Brand-Hof Breathe Together (YouTube video review)
By: Neill Dehaan
Tags: Wim Hof, Russel Brand, Humor, YouTube, Review

Russel Brand, he of the TV, Hollywood and sex and drugs notoriety is big on YouTube. His podcast is now videoed and has a large following and it’s probably nothing to do with his former lifestyle. His bullsh*t-o-meter level reading does sometimes flicker into the red zone during his interviews (mostly his podcasts are interviews with ‘thinkers’) but he is very likeable, thoughtful and speaks in words of more than one syllable.

Here he interviews Wim Hof. If you have never heard of Wim Hof then join me in being the only two YouTube viewers who have no idea who he is. To others though, Wim needed no introduction because he is apparently ubiquitous on the www. If I had thought of searching for ‘man climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in his underwear’ of course, then I would have known already.

Wim’s craggy features and grey beard give us an idea that he’s not recently out of his teens. Apparently, he is known as the ‘Ice Man’ because he can withstand temperatures that would make a woolly mammoth go in search of an itchy sweater to keep warm. He also knows how to breathe deeply (“fooly in and fooly out” is his vocalisation of it) and that is why he is in the interview hot seat for this podcast.

During the interview, scientific fact is wantonly mixed with ‘sciency-sounding’ words and then blended with utter codswallop, and my ‘spidey senses’ start to itch. It seems to be heading in a dodgy direction, and my natural super-scepticism (default setting — WHAT?) shoots to the top of my head, or as Wim would maybe have it, my cerebral cortex. He names a lot of brain bits during this interview and some of the content is highly confusing to a non-neurosurgeon like myself.

Mr Hof tells of a scientific study where he says he taught people to fight off the e-coli virus just by breathing. Wow! I’m a sucker for empirical studies so when he says that twelve people were able to fend off a deadly virus within a few minutes as opposed to 16,134 control test subjects who continued to suffer (hopefully not to the point of death), I wanted to find out more but sadly, we were not given more details.

When Wim insisted that after performing his deep-breathing exercise he had actually seen chakras with his own eyes, I thought he had gone over the top. My worst prejudices about ageing Dutch hippies came into play, wondering if he had confused the experience with something that happened when he was doped up at a ’60s pop concert. Later, when demonstrating the breathing technique, he said you might feel cancer cells being expelled (ooh err), and thereafter loudly stated that all western medicine was corrupt because of commodification. I felt my conspiracy-theory allergy coming on and breathing deeply wasn’t going to take that away.

Wim teaches Russel to breathe and Mr Brand’s eyelids flicker and flutter half-shut, his eyes roll back in his head and I’m sure he is having flashbacks of his previous non-sober lifestyle. Even the way he breathes oxygen is like he is toking on it.

Did I breathe “fooly in” as instructed? Yes; not because I expected any chronic illness to disappear but rather because it turned out to be a good relaxation technique and is not dangerous. Wim doesn’t advise doing it underwater in an ice-cold lake like he does without a good deal of practice first though. Personally, I think I’ll stick to my warm chair.

VERDICT: A good watch to keep out the cold (and the e-coli?)