#275： How Your Climate-Controlled Comfort Is Killing You
Episode Stats
Summary
Modern technology has provided us with an unprecedented amount of comfort. For example, with just a turn of a dial, we can ensure that our homes are always set at a perpetual 71 degrees even if it s blazing hot or frigidly cold outside. But what if our quest for technology-enabled comfort has actually made us physically and mentally weaker and sicker? What if our bodies actually need discomfort to truly thrive and flourish? My guest today explores that idea firsthand in his new book, What Doesn t Kill Us? by anthropologist and writer Scott Kearney.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
00:00:18.760
modern technology has provided us with an unprecedented amount of comfort for example
00:00:23.060
with just a turn of a dial we can ensure that our homes are always set at a perpetual 71 degrees
00:00:27.940
even if it's blazing hot or frigidly cold outside but what if our quest for technology enabled
00:00:33.020
comfort has actually made us physically and mentally weaker and sicker what if our bodies
00:00:37.480
actually need discomfort to truly thrive and flourish my guest today explores that idea
00:00:42.800
firsthand in his book what doesn't kill us how freezing water extreme altitude and environmental
00:00:47.440
conditioning will renew our lost evolutionary strength his name is scott carney he's an
00:00:51.960
anthropologist and a writer and in his latest book he investigates the sometimes crazy sounding
00:00:56.740
claims of a dutch daredevil and prophet of intentional stress exposure named wim hoff for
00:01:01.960
a year scott followed wim's method of physical vitality that consists of daily hyperventilation
00:01:06.480
breathing exercises and cold exposure to see what it would do to his physiology and the results
00:01:12.040
truly astonished him along the way he interviews scientists researchers and athletes who are at
00:01:16.680
the forefront of exploring why embracing environmental discomfort is the missing key to overall health
00:01:21.500
on today's show scott and i discuss wim hoff and his claims the health benefits of exposing
00:01:26.040
ourselves to the cold and how hyperventilating may help you do more push-ups than you ever thought
00:01:31.060
possible if you enjoyed our content on the health benefits of cold showers you're going to love
00:01:34.920
this podcast after the show's over check out the show notes at aom.is slash cold exposure
00:01:39.920
scott carney welcome to the show hey thank you so much all right so you wrote a book called what
00:01:52.160
doesn't kill us how freezing water extreme altitude and environmental conditioning will renew our lost
00:01:58.360
evolutionary strength and it follows you as you follow the practices and methodologies of a guy named
00:02:04.960
wim hoff we'll get to wim here in a minute because he's an interesting guy but let's start with the
00:02:10.080
premise of this book and you start off arguing in the book that modern life is making us weaker and
00:02:15.480
sicker uh how so well you know if you think about where our species came from you know homo sapien
00:02:23.180
sapien we are about 200 000 years old uh that's when we evolved from our previous ancestor which was
00:02:30.500
you know pretty similar to us and in that time we endured all the variations that nature could throw at us
00:02:38.800
uh you know at even in the equatorial regions of africa you know the temperature swing between night
00:02:45.420
and day could be 50 degrees and then we left africa we went through across the alps it's just a whisper
00:02:51.340
of modern technology um we went through asia made it to australia and the new world and all of this
00:02:58.100
was uh you know was with nothing to really help us you know some fur skin some sailboats some some sort of
00:03:05.700
basic stuff and to do it we had to rely on our amazing innate biology to resist the elements to
00:03:15.700
resist these variations uh and you know if you if you you know you went back in time it would be a
00:03:21.960
terrible idea to challenge one of your ancestors to a arm wrestling match or a foot race they would
00:03:28.820
just crush you and one of the reasons for this is that now we live in this cocoon of technological
00:03:38.000
comfort where where our need for that sort of like that you know we can call homeostasis that this
00:03:45.040
this place where the environment meets every biological need has made our bodies not have to do
00:03:51.740
any work and and because of that we don't experience the natural variations that our biology developed
00:03:59.740
in uh we live in a perpetual summer of 72 degrees and it doesn't matter what the outdoor temperature
00:04:06.460
is like you know we have antiseptic environments where you know we've scrubbed out the bacteria and
00:04:12.900
the the the the the things that that attack us and this you know makes the the the underlying biology
00:04:20.960
that we have that wants to resist that that that that where change was constant it makes that biology
00:04:27.640
underutilized in some cases uh it turns inwards and attacks itself leading to autoimmune illnesses
00:04:34.940
but also we're just not able to to you know we look outside at a snowstorm and we consider that extreme
00:04:40.980
weather and we're like hell no i don't want to go out there but our species can do that and so what
00:04:46.100
this process of the book was doing was exposing myself to some extreme temperatures and some extreme
00:04:51.580
environments and unlocking that hidden biology that every one of us has inside right and besides the
00:04:58.200
auto autoimmune diseases what are some of the other diseases of civilization that have come from
00:05:03.320
constant comfort oh my god there's so many there's osteoporosis is one diabetes obesity
00:05:10.160
um you know poor sleep cycles because of the constant electric lighting that we have
00:05:15.260
uh you know they're everything oh my favorite and one that i come back to in the book all the time is
00:05:22.180
is just since the 1990s uh do you remember that time period i don't know how old you are you
00:05:28.320
you're probably remember the 90s i'm 34 yeah 34 okay fantastic do you remember that when you moved to a
00:05:34.640
new city and you were like hey this is a cool place i want to go explore and find my way across town
00:05:39.680
you had to to to take out this ancient piece of technology which had like a picture of the city
00:05:44.800
on it and the streets and their names on the streets you had to navigate your way across the
00:05:48.500
city by using this this map uh i think that's how you pronounce it i haven't seen one in a while
00:05:53.640
um by using that map you you sort of just learned innately how to navigate the city nowadays when i
00:06:00.260
move to a new place i have a gps and i and i rely on it for every turn as i go through and i've lost
00:06:07.460
this innate ability that humans have to tell direction and that's just happened in our lifetime
