that. If you do the breathing in the cold shower, it’s like within a minute or two, you’re reset.
17:07 It’s incredible how fast it works and how amazing it works. It really is.
17:12 Yes. Yeah. What you say is that the thinking brain which goes like and all what is happening, you cannot stop it, but when you take a cold shower you get into the, it breaks the pattern, goes into the depth of the brain, the brain stem. It’s now proven and that with that you shut up, you suddenly become silent. You become disconnected of this thinking brain which you like but nobody knows how to do it.
17:45 So, a cold shower will be able to break through, [clears throat] disconnect from the world, and get back into deep feeling. You just had a study come out in Nature magazine that actually goes deeper into the science of what’s happening. What are you learning more and more about the Wim Hof technique? So in the whole wide world, stress tools generally accepted and implemented are meditation and mindfulness. Now [gasps] they, with 500 people, they compared the Wim Hof Method to mindfulness and meditation and it turns out that this works better, significantly better, toward stress resilience goes way up.
18:41 Stress experience goes way down compared to mindfulness and meditation and cognitive awareness, sharpness in the head, the mind goes way up compared to meditation and mindfulness. And then we got another study done with the Harvard University and it’s on interoception. Interoception is a new model of neuroscience. And it’s about trust. They can measure trust.
19:16 So before and after and it shows that this method makes people trust, cooperate without inhibition much better. So that is in short the science and it’s been submitted to the magazine Nature, which is one of the best in the world, and with 500 people it is like beyond any doubt that this method is going to be the stress tool number one in the whole wide world.
19:51 Yeah. Because it’s so simple and it’s so effective and anybody can do it.
20:54 See you in the Investment Club.
20:55 Wim, you started doing this 20, 30 years ago. And when you started, there weren’t mobile phones everywhere. There wasn’t social media everywhere. With these days, all the kids and the adults now, obviously they’re in their heads already, but now you got the phones showing you what everybody else is doing, trying to give you news that’s there to scare you. Um, how much more important these days is it to disconnect and to also force yourself to do something maybe difficult?
21:33 Yes, there is also a study been done on the amygdala and hippocampus. Amygdala is the seat of stress and fear. So if you see all these images, the worries, the news in the world, the wars going on and all that, that affects our it’s psychosomatic. It affects our neurology. So it comes in through thoughts but the words become neurotoxic.
22:04 So if you don’t cleanse this neurotoxic behavior and chemistry then it accumulates and it piles up and of course then you become afraid not because of what is happening in the world but you get disconnected inside your own body through the wrong chemistry accumulated. So if you do the breathing and you go in a cold shower, you reset the body, you cleanse the body of these neurotoxins. You influence deeply. You reset it and you are ready again. It’s not there.
22:46 It’s not accumulating. It’s not piling up. Now you are able to think well and feel unconditionally okay. And that is for the people in the world of nowadays, fear, worries, too much minding, [snorts] emotional stress and all, it causes neurotoxicity and that neurotoxicity we just need to clean and this breathing is simply doing that. It goes into the lymphatic system, it goes into the autonomic nervous system, thought of before impossible to regulate, to be regulated at will, but now it is there and it is simple.
23:38 So we can talk about all these, so a kind of modern issues, but it is very simple, an effective natural way to cleanse yourself and to reset the body and mind to its natural standards is breathing. It’s the most closest you can go. You don’t need anything outside. You need to go inside and a shower exercises the cardiovascular system fully and with that, that is the transportation system inside of our bodies. So once it gets cleansed to the lymphatic system, then yeah, you just feel ready again, you feel okay.
24:28 These modern issues are not there. Wim, are we too comfortable? Has the modern world gotten to where we don’t have any stresses anymore? And then does that dangerous for us because it makes us weaker? Because nowadays everything is perfectly climate controlled.
24:48 We have more food than we know what to do with. We have these safe spaces where there’s nothing bad that happens.
24:54 Um, is that slowly killing us? And is that what you’re trying to reintroduce, is the stresses back?
25:02 Absolutely. Absolutely. They have been seeing in neuroscience and neuroscientific research that the periaqueductal gray hemisphere, that is the deepest of our brain, is being activated through doing this method. And that is what normally in our society is not activated, cuz there ain’t no lions, there is no tigers. There is no direct danger anymore.
25:31 But indirectly there is a lot of danger and it shows because there’s a lot of disease, a lot of cancer, lot of autoimmune diseases, lot of depression. And if you don’t become aware because you are not sharp, because you don’t cleanse inside yourself and are only thinking, then 25%, 20 to 25% less blood flow goes in the deep brain. So you learn to be narrowminded. You haven’t got this hold over your own brain because the deprivation of the the blood flow not going into the depths because you’re thinking, thinking, thinking.
26:16 Thinking is where the neural activity is, where the blood flow goes, and that will be well fed and it keeps on going even when we want to sleep. No. If you want the all the brain functioning well, you need short-term stress. That’s why the gym is so good. That’s why running is so good.
