Barbell Shrugged - [Ice Baths] Using Cold to Improve Metabolic Resilience w/ Dr. Thomas Seager, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash #762

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

Thomas P Seager is an associate professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University. Seager leads research teams working at the boundaries of engineering and social science to understand innovation for resilient infrastructure systems, including the life-cycle environmental consequences of emerging energy technologies, novel approaches to teamwork and communication in socio-technical integrative settings, and engineering ethics education. Current research sponsors include the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency, and several industry partners. Seager is the faculty director of the Resource Innovation Solutions Network (RISN), a partnership of between ASU, City of Phoenix and other local municipalities for fostering circular, closed-loop economies. RISN operates a vertical incubator to nurture entrepreneurs that will accelerate the transition to a Circular Economy. Additionally, Seager serves as chairman and CEO of eXperiential Sustainability Ethics Training (XSETGames, LLC), which creates digital simulations for examining economic and ethical dimensions of wicked problems including pharmaceutical pricing, technological innovation, intergenerational equity and the Tragedy of the Commons.  These simulations have been used by corporations, government agencies, and higher education clients, including dozens of Universities on three different continents. Lastly, Seager founded the non-profit Sustainability Conoscente Network as a mechanism for sharing knowledge related to systems approaches to sustainable technologies. The Conoscente holds the International Symposium on Sustainable Systems and Technology in May of every year. Work with RAPID Health Optimization   Work with Dr. Thomas Seager Morozco Ice Baths Dr. Seager on X Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Dr. Thomas Seeger is coming into the show, which is very, very cool because when we were down at Parker University, one of our clients at Rapid Health Optimization actually put us in touch with him. He came down to learn at the seminar, of course, but also when I heard his background from our client, immediately knew we needed to have him on Barbell Shrug, which is the background of people is always interesting to me, how somebody from an engineering background focused in public health would wind up

through COVID creating super high-end cold plunges. Just seems like an interesting puzzle to put together. And what I learned is because of the engineering background, you can start to see how that brain starts to put pieces together on problem solving and how it gets into understanding health, physiology, metabolic function. And that's what we take the deep dive into today. I thought we were going to be talking when we first met him just about ice baths, kind of in the blanket understanding of what everybody talks about when you get into ice baths, cold baths. And what ended up actually happening is a significantly deeper dive into metabolic health. A lot of the root cause issues that are facing humanity, I guess you could call it at the highest level, but anybody that is paying attention to what's going on with our medical system, it's just a really, really unpleasant picture when you start to look at how unhealthy the world has become,

specifically in the United States. Dr. Tom Seeger really comes in here and absolutely crushes this, and I can't wait to have him back on the show. And as always, friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dr. Andy Galpin has a video lined up for you on the three-step process we use here at Rapid Health Optimization for you to unlock your true physiological potential. As always, friends, you can access that free video over at rapidhealthreport.com.

Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Nicole Race. She's not the guest today, but this is her first time on Barbell Shrugged. She's hosting. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged, Nicole Race. She's not the guest today, but this is her first time on Barbell Shrugged. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged, Nicole Race. And Tom Seeger from Arizona State. You are, we are at the Biomolecular Athlete at Parker University. You weren't around for this yesterday, but we got a tour of this place.

And there is some technology in here that is out of this world. Yeah, apparently a tornado tore this place down and they they just rebuilt it like as modern as it gets it's all like augmented reality and and every classroom is a movie studio like it's built for for the internet yeah we went into the chiropractic room and did you touch the dummies yeah in the chiropractic room they have like all of the sometimes i wonder if things are like normal and I'm just not around them. And then I see them and I'm like, this is so cool. They're like, that's been around for like 20 years.

I'm like, oh, I'm just an idiot. I'm sorry. I don't go to school anymore. Speaking of school, though, you're a professor at Arizona State, correct? I am. I'm an engineering professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering. I love that. We are at this like uh blood

work and genetic testing and you are an engineer i'd love to know kind of like what interested you outside of us having a mutual friend uh in common what what drew you to wanting to kind of be at a blood work and genetic testing it was a mutual friend i got an invitation i said yeah i'll be there yeah right would you like to come to this party? Yes. Here's a free ticket. We'll figure out what happens when we get there. So, yeah.

And then I found out Andy Galpin is speaking. And I've cited Andy on cortisol and ice baths in the past. Cortisol is one of these mysterious, it plays really big in social media. People are talking about ice baths are going to burn out your adrenals blah blah blah and nobody knows what they're talking about except Andy and Marius Brazaitis at the Lithuanian Sports University and a few people who are actually measuring cortisol so I wanted the chance to see how does Andy think and how does he present. And he spent the morning debunking the importance of personalized genetic testing, which I'm so glad to hear because he's right.

The personal genetic testing is a great way to make money and a lousy way to help people get healthy and perform better. Sometimes when you hear how much it doesn't work, you go, well, where's all that data going? Because that's probably the thing that they're all just collecting to sell on the back end. Yeah. We worry about who owns ancestry.com and who's got all of these individual identifying markers. But I'm more concerned about how many people suffer from metabolic disorder. That's not a genetic disorder. Because I'm an engineer, I work outside the body.

The medical doctors, they work inside the body. And I'm all about structuring the environment around the person to allow the body to heal itself. When someone like Dan says, medicine is great at saving millions of lives a day. He's exaggerating to make a point. He's got a good point about emergency medicine. Yeah, if you're in a car wreck, then you need that ER department. You need that surgeon to put things back together. And this is something that engineers can only assist physicians with. But my field is environmental engineering. That's clean water, clean air. These are the things that are saving millions of lives a day.

Yeah. I want to dig into water. Water is a, I have like a, this is a little out there maybe. I feel like after I lived in San Diego for a decade, terrible water. It's disgusting. It's disgusting. Yeah. However, if you go to Northern California and go to Mammoth, or if you head to Tahoe and you just turn the faucet on,

it's the best water in the world because it comes directly from that mountain. It's ice cold, and it comes out of the tap, and you can tell that it wasn't in this giant pipe from the Colorado River all the way to a place where there's literally no water, and it's in a drought 11 out of 12 months a year and the first time that I went to a mammoth after living in San Diego I was like there is such a significant difference to the quality of water and now everywhere I go I like go to the tap I open it up and I drink a little water I'm like this is trash this is not real water like what happened happened here? I'd love like a deep

dive into kind of like what you think about when it comes to water quality and how it affects really the environment around people. Our standards for water quality are way too low. They were established by the cholera epidemic in London. This is the genesis of my profession as an environmental engineer. There was a physician in London who put up a map of every cholera death and he put a pin in the household where the death was recorded and they all clustered around this one well that was contaminated.

He removed the handle from the well. His name was Dr. Snow. So he takes the handle off so no one can pump water out of this well and the cholera epidemic was resolved. People said, oh, maybe the quality of water, you know, is an important determiner of health because it can carry pathogens. It started a sanitary engineering. And the idea was to deliver water to the home that was free of these pathogens.

So in London, that meant going upstream of the Thames, drawing the water out before it was polluted by sewage, putting it through a sand filter and piping it into the homes. This is what environmental engineers have been doing. So in San Diego, you have two sources of water. One is desalinization, which is very expensive and doesn't lead necessarily to good water, although it's free of pathogens. And the other is Northern California. By the time the water gets from the Oroville Dam down to you in San Diego, it tastes like concrete. It's terrible. Because that's what it's been traveling through that whole way.

So this is environmental engineering. What is the clean water and the clean air? And the standards were written by the minimum that will not cause acute disease. And once we're above that threshold, we're like, ah, the environmental engineer has done a good job. And it's true. But that was a good job by the standards of the 1960s, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act. Maybe if the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland doesn't catch fire, but then we're doing our job. When you're talking about health and performance, you need a higher standard than, well, what comes out of my tap is so

chlorinated that I know I'm not going to get E. coli infection or some kind of gastrointestinal disease from it. But you're not actually clear of like heavy metals. And the chlorine is no good for you. Yeah. Fluoride is no good for you. And, uh, you know, this is fine for washing. Um, and it's not a good idea to shower in it if you can avoid it because the byproducts of disinfection, when we use chlorine to disinfect, it will react with organic matter and make something called trihalomethane. So this is either chlorine or bromine attached to a carbon atom. That's a carcinogen. The EPA has a standard for it. And when you're in the shower, the trihalomethanes will vaporize out of the water. You will breathe them in. Even if the water meets the EPA standard, you will be exposed to what are called disinfection byproducts that your body has

so little evolutionary experience with, it doesn't know how to deal with it, and it can create cancer or other markers of ill health. So I avoid it. How do you get around that if you just have a regular shower at your house? Is there filters you can put on your shower head, et cetera? You can. There are filters that you put your whole house on, for example.