00:06:12.740
yeah it's nuts you also talk about some of the other changes thanks to technology i mean a lot of
00:06:16.440
these diseases of civilization have come with technology it's not just you know digital
00:06:21.500
technology but like even like rudimentary technology like cooking with fire um that made
00:06:26.220
our jaws weaker right yeah well fire is a really interesting case because it's an old technology right
00:06:32.920
that that goes possibly all the way back to homo erectus which is an our ancestors ancestors ancestor
00:06:39.420
and what happened when we invented fire was that that we could instead of you know this sort of chimp
00:06:48.120
like primate or ancestor which would have to chew cellulose and sort of uh you know vegetables and
00:06:54.160
things you'd have to chew a hell of a lot to get out the nutrition and you had a they had really big
00:06:58.560
guts because of that um because you know you just had to have more digestive track your your jaws
00:07:04.200
were like super powerful think of a chimp's jaws like that's some serious tooth action uh as we
00:07:10.600
invented fire what that did is it outsourced the ability of our bodies to um to essentially you digest
00:07:18.400
food outside your body and and and by cooking something you you're able it becomes essentially
00:07:23.320
more nutritious and and you have to chew it less so so our over time fire made our jaws smaller made
00:07:30.820
our guts smaller uh you know and that led us to be able to walk around upright uh in in sort of a
00:07:38.880
convoluted evolutionary path um for the way we we search for food uh it made us um
00:07:44.680
uh it also gave us more time to instead of just chewing all the time right we actually had time to
00:07:52.500
to use our brains to do other things so fire is one of these technologies that evolved slowly with
00:07:59.260
us and actually we had it and it changed our physiology but and and we are we are impossible
00:08:05.420
to separate from fire like our bodies could not exist without fire but what i'm looking at in the book
00:08:10.780
is more these modern technologies like heating and and and all of these conveniences that we have now
00:08:16.940
where our bodies haven't had a chance to adapt slowly like they did to fire it's like it was just
00:08:21.640
dropped on us and if we've been around for 200 000 years that we're talking 150 years that's like
00:08:27.780
a blink of an evolutionary eye and and that stuff our body just hasn't caught up to to the new
00:08:35.640
environment that we inhabit and that is doing crazy things to us right so the mismatch is causing
00:08:41.480
these these these problems exactly okay so let's talk about wim hoff so i've i've heard of wim hoff
00:08:47.780
he seems like possibly a madman um crazy guy charlatan but he's doing some crazy things to
00:08:55.900
counter these diseases of civilization where he's purposely exposing himself to extreme cold extreme
00:09:03.300
conditions um and he's surviving we'll talk about i mean can you talk about some of the the crazy
00:09:09.040
things that he has done that that baffle people that he's able to do this yeah he holds all sorts of
00:09:15.120
crazy records um for mostly having to do with his body being extreme cold things and i actually first
00:09:21.800
heard about him when i was a forum correspondent for wired magazine in india and there was a look
00:09:27.540
there's like a little small uh snippet in the paper of this guy who was climbing mount everest in just a
00:09:34.560
pair of shorts so bare chest climbing up mount everest and he made it up three quarters of the way and at
00:09:39.320
the time i was like this guy is insane and not only insane he's disrespectful to uh the the the the
00:09:46.340
power of nature uh and uh he you know he's run barefoot uh marathons in the arctic and across snow he's
00:09:55.980
he's run marathons through the uh i think it's the kalahari desert um you know with no water he he's
00:10:05.540
holds the record for swimming underneath sea ice uh in distance i mean he he has done these things
00:10:11.380
which which really are um superhuman he's in he's stayed in in an ice bath uh for i believe 90 minutes
00:10:21.480
and his body temperature while they were testing him actually rose while he was in the bath uh and
00:10:27.760
usually you know a person who's not trained and just sort of dunked into this ice might dive die
00:10:35.600
from anywhere between 15 and 45 minutes so he does things that are you know superhuman and you're right
00:10:43.000
to say he sounds like a madman because he's absolutely a madman because only a madman would
00:10:48.060
do this but he's also a prophet because he is you know showing that that what the human body is able
00:10:56.340
to do if conditioned consciously and correctly into these environments so i i when i first heard of
00:11:03.820
him uh you know i'm an investigative journalist i'm an anthropologist and i had written uh several
00:11:10.980
books and articles at that point about the dangers of intensive meditation and in particular the types of
00:11:19.040
spiritual practices that offer you superpowers uh i you know in 2005 i was leading a broad program in
00:11:27.160
northern india uh i had i was an anthropologist getting my phd at the time and one of my students
00:11:33.620
the best the brightest the smartest student in the program uh at the end of the silent meditation
00:11:40.760
retreat as we're contemplating enlightenment contemplating nirvana uh she climbs up to the roof of the
00:11:46.620
retreat center and jumps to her death committing suicide at the on the last day of the retreat
00:11:51.800
and you know as the person who was in charge of her you know of the of these students uh she i had to
00:12:00.200
read her her her journal and you know i was involved with the police investigation and it was a horrible
00:12:05.340
thing but in her journal the last words in it were i am a bodhisattva which which means i am enlightened
00:12:12.540
that i am going to be essentially an angel and all i need to do is leave my body to attain that state and
00:12:18.040
and and this is the cautionary experience that led me down to write another book about intensive uh
00:12:24.400
meditation where people literally get so caught up in this idea of spiritual transcendence and and
00:12:31.540
becoming supernatural almost that they lose touch with reality and a lot of people die and it's a story
00:12:38.940
that's not really talked about very much so with all of this in mind when i hear about wim hoff and this
00:12:44.720
is in 2011 2012 i am certain that he is one of these sort of guru charlatans who wants to uh tell people
00:12:56.900
that he can give them superpowers uh take all their money as he does it and then potentially get people
00:13:03.060
killed and i wanted to get in front of that uh and you know show people that that you know the
00:13:08.960
attainment of superpowers is not a great idea yeah and but he he is claiming that some superpowers like
