Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #438 Exploring Metabolic Health & Cold Therapy w/ Dr. Thomas Seager

Episode Date: December 28, 2025

In this podcast, Kyle welcomes Dr. Thomas Seager, a professor at Arizona State University and founder of Oz Co Forge. Dr. Seager elaborates on the benefits of pre-cooling before workouts with ice baths. Key concepts discussed include the decline in testosterone levels, mitochondrial health, and the role of biomolecules in testosterone synthesis. The conversation also explores the role of light and its impact on health, particularly through the mechanism of bio photons and the benefits of light exposure. The discussion highlights innovative ways to maintain metabolic health naturally, D¡r. Seager's personal experiences, and alternative therapies like green light for pain relief. They also touch on societal attitudes towards steroids, personal health experiments, and the importance of rest and balanced workouts. The podcast underscores the significance of cold exposure, light management, and personalized health optimization strategies.   Thomas Seager is the co-founder and CEO of Morozko Forge, a cold plunge company he launched in 2018, and an associate professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University. A PhD researcher and author, Thomas bridges science, entrepreneurship, and human resilience through his work on cold exposure and performance.   FULL TEMPLE RESET registration is now open. Check it out here: https://kingsbu.com/fulltemplereset The Community is coming! Click here to learn more   Connect with Dr. Thomas here: Instagram: @seagertp Website: Morozko Forge Green Light   Our Sponsors: Let’s level up your nicotine routine with Lucy. Go to Lucy.co/KKP and use promo code (KKP) to get 20% off your first order. Lucy offers FREE SHIPPING and has a 30-day refund policy if you change your mind. Go to tonum.com/KKP, use the code KKP, and get 10% off your first order of Nouro. Discover the future of fitness and wellness with B3 Sciences, the leader in Blood Flow Restriction (BFR) training. They are amazing, I highly recommend incorporating them into your movement practice.   Connect with Kyle: I'm back on Instagram, come say hey @kylekingsbu Twitter: @kingsbu Our Farm Initiative: @gardenersofeden.earth Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Kyle-Kingsbury Kyle's Website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe & leave a 5-star review with your thoughts!  

Welcome to today's podcast. We have Dr. Thomas Seeger on. Go Arizona State Sun Devils. Dr. Thomas Seger is a professor at ASU. He also runs a company called Maroseco Forge. Many of you have heard of them. He is a writer there and a PhD and just a phenomenal guy. You know, I heard him on Danny Jones podcast and then had heard he was on my buddy Mark Bell's podcast.

So I hit up Mark. Please intro us. He did. And we had a fantastic podcast. of many. I really enjoyed his take on COVID and the world at large and just a whole bunch of cool things. But in this, we really get into the science of pre-cooling. What does it do to the body to jump in an ice bath before you train? Not after. And there's a lot of cool news when it comes to that. I truly feel like this in conjunction with things like blood flow restriction is going

to change how we look at sports and how we naturally can put ourselves in the best position to be superhuman. All right, without further ado, my brother, Dr. Thomas Seeger. Dr. Thomas Seeger, welcome to the podcast. It's a pleasure to be here, Kyle. This is a cool one. I heard you on Danny Jones podcast. I actually had a few friends send me that podcast.

And that's been the case. You know, I've had a few friends send me, I think, the Kevin McCarronin episode on Danny Jones. And, of course, Jack Cruz, who's been on this podcast as well as Dr. Alexis Jasmine Cowan. who I'm a huge fan of. So I love listening to your podcast on Danny's because of the fact that I feel like you articulated a lot of what Jack has rabbit hold, minus the curmudgeon, you know, just

feisty. And I love conspiracies too. Like I'm in conspiracy theories and all that. But it's like, I think he, he's a little bit scrooge-like, you know, in the way he delivers shit. I don't think that resonates with people. But I was like, man, Thomas Seeger's on it on the. he's on it when it comes to circadian biology and and what happens as we move away from