A lot of people will have an RO filter, which is a bit extreme, or maybe they'll have a water treatment system for the whole house. I rarely shower these days. I go in and out of my ice bath where my water environment is much more controlled. I'm using ozone for disinfection instead of chlorine. Ozone is much safer and it's much healthier. And so I don't know if I should admit this on a podcast. No one needs to shower in three weeks. Right? Exactly, Nicole. And so I don't know if I should admit this on a podcast, but like the first shower I had.

He's like, shower in three weeks. Right? Exactly, Nicole. Now, I don't bring soap in even. Like I don't want any of that soap. So I go in and I kind of scrub myself up in my ice bath and I get my ozone wash and I call it good. Don't ask my girlfriend if I smell all right. I kind of smell like I work from home.

That makes sense. good don't ask my girlfriend if i smell all right um i kind of smell like i work from home but i uh every once in a while of course i'm on the road at the hotel this morning i took a hot shower as the first hot shower i've taken in like two weeks so it never really occurred to me that like breathing in the vapor from being in the shower would be a problem like can you go into more details about why that's problematic that's the principal route of exposure to disinfection byproducts in tap water is not that you're drinking it, although that is a route of exposure, and not even that you're bathing in it or showering in it. And it's not transdermal absorption. It is the air next to the water droplets. So the stream of water coming out, of course, is mixing with the air. You're breathing that air in the shower, and you're taking in trihalomethanes through your nose,

through your lung tissue, and, of course, your lungs are meant to do exchange with the air. I mean, that's the way your lung is structured, to bring whatever's in the air into your bloodstream. So this is the principal route of exposure to, or I should say dose of disinfection byproducts and whatever's in your water that you don't want in your body. So trihalomethanes, do they cause specific problems like disease states or autoimmune issues or cancer? I don't know about autoimmune issues, but cancer is the typical endpoint that the EPA,

for example, is concerned about when they set limits for trihalomethanes or disinfection byproducts in drinking water. And there's a lot of ways that your body will naturally root out cancer, will naturally respond to cancer. And so I don't mean to be alarmist in this regard. If you're metabolically healthy, if your mitochondria are in good shape, then somewhere in your body, you're always going to find an aberrant cell and someone's going to be able to say, oh, that's indicative of cancer, but your body is not helpless against cancer. So I don't mean to be alarmist about the drinking water. What I'm trying to say is that the standards I was educated to meet as an environmental engineer are way too low for your audience. Because you are not trying to go for a state of health that is just above cholera.

You're trying to go for a state of health that is optimum human performance. And for that, you need better water sources. On the other hand, there's a lot on social media about hydrogen water, about structured water. It is possible to go too far in our pursuit of what someone's going to call optimal health. We walked into the grocery store yesterday to just get some water from the house. And there was like nine different types and i just went i just i'm gonna walk away it's too many decisions the hydrogen the ph this the alkaline and you're like that's my water oh how about just like clean water is that possible

used the natural flavors that make you wonder what the heck natural really is yeah water's a big business now yeah and as far as like the testing goes um are the reliable tests because every time i i see one all i do is go oh there's a business and they're about to tell me my water sucks like how do i where where can people get like a an actual uh trustworthy test to find out where even the filters, like I have filtered water on the fridge and the sink. And we thought about doing showers, which was like too much for me at the time. But where can people find out a reliable test to just learn what's coming through their faucet? Shark Family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to

rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. Then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle.

Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns. And then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program. And we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and just my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able

to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidhealthreport.com and let's get back to the show. But where can people find out a reliable test to just learn what's coming through their faucet? What a great question. I wish I had a recommendation for you for an honest home testing company. But there's a couple of things that your intuition is leading you to. You're like, if I go for that 332-point inspection of my car, they're going to find 27 things that are wrong right so if you invite some water testing company

into your home they're going to use those test results to sell you a system yeah and in that moment you're going to feel great about your system because fear is one of the best ways to close a sale and they're going to show you test results that they create in you this fear. And the fear only goes away when you buy our system. So I don't have a recommendation for you. I have an understanding of the technologies. Activated carbon. That's a good one. The downside to this is it depends upon you as a homeowner to monitor your filter,

to change it constantly, to make sure that the filter doesn't become out of date. Otherwise, it will be saturated and no good. So the moment in time when you buy that system and feel good about it, it might be fleeting if you don't continuously test. I feel like such a water snob. When you own gyms too, you have the perfect water filter thing, and it's like an endless stream of amazing cold water and then putting that in your house and then when i have bad water now it's like you can like taste the

metallic like there's something to it you're like this this is not good for me at all like i know for a fact this isn't for me i'd love to also kind of uh you mentioned air quality earlier and um we actually had a client that just moved down to Miami. And he was the one that kind of like brought this up to me. But I had been feeling many of the things that he was talking about. And I was like, why did you leave Nashville and go to Miami? Like Nashville is beautiful. It's fun.

Blah, blah, blah. Miami obviously has its benefits. But he was like, I just need good water, good sunshine, and good air. And it's all here. He couldn't get that in Nashville? Well, I think need good water, good sunshine, and good air, and it's all here. He couldn't get that in Nashville? Well, I think it was more like in the woods. All right. The good air part.

Yeah. But I was like, yeah, there's something to just this, like, the essentials that you need. Some sunshine, some good quality air and water, and we can go a really long ways when it comes to, like, this, like, base layer of health. If we were to talk specifically about air quality obviously la we don't want that um but it's kind of one of those environmental factors you don't really have like a there's no you can't walk around with a purifier just for your your own self so how do how do people even start to change that or or improve that i'm going to be uh crude for a minute. They buy it.

They buy a different house in a different neighborhood. People, they look for school systems, and school systems are expensive, not because they charge you for your kids to go to school, but because the homes in that district are so much more expensive. It's typical of the environment, too. I grew up in Pittsburgh, and shoot,

some journalist described Pittsburgh in the 50s as hell with the lid off, you know, because it was a steel town and it was so polluted both in the rivers and in the air. And I think that was part of why I was attracted to a career in environmental engineering. One of the things that I learned is that the prevailing wind in the United States goes from west to east. So where are the nice neighborhoods? They're not in East LA. They're not in East St. Louis. The worst neighborhoods are always downstream of the smokestacks, downstream of the treatment plants. The places in Pittsburgh that were the highest rent at the time, they were up high. They were protected from the smoke billowing out of the steel plants. So what did people used to do?

They'd move upstream or they'd move upwind of the pollutants. Now the things are, for the most part, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act have done great things for public health. Things are mostly reliable. If you live in Flint, Michigan, then you're probably going to flame me online and say, mostly it doesn't apply to my water. And it's true. There are still infectious disease outbreaks that are a tribute to our water system. So we're not done.

But it is the older guys than me that won the clean water and the clean air battle. Now my interest in public health has come around to mental health. It's come around to this higher standard of performance and human flourishing than the previous generation of environmental engineers were concerned about. The most engineers that I talk to, my colleagues, they're going to say, oh, you know, it's not really our job, mental health. We're trying to reduce traffic accidents from vehicles, or we're trying to make earthquake-proof buildings so that people don't die, you know, in a building collapse. And it's absolutely true. And it no longer interests me. I'm not in the

concrete or the steel or the pavement or the pipes anymore. I'm more interested in what is going on in this country with regard to mental health. Why are suicides and drug overdoses through the roof? What happened to life expectancy in the United States? And most of my colleagues say that's not really our job. I disagree. I think we need machines and technologies that will support the mental health of Americans because we're in a state of crisis. I mean, there's so many hundreds of factors that factor into mental health, like maybe environmental pollutants and whatnot is kind of underrepresented when that conversation happens. What do you think is the kind of the potential for improving mental health

with environmental improvements? I agree with you that there are hundreds of factors. Like this is a complex system. People are complex. However, the one that is most overlooked is the metabolism. Most people don't realize that their brain is using about 25% of the energy that the body has to process. It's the single most energy-intensive organ in the body. We're all worried about our muscles and our vo2 max and that kind of thing which is all fine but the brain is what is um hurting when

your mitochondria aren't able to produce enough energy so how do you help the brain you help the metabolism this is coming from people like aliie Houston and Chris Palmer. Chris Palmer, he's a psychiatrist at Harvard. So he went to medical school. He can prescribe drugs. And what he was finding in his practice is the drugs weren't working. Now there is a freaking surprise. If the drugs worked, then we wouldn't be in the mental health crisis that we're in right now. So he sort of stumbled upon the ketogenic diet for a patient of his that was having trouble losing weight. And it's kind of a side thing. He said, well, you know, have you thought about keto? I hear it's worked for some people. And the guy lost maybe 20 pounds, but his anxiety went way down.