00:13:14.660
he can he claims that with meditation and breathing and exposure like you can on demand um increase your
00:13:21.160
metabolism so you warm yourself up or on demand you can fight increase your immunity system so you can
00:13:26.820
fight diseases so he is making those claims so i mean damn right and and i think i was
00:13:32.520
absolutely right to go out there and try to debunk this guy um because they they are huge and they
00:13:37.600
are things that should be you should be absolutely skeptical of uh but you know as an anthropologist
00:13:43.660
as an investigative journalist who has a certain set of ethics that i abide by when i went out to see
00:13:49.840
him uh on a commission that that you know eventually ran in playboy magazine my intention was to debunk him
00:13:58.560
but but by doing it through his method by saying look i'm gonna learn your method and i'm gonna watch
00:14:04.860
it fall apart i'm gonna watch these students be mindless followers of your of your method and you
00:14:10.660
basically taking advantage of them and then i'm gonna see you put us into a dangerous situation
00:14:16.520
that um that you know then i'll be able to tell the the the tragic story of of wim hof
00:14:23.700
uh but it turns out that when i did the method uh that when i actually did his breathing method and
00:14:32.160
his environmental exposure routines that things in my own physiology started changing very rapidly
00:14:40.280
now i was living in los angeles at the time uh so we're talking perpetual summer uh there and and i fly
00:14:47.220
to poland in the middle of the winter that stopped napoleon's army you know it's the it's the winter
00:14:52.980
that ground hitler's blitzkrieg to a halt and within a couple days i'm standing outside in the middle of
00:15:01.560
this just frigid cold in nothing but shorts with my bare feet in the snow and i'm burning up and it's
00:15:09.640
and i can stay out in the snow for an hour like this you know we do these things like i sit on the banks
00:15:15.160
of a river and all the snow melts around me because my body is is running so hot and then i climb up a
00:15:21.660
mountain uh in poland it's actually a ski slope called snezka uh and we spend about eight hours on
00:15:27.640
this mountain it's about two degrees uh fahrenheit outside and uh and i make it to the top and i'm hot
00:15:36.220
the entire way i'm sweating and i'm just in you know shorts and boots so i mean it's an amazing it was
00:15:41.000
eye-opening and it happened so rapidly that i was like i i there was nothing i could do but say that
00:15:46.460
hoff is on to something now he may make some grandiose claims that surpass this shock and awe
00:15:52.540
at that point but it was enough for me to realize that i had to examine this this guy on fair terms and
00:16:00.220
really delve deeply into the ideas that he's putting forward that that that we can unlock hidden human
00:16:06.360
potential and it's these aren't superpowers these are human powers that we all have and you know and
00:16:13.160
i think that's the the the crux of it right we don't have superpowers um we have just normal human
00:16:20.460
abilities that we have suppressed so what does his method look like so part of it is just getting
00:16:26.100
exposed to the cold um what else is involved so the yeah there's there's two basic parts of the method
00:16:33.700
uh and you can learn the wim hoff method in like 15 or 20 minutes like it's not very difficult because
00:16:39.880
it involves putting yourself in uh situations where the environment creates a predictable biological
00:16:48.360
response uh so in the cold it one of the things would be the first thing that happens when you jump
00:16:55.320
into the the snow you know is you tense up or you're taking cold showers you tense up uh and then
00:17:01.620
eventually you'll start shivering and this is just your body trying to fight that stimulus and what
00:17:06.480
wim teaches is that you get into that situation and instead of tensing up you relax you just let that
00:17:13.840
cold sort of in and and and by by suppressing that tensing moment and suppressing the shiver you actually
00:17:22.720
are are having a significant impact on your sympathetic nervous system and these are your fight or flight
00:17:27.520
responses and by modulating that you actually start gaining control over how your sympathetic nervous
00:17:35.320
system works and it's you know and and because our bodies are are are have evolved to adapt quickly
00:17:43.520
you actually get this control um it um super fast it's it doesn't take very long to to accumulate that
00:17:51.780
and and so you know when you're standing in the in you know you're jumping to ice water or something you
00:17:56.320
just don't shiver you just suppress that and your body figures out a different way to heat itself up
00:18:02.920
at first it does it sort of weekly but over time it's able to sort of really ramp up the engine
00:18:08.300
and and keep you warm in those environments the other part of the method is a breathing method where
00:18:13.840
where uh and you don't need to do it at the same time you don't do this in the cold water or
00:18:18.040
something you do this you know it could be separated by hours in the day it's fine um where you
00:18:22.740
you hyperventilate which are not like panicky hyperventilations but deep rapid breaths it
00:18:30.280
and you do about 30 of those right and and then at the end of that you let all of the air out of your
00:18:40.760
lungs uh and then you hold your breath uh and the first long as you can uh usually i'll do about a
00:18:46.900
minute uh at first and then then you do another hyperventilation round and then you hold your breath
00:18:52.740
again and and then all of a sudden instead of just a minute of holding my breath i can hold it for
00:18:56.980
two minutes do another round that i'm holding it for three minutes and it's like it's really a
00:19:01.960
a very fast increase uh and what you're trying to do is suppress this this response and modulate
00:19:09.660
this response this need for gasping uh and once you get that that's another um parasympathetic uh
00:19:17.160
response uh and and so you're gaining control of both sides of this of this uh autonomic nervous
00:19:23.860
system by doing these these two sorts of exercises uh and at the end of that then you uh what you do is
00:19:29.400
you do a third round of of hyperventilation and then you let all the air out of your lungs you just
00:19:35.000
start doing push-ups just immediately just go into doing you know your normal push-up routine of
00:19:39.940
whatever you do and when i first had started this uh doing this practice i could do about 20 push-ups
00:19:46.000
you know i'm not an athlete i'm just a dude a journalist you know i'm a writer i could do 20
00:19:51.200
push-ups but when i did this breathing method uh at wim's house i could do 40 and i wasn't breathing
00:19:57.340
