See, I hadn't actually re-read it in seven years. In August 2022 I decided that I would finally re-record the audiobook for T he Enlightenment Trap and I spent several weeks in a recording studio when a strange thing happened. In 2017, What Doesn't Kill Us became a NYT bestseller, but I always felt that it didn't quite made sense unless people also understood my earlier project. I managed to acquire back the rights to from Penguin, but the audiobook rights were locked up by another publisher until last year. Unfortunately it didn't sell particularly well. The book came out in 2015 to great reviews. So I spent a few more years working on that project while also practicing the WHM daily. I first had to fulfill my book contract for A Death on Diamond Mountain on the dark side of meditation. I was really happy about the attention he was getting, and knew I would one day write a book, but I couldn't do it right away. It just so happened that Wim messed up my plans because his methods actually worked. My story in Playboy ended up launching his career. A few months later he appeared in a VICE documentary, and from there an appearance on Joe Rogan. Both Emily and Ian believed they were on the cusp of enlightenment and could achieve superpowers. I expected Wim would be a similar-sort of questionable guru and I planned to debunk him-thus beginning a career as someone who takes down charlatans professionally. His death closely mirrored the death of my student Emily O'Connor at a meditation retreat in India several years earlier. I had just written an article in Playboy about how a charismatic Buddhist teacher's meditation program led to the death of Ian Thorson in the Arizona desert. I want to tell you officially that there is in fact a relationship between between the book release and my video, but it's more complicated than it appears. Perhaps they think that this was all an attention-grabbing ploy to sell millions of books at the expense of Wim's business. Some people have suggested that the timing of my video on the Wim Hof Method was suspiciously close to the re-launch of my book The Enlightenment Trap. Why Am I Releasing The Enlightenment Trap Now? I pray that we are able to come up with an amicable solution and get back to our regular duties of ice baths and breathwork. I do not know where any of this is going to go in the future. Ideally we could get to a place where Innerfire acknowledges that my reporting alerted them to problems in the organization and everyone could have a cooling-off period before doing actual damage to a method that I have practiced for ten years. I would like to see the problems within the WHM organization corrected, while still being able to continue my journalism career without further harassment. I do worry, however, that escalating from here could result in the removal of the official Wim Hof YouTube channel. Unfortunately I am having no luck with productive conversations with Enahm. Wim is isolated and wants a way out. I have suggested several ways that we could de-escalate the situation, but Wim says he doesn't want to be part of it, and that I should speak directly to Enahm. In my first video he said that day-to-day operations overwhelm him and he doesn't want to be involved in his social media presence or the business itself. Now he's saying that I am a journalist "on a vendetta" against Enahm. Since then, however, his tone has changed a little bit. This is an on-the-record recording of our conversation. The day after it came out he said that the video was instigating necessary change within the organization-with plans that would reform payment practices, ownership of the company and other things. Understandably, Wim is in a difficult spot. I am in consultation with my legal team for how to best respond. Innerfire's misuse of YouTube's the content moderation system is explicitly against the site's terms of service. Journalism is a protected category of speech in the United States and (most of) Europe. Enahm is systematically attempting to remove my presence from the internet, has issued me threatening letters, is impersonating his father and (I think) his sister in online forums, and is generally not being a nice guy. Right now about half of my YouTube channel is offline, but the video has been mirrored in a few places including on my Instagram account and on the Internet Archive. Within hours of the video going online, Wim Hof's son Enahm Hof started issuing copyright take down and privacy violation notices through YouTube's legal complaint system. A few days ago I put out a YouTube video titled "How Wim Hof Lost His Method" that started an important conversation about the business practices of all things Wim Hof.
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