His mood came up and Chris said, maybe there's something to this. He wrote a book about it called Brain Energy. He didn't go into the details in his book, but if you listen to some of his podcasts, he will tell you that his mother suffered from schizophrenia. Now, that is a serious mental disorder that is associated with shorter life expectancies and really poor life outcomes. There were times, if I understand this correctly,

when Chris was homeless as a child because of his mother's mental health, well, he can now resolve or reverse schizophrenia in his patients by improving their metabolism. When you give the brain the energy it needs, now it can do the hard work of managing mood, of cognitive reframing. So even though it's a complex system and there are hundreds of factors, the one that is most overlooked right now is metabolism. You take care of your mitochondria and your mitochondria are going to take care of your brain. So how do you do that?

And there are lots of things. Light circadian rhythm is important. Getting the seed oils out of your diet is important. Getting your vitamin D and your magnesium. So there's some dietary, some sun exposure aspects. But the thing that is most effective for stimulating mitobiogenesis is cold water immersion. You get in there, you activate your brown fat, and your mitochondria will be stressed by the necessity of producing heat. It's called non-shivering thermogenesis.

When your muscles are shivering, they're producing heat. non-shivering thermogenesis. When your muscles are shivering, they're producing heat. That's shivering thermogenesis. When your brown fat is working, that's non-shivering thermogenesis. And when your body recovers from the cold, it will eliminate the damaged mitochondria and it will, through mitobiogenesis, create new copies of mitochondria from those that it identifies as having the high quality mitochondrial DNA. So this is sort of my new mission to create the machines that people can use to maintain high metabolic health and high mental health that results from it. Are you up to speed on what the research says as far as kind of like optimal protocols for cold water exposure?

Yeah, I am. And it's really disappointing when people hear me say there's no optimal protocol. Everyone wants the optimal and everyone wants to be told what to do. And I leave that to Huberman. He just came out with a book called Protocols. And cookbooks generally sell really well. Like what's the recipe? What's the ingredients? And we all still suck at cooking. Yeah. I still can't bake a cake.

I put in a quarter of a teaspoon or whatever. You know, I follow all the directions. Why didn't it come out right? Huberman's really good at the protocols, and I suck at telling people what to do despite the fact that I'm a teacher. So I've had more success explaining it like this. What is the optimum weight training protocol for you? Well, you don't know. It depends upon your

current state of weight training. How much should you lift? How many reps should you do? How cold should you be? How long should you, it depends upon your current state of cold training. So there's some rules of thumb. They might not be optimal, but they will get you started. When you're starting out, go cold enough to gasp. So you get in the cold and you feel that sort of nervous system activation that is associated with the gasp reflex and go long enough to shiver. Because once you've started shivering, when you're starting out, you probably don't have a lot of brown fat. Your body is going to use shivering thermogenesis. You know you have activated your nervous system in a way that will signal your body to recruit new brown fat. That goes on for maybe two weeks. Then your body has recruited this brown fat.

Now you don't need to shiver anymore because your brown fats are doing the job. Cold enough to gasp, long enough to shiver. This is how you stay in touch. You respond to the signals that your body is sending you. Just like if you were doing weight training, are you supposed to go in there and start lifting heavy right away? Or are you supposed to respond to the signals that your body has given you? Do you feel sore after your first workout? All right. If you can't walk, you probably overdid it. But if you feel that delayed onset muscle soreness,

then you're probably challenging your body at the right level. Cold is like weight training in this respect. Gotcha. So if you're, say someone doesn't have a cold tub yet, they just have a shower, just put it on kind of cold as long as you go, whoa, go, God. You want to jump out right away. It's cold enough for now.

You got it. And then over time, as you get more go god like you want to jump out right away it's cold enough for now and then and then over time as you get more acclimated to it you can get into like actual ice baths and whatnot kind of down the line you don't have to start like that 32.1 degrees this is a great way to start i started with cold showers and they made me angry uh because there's a difference you know when you get in there and the cold water is only on part of your body you want to you want to get out of it you want to put it on a different part of your body you want to stand in the shower in a different way i didn't really understand my reaction i didn't understand why i was so pissed off in the cold shower all the time and but i was

doing it because i thought i had to toughen up and so so I'm like, well, it must be working if I hate it. It turns out that partial body cold water immersion is different than whole body. When you go into the bath, you activate what's called the mammalian dive reflex. So if it's just partial body, you get that fight or flight response. You get the sympathetic like, you're in danger response.

You get revved up. Your heart rate will go up. Your liver will release glucose into your bloodstream to prepare you to fight or flee but when you go into the bath and you're up to your neck in this freezing cold water and you think this would be the most desperate circumstance of all something called the dive reflex takes over your heart rate goes down your respiratory rate goes down even though your metabolism is revving up, your oxygen consumption goes down because you, like all mammals, are primed by this involuntary dive reflex. If you're going to get into the water, your ancient ancestors must have been like

going to spear a fish or collect a lobster or something. Your body says, we're diving now, and we need to slow it all down so that we can stay underwater long enough for whatever he needs to do. He's going to go feed his family or something. When we're done down here, we'll come up and then we'll breathe heavy again. Then we'll purge the CO2 from the bloodstream. Then we'll come out of this dive reflex response i loved the feeling of being in the ice bath after the first 15 seconds of being in the ice because the first 15 seconds is hellacious the once the dive reflex kicks in you hit this involuntary sort of meditative state your brain waves change we've measured that and you and i always have this experience of, what was I even worried about?

Like, this reminds me of being at the beach. I'm okay. My toes might hurt or my fingers might hurt, but it's now relaxing for me. And that's a different experience than a cold shower. You can get metabolic benefits from a cold shower, but I doubt that you can get the same sort of psychological benefits that I feel like I'm getting from the ice bath. What was the comment you made about the brain waves changing? We put on the Muse headsets. You can find them online. Choose Muse.

And it's sort of an amateur. What is it? EKG? No. EEG? Yeah. So there's an electrode that goes around your head. And we said, okay, let's play around with what happens with the brain.

The brain waves drop down into a meditative state that and it's right away. That's involuntary, regardless of the whether the subject was an experienced meditator, you know, someone who'd been to the Buddhist temple and studied these techniques and been at this, when we compared them meditating dry and warm versus cold and wet, everybody achieved a different brain state, cold and wet, despite the fact that they were like, whoa, I'm in the cold water. And that tells me it's an involuntary reflex inside the brain that drops them down into this deeper state of thought rather than the high activity waves that are associated with vigilance or with active problem solving. And I think this is one of the psychological benefits because I suck at meditation but when i get into the ice bath my worries they melt into the water it snaps me to my present moment and whatever my anxieties were that sort of uh were

driving me towards the ice bath in the first place those disappear yeah i've said this on the show many times we've talked with us many times like like Kotler's book, Stealing Fire. It's basically about how extreme physical things, whether it's ice baths or MMA fighting or whatever it is, will automatically presence you as opposed to kind of the conscious act of trying to be present like when you're meditating. Do you think that's kind of what's really happening there? It lowers your brainwaves, for lack of a better way to say that, simply because it's just putting you present and in the moment? And that could be iSpaths or it could be any other kind of calm activity that puts you in the moment? This is what happens to me.

I'm not the psychologist. I'm not a neuroscientist. I know what happens to me is maybe I'm worried about something at Morosco Forge or maybe I just got an email from my director at ASU saying that I'm in trouble for something else that I put on Twitter, which happens on a regular basis, you know? And so I have these anxieties about all the trouble that I'm in, and I get in there, and they disappear. When I get out, I feel like there's nothing I can't handle. There's no meeting with the dean that I can't handle. There's no meeting with the dean that I can't have. There's no customer that I can't call up. There's no supplier that I have

to yell at because of their defective whatever the heck it is. There's no conflict that I can't navigate. I feel like Superman when I come out of the ice bath. I can do anything. And maybe that's because the worst part of my day is already over you know nobody wants to to get in to an ice bath i don't care how tough you are i just spoke to andre bellaby he is now the world record holder for uh being submerged in ice cubes four hours and something like five minutes right it seems crazy because it gets you in the Guinness Book of World Records, right? He just won the card. Wouldn't you like get hypothermia or something like that?