and i had no air in my lungs it was amazing uh and now i do it every morning i do 50 push-ups
00:20:03.100
breathless uh the most i've ever hit was 80 uh and it's you know it it's it's just a really
00:20:09.320
surprising thing and and maybe that's the the aha moment where i decided that wim was really onto
00:20:15.140
something because you don't just double the amount of of exercises you can do with the breathing
00:20:19.180
method that's just not how i thought the world worked well and so you besides following wim you
00:20:24.440
actually go and talk to scientists who have been researching some of the things that wim's been doing
00:20:28.980
so like with the breathing thing why is i mean why is it that you're able to do more push-ups by
00:20:32.920
doing this hyperventilating exercise and holding your breath what's going on there well so the first
00:20:37.500
thing that that's happening is you're blowing off uh carbon dioxide from your lungs and so the way
00:20:43.660
your body detects the the that it needs to breathe air like it like it's running out of breath um it is
00:20:52.240
it detects the buildup of co2 it can't actually detect oxygen and that's just the way the body's
00:20:58.320
biology works so when you hyperventilate you blow off all of that co2 and and then you're you know
00:21:06.980
and so you're you're moving that gas point later because as the rest as you're holding your breath
00:21:12.040
that respiration has to you know has to basically fill up your lungs again with co2 or the you know
00:21:17.280
the bloodstream has to accumulate co2 and that's like okay great we got co2 we need to breathe so you're
00:21:22.180
just tricking your body's normal respiratory um method uh by blowing off all that co2 and and pushing
00:21:30.680
yourself into into a physical place where you can do more push-ups and the reason why this is
00:21:37.520
interesting right but you know rather than it's just a hack that's okay you just tricked your body is
00:21:43.220
that is that you still did the push-ups right your body actually had that ability to do this and
00:21:48.600
its warning signals were actually far too conservative like your body has this sort of
00:21:53.920
you know if we the world we grew up in right which is sort of homeostatic which is comfortable
00:22:00.200
uh we set off our alarm bells for for where we're reaching our limits super duper early and if you start
00:22:07.820
doing these things where you're you're pushing yourself in this uh hypoxic or sort of low oxygen
00:22:14.280
environment uh all of a sudden your body starts to learn that it actually has more ability and and
00:22:20.860
will will sort of seed a little bit more control into your into your uh into your system into sorry
00:22:28.060
into your mind yeah so what's the benefit of that i mean like besides doing more push-ups like how else
00:22:32.820
does that translate into performance other in other areas so one and there's lots of ways that that this
00:22:39.880
happens i mean it increases your ability to rest to um breathe in general and which puts more oxygen
00:22:46.460
in your bloodstream gives you more available energy but i think the most interesting way that i've seen
00:22:52.100
people use it is when i met a guy named brian mckenzie and this legendary surfer of laird hamilton who
00:22:58.120
both get sort of a chapter in the book and what they're doing brian mckenzie is one of the founders of
00:23:04.900
of high intensity interval training or hit workouts and the idea between hit for hit workouts is that
00:23:11.840
if you train at the absolute maximum exertion what what you know uh athletes would call the vo2 max
00:23:19.920
then uh and or if you're like if if you're trying to train for a marathon instead of logging more and
00:23:27.880
more miles every week you just do these sprints but at your absolute highest level then you actually
00:23:36.060
are pushing your body much better and much more efficiently to run marathons elsewhere so so shorter
00:23:43.240
workouts shorter high intensity workouts are more efficient now when that mixes with the wim hof method
00:23:47.960
if you're if you're now prepping yourself to push past what your limits are so like instead of going
00:23:54.260
out 100 if you can trick your body into like 104 or 107 then your high intensity interval workouts
00:24:01.440
are even more power packed and and you get that much more benefit for these longer endurance races
00:24:08.340
and it's it's awesome i mean you see these just top tier athletes doing this method now and this only
00:24:14.920
works for endurance like you wouldn't be able to do this and then pull a deadlift er right no actually i
00:24:20.620
think you know that's a good question like how how does it affect strength uh and i i i can't i'm i'm
00:24:29.140
this is probably a little bit outside of my knowledge because i'm not a big big weightlifter but i would
00:24:34.640
say that if you can suddenly do more reps than you could usually do in training right then wouldn't that
00:24:41.580
make you a stronger person in general right if all of a sudden i could you know i could i could i could
00:24:46.900
do 20 push-ups right i was usually doing 20 push-ups and now i can do 40 in my workouts isn't
00:24:52.420
that you know for 20 more push-ups than i could usually do it doesn't that affect my my ability
00:24:57.360
to get stronger possibly um but yeah we also had you also talk about um deep sea divers so this
00:25:04.300
technique deep sea divers actually don't like doing this even though it allows them to hold their breath
00:25:08.220
longer they don't do this we had james nester on the podcast oh he's awesome by the way yeah i love
00:25:13.400
this is like something yeah this is like something you don't want to do because this could actually
00:25:16.480
kill you if you're trying to deep hold your breath underwater yes uh and and yeah a big caution to
00:25:22.460
anyone listening to this it would seem that free diving and the wim hof method would just you know
00:25:27.700
goes to go together like peas and carrots uh because you know you're able to blow off co2 you're able
00:25:34.660
to hold your breath longer and therefore if you were going to dive 300 feet underwater it that's a useful
00:25:40.040
ability the issue is what they call shallow water blackouts is because you're tricking your body
00:25:45.920
to by blowing off co2 uh you don't always know when that gasp reflex is just going to kick in and and
00:25:56.060
and you can you know and i have passed out doing this push-up method you know when i did 80 push-ups
00:26:02.040
i mentioned earlier i hit 80 and boom i just went out like a light bang my head on the floor and uh and
00:26:08.600
you know that was unfortunate uh but if i was doing that and free diving i would have passed out
00:26:15.180
and and my autonomic reflex would be the gasp and this is why you know 300 free divers have died
00:26:23.380
in the last few years uh is that because if you if you are doing this on dry land the worst thing