you know from the equator i love i'm going to dive into all that stuff but i just want to say i love your approach to it hearing that you're a you're a professor of arizona state that's where i played football so i got a lot of love for the sun devils and um it's cool you know and then finally hearing that you're on mark bell's podcast it's like oh mark's a buddy let me reach out to him and see if they can connect us so i feel i'm super thrilled to have you today the best thing about Jack Cruz is that he makes me look like the nice guy. You know, instead of me being the asshole, you know, he looks like the abrasive one. But honestly, I've learned a lot from trying to figure out what he's saying. And it's not easy. He's done so much homework. And I'm beginning to appreciate

how difficult it is to empathize with an audience that hasn't done half the reading, that hasn't made half the connections. I only understand about 30% of what Jack Cruz says. And I always start from the assumption that he's right and I just haven't figured it out yet. Then I got to do all my own reading and see whether I can interpret it. You know I'm a college professor. And so one of my things is trying to teach. Ever since the COVID lockdowns locked me out of my classroom, I've been teaching over Zoom. So sometimes I'll go on a rant. Kyle, it might sound like a lecture, but there'll be no quiz. I like it.

I like it. We had Dr. Ted Ocicoso on the podcast. It was a 90-minute lecture, and I was so pleased. He was so sorry at the end of it, and I was like, all I said, the entire podcast was, uh-huh, wow, for 90 minutes. And he just dropped 90 minutes straight of knowledge. So, you know, face-to-face, we can have a good back and forth, but anytime you want to get long-winded, please do.

I'd love to learn about your background, like what? got you into your field of knowledge, your studies, like what attracted you as a child into learning and everything they're into now, becoming a professor. And then again, you know, what a lot of people in that position, and maybe this is more geared towards, I mean, you see in many fields, whether it's Weston Medicine teaching the like, where some people get stuck in the groove of, I know what I know, and I don't need to expand upon it. Right. And so they kind of lose that thirst or desire to continue to learn, to continue to grab new ideas and shift with the world. And so it always stands out to me when I

see a professor or if I see an MD who has for sure continued to grasp new concepts and is still digging, you know, diving deep into the rabbit holes the way that I am. So a lot of respect for that and your position in life. But I'd love to hear, you know, what made you you? I'm glad you asked because my father was a professor, University of Pittsburgh. He was a professor of education. So I had a number of public school teachers, Pittsburgh public schools, who knew my father because he was their graduate advisor. Maybe it was a principal or a superintendent or something like that. The schools I went to were terrible. It was an awful 1970s forced busing, desegregation, inner city, violent school system.

But my parents believed in it because they were woke before woke was even a thing. met at Harvard in grad school. They were on the leading edge of all the nutrition lies. My mother was a flackjacket feminist. And you might remember, I don't know how old you were, but this was like the heyday of the Equal Rights Amendment. She was advocating for a constitutional amendment that prohibited discrimination on the basis of gender. And in the abstract, there's nothing wrong with that, but the ERA failed to receive ratification by two-thirds of the states. And I think my mom was a little bitter about it. She took a job in Harrisburg working for Governor Dick Thornberg. So he was elected, he was a Republican elected as a governor of Pennsylvania, and she became

the director of the Pennsylvania Commission for Women reporting to him. It was a real, sort of, you know, feminist advocacy. Kyle, it has taken me decades to recover from the lies I was raised in. People talk about, you know, the Matrix movie. You've got the blue pill and the red pill. And the red pill is a metaphor that is often used in intersexual relationships. So these are dating relationships or marriage and encourages men to see things the way they are. rather than the way we fantasize they should be. All that's fine. But my childhood was in this super liberal bubble.

Despite the fact that my parents were Republicans, they were advocates for the environment. They were advocates for women's rights, for gay rights. And in the 70s, that all seemed sort of like context appropriate. By the time I grew up, it took me a long time to figure out margarine is not good for you this is part of the blue pill lies that came out of harbour was somehow you know these artificial machine oils that are partially hydrogenated are supposed to be healthier than the foods that our grandparents grew up eating it doesn't make any sense and it turns out it was all predicated on a bunch of sugar industry funded lies but my parents didn't know They weren't around for the age of the internet. They believed the things that the institutions of higher education were telling them.