Yeah, he did. Or like when you start to lose your fingers or toes? Yeah. Yep. All those things happen. He drove his core body temperature about four degrees Celsius below the clinical definition of hypothermia. And he could have lost consciousness. Most everybody else would

if he hadn't trained for this and so it's a great like why would you do this but the reason i do that is because that feeling that i get afterwards like what's gonna bother you after that what's gonna really trigger you give you that like emotional flashback that makes you panic and the answer is nothing you brought up fred so i called fred and i said you know hey what's it like for you and what do you get out of it and he says honestly i'm as fast as i'm ever going to be i'm as strong as i'm ever going to be i don't use the ice bath to recover from a workout i use it for the mental benefits and he tell me about that fred he goes well you, sometimes I'll spend 15 minutes just staring at that ice in my

morosco saying, I don't want to get in here. And then I do. Yeah. And after you've sort of gotten over that hurdle, there is something about the way you feel about yourself that is like, I will persist. Andy Anders says, great. I will persist without exception. I will get up. I will get another down. There's going I will persist. Andy Anders says it great. I will persist without exception. I will get up.

I will get another down. There's going to be another. We're going into overtime or whatever it takes. I will find a way to continue to compete. Now, I've talked to Luke Donald from the PGA and Mitch Wisnowski, also on the 49ers. He's the punter. I talked to Tristan Casas on the Red Sox. These are super high

achieving athletes. Every single one of them tells me it's for the mental benefits. It's not for the DOMS recovery. It's not for, you know, your track coach told you in high school that you should ice your knees after cross country or something

like that. And it does take some of the pain away it does restore mobility but that's not why the people at the top of their athletic competition are doing it they're doing it for that mental benefit i do feel like there's like a physiological desire for our body like there's there's systems that in order for them to be activated for us to live a full life, we have to be cold. And I really noticed this. You probably noticed this. Nicole over here lives in southern Florida.

And when I was in SoCal, for the decade we were out there, like February rolls around and you're in like a parka. And you look at the weather and it's 68 degrees. You kind of feel like you've completely lost all of your uh sense of normalcy when there's people in wisconsin and it's minus 30 and they're in the exact same code um i had i had a client that lived in alaska and she told me that when it became like 35 degrees like everybody would go out and start tanning shorts and t-shirts thatshirts. It was like, because they had just gone from like negative 30 or whatever it is for three months. And all of a sudden the sun showed up and it was like, now everybody's like outside, just like trying to absorb some sunlight to get it into

their body. Are there like physiological reasons that we just need to actually go get cold? And obviously the cold bath is a way to do it. But what is that kind of like the process and the need of that? Because it's every winter, no matter where you live, you're going to have this period where you're like, why is it so cold out? And when it's 65 in SoCal or in Southern Florida, you're clearly not living in the same world as the people in northern Wisconsin. I live in Phoenix, Arizona now, which is the hottest city in north america as far as i know you know or even the western hemisphere uh when i left i think it was 114 degrees and um you know what happens every summer yeah but there's a term called the phoenix wimp because we get maybe one week a winter you know somewhere in

january there'll be a cold snap and maybe, somewhere in January, there'll be a cold snap and maybe in the outskirts, there'll be a little bit of a freeze warning and everybody will complain that the temperature has dropped into the 30s. But I went to school at Clarkson University, which is way up in Northern New York. It's a hockey school.

I went to a camp up there when I was a kid. All right. It's way up there. Yeah, like most of the population of canada lives south of the where i went to school you know so i've experienced negative 40 and it doesn't matter whether it's celsius or fahrenheit like that's where the the you know the scales cross your spit will freeze in the air at negative 40 so what's up with this phoenix went when you live in southern florida or san diego or phoenix and you go from like your suv to your office building to you know your air-conditioned home and everything is

climate controlled around you you lose brown fat it is brown fat that is responsible for this non-shivering thermogenesis and it was so rare in developed countries that medical doctors thought, well, human adults just don't have it. You know, kids have plenty of brown fat. Babies are born with all kinds of brown fat because babies don't have the muscles to shiver to keep them warm. So brown fat is the principal way that babies will stay warm. But medical doctors thought, you know, you grow up and we just grow out of that baby fat. We just don't have it. And then a team in Sweden was looking at these cancer scans. This is called PET, which I think stands for positron emission tomography, although I can barely say it. These PET scans, they put a glucose, a radioactive glucose tracer in your blood,

and then they measure where it goes. The tumors preferentially uptake glucose. It's their preferred substrate for their metabolism. And so you identify on the PET scan, where are the radioactive, and you say, that's the tumor, because that's where the glucose went. But they were finding these other spots, and they were symmetrical within the body. Cancer's not symmetrical. So the Swedish team was like, what do you think that is? Maybe it's brown fat. The PET uses a lot of electricity. And so they have to keep the instrument warm or the instrument room a little bit cool. And it was cold enough for some people to activate their brown fat, show up on the PET scan. They published a paper 2007. So this is all

very recent. And they said, hey, we think that there's some adults that have brown fat and it's showing up on our scan. That became the basis of Susanna Soberg's dissertation at the University of Copenhagen. She's just doing PET scans of winter swimmers. And she's like, yep, there's brown fat all over the place when people are getting cold. So somebody at the Sloan Kettering Cancer Institute, this is in New York they said we got 10,000 PET scans and we don't know what the Swedes are talking about so they went through and looked at every one of them five percent of the adults they scanned showed positive brown fat and that means 95 percent of people about 45 or older have no detectable brown fat in their bodies

at all this is why medical doctors thought human adults just don't have it. You can maintain brown fat long into adulthood. And if you've lost it, you can restore it. White fat cells were due. It's called Beijing. They will make new mitochondria. They will adapt to the new function that they haven't been asked to because you haven't been getting cold. You will lose all your brown fat if you don't get cold and it can be restored. You might say, well, what's the big deal? I don't need brown fat. I have heated leather seats, you know. But brown fat is not just for warmth. It's not just for thermogenesis. It's also an essential secretory organ. So it will produce neuroprotective factors. It will produce hormones. It will communicate with the thyroid to modulate your metabolism.

So if you lose all your brown fat, now you're looking for a thyroid disorder because the thyroid has nothing to work with it to modulate its function. It could be hyper, it could be hypo, but your thyroid typically becomes disordered if it's working without the brown fat to be in constant communication with. So there are several examples of women in particular who have been diagnosed with Hashimoto's thyroiditis. And where do they live? Well, they live in Arizona. You know, they live in Florida. They have no brown fat. How is this going to be reversed? Medical science has nothing for them but drugs to say, well, you're going to be on these prescription medications for the rest of your life. However, if you step outside medical science, you take this

sort of more biohacking approach and say, you know, how about maybe some sunlight? You go in and out of keto a little bit and you get some cold to reactivate your brown fat, to recruit new brown fat into your body, to give your thyroid something to modulate its function. And then you're off all your meds. Then your thyroid something to modulate its function and then you're off all your meds then your thyroid blood markers normalize then you you're still you can still create the thyroiditis it would be sort of an exaggeration to say you're cured even though there's no trace of thyroid dysfunction in your blood markers anymore because if you recreate the environmental conditions that led you to the Hashimoto's,

your Hashimoto's will come back. If you stay away from those environmental conditions, then it won't. The point here is that brown fat is an essential organ, not sort of a nice to have because, oh, it reminds you when you were young or something. It is associated with your metabolic function and the health of your brain. So when you get to Phoenix and you're there for maybe three years and you turn into a Phoenix wimp who's wearing a hoodie with a ski cap or something because it got down to 55 degrees, that tells you something. That's the time to put on a T-shirt and shorts and go for a walk outside. That's the time to get into your pool.

Every other house in Phoenix has a pool when the water is only 50 degrees. Give yourself a little shock response. And why does the body work like that? Because we are evolutionarily adapted to the cold. The human race, like as Homo sapiens, we are physiologically different from other animals with whom we share like 99% of our DNA. I'm kind of laughing when Andy's up there talking about genetic testing.

And he's like, look, first of all, the variances aren't that great. Second of all, they don't do that much. You know, third of all, what they do doesn't really show up. So, gosh, if I share 99% of my DNA with a bonobo, what the hell, you know, variances are we really looking for? But there are important physiological differences. Bonobos, chimpanzees, apes, they don't have subcutaneous fat. They're ripped. Whales have it.

Manatee have it. Dolphins have it. And so do human beings. Swales have it. Manatee have it. Dolphins have it. And so do human beings. Swimmers have it. Right. Swimmers have like a, when you look at their bodies, you would expect like a, I mean, they're not shredded. They're in the best shape, right? But they're not body bones.