26:44 And even simpler, a couple of rounds of breathing and going into a cold shower, they are doing that. They bring you into the depth of the brain is being activated because cold is dangerous. So what happens, your adrenal axis, the depth of the brain and the brain stem, periaqueductal gray, the endocannabinoid system, all systems stored, thought of in neuroscience we cannot control, we cannot activate it at will. Go in a cold shower and it happens. So we should not think of the cold as a negative power.
27:26 No, it is a short-term self-inflicted acute stressful exercise which is hormesis. Hormesis is a self-inflicted acute stressful exercise very well to activate the full brain and then the blood flow goes everywhere and where the blood flow goes everywhere you feel good because you feel alive and we don’t feel alive anymore when we only think the whole day long because we live in a comfort zone behavior and all the extensions of our minding has resulted in technology taking over. We don’t need to do anything almost anymore.
28:14 There is no danger. But that’s the danger because long-term not being in your own brain in the depths. Once you get sick, you can’t do anything because you have never learned to go into the depth of the brain. And in the depth of the brain is the emotion. Is what, the endocannabinoid system.
28:37 We’re taking care of disease. The pharmacy inside is in the deep brain. When it goes good, it’s okay. Sort of. But when the s*** hits the fan, we don’t know what to do anymore.
28:50 We go to doctors. We go to outside world and we get into I don’t know where we getting into, but we should get into ourselves. And that is what the breathing and the cold do. It’s acute stressful exercise that exercises the full brain which is the central nervous system connected to all parts of the body.
29:18 So important. Wim, I remember seeing videos of you going deep on these concepts in some of your retreats. I think in the mountains in Poland. I saw you doing breath work with people for, you know, hour an hour. I saw you walking up to the cold mountains, you know, with no shirts on.
29:38 And I’m curious, um, are you still doing these deeper, um, retreats with students?
29:46 Yeah. In 10 days.
29:46 In 10 days.
29:47 In 10 days, I’ll be in Sweden. I’m now in the tropics, but in 10 days I will be with 250 people in the near the polar circle and we will climb all the mountain up there to, what is it? I don’t know exactly but it’s really cold there and we will be able all to climb the mountain in our shorts and we will go a half hour from our accommodation. There is a big lake, we make holes in there and we will all go in there. I mean it’s going to be tough but we are going to be tough too.
30:31 Wow. How long are you in the shorts outside exposed to the elements? Is it hours that you’re out there?
30:39 Yes, hours.
30:40 And you jump in the water on top of that.
30:43 Yes. Yes. The thing is it’s not only hours, it is everybody is doing the hours. That is the mindset. That is the connection.
30:55 If people only come motivated then even people of 80 years old, 80, never been in the cold, they will be able to climb the mountain and be ours in the cold.
31:10 Isn’t what is that, that is an innate capacity of ours we lost. We never exercise, we think it cannot be, we cannot be so strong and it’s not there. Any a mammal in the world, one day before it dies, it’s still able to find food, to flee, and to fight. And what did we do with our elders? We put them in elder rooms, weakened, and they become weaker.
31:42 Just before this our conversation, our interviews started, talking, I feel younger since 10 years ago we met and I feel older. Hey, what they are saying, I’m 66 now. I’m strong. I do stuff young people cannot do. So I am not buying the concept of becoming older and an elder and a senile and a dementia and all that.
32:14 It is the system. The system called nature is able to make you that mammalian power and until you are not dead you will be able to find your food, to be strong, to flee, fight and what else all, and that is the way I want to go and keep on going. But by the way, I still got so much to do, so much time to come. I just had a one-year-old now. I got a new job.
32:53 What do you think? I’m doing that and then go way down. No, no, no, no, no. I will outlive everybody. Why?
33:02 Because I’m in control of my mind. And my mind is saying that it is different than the way people think, the way the paradigm is constructed. And it’s time that we wake up within ourselves and reconnect, which I’m showing scientifically all the time, that we are able to do so much more than we thought possible. So there we are. So that daily reset, that cold therapy, that breathing is going to help with longevity.
33:37 It’s going to help with depression. It’s going to help with dementia. And all these modern ailments we see, you think come from too much comfort. And the fact we’re not willing to go to these difficult places in our mind and in our body.
33:50 Absolutely. Absolutely. If we don’t use hormesis, self-inflicted acute stressful exercise, or as they call it in science now, hormatic enhancing interoceptive refocusing, think different, and [clears throat] use the stress, acute stressful exercise every day that makes your body reset in the depth and then you cleanse and then you feel much more control and your mind is able to exercise that control to do whatever you need to do with this beautiful vessel which we got and feel life the way it is in the depth. [snorts] So there, that there, I’m going every day, every day when I wake up, I’m going to change the world.
34:47 That’s the [clears throat] way. And I love my family. I’m playing with my kids all the time. I got plenty of energy.
34:58 Now, when that’s what the cold is doing.
35:00 When your 250 people are on this mountain in Sweden coming up and they need to reset or they’re feeling cold. Do you have them go back to the breath work as they’re hiking up this mountain? Are they constantly revisiting that breath work or how does that work? How do you keep people? That is the beauty.