And my red pill awakening, so to speak, has been a long, slow process of painful lies that I've had to confront. It wasn't, man, if I was happy in my blue pill existence, I guess I would have stayed there. It wasn't my choice. The first one was my son's diagnosis with type 1 diabetes. I had just finished my own doctorate, and I took my time. I left school, went back, left school, went back. So I was 35 years old by the time I was done. He was six.

And so we did what we were supposed to do. We met with the endocrinologist. We met with the nutritionist. I kept scrupulous records, everything that he ate, all the insulin that I had injected into him, all of his exercise. And I couldn't figure out why the nutritionist, the endocrinologist, and the American Diabetes Association were telling me things that didn't work. What really stood out was protein cannot increase his blood glucose.

But then here I have the journals. He would eat like a cheeseburger with no bun, super minimal carbohydrates. And then two or three hours later, he would get a blood glucose spike. And I'd have to adjust his insulin. accordingly. Am I to meet with the dietitian or whoever it is? And they say, oh, no, that's not possible. So I had to go to the library and learn about gluconeogenesis. Your body will take amino acids and create glucose. If there's no carbohydrates in your diet, that's okay. Your body knows how to make glucose. And it makes it primarily from amino acids. The keto diet is not

the same as the carnivore diet. Carnivore diet might be high protein and you never get into keto. Keto is a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet with a modest amount of protein. Otherwise, gluconeogenesis will bump you out of keto. I had to figure this all out. And I started thinking, maybe the American Diabetes Association doesn't know a goddamn thing because it doesn't line up with what I'm learning from my son. The Domino's kept tumbling, but I was dedicated as an environmental engineer to teaching sustainability. It's the School of Sustainable Engineering in Arizona State. And so I was into lifecycle assessment and climate change and pollution and global trade and the environmental injustice and things like this. I'd moved after Katrina into what's called

resilience, disaster recovery. And I'd noticed that our vulnerability, it wasn't really from the infrastructure. And our capacity to adapt wasn't really in the concrete or the levees or the steel or whatever. It was in the human ingenuity. It was in the creative capacity of our organizations to respond to crises. Then we hit the biggest crisis of all. And that was the COVID lockdowns. It wasn't the virus. It was the response to the virus. And there's some people out there say, oh, there, you know, viruses aren't real. Look, people get sick. I don't care how they get sick. People were getting sick. And our government somehow decided to have the surgeon general do videos where you wrap a t-shirt around your face or put on a handkerchief or something and then

lock everybody, including my own students, into their dorm rooms, as if that was going to do anything to protect anybody. And we know now that it made it worse. That's where my whole career changed because I'd put together my son's experiences, my own experiences when I had a inflamed prostate. And what was happening at my university, and I said, I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm not going to be the classic civil engineer. Environmental engineering has always been about public health. And now here I am confronted with the most enormous public health crisis of my lifetime. I'm not getting all wrapped or up about climate change or a super fun sight or even Katrina anymore. I'm more worried about my students' mental health, about their

metabolic health now than I am about their capacity to do differential equations. So I teach engineering business practices. I teach my quantitative approaches to sustainability class. I teach my systems engineering class. The teaching hasn't changed. But the research is totally different. I don't do sponsored research from the NSF anymore. I just wrapped up my last office of Naval Research, Grant. Instead, I'm writing these books like uncommon cold and uncommon testosterone, so I can teach people how to stay metabolically healthy, regardless of who's in the White House. I don't care. Who's, you know, I do care. Who's running the Secretary of Health and Human Services is Kennedy. I care about the institutions like the NSF and the NIH, but I don't want those institutional leaders

to really govern your health. You need to be in charge of your own health. And to do that, you need to have the truth. You need the red pill of health so that you can do the things that are going to work instead of the things that the American Diabetes Association or the urologists that are afraid testosterone is going to somehow increase prostate cancer risk despite the fact that all the data shows the opposite. You need the truth about how to maintain your own metabolic help so you can avoid

heart disease instead of the bullshit like the cholesterol heart hypothesis, the crap about blood pressure standards and liquid panels and things that nobody in medicine was interested in until somebody invented and patented a drug to treat it. Now we have made up diseases that didn't exist when you and I were kids only because there's a royalty stream available in whatever patented treatment there is for those things. That's my rant. I'll let you get a word in. I love that.