There's definitely like a layer of fat that you can see that is different in their body type than many other. Well, what does that fat do? That keeps us warm in the cold water. We have nostrils that point down instead of out why is that so we can dive in without you know driving cold water up into our brains and here's the biggest one our infants are born with an instinct to swim you watch a giraffe it's got an instinct to you know to start galloping or something why do our babies have an instinct to swim instead of walk because we were born in the water and that water was cold there's something called the population bottleneck so i'm going to give you a specific example you go back like 70 000 years and the human race you know depending depending upon whatever your view of evolution is,

the human race has contracted and expanded in according to whatever our environmental conditions are that make the environment more conducive to more humans or less. And the Ice Age is one of the least hospitable environments for Homo sapiens. So 70,000 years ago, some volcano, it erupts. You get two straight years of winter. The glaciers grow. We are in the Ice Age. If your ancient ancestors were not cold adapted,

if they weren't able to go fishing in the water, wading in with like our upright bipedalism, you know, to catch the fish, then they're gone. And so we all are the product of people who were cold adapted. You can say, man, but that was a long time ago. You know, evolution does a thing. What if your ancestors are equatorial? Well, the oldest human fossils are found in East Africa.

There are four modern glaciers at the equator in East Africa. Where does Wim Hof take his trainees? Up Mount Kilimanjaro. Those waters, even in East Africa, were cold. You say, his trainees? Up Mount Kilimanjaro. Those waters, even in East Africa, were cold. You say, yeah, but it was a long time ago. You know, we all have different hair and we all have different skin colors and we all adapt to our environment. But we're not talking about the DNA in your nucleus. When it comes to cold, we're talking about the DNA in your mitochondria. And I never learned this, you know, in high school biology. When I learned about sexual reproduction and DNA, there's, you know, you get this from the father, you get this from the mother, and then they make a new helix.

And mitochondria have their own DNA. Those are not in the nucleus. And they do not, the mitochondrial DNA do not reproduce sexually. They are inherited exclusively from the mother, from the maternal line. Now there are some mutations and there are aberrations. So it's not a pure, it's not like copying a CD, you know, but the evolution of mitochondrial DNA is much, much slower than it is in the nucleus. So we can develop expressions of variations in our nucleic DNA that are obvious to all of us, but we have less variants. There's some variants, but less variants in the mitochondria.

We have essentially the same mitochondria that our great, great ancestral grandmothers who survived the ice age. Is it any wonder that we are evolutionarily expecting to be cold? That we need cold? Because that's what our ancestors were adapted for. Now you know I'm an engineer. I build machines. And so what I'm telling you now is sort of a nice compelling story that would explain why you live in southern Florida for too long and you develop that feeling of being cold at 65 degrees. It's a signal that there's something in your metabolism that is not flexible enough. That is, I'm not saying you're metabolically healthy.

I'm saying you've lost metabolic flexibility. You probably don't have the brown fat you need. He just called you soft. I know. I didn't say it. Wait till my turn on the mic. Oh man. Okay. So I am that avatar, right? I'm a female who's pretty lean. I've lived in warm environments pretty much my whole life. I was in Arizona for a while. I've been in Florida for

almost 20 years. I get cold so easily and I hate to be cold and I've also had that same experience as far as Like, you know starting off with just a cold shower. I hate it I feel like it created such like a like a negative reaction Like I just I hate it because it's like, you know, the cold water was kind of my face Then it goes my back all of a sudden, you know, it's just like it's just I felt like it caused more stress Whereas I have done ice baths plenty of times and I do feel like especially if you go up to the neck Systemically, it's just it's more even you know, like you adapt to it and I can kind of calm down from there, but I don't do it very regularly. So as far as the brown fat, you know,

you said someone like me or someone who hasn't, doesn't have a lot of cold exposure, you probably have lower levels of it. What is the ideal level? Is there a ratio, a percentage? And then is that affected by your body fat percentage as well? No, brown fat and white fat are different. When I say brown fat to a lot of women, they don't like the idea of recruiting fat. They're like, no, no, no, I have plenty, you know? But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about an internal organ, and it's mostly at the base of the neck, some around the heart, that brown fat is ideally situated so that when it is producing heat, it will warm the blood before the blood goes to the brain.

So we're not talking about the kind of fat below the skin called subcutaneous fat, of which I have plenty. We're talking about a fat that isn't going to show up when you're in your bathing suit or when you're looking in the mirror, and you don't have a lot of of it you need a little bit of brown fat to produce a lot of heat so keeping white and brown fat separate in your mind is important sometimes we say brown adipose tissue because that way we don't have to use the word fat right um but i avoid it the it's a euphemism because it's so much easier for people to understand what fat is is there a reliable and accurate way to measure brown fat to see what your baselines are and then to have cold exposure or or what have you and then see if you made a

measurable improvement there is and it's not worth it um it it reminds me of of Andy saying all of these, you know, at home consumer DNA tests are worthless, but people take them really seriously. Because if you show somebody a test and they say, this is you, some inner narcissistic, I'm not saying that it's unhealthy. I don't mean pathologically narcissistic, but some sort of self-concerned part of us little child is like it's me it's like i gotta you know when mom put my artwork up on my refrigerator i felt good when we get a test and we say this is your dna this is your blood marker this is your brown fat we we're our own favorite topic never mind that if you get a dna test from another company it's going to say a totally different thing like you never got two different reports from two different teachers on a report card. One says you're a model student and you're a pleasure to have in class. And the other one says you don't pay attention. You're incorrigible and you're constantly, you know, in trouble.

Same kid. Two different. I know, Anders. Two different perspectives. Story of my life. So, yeah, you can have your brown fat measured, but there's no point. To do it, you've got to get a PET scan to really see where it is and say, look, I'm increasing it. If you have cancer, yes, go get your PET scan. It's going to identify your tumors. It's going to differentiate them from your brown fat. And I have those scans of cancer patients in my phone. They will DM me and they'll say, look, my tumors have shrunk and my brown fat. And I have those scans of cancer patients in my phone. They will DM me and they'll

say, look, my tumors have shrunk and my brown fat is increasing. I'm making progress with my cold plunge therapy. If you're trying to monitor something active, a disease state, go get your PET scan. But Nicole, your best measure is what feels cold. We call it the thermal comfort line. In water, about 80 degrees is thermal neutrality. If it goes below 80 degrees, you're going to start to feel like the water's chilly, you know, and you probably have this experience either at the beach or somewhere else going, oh, that water's a little cold. Can we heat it up?

People heat their pools because they want to be comfortable, you know, during the winter, and they heat them to somewhere around the thermal neutral line. it up. People heat their pools because they want to be comfortable, you know, during the winter. And they heat them to somewhere around the thermal neutral line. However, as you recruit brown fat, the cold water doesn't bother you anymore. You get in and you're like, oh, it's 60, but I'm not even gasping. And you say, well, it's down to 50. And I feel like I can be in here all the time. I remember I went to San Diego. I'm going to the beach because we don't have those in Arizona. And I want to get in the ocean. going to the beach because we don't have those in Arizona. And I want to get in the ocean.

And there's one of those chalkboard warnings. And it says, you know, all the different ways you can die. The sharks are out today. The jellyfish are, you know, available. And the riptide is going to drown you. And it says, and the temperature of the water is 58 or whatever, you know, in December. And I'm disappointed because 58, I'm not even going to feel it. Then that's because my thermal comfort line is now so low.

My brown fat knows what to do. You know whether you have brown fat by whether you are comfortable at colder temperatures. From what you're telling me, you're not. Yeah, my tolerance is very low. There you go. That 58 is different, though, by the way, because you're moving. It's way colder out there. I don't know what it is about the movement side of that,

but it makes it significantly colder. Okay. I'm standing up for all the surfers out there that are wearing like four millimeter wetsuits and like peeing on themselves to stay warm there's something about it that is like significantly you can go in like the 40 degree ice bath

like be completely still and it's not too bad something about big body of water and a lot of moving around and you're like god it is absolutely frigid out here and there's no one has ever gotten into a morosco with ice up around their neck and said to me, you know, this is cold and everything, but if only the water were moving more, I think I'd probably get a bigger dose.