35:22 The beauty is that it is so simple. I tell them refocus. Refocusing is get back to yourself. And [clears throat] up till now I’ve been seeing thousands of people in the mountain and always works. It always, people have the innate capacity.
35:44 Don’t go away. Go back. Use your breath. Your breath is directly going in. It has direct effect.
35:53 Makes your body alkaline. That is what then your will is a neuro signal is able to travel better like a alkaline battery. It works better and longer and it is chemistry. So at the moment when people really feel cold and say yes, they, before we go into the mountains I teach them about, hey, refocus, get back into your mind because you got that capacity. Let me tell you a little story, a little story.
36:27 I had a questions and answers and it was around like 10 years ago and I was with the people and I got a question of, and he said, “Wim, you are drinking beer that intoxicates your liver. That is not control.” I said, “Yeah, I’m not a Puritan. I’m not a Puritan. I like my yellow water.
36:51 That’s what I said there jokingly.” And now and he
36:57 Great. So, you were telling me a story about, yeah.
37:00 The yellow liquid.
37:02 Yeah. You know, the beer, yellow water, and I said I’m not a Puritan and then he said, yeah, but that is not real control, I said, and he went on. So I said to him, you know what, in a half hour I will go outside on my barefoot in the snow, stand 3 hours in the horse stance in the snow consecutive. Would you like that? And he said, “Yes, yes, yes.”
37:38 Oh, whoa, whoa. Okay, but first you need to get me a beer. And he got a beer so fast. Boom. And but half hour later, all the people present and we got it filmed, I went outside, I stood for three hours barefoot in the horse stance.
38:02 No problem. Done. But that’s not the thing. The thing was after 1 hour people started to come and join me and another and another and another and suddenly there were like 50 people with me barefoot outside in this awkward position of the horse stance and being able, never had been exercised, to stand in this horse stance for like a half hour, 1 hour, 1 and a half hour with me. So it is not about this, you have to train so much.
38:47 It is your motivation. When you see somebody doing something, he’s a human and he is doing it, then suddenly you remember inside deeply and you feel, hey, I’m going to do that too. But if we massively say this is possible and this is not possible, then we follow that paradigm and what I saw at that moment, that people are so capable of doing so much more than we think. And on and on it proves itself and the cold is merciless. You have to do it the right way, especially when you go for hours outside in your shorts on a mountain in deep freezing temperatures.
39:41 How do you do it?
39:42 So that is no joke. It is really working.
39:46 How do you do that then? How do people out there with no shirt on climbing these mountains when they’re old or they’ve never done it before, how do you keep them able to survive?
39:56 I remind them who they really are, the way the physiology really works. Then they are trying it out. I give them two, three days to try it out in all these groups.
40:12 Okay. And then I see that they are ready. We go and it’s done. In 4 days is a transformation. But it is not that you can train for this.
40:28 It’s already there.
40:29 Okay.
40:29 But you got to awaken it. You got to connect.
40:35 Very simple.
40:36 And what about the horse stance? How do people stand in that horse stance with bare feet on the snow that haven’t done that before? How do they do that without, you know, cramping up or The thing is, when I was doing it and looking behind, I was wondered. I was flabbergasted cuz he still stood there like an army. Army of Bushido warriors in the snow, heavy training, doing it, amazing.
42:11 So that is what motivation does. The last time I climbed the Kilimanjaro in shorts the oldest man was 76 and he had never climbed a mountain and he was suffering from Lyme disease. I looked him in the eye. He said to me, “I want to climb this mountain with you.” And then I looked him in the eye and I saw motivation.
42:43 I saw a soul. And this man went with me. And this is a mountain that you can do between 5 to nine days. He did it in a shorts because 5 to nine days and not fully dressed because up there is arctic cold.
43:04 Yeah.
43:04 And there is half the oxygen in the air. This man did it not 5 to 9 days. He did it in a short shorts in 31 hours. That’s motivation. That motivation anybody has but you got to bring it up.
43:26 You got to take out your doubt and get into your body the way mother nature builds you and you are born with. And then you are able to connect to the depth because we use the cold only to go to learn to connect to that depth and to use it in daily life to battle stress, to battle whatever comes in and what should not come in, that we are in control, moving it out and feel on top of it. That is what the cold is doing. We are awakening people to their true power the way mother nature made it.
44:13 Not society, not the schools. We know what happens there. It’s a system. It is not serving real health, happiness and strength. And what I do is bring back those values.
44:30 Those powers should be willfully in control by us, in us. And that is what is happening. Wim, do you remember the first time that you got into the cold? I think I remember a story. Maybe you were in Holland.
44:47 You were maybe dealing with some grief at the time and you saw, I think, a pond near you and you went in there and everyone thought you were crazy. Do you remember when you first started doing that? Because if you hadn’t have done that, I don’t think any of us would be talking about this right now.
45:04 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Brian, that is exactly because 10 years ago we met and now we meet again and now hundreds and millions of people are doing this.
45:14 Yeah.