Yeah, in many ways, that was kind of my onboarding for red pills happened through food as well, just due to the fact that, you know, I thought, even in college, I was trying to get as big as I could at Arizona State. So, you know, I'm eating McDonald's three days a week. I'm having crispy cream donuts and slamming a dozen donuts down with a pint of heavy cream.

I had, no, I mean, I knew it wasn't good for me. to what extent I had no idea, but it was just gained weight at all costs. And then as I got into mixed martial arts, my strength coach turned me on to a guy named Paul Check, and I read how to eat, move, and be healthy and actually shifted to an organic diet, found out, you know, my metabolic typing is a bit more polar. So things like the ketogenic diet, high fat eye protein really worked well for me. When I retired from fighting, I had heard Dr. Peter Tia and Domin Diagostino on Tim Ferriss's podcast.

So I was like, let me give this keto diet a try, was on and off that for a couple of years. And that with plant medicines and fasting really fixed my brain from a long career in football and a long career in fighting. And, you know, those pivotal moments shifted my whole thought process around food. And what is that, how does that change my outlook? Because, you know, we know now we've learned about the microbiome. We've learned about the gut brain axis. We've learned about your epigenetic on-off switches that are actually in charge of more than whatever your genetic coding is, right? So you understand these things, then you're like, oh, the steering wheel's

been on my hands the whole time. And if I understand where I'm going and some of the ways in which I can pull in these levers, I can shift my entire operating system with how it works with the world, right? From a emotional standpoint, from a neurochemical standpoint and beyond. And so, you know, those are really, you know, my, my big drop into human performance came through food and it came through understanding metabolic flexibility. Obviously, you know, everybody in their mom's written stuff. I'm sure you're buddies with Callie Means, you know, he's been on the podcast and I root for their book's

success. I can't say we're buddies. Yeah. I think he's a good guy. I think he's a good guy. I found it hilarious that Jack Cruz was, you know, pulling shots on him because I was like, I don't think this dude's the problem. I really don't. Even if his father had a connection to the Rockefeller's, I don't think he's the

problem. Callie Means is not the enemy. Like, I'm agreeing with you on that. And Jack Cruz makes a good point. Let's get the food dies out of the lucky charms. Do you know you're still eating a marshmallow, though, right? Like, who the hell gives a crap? How they made it the color that it is. It's still a garbage marshmallow. Now, I'm not really criticizing Callie means for wanting to get the food dies out, for wanting to fix the food. When Jack says, he's all about the light right now, and he says, it's not about the food. I think Jack is exaggerating. He probably even knows he's

exaggerating. He's trying to get people to pay attention to this thing that is way overlooked. But of course, food matters. Where Cali really failed was he couldn't admit that the vaccine is poison. Like, I think that people would have forgiven him on the Danny Jones podcast if he said, Jack, you're right. All the data agrees with you. I know what you want me to do. I do not have the power to do this. I'm like an advisor to a guy who was appointed by a politician. This isn't the way the institutions in Washington work. We're going to work like this, and it's going to be in an incremental way that tries to bring the mainstream American politic towards our view gradually, so that even though there are still going to be some people who get vaccinated of their own accord, and I think that's

foolish, we will eventually come out the other side of this with the political support that we need to do the things that have to be done. Now, Jack might say, I disagree. I'm not happy with that. You know, I'm not willing to compromise in that respect. And he's sort of entitled. He voted. He moved to El Salvador for goodness sakes. And Callie could chat. Callie could come back and say, well, you know what, Jack, if you care that much about it, move back. Come help us convince these people. And I think people would have said, wow, Callie Means has really got, you know, a lot of integrity. He missed an opportunity to say those things. And at that time, I kind of get it.