When you have ice melting on the skin of your shoulders, you're not thinking about movement. However, body surfing is one of my favorites so uh i have a friend who lives in monterey and every time i can go to the beach and start body surfing up there the movement will also generate heat um so yes you when you're in the bath and you're still you will develop a layer of warm water just millimeters thick around your skin if you stay perfectly still you can sort of warm up the water around you and take some of the edge off that's not how i do it but you have a point when the water is flowing there's no potential to to create that annulus of warm water around you yeah

yo can we circle back to uh talking about chlorine just for a second you're talking about inhaling chlorine or the... The vapor. The vapor. Yeah, the vapor from the shower. Hold your breath during the shower, Doug. I think you're going to be fine. Yes. That's my new method here.

Training for jiu-jitsu, not breathing for long periods of time. I can be more successful. But no, I wanted to bring up just like chlorine in swimming pools. If you have a swimming pool that has chlorine in it, and you're using it on a regular basis, you live in Arizona, people swim in their pools, presumably, often. What is the potential downside to being exposed to chlorine on a daily basis? Besides cancer? Yeah, besides cancer.

Besides something that's not a big deal. Besides burning off two layers of your epidermis? Besides smelling like crap for hours afterwards because the chlorine is in your body. And even after you've taken a shower, you still kind of feel like you smell that chlorine on you because it's still coming out of your skin. I'm sounding a bit too alarmist. Kids love the pool and they're going to play in there all day. And if you're saying to your kids, oh't jump in because they're there's chlorine chlorine is a hell of a lot better than beaver fever chlorine is a lot better than you know waterborne transmitted

diseases so chlorine is better than the alternative and i don't want it anywhere near me or my customers so we use ozone wait why is it as common as it is like if if chlorine's in so many swimming pools and it causes cancer like why are people just like openly letting their kids play in the pool and swimming in the pool themselves like it seems it seems very very common you know when we were at the red roof inn or something i never let my kids into the pool like there's some pools that the pool at home you could smell it walking up to it. Yeah, exactly. You can smell it in the hallway. It was like the swim schools where they have nothing but tiny kids that are basically everyone's using it as a bathroom and the place that they're learning how to swim. Swim diapers don't really do that much.

Right. The big chunks only from what I've found. My dad totally came to a swim lesson this past winter or whatever with my kids. He was like, you let them get in there? He's like, I'm not even in the pool. There's like a window and I can like smell how bad the chlorine is in there. He's like, do not put those kids in there right now. We paid for it.

Why do we use it though? And there's a good reason. Chlorine will stick around in the water. So when you add it at the water treatment plant you kill everything in the water and that's great but then you have to send it out through the pipes before it reaches your home it's called residual chlorine so the chlorine is added at the treatment plant but it maintains a chlorine concentration throughout the entire water distribution network to keep the pipes disinfected and the hydrants and the water tap. Ozone will only work at the water treatment plant.

It will not protect in the pipes or in the distribution network. And if it's in the pool, it will only work at the point of injection because ozone is so unstable that it has a very short half-life. It will degrade immediately, and you have no disinfection residual in the pool. It's only in the contact chamber where the ozone is injected when the water is warm. But when the water is cold, the ozone is more stable. It slows down the degradation of the ozone. So ozone is perfect for the ice bath because the colder temperatures will allow maintaining a higher ozone concentration for longer. We

circulate the water through our ice bath way more than the pool is circulating. So we're constantly injecting new ozone and we don't need chlorine. Everyone with warm water and every water distribution network needs the chlorine. So even if in Europe, ozone is used for drinking water treatment, much more in the United States, And they still add chlorine to protect the pipes after the water leaves the plant. So there's good reasons for chlorine, but that doesn't mean I have to have it. We dig into fluoride as well. Like the story says it's good for your teeth. Is that accurate?

But there's other downsides that are often unspoken? The idea that it's good for your teeth is only when you're raising your children like I was on Lucky Charms. Goldfish? Right. It's only good for your teeth because your ultra-processed food diet is so messed up when you're trying to sell kids more fruit roll-ups you've got to give them fluoride to prevent the cavities that are going to be the natural result of too many fast acting carbohydrates in their diet so for me you know it was lemon blend which is kind of a pittsburgh thing and it was all the inexpensive cereals because we grew up in the 70s my father was a university professor his pay increases did not keep up with inflation

it was my mother's job to find the cheapest foods that she could to feed the three kids and that was stuff like lucky charms that was stuff like king vitamin which this is the name of the cereal it would like tear the skin off the roof of your mouth it was so freaking crunchy and hard but when i was in nursery school i loved it and my mother told me it was good for me because they sprayed vitamins on it and she taught me to read the nutritious labels you know here's niacin and here's, vitamin, whatever that heck else is. And all my USDA requirements are being met. And she let me put a tablespoon of sugar on my cereal because we had sugar for some reason on the dining room table all the time.

You're dang right I had cavities when I was a kid. It wasn't until I got to grad school when I understood the physical chemistry of the tooth. When you put fluoride ions in contact with your tooth enamel, the fluoride ion is much more reactive than the typical hydroxide. So that's OH minus, whereas fluoride is F minus. And the F minus will substitute in your teeth for an OH. So it'll kick an OH out and we'll put the F in. The F, which has a very high charge density, will stay bound to everything else in your tooth enamel much more readily than the OH.

This makes your tooth enamel harder. It makes it resistant to the decay that will be promoted by phosphoric acid in your Coca-Cola, for example. So fluoridation will reduce dental cavities by making the teeth enamel harder. And the only reason you need harder teeth enamel is because of all the sugar and phosphoric acid that you're eating when you're a kid and your teeth are sort of soft. I would much rather, if I could do it over again with my own kids, get all of those ultra processed, high, fast acting carbohydrates out of their diet, away from their teeth,

than give them fluoridated water. Because the reaction in your tooth enamel is much better studied than what's the reaction in the rest of your body. What's the reaction in your brain? Guess what? Fluoride? You know, I was talking about our ancient grandmothers and they went down to the water to give birth and that water was cold because coming off the glaciers of the equator. They did not have fluoride in their water. We have no evolutionary experience with the levels of fluoride in our water and in our toothpaste. It says right on the toothpaste tube, do not swallow.

You know what? Why would they put that on a product that is supposed to be in your mouth? Because they know it's not good for you. It's an interesting thing because you're in the public health side of things. Every time I hear public and then whatever the public is supposed to listen to i'm like that's a very broad generalization that i'm likely not going to listen to or take that advice and would like to not fit into that category but that's also part of your job so how do you make a broad recommendation on like fluoride or even combating that you may not need that much?

Because then it's like, well, now we need to have an entirely new food pyramid or that plate that most people aren't following anyways. Like how do you go about attacking something like that when public health is the goal? I got a deep breath here, Anders, because part of the reason we're in this mental health crisis is because of our institutions of public health. The lies that we heard from the FDA, the lies that we heard from the CDC, the draconian, the lockdown policies, the social distancing, everything that was part of the response to COVID that has made us sicker and the mental health consequences of those terrible policies. So to say public health, it activates all of the bull crap that we've all lived through. It's probably a term that I shouldn't use anymore. There are two professions that have been, in my mind, wholly discredited.

The first one is the economists. Like whatever they did that got us into the 2008 Great Recession would probably make you think they should all be fired. And yet it's still like we still have schools of economic. Yeah, right. I mean, like's still, like, we still have schools that we cannot, right? Yeah, right? And we're like, hey, did anybody get this wrong? Like, is there anybody that maybe we shouldn't listen to anymore? And for me, it was The Economist.

Well, 2020, the country went on lockdown. And I lost a lot of friends. Because in my academic circles, you know, they all told me this is the big one. This is the pandemic that everybody's been talking about. And this is what's going to wipe people out. And I sort of like, I didn't want to buy into that, but I was scared in the moment. And my girlfriend at the time, AJK on Twitter, she said, nope, it's all bullshit.

The lockdowns are bullshit. The idea of this pandemic is bullshit. at the time ajk on twitter she said nope it's all bullshit the lockdowns are bullshit the the idea this pandemic is bullshit she wasn't denying the presence of a virus or the people uh you know they can get sick but she goes lockdowns are bullshit and covid's been community spread the whole time and i'm like no way you know i got this person and been cited 13 000 times and these friends and they tell me this and she goes no it's all bullshit i go why she says because i've looked at the data what data are you looking at? And she goes, go on the CDC website and look at the influenza-like illness reports.

So we did. There's like 110,000 reported every week in November of 2019. And she goes, what do you think that is? I go, oh, I think that's flu. That's what influenza like. She goes, okay, now let's subtract all of those reports that tested positive for flu. We're only going to look at the reports that test negative for all nine known strains of flu, right? There's still 100,000. She goes, what do you think that is?