45:14 It’s no joke. And it’s even the Catholic Church has come to me.
45:20 Wow. PhDs of them, the nuns and the priests, they can feel the providence of God better after doing this because it takes out all the world and his thoughts. You get into the depth. So I was, as a young man, I was like hooked to esoteric beliefs, traditions, doctrines, religions, languages, etc. Because I wanted to know what is the soul all about because what I read doesn’t match up with that feeling which I am eager to feel, to see, to understand the soul.
46:08 It is not clear in no scripture. It’s too far away, too esoteric, too far out. So at a certain moment I felt I want to go into that cold water. I looked around in a Sunday morning. I went in and there I got it.
46:29 This is it. A, this is it feeling.
46:34 Not thinking, feeling. I had exactly what I was looking for and would never ever have found it in books or talking about it
46:46 Or thinking about it. It was there, straight there, going into the depths of my own brain into a so-called dangerous environment, the icy water, which don’t do that, it is dangerous. We got a primordial fear for cold cuz we still from the prehistoric genetically, it’s that fear, that connotation with cold freezing is wrong. But now we live in a world where we only think, the cold is no more, the heat is no more there. The wolf is no more there.
47:29 There is no more danger. It has completely shifted. The cold in the right way is able to go across our thinking into the depth and reset our brain to our willful functioning. And that was that moment. This is it.
47:54 Yeah. I felt great the whole day long. I had so much energy and then the other day I went back with doubt that yeah, maybe a one off, and I go again and the same thing right there and since then, I was 17. Since then I’ve been doing it every day in the winter time cuz in the summer time I had no money for ice cubes or I wasn’t thinking about a freezer and all that. In the winter time every day outside in the Netherlands.
48:32 And when I lost my wife, you remember when I was 35, she suicided or she fell from 8 stories down while I was 250 kilometers away in the mountains guiding people, making money as a mountain guide. And but suddenly that, how can you deal with that with four kids? How can you deal? There is no way. We have never learned how to deal with that.
49:09 Yeah. Just swallow it. Everything goes on. You got to do this. You got to do, no, that is not the way my emotions work.
49:17 They are there. I got a broken heart. I feel emptiness. I feel torn. What do I do?
49:24 That is when I started to do the cold ice bath thing much more consciously [snorts] and there I took on an effective way to get rid of this numbness in me, of this being torn in me. I could serve without money. I had no money, but I could serve my four kids easily because I had all the energy every day. And that made us able to create energetically our nest. And children are just demanding and that’s beautiful.
50:08 I love my children and I work with them right now. We have a very successful company in the whole wide world with all my kids from back then. And but back then there was no money. It was nothing but this pain. This pain and the world goes on.
50:30 So what do you got to do? You need energy. You can’t be torn within [snorts] being drained of energy. You need energy. That is where I took on the iceberg and the breathing much more consciously.
50:46 And then I saw the healing properties for mental disorders, for pain inside, how to regulate your emotion. Then I started talking with people about that and people thought, yeah, that is not possible. That is not possible. That is not possible. But then I came in with the television and from the television into scientific environment, experiments, and then it all started to be backed up that we had found a deep control possible for anybody to do if they only exercise into the cold and into the breathing.
51:32 How to control your emotions, how to control, how to get much more energy and how to activate the immune system, all came out of that. And that is exactly what we need nowadays in this modern world with AI. I say no, we have two eyes, two eyes and a soul behind. And we should not be overwhelmed by this technology no more and look more much more inside and be who we are by the laws of nature.
52:09 It’s such a powerful story, Wim. And along the way you also started doing these contests around the world. I remember you did them in Japan. You did it everywhere where they would submerge you in ice in front of an audience and you were breaking world record after world record after world record. I think that’s when the world started knowing about you and then of course Vice magazine did that video on you.
52:32 That was probably 12 years ago, 14 years ago and then everyone started to know who you were. Um, can you talk about that time because that was before I think you did the Wim Hof Method and you were still this kind of
52:45 Showman and then you started teaching.
52:50 Yes. No, absolutely. The people think that I’m crazy, you know, before, but television, take on television. They started to challenge me more and more. When can you go 10 m under the ice swimming?
53:08 Can you go 50 m under the ice? Can you go 100 meters in the ice? Can you go and climb Mount Everest in your shorts? Mount Kilimanjaro with their people in your shorts. Can you run a marathon barefoot beyond the polar circle?
53:22 Can you hang by one finger in mid-February when it is cold and you have no dexterity in your hand between two hot air balloons somewhere in the cold part of the Netherlands? Things like that. And I said, “Yes, I can. Yes, I can. Yes, I can.
53:43 Come on. More. More. More.” So that brought me like 26 times a world record.
53:50 But that is when it got onto television and doctors and physiologists also look at the television and they then started to have interest because I was doing things physiologically in science was not knowing to be possible and I was doing it on the screen. So I got invitations by scientists to start to do, how do you say this, case experimental research and I did and from there one research to another to another to another up until when I got injected with a bacteria.
54:38 Yes.