00:26:29.140
that's going to happen is you're going to fall down you do it underwater you're going to drown
00:26:32.020
right and so this i'm imagining this breathing technique also is what allows
00:26:36.920
whim and all which allowed yourself we'll talk about more detail um later on but to uh climb
00:26:42.580
mount kilimanjaro with like at a record pace right you're able to like instead of doing the usual
00:26:47.320
acclimation you're doing slowly you're able to get up in two days yes uh i mean faster than two days
00:26:52.780
uh we did we actually summited kilimanjaro in 28 hours i will say that that is not the record
00:26:58.740
uh the record is just shy of seven hours by this just crazy endurance athlete um kilian jornette
00:27:05.300
and uh but what he did is he actually acclimated his body at high altitude first ran down to the
00:27:14.140
bottom of the mountain so when you're at high altitude you're generating more red blood cells
00:27:17.020
right so you can you can move more oxygen through your system he went down to the bottom and then then
00:27:21.420
you know sprinted up to the top and i got nothing on on kilian right i would never assume
00:27:27.520
that however what we did is we did it without acclimation so we went up from the base of
00:27:33.840
kilimanjaro to the top and we did it in 28 hours and it usually takes five days to acclimate your body
00:27:41.140
to that altitude and we had spoken to the um the u.s militaries and sort of environmental scientists
00:27:49.960
they predicted that 70 percent of our group of i think we had about 28 people uh would come down
00:27:57.000
with acute mountain sickness or ams which uh is a debilitating and possibly fatal condition
00:28:03.700
uh of of being at high altitude and you know when we did it uh we only had two people come down with
00:28:11.260
ams which is uh you know was unheard of you know we talked to some mountaineers in holland uh the
00:28:17.840
mountaineering club of holland said that all of us would die on a mountain uh but you know we we you know
00:28:24.460
hiked up right to the top and we did it at at just this mind-boggling pace and i did it i did
00:28:32.180
it was mostly shirtless too was it i guess it was thanks to the breathing technique right so so what we
00:28:38.160
were doing is the entire way up we were we were doing that wim hof breathing so 28 hours of just
00:28:44.960
which took a like more mental focus than i knew i had uh to do but we were breathing rapidly because
00:28:55.160
we were trying to consciously account for for the decreased oxygen by increasing our respiration and
00:29:02.540
it worked and this is a technique that that people can use as they go up mountains now like
00:29:08.480
you can you could if you're getting down to acute mountain sickness this this is one way that i think
00:29:14.200
that we can we can combat that which is fantastic you don't need diamox you don't need to to um i
00:29:20.400
mean if you're getting ams you know by all means descend quickly because that's the medically right
00:29:24.920
thing to do but you can prevent it and this from even coming on with this breathing method and that
00:29:29.620
is really cool so let's circle back to the uh the cold exposure because we've i'm a big fan of cold
00:29:34.840
showers we've written about it um on the site before a lot of our listeners are probably
00:29:39.340
practitioners of cold cold showers so what's the science behind cold exposure i mean what happens
00:29:45.140
to our bodies when we expose ourselves uh to cold so the cold does a whole bunch of things to our
00:29:52.900
autonomic nervous system uh that that we just don't usually have and the most obvious and the and the
00:29:58.960
the the most interesting i feel uh is something called vasoconstriction so our body is full of all
00:30:07.220
these arteries and veins and we've got enough of this to go if you lined all those arteries and
00:30:12.460
veins end to end we'd be going across the states two times it's a huge circulatory network and along
00:30:19.620
all of the veins veins are what return blood to the heart are muscles uh and these muscles just sit
00:30:27.680
there and but they're potentially so strong that if i were to you know if someone were to cut my leg off
00:30:33.400
below the knee uh those veins would constrict to stop the flow of blood out of my body uh and this
00:30:40.700
is why soldiers are able to survive these debilitating wounds we have this autonomic system that will stem
00:30:45.800
blood loss but the other use for it and the more common use for vasoconstriction is uh to shunt blood
00:30:53.780
to the core if you get cold to sacrifice the extremities uh to to keep your your your core warm
00:31:00.920
now for the vast majority of us uh who live at this sort of constant 72 degrees we never ever
00:31:08.920
activate those muscles so those muscles are get get weak and that weakness leads to all sorts of
00:31:15.080
circulatory diseases uh so just getting into the snow getting into cold water is like lifting weights for
00:31:21.280
your your circulatory system and it's it's the easiest thing to do to to do that to to get to turn
00:31:30.540
a cold shower and then they flex and you go warm and they relax and you go cold and they flex again
00:31:35.940
and you know even somebody with like chiseled abs is a total gym rat could have this like totally weak
00:31:41.940
uh a circulatory system so that's the the first thing that the cold does another thing that does is it
00:31:48.920
modulates insulin um production which is you know helps with uh with with an insulin uh insulin
00:31:55.760
resistance is is the condition that leads to diabetes uh it can the cold will also make you lose weight
00:32:05.040
so fast and if you if you think about you know you're at the gym and you're you have a little bit
00:32:10.380
of a punch and you want to lose weight it's pretty hard to do that through running and exercise right
00:32:15.900
i mean you can but it takes a lot of focus effort your body would generally prefer to burn muscle
00:32:21.700
and other tissues before it goes after your fat content and the reason for that is that that fat
00:32:28.460
is has an evolutionary purpose to actually heat your body and we have a tissue that we're born with
00:32:34.640
called brown adipose tissue or brown fat that every infant human infant who's not premature has and
00:32:41.520
and that's because when you're that small you're just born you don't have the musculature or digestive
00:32:49.500
system to heat your body the normal way you know that that adults do when you know every time you
00:32:55.560
move you generate heat uh every time your digestive system sort of moves it generates heat and this is
00:33:00.500
how we maintain it sort of a 98.6 body temperature that's how we thermoregulate but infants who are also
00:33:08.080
very small which means they have a high surface area to mass ratio lose heat very quickly so the
00:33:13.500