After Trump was elected, and it was clear that he wanted to make certain appointments, nobody knew whether they had the votes in the Senate or what kind of compromises were going to have to be made so that people like Macri and Kennedy and Batachara could be confirmed. I think what we've seen is a gradual shift, and I'm not a political scientist, but we've seen a gradual shift of the people in the mainstream to the agenda of truth. The more Kennedy gets out there and tells the truth to people, the more people who might have been on the fence say, you know, he doesn't sound like a lunatic. He doesn't sound dangerous to me. He sounds like He's making a lot of sense.

And then Aaron Siri, who was fired as a special advisor to the White House on the same day that Trump invited Larry Ellison and Bill Gates to come visit him at the White House. And Ellison gave this ridiculous press conference about how he was going to invest, you know, $500 million in MRNA vaccines to cure cancer. And Siri gets sent packing. He's like, OK, I'll write a book. And it'll be called Vaccines Amen. And now he's sort of on every podcast. He's saying this is what's wrong with the understanding of vaccines. This is the science that's never been done. And people are going, Aaron Siri doesn't sound crazy to me. He sounds like he knows what he's talking about. So I think since that podcast in which Jack Cruz made some really good points, there has been a political movement that has allowed more admission, more aggressive policies.

There's always going to be idiots on Twitter trying to spread lies and propaganda about whatever it is. They find themselves in, you know, the replies on my Instagram telling me how full of crap I am. There are medical doctors who will come out of the weeds and say, you cannot raise your testosterone levels to 1180 nanograms per deciliter without TRT. And I say, well, okay, we're just going to tear up my labs then because this is exactly where you're going to. has happened to me. And I'm not some, you know, washboard abs working out. I'm a fat sedentary college professor. Don't tell me that what worked for me never happened because there's no double blind placebo control trial in, you know, your pharmaceutical funded continuing education course that tells you that this happened to me. I think there's been a change in how we approach health

and that more and more people, many of them my customers are saying, I'm going to figure this out myself. I don't trust anybody else. Who knows whether Peter Atia in his APOB lipid panel thing really makes any sense. And I don't know if I take David Sinclair supplements if I'm going to live to 120. Let me try some any one experiments on me. And do I feel great? Do I feel like I have more energy? Do I feel like I have mental clarity? Do I feel like I jump out of bed in the morning every day like a kid waiting to open Christmas presents? Because I want to live like that. And if you are, keep doing what you're doing. Yeah, well, I am. All right, guys, quick break to tell you about what I've been up to. This year has been a year

of transition for me with a fit for service making huge changes. I've been working to create my own community. I still don't have a name for it yet. That is in the works. I'm brewing on it. But one of the things that I have come to understand is what this community is about. And so I want to give you a little hint here and let you guys drop in. I'd love to get your feedback. And there's a link at the top of the page here if you guys are interested at all. All right. So join in a transformative journey with our exclusive community where a like-minded individuals come together to explore the realms of body, mind, and connection. For $150 a month, you'll gain access to a treasure trove of wisdom from hundreds of podcast guests, a lifetime of learning and human

optimization, and the teachings of legends like Paul Check, James Clear, and so many others. Reconnect with your inner compass and discover the freedom, health, and sovereignty that await. Embrace the journey to excellence because we are what we repeatedly do. If that interests you, peep the link in the show notes for the community, and we will get you guys locked in. All right, back to the podcast. In the last three weeks since listening that Danny Jones podcast, I made a point to jump into pre-cooling here. So this is a great way to segue into pre-cooling. We'll talk about, say about that. And then I want to circle back to light circadian biology and all the other fun stuff, which I think are cornerstone pieces.