54:39 E. coli. E. coli, which normally makes people sick because it causes inflammation and inflammation is the cause and effect of any disease and nobody could control inflammation naturally until I came on the earth in the hospital and [snorts] they did this and I started to do my breathing and I showed how to control the inflammation not going up the way it normally goes. I could, I showed that I was in control over the immune system making it stronger cuz I knew that the bacteria is injected, or a part of a bacteria, which causes the inflammation.
55:32 That is the normal thing. That is what happens physiologically and that is like disease. Fever, nausea, vomiting, back pains, overall agony, all that for 3 to 6 hours. That’s a controlled model in immunology. And so they did that on me and I was the first one to show how to bring it down, which was unprecedented.
56:01 And then they said, “But you are the Iceman.” No, I said, what I can do, anybody can do. And then eventually they came with a group into a comparative study to see if they could resist the bacteria causing inflammation in the blood after injection as well as I did. And it only took 4 days of training of these people and they were able to do the same. And this was after 16,000 more than 16,000 cases.
56:41 Everybody becoming sick. Suddenly 12 people not sick. There the medical world should have risen out of their lazy chairs and [snorts] start studying this phenomena called breathing, coming from going into the cold. You learn to breathe deep, slow, deep breathing that makes you connect with deeper powers, physiology inside the body, and I was able to resist the cold just by gentle deep breathing. That is the power of the breath, the changing the chemistry inside and then the immune system suddenly is working.
57:28 Whatever makes you stronger to go and longer into the cold. Hey man, there is the immune system, is the depth of the physiology suddenly activated as well. It’s nature, that is who we are, what we are. The cold is not something you can debate about. It’s a real aggressive impact on the body and you better go and the body knows how to go into the depths.
57:57 But once again, because of the psychology of comfort zone behavior, we think that cold is bad and oh, only by accident we fall in. Oh dear. Are you safe at that? No. Go in controlled, start with a cold shower, and very soon, and I see this with 80-year- old people never been in the cold, in one day they go like 5 minutes or 6 minutes or 7 minutes in icy water.
58:31 So it is inside. It’s only a matter of awakening. And so I got into the science and more and more. But let me tell you, Brian, we live in a world where there are whole industries who [snorts] want us not to be autonomous within our own body and mind. It’s a money-making scheme.
58:55 And I can understand that because everybody needs to make money. But there should not be made money over our health. If we have natural ways to get to be in autonomy over our mental disorders, our physiology, our immune system, it should have been studied since 10 years that we know each other. It’s still much under studied as the way it should but that’s because the whole universitarian world is very tied to the pharmacy
59:35 Pharmaceutical world and they, it’s like corrupted and that is what I found in the last 10 years but in the meanwhile hundreds of millions of people are doing it so why are the universities way a day not seeing that this is taken up, been taken up by masses of people and you are not going to study. Amen. This is the dilemma I’m fighting.
1:00:04 Okay.
1:00:04 But I keep on going. I keep on going and I’m like water. I will reach the ocean. I will reach the billions of people. I remember that study they did with you in the hospital, I think in Holland, and that was probably 10 years ago, right, nine years ago, and um, you were surprised that maybe that wasn’t noticed more in the medical establishment but then again we know the medical establishment and the universities and the professors it’s all bought and paid for by pharmaceutical companies and so that they still want to give you a pill when you go to the doctor.
1:01:42 But on the other hand, people are waking up and they’re realizing that they need to take control of their own health. So you got these two things here, right, Wim? You’ve got the traditional medical establishment saying, “No,” but then people are waking up saying, “Yes, I want to take control.” And at some point, they’re going to have to rectify, right?
1:02:02 Yes. Absolutely. The whole academic world is corrupted and that is what money does. If you are able to function as a university because of money and it has been endorsed by the industries, they then direct the outcomes of all the studies. They will compose the studies and the people will see that they will not be able to find funding for something that is natural,
1:02:36 Right?
1:02:36 Cuz it doesn’t make money. We live in that world. So that is dilemma I got. And once again, I’m not into politics. I’m not into against making money.
1:02:51 Absolutely not. But if natural ways are able to ameliorate our mental health, physical health without any cost then it should be implemented, otherwise, otherwise why do we have governments? I say governments, we have seen in the Covid time, we have seen in Gaza, we have seen in the wars, it keeps on going, that is not civilization. We have to learn to govern ourselves much more. This system is not going to solve the human problem of aggression, of greed.
1:03:38 So we got to change the paradigm. And now through the neuroscience I’m doing, I’m simply showing that we are able to control our own brain, our own mind a whole lot better. Don’t be governed by the government. Govern yourself. That’s what I’m saying.
1:04:01 And it’s there.
1:04:03 You mentioned artificial intelligence. Um, Wim, what do you see when you look at AI? What do you see as the danger? You know, a lot of people say the AI is the same as us. It’s running on a silicon chip and we run our brain on a carbon-based chip.
1:04:19 But then you also said that when you went into the cold, you connected to the soul in a way that reading couldn’t help, talking couldn’t help, history couldn’t help. You had to feel it. And so that isn’t a computer. That’s something that’s inherent to the human being. So, how do you see the AI?