strategy that infants use to survive is is this brown adipose tissue which they have a lot of and
00:33:20.760
what it does is it sucks white fat from their body and directly metabolizes it for heat energy
00:33:28.060
and it produces a lot of heat and this is how all of us got through our earliest years now as we get
00:33:34.860
older we're able to heat ourselves in in various other ways and scientists thought that most adults
00:33:42.160
just didn't have any bat until they until 2007 when uh and i won't get into the whole story and how they
00:33:50.640
found it but a researcher named aaron sipus over at harvard um discovered that adults actually do have
00:33:57.480
it and the reason that we don't they didn't realize it before is because you only keep it around
00:34:03.520
after childhood and you only develop more if you're constantly exposed to cold and and the the
00:34:10.220
response and the reason why you you get bat is that is that you're cold and your body's like okay i
00:34:14.660
don't want to shiver myself warm all the time i'm going to use my metabolism and that sucks out and
00:34:19.440
then suck out your white fat so this white fat is is energy that we have but it's it's it's not for
00:34:25.700
caloric energy to move our muscles it's caloric energy to heat our bodies and that's one of the things
00:34:30.120
that's sort of an evolutionary mismatch with the way we live today and uh you actually lost seven
00:34:35.300
pounds of fat after your first uh trip to poland with whim correct yeah isn't that nuts right me
00:34:40.760
hanging out in the snow eating polish food which i will remind you is mostly sausage and you know
00:34:46.220
uh sausage and pierogi so oily fatty carby food uh i lost seven pounds of fat uh while while hanging
00:34:53.120
out with that so like so let's say someone's listening to this like that sounds awesome like i want to give
00:34:57.100
my my circulatory system a workout but i also want to get this brown fat so i can start losing white
00:35:02.920
fat so like what do you need to do like do you have like how long do you need to expose yourself
00:35:07.960
to cold for you to start developing this ability well everyone's physiology is a little bit different
00:35:13.760
so i can't give a exact response and actually still research is ongoing but i can say that i was able
00:35:21.080
to keep my body warm through this this metabolic process very well after three days of of going out
00:35:29.660
in the snow for as long as i could could could manage it you know and and and i need to be clear
00:35:35.200
that you need to be in control in the snow if you start shivering uncontrollably or start getting
00:35:39.400
frostbite you're doing this wrong you're pushing past your limits humans are designed we evolved to adapt
00:35:44.820
rapidly our ancestors who passed on their genes didn't see an oncoming snowstorm and say i'll get ready
00:35:50.680
for it next month they were like our bodies have to be ready now and so you build it up extremely
00:35:56.320
rapidly uh one test uh in a lab in uh holland showed that they put like 12 diabetic men so overweight
00:36:04.420
diabetic men i think they were mostly in their 50s and they put them in a cold room uh about 51 degrees
00:36:10.760
for three hours a day for three weeks at the end of that time and they were just wearing shorts and a
00:36:18.440
shirt i believe at the end of that time just being cold decreased their insulin sensitivity
00:36:24.260
by 54 which is a dramatic improvement for their diabetes so you do this you do this quick and all
00:36:31.480
you need to do is get cold you know start with cold showers that's the easiest you know way to do it
00:36:37.700
you start with your hot shower you can take your scottish shower that that starts hot and goes cold
00:36:41.900
and and then when you're in that environment the most important thing is to relax like you don't
00:36:50.280
want to to warm yourself by that muscle action which will may help you lose weight but it's not going
00:36:56.260
to help you get this metabolic activity so you consciously just you know you take a deep breath and
00:37:03.640
you just say okay i'm cold and and and it'll be all right and this is the signal to your nervous system
00:37:11.000
to start building up um metabolic changes in your body another very easy way to do things is something
00:37:17.660
that i do a lot is to if it's winter which it is now uh go for a run outside in just a pair of shorts
00:37:27.060
maybe wear a hat and gloves if it's super cold out and you're worried about your extremities
00:37:30.460
but go shirtless or if you're a woman you know wear a sports bra but to go with as as much of your skin
00:37:36.480
as possible um out to the cold and then go for you know a three mile run or a five mile run or
00:37:41.440
something like that come back and and what what's going to happen is that because you're moving your
00:37:46.360
muscles a lot you're actually generating a tremendous amount of heat you know if you if you run in the
00:37:51.040
winter now and you're wearing fleece you're probably sweating under all that stuff so this this is a
00:37:57.240
great way to do this method because your skin is actually getting that signal for the cold it'll be
00:38:01.760
your skin will be cold to the touch but your core will be warm but those neural signals for saying
00:38:07.360
get ready for winter are coming into your body and that's going to be one great way to start building
00:38:11.560
up this metabolic change so for the cold showers is there like a time length you should shoot for
00:38:16.640
like five minutes under the cold or does it matter uh i mean longer equals better in this case but you
00:38:23.440
get them you know with any sort of new practice you you have the benefit of the law of diminishing
00:38:29.480
returns right where you know and this happens really for any exercise routine any meditation
00:38:34.620
routine anything new that you do is you learn the most in the first the introduction to this and if
00:38:42.320
you can get into the shower and relax and stay there for like 30 seconds of just being uh after you're
00:38:48.800
relaxed you will have gotten a huge benefit into your system now if you stay there longer you'll still get
00:38:54.220
benefits but the the curve sort of bends a little bit after that uh so i would say you know minimum
00:39:00.440
shoot for a minute right because that's not really it's not going to kill you it's going to be fine
00:39:05.340
if you can do five that's great you know um you know you you know some people work this up for a long
00:39:12.080
long time but the goal is to subdue your panic response and relax and and that is a signal to
00:39:21.580
your body that you're getting that you're you have to have mental control instead of this autonomic
00:39:26.340
control and that's the the first step and then you do more stuff and you'll find that it gets easier
00:39:31.380
and and the really cool thing is that so when you're in the cold you release all these awesome feel good