You know, we've kind of covered food. Metabolic flexibility in a nutshell is the ability to burn fat for fuel as well as carbohydrate. It's not just being a carburner, which in turn lower systemic inflammation, which in turn, you know, is indicative of a drop in all-cause mortality. So it's good, right? We want these things for ourselves. There's easy ways to get into that through ketogenic diets, fasting mimicking diets, different fasting protocols. I've talked about that, you know, to great length here.

And I think that's a cornerstone piece, right? And I would say to Jack Cruz, you know, who must know. He wrote a book, we're using an epipelio diet as the recommended diet, which was a ketogenic diet. So he can't say he doesn't know this already. It's a wonderful hook. But I want to dive into light and we'll dive into other things. But let's talk testosterone. The importance of testosterone, I think, now, and this is like, look, I've been on TRT

since I was young. I started to experiment with steroids with the goal of playing college football and the goal to play in the NFL. Didn't quite make it to the NFL. But I've relied on TRT in large part because my balls just don't make testosterone anymore, even with the help of HCG and in Cholmophene and other things, not to the degree that I like. but when I first heard you talking about how this affects testosterone and natural athletes,

I want my kids to stay natural for all the reasons that I made a mistake with. I want, you know, and I want people to be able to have a positive effect if they're taking TRT, because a lot of people taking TRT aren't lifting weights appropriately. They're not eating correctly. You know, they get a boost in energy. They gain a little muscle. They think, cool, now I'll go have a 12-pack on the weekend. And that's not the lifestyle changes I'm hoping for people, you know, no matter what their decision is,

and tinkering with their own, you know, hormone levels and things of that nature. So I'd love to dive in. When I heard this first, I was like, this is fucking red. Let me run the experiment. And so for the last three weeks, anytime I've gone for a run, anytime I've lifted weights, anytime I've had a kickboxing workout. I've got my own little dojo here. I pre-cold.

It's not super cold. It's 44 degrees. I just keep it there so the wife and kids enjoy getting in. But I'll do two or three minutes. I'll hit my warm up and then I'll jump into it. And I've noticed several changes. Number one, my appetites increased. I can sleep like a freaking baby now.

Yes. Right? And in addition to that, you know, my metabolism, I'm going to eat more. I'm not gaining a lot of weight. I'm just eating more. My pumps are through the roof. When I'm training right now, I feel like if I'm weightlifting, like, wow, I've got great, great shifts, you know, from the vaso constriction of the cold to the vasodilation and working out or sauna. And most importantly of all, though, my mental.

game has shifted in a way where I feel like I'm switched on in a way that I hadn't necessarily felt before just from the cold, right? I mean, the cold does a lot for neurochemistry. It does a lot for systemic inflammation and all that. But kind of the issue I was hitting was I would train four or five days a week and then I'd want to wait at least four to five hours after the training due to the cold bath. And I might have to get an early, early dinner in to take my son to football practice and I might just miss it on that day. And so I was really only getting two guaranteed days a week, which were my days off, where I could do the cult therapy for any significant amount of time. And while that's effective, it's not the same as getting it five or

six days a week, you know, by adding it before my workout. So dive into this concept because I think it's really cool. And especially when you factor in, we've, decade by decade, you can track men's testosterone dropping precipitously in the ages that shouldn't be dropping. Decad by decade, we've seen sperm, sperm counts drop precipitously. And, you know, I don't know if you're familiar with the Clive Owen movie. I think it was no country for men. It's set in the future. No, not that one.

All right, no country for men. I'll let me pull it up here because it's, it's worth finding out. I don't know. Fuck this stuff. Because that Cohen brothers stuff scares the hell out of me. It's basically a movie where in the future they can't have kids. Right. And so, yeah, so that's a dystopian sort of science fiction. Children of men. Children of men. There we are. Children of men. But it's a very, it's a very real dystopian picture, right? So break this down for us. There are so many things that you brought up. So I tried to take some notes. Let's see if we can take them in reverse order. Testosterone levels have been declining for decades. And there's a lot of ways to drown.