1:04:41 Because I think you have a deeper understanding than say an executive in Silicon Valley or someone who just studies for a living.
1:04:51 Yes, AI is empty, is hollow, is thoughts, that is our brain, and very nice. It’s maybe very useful. You don’t need a lawyer director anymore or a notary or people who are into these matters of writing and all because AI can do that faster. So what is the difference, is very simple. The AI has no periaqueductal brain stem and that is the seat of our soul.
1:05:30 It is the purpose that we feel consciously alive that without thinking, that without the worries, without this ongoing thing there, the human brain, the depth, the seat of the soul, is really what is different to us and AI and AI will never have it. AI could maybe repair itself through satellites etc. but it stays hollow and if we don’t take care of our soul, I mean look at the wars in the world. Yeah, AI is more intelligent than we calling ourselves civilized, civilized humans, we live on love for the family.
1:06:25 No, we kill each other. We are into greed. That is not civilized. It’s low consciousness. AI would never do that.
1:06:38 So that is the right way of using our brain serves the love for life, the love for our children, the love for our friends and friends and post for everybody. That is the future. The future is so the rest will be taken over and the right way of using our brain is in a higher consciousness. No more lower consciousness directed governments and people with double agendas and all that. Happiness is going to go, otherwise AI will take over
1:07:21 Because we are not logically the way we should, as we say we are humans and civilized. So ah, the family love in the family [snorts] it’s the same in Russia, it’s the same in Gaza, it’s the same in Israel, let it be live in peace together, make this world a paradise. That is what the soul is saying, not the human brain. Human brain has been the evolution of the human brain always has been with war. But it is lower consciousness driven by greed, by taking and not sharing, by dominating.
1:08:11 And that goes away once we go within and learn to regulate our emotion. And the greatest of our emotions is love.
1:08:22 When we are living by love, then we don’t mind. And remember when you felt the love for your child, when you felt the love for your wife the first time you met her. It’s overwhelming. That is the power of love. And it’s time now that we go into that love.
1:08:44 Love for life. Not to get into boredom, not to get into careers, not the way the people show us and school us to be part of a system and suddenly we are in strange love for life. We live in worries, we live in mortgages, we live dead. AI will take over all that because it is no need anymore for to do all those so-called career driven things and these positions and hierarchy. You are never going to be better than somebody else but be the best of yourself.
1:09:26 [snorts] That is love. Pure unconditional love. Something AI never will feel. Mhm. It’s interesting, Wim, because you try to get people to stop thinking because it’s dangerous for people to think too much.
1:09:42 And so with your cold therapy and your breath work, you take people out of their minds. And when people are in their minds, they’re a bit like the AI, right? Overthinking, thinking, overthinking, optimizing, dominating, and it represents some of the worst of humanity, like you said. But when we get down to the soul and the love, that’s when [snorts] we’re the best of humanity. And so AI is an interesting mirror because it shows us a bit like what we are.
1:10:11 It’s fascinating when you look at the AI, you say, “Oh, wow. That’s like the part of my brain that can also be dangerous because if you think without the soul, you can do terrible things.” And we’ve seen humanity do terrible things. And so, yeah, I agree. I hope people see the AI and maybe they can see themselves better and see the practices they need to do better to become more human.
1:10:36 Yes, we don’t need all these, we at a certain moment there are robots and AI who are doing all the labor and then what do we do?
1:10:49 Yeah. Look who you are and what you are within. Know how to reset yourself, how to regulate your emotion and bring on the love. The love is the greatest power and that regulation of emotions is there. We did the study but we need more studies to be done and but the system will not get into that yet.
1:11:18 But I’m breaking through. [clears throat] I am just one man. And I’m convinced that we are able to make this world a paradise. Cuz if we live according to the rules of love and sharing together and living together, then this world is a paradise. So it’s very easy. But if we think different of each other and I’m better than you or you are better than me and I control you and I drain your energy, it’s because we have no hold over our own emotions and our own energy.
1:11:58 If you go take these cold showers, you get plenty of energy. Energy is represented by money. And now it’s digital. It’s so abstracted. All the realities are so abstracted that we don’t feel our purpose anymore.
1:12:16 We are not connected inside. We are connected to our brain because that’s the way we are drilled in schools. What is this? And again and again and again and again and then suddenly we are inside there but not in the depth. And then we don’t know why we are here for.
1:12:38 We become depressed because the blood flow is not going to the depth. It’s not been activated. We serve the system but the system is not serving our happiness, strength and health. As simple as that is, happiness, strength, and health. Expressions of a healthy soul should be able to be guaranteed in any school in the world.
1:13:06 Breathing should be done in America in these schools where children are being put into a competitive environment [gasps] and some children they just lose identity because a monkey is not able to learn to swim or a fish learn to climb. We are all different but being pushed into one system. And so some children just alienated completely of who they are and what they are and they are forced to come up with numbers and figures and and function in that system.