00:39:36.360
hormones you know norepinephrine epinephrine adrenaline cortisol they're all start releasing in
00:39:42.360
your system and you get out of that cold shower and you feel awesome and that becomes sort of this
00:39:47.160
addictive and really fun thing and besides the uh the cold exposure i mean that's what your book's
00:39:52.200
primarily primarily about but are there any other ways we can inject stress in our lives to become
00:39:56.820
stronger sure i mean you know i do i i find the cold uh to be this a safe way to do it right because
00:40:04.860
you know it's you obviously can get you know kill yourself doing with extreme cold right but it's easier
00:40:10.920
to warm up your body if you get a little too cold than it is to cool down your body if you get a little
00:40:16.220
too hot but that doesn't mean you can't do the same basic training with the other extreme right you
00:40:21.060
just have to be a lot more careful uh in in in pushing your limits but yeah i mean the breathing
00:40:26.940
method the cold you can use heat uh you can use altitude i mean a lot of this stuff is is things
00:40:32.380
that people have known for a while right the reason why the olympic training center in america is up in
00:40:37.820
colorado is because we're at 5 000 feet and that's an environmental stimulus you don't even realize
00:40:42.120
about but you just get the passive uh benefit of being at high altitude so you know that any you
00:40:49.060
know and i write in the book there's this concept that i have called the wedge which is where any
00:40:54.460
environmental stimulus that comes into your body that has a predictable biological response you know
00:41:04.040
that that that if that that stimulus and that response if you have any control over that response
00:41:10.640
that is a moment of where you can train and i you know i i talk about this in in the book is that you
00:41:16.240
can say a sneeze is a great is a great example of this you know you know if you if you start to have
00:41:22.060
to sneeze and and you say well i don't want to sneeze right now you can actually delay that you can
00:41:27.340
say okay i'm just going to resist this sneezing reflex that i have uh that is growing this this ability
00:41:36.000
you have to to sort of master your autonomic nervous system now i don't know if you should
00:41:40.140
never sneeze in your life i mean this is not necessarily useful sneezing is is a great thing
00:41:44.060
to do but but you know it's one of the fundamental ways that humans learn and and you know you could
00:41:50.680
maybe learn to hold your pee for a long time or you know delay an orgasm and and there's just lots
00:41:55.980
of like predictable biological responses that you can start to master and you know the the the body is
00:42:02.520
the limit there whatever you can think of so uh part of your experiment with uh wim hoff's method
00:42:07.560
was um you did the besides the hike up mount kilimanjaro you also did the tough guy we've had
00:42:12.780
scott connealy on the podcast talk about the suffer fest and the tough guy um you know he's running that
00:42:18.560
right now i am so jealous he's doing that right now it's cold i mean it's cold here in oklahoma i can't
00:42:23.060
imagine what it is over there but it's this brutal obstacle it's like the original obstacle course race
00:42:27.860
just it's in the dead of winter in england um you the the guy make this guy named mouse makes his
00:42:34.980
guys go through just ice cold water just brutal stuff um and you did this tough guy and not only
00:42:42.460
did you do it you did it without you just did in a pair of shorts and a pair of shoes that's it
00:42:45.940
um so can you tell us about your experience doing the tough guy while following wim hoff's method
00:42:51.880
yeah you know i am not an endurance athlete like i didn't expect to want to win this or anything
00:42:57.100
and you know people win tough guy at in like an hour and a half but it's a what is it like a 12
00:43:03.220
or 15 mile race um but mostly obstacles where you're jumping over walls and and and and then
00:43:10.980
into like icy water and then you're all muddy and you're climbing under barbed wire and there's
00:43:15.000
electrical shocks and all of these sort of like you know typical what we now think of as typical
00:43:19.140
obstacle course things but the main uh obstacle in tough guy is the cold and people will go
00:43:27.040
run this basically wearing wetsuits you know covered in neoprene uh because you know the year
00:43:32.440
before i did it we had there were 300 people who ended up in the emergency room with hypothermia
00:43:37.800
now i wanted to run this in just shorts you know i had shorts shoes i may have had gloves because i
00:43:44.660
wanted to be able to climb up those obstacles efficiently and uh and i completed the the course in
00:43:51.720
about three and a half hours uh which is you know definitely nothing special but in this frigid frigid
00:44:00.080
weather and i was just warm i was actually elated the whole time uh i was doing it it was just it's just
00:44:06.020
this total high because whereas everyone else was shivering and sort of you know really fighting this
00:44:12.160
one challenge uh i my body responded to it with just releasing adrenaline and epinephrine and just
00:44:18.820
making me feel great and and and everyone who i met on the course was like why are you smiling my
00:44:25.300
friend and i was like it was just an awesome um sort of just whole body pleasurable experience to me
00:44:31.020
and i think because i've been doing this wim hof training for at that point uh regularly for about
00:44:36.500
six months uh the the the challenge that other people's bodies were sort of failing at i had just no
00:44:41.760
issue with i thought it was great yeah i think it's interesting like the this whole obstacle course
00:44:45.980
racing phenomenon like this um interest in wim hof and what he's doing it seems like there there
00:44:50.380
is a underground revolt going against sort of the diseases of civilization i mean are there any other
00:44:56.300
you know little subcultures you came across during the research of your book where you you found people
00:45:00.900
you know purposely injecting environmental stress in their life to become healthier and stronger
00:45:05.360
sure i mean you know i i like the obstacle course race industry because it's so
00:45:09.140
contained and obvious right it's like like you know you you you're a weekend warrior and you go
00:45:16.400
out there and you get a little suffering because hey not only does it look good on facebook it actually
00:45:20.940
feels really cool to take on a challenge to to do something out of your ordinary routine and you know
00:45:27.720
in some sense every exercise routine that anyone takes on you know crossfit or um you know or surfing
00:45:35.420
where you hang out in the water for a hell of a long period of time all of that is is sort of
00:45:40.500