I go, that's COVID. COVID's been a community spread, you know, for at least six months before the lockdowns. So I lost a lot of friends and I made some new ones. One of them is Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford University. He was the first one to publish original data that backed up AJ's article. She wrote this article called The Curve is Already Flat. And it went viral. She was the second person ever censored for anti-lockdown views because they pulled that down off of Facebook.

They pulled it down off of Medium. And Jay and Amanda found one another because Jay was the first person to have his own data to say, yes, we've sampled the blood samples that are stored from the fall of 2019 in Santa Clara County. And we found the antibodies to the virus. And COVID's been in community spread for at least six months. So they connected. And now we're getting along great. And we're making new friends. President Trump called Jay Bhattacharya and asked him to come to the White House.

And Jay and Scott Atlas and some other people I know, regardless of your political views, they have a rule. If the president of the United States calls you and says, your country needs your help, you answer the goddamn phone. So he goes to the White House and he's sitting there with Trump to hear Jay tell this story. And Trump says, I only have one question for you, Dr. Bhattacharya. Did I save millions of lives when I locked the country down? And Jay said, no, sir, you did not. And he's never heard from Trump again because Jay is a scholar of public health.

I'm an engineer who builds machines and treatment equipment and things like that. But Jay has a medical degree and an economics degree. And considering those are the two professions that have been through the worst fricking failures of our lifetime, Jay's kind of been through some demoralizing moments. No one wants to hear him talk. Right.

That's in charge. You would think. But Jay is also the minority voice. Trump never called him again, but DeSantis sure did. And DeSantis says, what should we be doing in Florida? And Jay's like, masks are bogus and lockdowns don't work. And here's what really does work. We should try focused protection of the people who are most vulnerable.

We can identify those people. We can try and ride out because there is a virus and it's spreading, but we can try and keep those people in situations where they get the care and attention that they need, et cetera, et cetera. He's a voice of reason. The residue of those lockdowns have harmed our children, harmed people who are not vulnerable to COVID, harmed our society and caused, at least in part, this mental health crisis. But the fact is that life expectancy in the United States peaked in 2014. So that's five years before COVID came here. What the hell is going on in public health? It isn't working. And if you even expand that out

to like the decline in birth rates, it's really weird. Yeah. I don't know how those two are related, but there's something about the public health, um, kind of like, uh, whatever the motivations are behind that, that are leading us not just to an unhealthier society, but a, a very unfit, like evolutionary on evolutionarily unfit society. They're related like this. It is the metabolism. Um, for example, let's say you're 39 and you're 40 years old. And this happens a lot in academia where a woman will postpone starting a family because she'll be said oh you got to finish your graduate degree you know first finish your phd or first finish your medical degree then you can get married and have a family

so she does she waits and then she gets up as well you got to finish your residency you got to finish your rotation you got to get wait until you get tenure because you really need to focus on your career next thing you know she's 34 years old and she's like, okay, I'm ready to have a family. And you know, I want to have maybe two kids, which is a totally normal, you know, ambition. And so she goes to her OBGYN and she, for the first time is going to hear the word geriatric. And she's going to say, what do you mean geriatric? Like the AARP isn't even mailing me anything yet. I'm not geriatric. And they're like, no, no, your pregnancy would be considered geriatric.

What the hell are you talking about? The state of metabolic health in this country is so degraded that at a first approximation, 90% of American adults have some sort of metabolic disorder. And it shows up in men first as erectile dysfunction. Because your endothelial cells rely on mitochondria to produce the nitric oxide that will cause vasodilation and maintain an erection. And medical doctors didn't think it was this way. The endothelia don't have a lot of mitochondria. So most people thought, oh, the mitochondria are not a big deal for endothelial function. But they are.

There's a new paper that came out. It was just a couple of years ago. Let's see. It is the mitochondria that produce the energy necessary for vasodilation. So in men, metabolic disorder shows up as erectile dysfunction. But in women, I mean, conception and pregnancy is the most metabolically demanding thing that a woman could ever do. The only reason 35 is considered a high-risk pregnancy is because of metabolic dysfunction. If the metabolism is fixed, then the risk goes away.

And women can maintain high levels of fertility if they maintain high levels of metabolic health, like 39, 40, there are women who have DM'd me and said, you didn't tell me that ice baths were going to give me a surprise. And I'm like, did you not read my article? Did I forget to send that to you? Because your fertility, both in men and women, by the way, but this is particularly true of women, will boost when your metabolism boosts. And so women who thought they could no longer conceive or been told by their medical doctors that this isn't realistic for you will restore their mitochondria, restore their

metabolic function, and restore their fertility. So what's happening in the United States with the declining birth rate? You can look at cultural factors. You can look at economic factors. And those all are the case. But none of those are a comfort to a couple that is childless involuntarily. They might say, no, no, no, this isn't a cultural issue. We want to have kids. No, no, this isn't a financial issue. You know, we've planned for this. We have an extra bedroom. You know, we're ready to paint it. Just tell us what do we have to do to conceive the decline in metabolic health explains the gap between the babies people want to have and the tens of thousands of dollars that they're investing to try and conceive and the birth rate that we've actually got yeah the uh the male side

of it too i wish i had numbers off the top of my head but i feel like the i hear more that the um almost like the mechanics of the sperm like round head versus being able to actually penetrate the egg um that it a lot of times the infertility actually shows up on the male side of things much more than it does on the female i know that the age of the female makes a big difference but almost from like being a kid going through puberty and then getting into an age where you would be wanting to have a child and something along those puberty years, those adolescent years, something goes wrong and the sperms just don't develop properly. And that, I have no idea what that could even be traced back to, but it falls into that something's off. You are correct. It didn't used to be a problem in men, and it is now.

Yeah. One of the markers of sexual health in a man is testosterone levels. And 20-year-olds in the United States, 20-year-old young men, they now have the testosterone levels that were typical of men in their 50s if you just go back 20 years, I mean, this is kind of convoluted the way I'm saying it. Testosterone levels have been on the decline in the United States for decades to the point where young men who used to have high and how it would be considered healthy levels of testosterone now have low T such that we've had to renormalize what we consider normal. We've had to bring the normal bands down. But I'm sick of normal. I don't want to be normal. I'd rather be abnormal and healthy than normal and sick. So how is this happening? Testosterone is metabolically

expensive to produce. Not as expensive as breast milk or as just dating a child, you know. But it's expensive. So if your metabolism isn't right, you can be working out, which is good for testosterone. You can be exercising and you say, well, I'm taking care of myself. But one of the ways that a man's body will cut back to conserve energy is reduce testosterone production. That's metabolically expensive. We're working on some other things here. So we're going to cut back on that one. And there's, although that's an indicator of sexual health, it's not the same as sperm quantity and sperm quality. You can also measure reductions in sperm quantity and quality because you're exposed to too

much plastic. You're exposed to environmental toxins. Or, to put it indelicately, your nuts are too warm. That is, you're holding them too close to your body. They never have a chance to cool off, which promotes sperm production. Or maybe you're getting hot, like using the sauna, which is good metabolically, but will reduce sperm counts and will reduce sperm quality. But you're never getting cold so there's a lot of room for improvement in with men with men's sexual

health when it comes to ice baths in my case i was in my early 50s and i'd lost a lot of weight because i'm separating from my wife and i'm worried about dating again and i'm thinking jeez i really need to take care of my health. So I got the whole blood panel done and my PSA. So this is prostate-specific antigen. It comes back too high. This is a very frightening thing, because if you go online to read about prostate-specific antigen,

the Cleveland Clinic and WebMD and Mayo, they're all going to convince you that you're going to die of prostate cancer because I've had this experience. It's not true by the way, you know, it's, it's a marker, it's an elevated risk, but it doesn't mean you have prostate cancer. And so I started talking to other guys and, uh, I had it in my head that my choices were death by prostate or a lifetime of erectile dysfunction, because that's what happens after you have your prostate taken out. And I'm like, well, screw that. I'm going to die of prostate cancer then. Because at that point, I'm like, what woman is ever going to love me? You know, if I can't get a heart on,

I've got to do something else. And what I did was a ketogenic diet and ice baths, which brought my PSA from seven down to like 0.8 or something. And I was very satisfied with it. I'm still doing the whole male health panel. So along the way, my testosterone levels jumped up to 1180. I finally went to my urologist. I gave him my labs. He said, no way. Because he's about my age, you know, mid-50s.