1:13:46 They lose their mind. They shoot their parents, then they shoot the rest. M
1:13:51 There is no identity in the head. It’s in the depth and that depth now needs to be researched showing that everybody is able to get there. If I go back to the point where I was with these people standing outside in a horse stance, very soon in one hour people could do things in karate lessons you cannot do in years, that the immediate deeper control is who we are. But we are not schooled to get there and to recognize who we are and what we are. And thus now we have a conflict with AI.
1:14:43 The technology is going over us and the evolution is saying, hey, if you don’t go to your soul then let me get you, maybe I force you now to get there, otherwise I will get over you and then it’s over and it’s done. That’s where we are at the crossroads. And it’s very simple. The soul is who we are and what we are. And it should be driven by love.
1:15:13 Love for the family. Anybody has got that energy. But if we live in a system that drives us crazy, [snorts] that makes us go run and maintain a system that takes all the energy, inequaling inflation causing job loss and I mean purpose is suddenly gone. People are depressed but who cares? And we call ourselves civilized and highly conjectural technology.
1:15:47 We all have amazing all these people depressed. What is that? Is that on purpose? They know. And whoever knows or not, we need to go in a higher consciousness.
1:16:03 Not driven by greed and possessive and dominating but into sharing together and starts all in the family. Let’s get back to the family and reset and then show in science through scientific research that we are able to get where AI never will be able to go. Pure happiness, love, pure emotion and that being shared and guaranteed for every family in the world. That is my aim. That’s what I show in size, but it’s not being taken up because we are in the grip of money making greedy system that doesn’t let natural ways to go naturally into who we are and what we are cuz we are [clears throat] all beautiful souls by the power of nature.
1:17:10 M it’s there and we need to get there now otherwise it will take us over and whoever thinks they are in control, they are not in controlling others, they have no control within themselves, within yourself, if you a happy man doesn’t go to war, happy man is not into greed. Let’s make the world happy and show that emotions can be regulated absolutely in the depth. And by which you become aware much more who you are and what you are, why you are here in this world, the purpose and spiritually grounded.
1:17:53 I mean cold. When you take on cold, you will be grounded but at the same time spiritually fully there expanding in consciousness. The neurology in the brain very healthy everywhere [snorts] that is expanding perception neurologically and then your consciousness expands until you die. It’s amazing how that goes. So there is a power that is stronger than life itself.
1:18:22 It’s stronger than death, stronger than fear for death. I’ve seen all that. But I’m going to science and I want more funding therefore. But this is the world where we live in. So we have to go like water to the masses of people and I’m getting to billions of people.
1:18:45 That is my aim. And with that we will change this system. Wim, tell me about your music and why it’s important to you because we see you sometimes in the sauna with a beer and your guitar and we think, “Wow, well, this I didn’t expect that. I thought he was the Iceman.” But it’s obviously a big part of who you are.
1:19:05 When you do events, you get on stage and it’s somehow very important and it’s another way you connect with people or give them your energy. Tell me about it. I think you have an album that came out recently.
1:19:18 Yes. Yes. Numbers came out and on 23rd of January the whole album comes out. The album is called Freedom into the Depths and yeah, 50 minutes of very well elaborated music, tribes, traditional music, me singing, guitar, drumming, go deep. But yeah, it’s all there and I mean when you are in the shower and it’s cold you start to sing, it comes out, man, you know, and you just stop because you feel alive.
1:20:55 And this is just part of what is music in essence is where the heart goes uninterrupted by thoughts. Then it is the deeper part of the brain at work, the limbic system, the mammalian brain, the one who cares, the one who feels, the one in the family, that is expressed, it airs when you make music. When you play the guitar and sing then you are not thinking, it’s a different part of the brain. And therefore it is so important for me to just do that every morning.
1:21:40 I take my guitar, I sing very tender, sometimes very strong, sometimes very deep, sometimes very high. It’s my heart. It airs, it breathes, it’s emotion, [snorts] it’s neurology. It goes out and I feel great afterwards. And I see there the function of music is the key to your heart.
1:22:07 So it should not be commercialized and you should make your own music. Don’t be afraid to sing, to drum a little, to do something different than thinking. That is the function of music, to air, to breathe from your heart. That’s good for your neurology, for your vagus nerve, for everything in the depth. And therefore people understand music.
1:22:38 Yeah. You have to hear the Rolling Stones. Oh, great music. The Beatles, great music. Pink Floyd, great music.
1:22:45 Hey, and why are you? Because the function is not just to listen, but to do it, to air your heart [snorts], to let go of stress, to be disconnecting from the thinking brain. It’s actually neuroscience. So this is why I’m doing this music, showing the music, and there is a message in the music and the message is a key. We found the key.
1:23:18 It’s simple. All the conversation we have been talking is about going into a cold shower and do some breathing and sing from your heart. That is as simple as it is to go into the depth past your thinking brain, which is, all the modern issues come from long-term psychosomatically being too much into the brain which is the central nervous system. It affects our bodies and it causes neurotoxins and then we get all these diseases and nobody knows how to address it.