bucking your nose at this sort of comfortable life that you really you know you could just live in your
00:45:46.200
office the whole time every day uh and you know i have just mad respect for anyone who can go out there
00:45:53.100
and just go grab a little bit of suffering and say actually that suffering isn't is actually making me
00:46:00.000
stronger and and then i start to enjoy it uh but you know maybe you've seen this viral video going
00:46:05.340
around of like kids in siberia dumping ice water on themselves uh this is where uh there's this school
00:46:12.740
where they have um it's like a it's like an elementary or maybe even a preschool and they have these this
00:46:19.300
this video of like these kids running outside into the siberian winter pouring ice water on themselves
00:46:24.740
rolling in the snow for five minutes and then going back inside and the teachers at the school
00:46:30.040
say that it has prevented all of their kids from getting sick which is crazy you know no one would
00:46:35.300
do that in america we we are so coddled in this in this country you know you know this is the country
00:46:41.440
where a free-range child uh ends up having the parents of that kid end up having child protective
00:46:47.380
services called on them uh it's it's just so funny but i think there's a lot of people out there who
00:46:52.200
who want to get back to nature and you know there's a whole ancestral health movement uh barefoot
00:46:58.700
running uh you know paleo diet people i mean all of these people are are pushing on on this idea that
00:47:06.240
that technology isn't all that it cracked up to be and that maybe comfort hides its own type of
00:47:12.200
suffering so when you before you started wim hof's method for a year you got your physiology test you
00:47:18.160
went through some medical tests how did your physiology change after a year following his
00:47:24.020
methodology well so i went to the boulder uh sports and recreation center over at the university of
00:47:31.160
colorado boulder where this physiologist first measured me when i before i had done that was doing
00:47:38.360
the method regularly so i had actually consciously stopped doing it for about a month in the middle of
00:47:43.720
the summer and he measured me on a stress test which is basically getting me up to my vo2 max and
00:47:49.460
seeing how my body uh processed energy and i was a pretty ordinary dude like you know definitely nothing
00:47:57.220
special uh he actually sort of laughed at how not special i was uh and which meant that i i burned
00:48:03.580
mostly carbohydrates uh during my exercise and then eventually started burning fat at the very end
00:48:09.500
which is the exact opposite of what you want to be if you're an endurance athlete and at the end of
00:48:15.640
this um of the the training course after i climbed kili after i'd done all these things where i had
00:48:21.900
changed my workout daily workout routine any more than doing the breathing exercises and cold exposure
00:48:27.920
uh at the end of all that and that's like 15 minutes a day it's really not that that much much time he
00:48:34.860
examined my physiology again and i had suddenly switched to a primarily fat burning person uh and
00:48:42.240
and i was able to do additional stages on on his vo2 max test uh and he was actually really surprised by
00:48:51.540
these results because i hadn't actually changed my my cardio routine at much i was doing like three
00:48:58.900
you know three you know runs a week or something like that and he was like it was as if i had added
00:49:04.220
seven hours of exercise uh to my routine uh every every week and he thought it was really really cool
00:49:11.400
and i was pretty happy with those results so you went into this uh investigation as a skeptic i mean
00:49:18.720
are you a believer now or are there some aspects of wim's claims you're like i don't know about that but
00:49:22.940
there are there some aspects you're like yeah that that's i'm i'm down with that oh i mean certainly
00:49:28.760
i'm i'm always going to be a skeptic of claims that are that are too big uh and and i think wim is
00:49:34.860
the doorway into something really beautiful and really wonderful about our physiology but sometimes
00:49:40.980
he'll say things that are impossible to prove or dangerous to prove and he'll he'll sometimes say it
00:49:46.420
can cure cancer or cure aids and i don't know about that like i'm i'm gonna i'll wait for the evidence
00:49:51.960
to roll in um for that but what i will say is that he has certainly opened my my eyes to a different
00:50:00.620
way of looking at our body in the environment like we used to think that health like general health
00:50:07.920
relied on two things diet and exercise you know the the energy you put into your body and what you
00:50:13.380
expended through physical exertion but what this has taught me is that there's actually a third pillar
00:50:18.100
and that the environment you inhabit is just as important as those two other things and that alone
00:50:24.540
seems to have just a whole cascade of other effects on on health in general and i would you know it's
00:50:32.320
it's you know it's changed my life and it's changed my perspective on things um you know forever i would
00:50:37.460
think well scott this has been a great conversation where can people learn more about your your book and
00:50:41.760
your work uh so i have the book uh which is called what doesn't kill us how freezing water extreme
00:50:46.400
altitude and environmental conditioning will renew our lost evolutionary strength uh it is on all the
00:50:52.040
places that you might find a book you know bookstores and amazon and all those places uh there's an
00:50:57.440
audiobook out so if you really like listening to my voice now you can do 10 hours of it uh you know
00:51:02.320
on audible and ibooks and also i have facebook i got the twitter i've got email i've got my own
00:51:08.400
website which is scott carney.com you know all the things that you you know google is your friend for
00:51:13.380
finding me well scott carney thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure this has been a lot
00:51:17.460
of fun thanks my guest today was scott carney he's the author of the book what doesn't kill us it's
00:51:21.580
available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can also find out more information about scott's
00:51:25.720
work at scott carney.com also check out our show notes at aom.is slash cold exposure where you can
00:51:32.300
find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the art
00:51:46.800
of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website
00:51:50.820
at artofmanliness.com this show is recorded on clearcast.io if you're a podcaster who are looking
00:51:56.380
for a solution for better sounding remote podcast interviews check it out clearcast.io something i've
00:52:01.400
developed as always we appreciate your continued support and until next time this is brett mckay