And he said, I want to do one more test. And I didn't know what it was. It was luteinizing hormone. Luteinizing hormone signals the testes to produce testosterone. If he'd said, okay, Seeger, you know, you're at 1180 nanograms per deciliter on testosterone, but your luteinizing hormone is low, then he knows that I'm juicing. And he would have been like, you got to get off the sauce, you know? My luteinizing hormone came back way off the charts. Like, then he didn't want to talk to me again. He't want to say you know what are you doing i should treat my other patients like this because he can't change the way he treats patients he just for his own curiosity

wanted to know so i had to go look this up if you do cold stimulation after exercise like everybody says you should do to recover from the exercise, it will reduce your testosterone and luteinizing hormone. But if you change it up, if you do the cold first and then you do the exercise, men get a big testosterone and luteinizing hormone boost. I wasn't doing cold because I wanted to lose weight and I wasn't doing it because I wanted to be ripped and I wasn't doing it because I had sore knees. I was doing it because I was scared I was going to die of prostate inflammation. After I got out of the cold, I would do, you know, pull-ups or push-ups or jumping jacks and I would go on a walk, like whatever it was just to help me rewarm. I was

doing it in exactly the right way to boost testosterone. So I'm like, oh, I got to tell the world about this. I got to write an article, you article you know i'm gonna put it up on moroscoforge.com and nobody read it because it turns out that google doesn't want to hear from me you know if you could google this like you would never get to our website until joe rogan who has a morosco found that article and read it out to David Goggins on a podcast in December 2022. And he put like my face up there and he's telling the story. And Joe started pre-cooling his workouts because I wrote this article about testosterone. Now everybody reads it and guys are DMing me from all over the world saying I was in the 400s. I'm up to 900 now because I'm using your protocol.

How do I go higher? And I am not a testosterone expert. I've read a lot of articles, and I've gathered a lot of stories. Turns out when you fix your metabolism and you do it in the right way, you can get your test. There's no reason that testosterone has to decline with age in the way your medical doctor is telling you that it's supposed to decline. You should keep it up there and have the sort of same T levels as an

over-sexed 19-year-old. It's awesome. Tell me about the path to build the cold tubs. The path to build the cold, I don't know, because Nicole was checking her watch. She's hungry. path to build the coal tubs is like this um i teach engineering i have a former student he says have you ever done ice baths never heard of it i'm doing these cold showers we tried the ice bath it was wonderful i'm like okay we want to do more of this but we live in phoenix we had to buy you know 150 pounds of ice every time we want to have an ice bath we're doing this once a week and um maybe we have a little too much pride but we were like we're engineers we ought to be able to do how hard could it be you know so we took

apart some refrigerators and we worked something up with a compressor and some heating coils and so we made ice and so we made the world's first ice bath that actually makes ice you know and it was the ugliest thing Anders I think you can still see it on Instagram but we had a little party and we had some people that were like look look at what we made you know and one guy goes could I buy it and we're like i guess now by this time i'd spent like 25 000 on my credit cards you know to buy parts and tubs and insulation and things like that because why because i was too cheap to spend 15 bucks you know every sunday on ice down at the quickie mart or something like this so this is not an economically viable way to do this. But we were having a lot of fun. So we said, sure.

We sold the first Morosco ice bath for something like $2,000, and we lost a lot of money selling it because we had no idea what we were doing for business. But after he bought one, and we saw how enthusiastic people were, I'm like, well, we could probably sell two of these a week. We could have a little side business in the backyard here. This is great. I put it up on Etsy.

Ben Greenfield found it. Ben Greenfield was in the middle of writing this book called Boundless. And if you haven't bought this book to use as a doorstop or something around your house, then I highly recommend it because it's like a 75-pound book.

And it's an encyclopedia of biohacking. And on one of those pages, you can read about Morosco Forge It's like a 75-pound book, and it's an encyclopedia of biohacking. And on one of those pages, you can read about Morosco Forge because nobody was doing it at the time, and Ben really prides himself on bringing the new, new thing to his audience. So he said, I've only seen two ice baths. Rick Rubin has one, and it's really cool. And by the way, there's this other one called Morosco. And then people started calling, and they were like, all right, I want to buy.

We put up a little website, and we were way too early this is 2019 it was before joe posted vim hoff was really big but it was before people said i really need i want to do this every day i need to have this in my house and then um covet happened and you know peloton blew up and zoom blew up and all these businesses blew up. People were spending money on home fitness and we didn't really know what to do. We bought a warehouse and we tried to become a real company, so to speak, and they locked me out of my classroom. We went to exclusively Zoom, which is really no way to teach and along the way i started posting dumb shit on twitter stuff like um you know if covid were a real disease would they have to fake all the death

certificates you know just stuff like this because i'm being kind of a smartass which got me in a lot of trouble you're bored you were at home you're bored i was resentful yeah you know i didn't like what was happening on the university. I thought we were letting our students down. It wasn't what I signed up for. And I took some of that resentment out online. But also, I felt like somebody had to respond to all that bull crap that was not science. I didn't realize how far the censorship had gone.

And sure enough, they came after me. So my attorney called me one morning and she said, Tom, you should know that we have an adversarial relationship with your employer. And if you want to sue that, we're able to represent you. I'm like, what are you talking about? She goes, oh, well, I have a rule. Whenever I hear a hit job on NPR on one of my clients, I always call the client. Has NPR done a hit job on me? Like the national one?

Like the big, yeah. They're coming for you. San Francisco Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, all of these media outlets. Because, you know, they all republish the same crap from one another. They're all calling me like the world's most notorious covid denying professor and they're calling for me to be canceled and this is one of the meetings that i had to have you know with my dean and my director but i'm not backing down anything that i put on twitter because i was in twitter jail for a little bit but it wasn't even that radical you know

and that's when i said i'm changing my whole career like I'm doubling down on the ice baths I want to empower people to take charge of their own health you cannot trust the FDA or the CDC or any of the institutions of public health you have to be willing to do this yourself but I was doubling down on the science of it I left it to Jason and his wife adrian to run the company in 2023 i don't know if you noticed but everybody wanted to be in the ice bath business everybody's in the cold plunger business you can buy some really inexpensive toys from china if you want to we're the one of the most expensive now yours is like a like a piece of furniture looks nice yeah exactly right um and you know maybe over time the cost will come down but um it was more expensive both we're hopefully we come out with a model that is more

affordable and we come out with models that are even better um but it really took a toll on jason and adrian became super competitive we had different visions of what we wanted to do. So most of 2023, I was working on my book, and they were working on the business. Then in October, they said they wanted to move on to other things. And so I bought them out. I borrowed a bunch of money. Now the CEO at Morosco, again, the book is published,

so I'm doing a lot less of the science, which I really miss. And I want to get the company back to the point where it's pretty much running itself. And I can keep, I can do a second edition of the book. I can keep putting out articles. I can keep like doing the talks, talking about metabolic health and the role that ice bath has. And brown fat is an essential secretory organ and all those things. It's awesome. Where can people learn more and find the tubs?

You can go to moroscoforge.com. That's moroscoforge? How do you spell that? M-O-R-O-Z-K-O-F-O-R-G-E. But it doesn't matter because, I mean, Google ignored us for years, but now we are the number one search result for four different misspellings of Morosco. There you go. Because, you know, they found us. They probably need

us more than we need them. Because when people are looking for something, Google does want them to find it unless Google is labeled as misinformation. And so far, we're not totally in the Google jailhouse. Nicole Race, where can the people find you?

Oh man, so popular. It's going to be huge. Yeah. Instagram, Nicole underscore race underscore. There you go. You bet. Doug Larson. Doug Larson.

Doug Larson. Appreciate you being here. This is like just the nudge that I needed to do some more cold plunging and ice bath in my life. Let's get you in. Yeah. 100%. Something about the sauna is so easy. All he had to do was say the word erectile dysfunction and i'm scared to death

to not do cold plunges for the rest of my life i will do any training program you want as long as erectile dysfunction does not hit me you have my attention we just put a post up uh i have an article on erectile dysfunction and the post went up and uh it only got like 40 likes, let's say. And AJ, she runs our media. And she goes, Tom, did you think that your 80% male audience was going to put a little heart on your post on electoral dysfunction? She goes, let's look at your analytics. She goes, it's been shared 278 times. It's got 40 likes. I think maybe some guys are reading.

If I had seen your like on there, I'd have been like, Doug Larson likes this. I'd be like, really, dude? What are you doing? What are you doing over here, bud? I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner, and we are BarbellStrugged at Barbell underscore Strugged. And make sure you get over to RapidHealthReport.com. That is where Dr. Andy Galpin is doing a free video on the three steps that we use for you

to unlock your true physiological potential, basically how we make the best in the world better. And you can access that video over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.