1:23:58 All kinds of fancy naming. I say let’s reset, sing, don’t be afraid to sing because the function is that you disconnect from your brain. You become the master over your own brain, over your mind, over not minding but singing, and do it wholeheartedly. Then you will see and feel so much better. And your consciousness then is able to expand because expanding consciousness is inside the neurology, neurotransmitters in the brain.
1:24:38 Then go everywhere and then suddenly you see, you feel more. That is expanding consciousness. And then the faculties, deep faculties of clairvoyance, telepathy, looking into the time and seeing things of yourself, of the past. I do these breathing techniques with people. They see faces of their parents, of their grandparents, ancestors.
1:25:12 It’s all there but we block it because we are schooled to be only in a part, in a little part of our brain and thus we cut off who we are and what we are and then of course you become depressed and then of course you look for sense in the life, purpose in life, you don’t know, you have to run with the system. No, the music to me is learning to disconnect from the mind and go into your heart. The connection, the neurological connection of the heart with the brain is bigger than the brain to the heart.
1:25:57 But we disconnect it because we think and thus we deprive us of our own wholeheartedness, feeling light. So powerful. Wim, Wim, what’s next for you? What’s coming up in the next year or two? Do you have events?
1:26:19 Do you have TV shows? I hear they’re making a movie about your life. Is that coming out in the next couple years? What’s next for you?
1:26:26 Yeah, all that what you mentioned, the retreats in 10 days. I will be back in the mountains and I’m loving it. I already feel, you know, that feeling is good. That’s in 10 days. I’m living a very happy life with my wife and children here.
1:26:50 I live in the tropics now, but I got the North Pole in the garage every day. You can find me in the icy water. I do my training, my rituals. I want to go on with the science. Very soon we get the big study coming out.
1:27:05 We got to be stress tool number one in the world and then show that we all have a capacity to very swift and very rapidly regain a much deeper control over our inner power. That is my aim, to get not to the millions or hundreds and millions of people but to billions of people. That means I keep on pushing. I keep on doing retreats, keynote speeching, making books, making music, making art. I do anything and I got the conviction, me as one man, I can change the world.
1:27:49 That is my faith. So I am driven there in my but and the way we do this together now it’s amazing because through you I shine, I can talk to so many at the same time. So I respect, I thank you absolutely from the heart for what you do. I love your costume because the last time it was red and now it is and now it’s orange. Is a bit the color of the Netherlands but to me, Netherlands, no, I’m living in the world and every child in the world is my child and until we cannot show and guarantee care for every child in the world, my work will be keeping on going and making it happen cuz I want the evil out, the low consciousness out, and the higher consciousness coming in.
1:28:46 It’s time we are going to not beat AI. AI is going to serve us and then we find, we get time and space because all the work will be done to go to our real purpose and that is our soul. So powerful. Wim, I want to thank you for the incredible work you’ve done and for staying persistent and for keeping fighting. The bigger you get, you know, it’s sometimes there’s people that criticize what you do and you just keep going.
1:29:20 You’re relentless. You change my life. And I agree with you. We got to get the whole world taking control of their health. You don’t need a pill.
1:29:31 You need a practice is what you need. And that’s what we need people to do. I would tell people who are watching or listening, this is so easy to try. Take the next shower, make it cold, and then when you feel that, then go and look up the breathing techniques. In two or three minutes, you can change your consciousness faster than a drink, faster than a smoke, faster than a therapy session, faster than any drug on the planet.
1:29:59 You can reset yourself. I use this technique all the time. I’ve done it before interviews. I’ve done it in situations. It’s so powerful and without you, Wim, there’s no way that the world would be embracing the cold and breath.
1:30:12 So, I just want to say thank you, sir.
1:30:15 Yes. Right on, Brian. And I thank you, too. We are warriors of the light, the not darkness and not heaviness, of the light. And we keep on testifying that it is there and that we got that control.
1:30:33 And the research actually is already done. So there is no speculation about that. That is what, so I got a new book coming and that is called Exposure. There you see a man who walks his talk. All what has been said about me, forget it, man.
1:30:53 Just look at the pictures and you see a man who really battles with his own fears and his own shortcomings and comes out victoriously and so can you. This is what I wish for everybody, that you are able to get so much more within yourself in actually very short period of time. Just try it once. As you said, it’s stronger than smoke, faster than smoke, faster than a drink, faster than anything of those external things by going within through these simple breathing techniques.
1:31:38 And a cold shower, just try it out and then you will see and feel. And then you don’t become addictive, you become powerful. You get in control. Addiction means you gave away the control. Now you get within yourself and you gain control and that I wish for everybody in the world.
1:32:02 Beautiful. Thank you, Wim. The book is Exposure. The album comes out in January. You can go to this man’s retreats.
1:32:09 Wim, thank you so much. Can’t wait to see what you’re up to next year. And you’re always welcome here in London. Lots of love.
1:32:16 Thank you, Brian. Thank you.
1:32:17 Bless, brother. Take care. We’ll see you all next time on London Real. Bye.