You know, a 20-year-old today has the testosterone level that a 70-year-old had, you know, back in the day. And I don't know if those equivalencies are really the right way to look at it, but there are many more young men suffering from erectile dysfunction, as an example. Dr. Abraham Morgan-Towler talks about administering testosterone as a therapy for erectile dysfunction. We know that total testosterone levels are, because testosterone is the libido hormone, the lust hormone, they are associated with a lack of desire, and in men, especially a lack of sexual performance. So what's the deal? What's going on? People want to blame porn. Oh, it's the internet. People want to blame the great feminization. You know, it's the Me Too movement. These are important cultural factors, and they are not the cause of low testosterone among young men.

The cause is mitochondrial injury. All sex hormones are synthesized from pregenitalone. Pregnenolone is a sex steroid that originates in the mitochondria. So you've got to get cholesterol out of the bloodstream into the cell, into the mitochondria, where on the inner membrane, it meets an enzyme that converts it into preternia. Then all the other sex steroids or hormones are formed from pregnant alone, whether they're, you know, the characteristically male or the characteristically female. If your mitochondria, and in particular, the membranes aren't functioning well. You don't have enough of them or they're dysfunctional.

You suffer from metabolic dysfunction because your mitochondria aren't right. Then you're not making testosterone because your mitochondria are busy keeping you alive. So now what I'm arguing is that young men, are suffering from a greater rate of mitochondrial injury or mitochondrial dysfunction than ever. Why is that? There are four reasons. I'm going to call these the pathways to mitochondrial injury. The first one, seed oils.

When seed oils are too much of your diet, and I just try and eliminate them, and I can never get rid of them altogether, but I'm a seed oil minimizer. The omega-6 fatty acids in the seed oil, they have a double bond in a different place than the omega-3. Mostly, if those seed oils are metabolized or energy, you know, because that's what the calories label means. This is how much energy is in this food. And it's not a big deal. You can metabolize them. But they are incorporated into your body as material.

Seed oils give you omega-6 fatty acids that become phospholipids in your cell membranes and your mitochondrial. membranes. If you get enough omega-3, you make good membranes. If you get too much omega-6, relative to omega-3, the membranes are made from the wrong fats, and they don't work as well. So now, you're not getting that cholesterol through those membranes to the point where the Pregnolone is synthesized. Number one, too many seed oils in your diet. Number two, poor light hygiene. So what do I mean? There's too much brightness at night. Your nights aren't dark enough. And it's okay if your days are bright. I'm not blue blocking in the middle of the day.

For the sake, there's a blue sky. I live in Phoenix, Arizona, and it's fine. But a lot of people in Phoenix aren't getting enough infrared because it's so damn hot outside. You know, we live in our air-conditioned cubicle life behind our triple glazed reflective windows or whatever. A lot of people don't even go outside in Arizona in the summer. They wind up vitamin D deficient. and they wind up infrared deficient.

The mitochondria need a steady diet of infrared light. You get that from heat and from sunshine. You get that. It's the very first light that appears in the morning at dawn, and it's the last light to disappear at sunset. When your light environment isn't right, your mitochondria get messed up. Environmental toxins can do it as well.

And so a lot of talk about the aluminum in the vaccine, aluminum is everywhere in the earth's crust, but aluminum is like the third most abundant element in the earth's crust, but it's always bound up in silicates. The aluminum in dirt in clay isn't bioavailable. You could eat that clay and never absorb the aluminum. It's when you put the aluminum in, for example, the aluminum sulfate that's used in drinking water. It is the ionic aluminum that is not bound up with silicates and in oxides, that when it enters our bloodstream, it becomes a neurotoxin. The same thing is true of mercury. There are forms of mercury that are toxic to your brain and toxic to your mitochondria. So environmental toxins, a third route to mitochondrial injury. The last one, for whatever reason, it's escaping me and I've written about it, but it'll come to me in a minute. As these things intrude upon our young people, They age more quickly than they ever have. If you have a clean sort of seed oil-free existence and you've got a good, light environment, you're getting enough sleep because testosterone is made when you're sleeping.

And you're living in an environment that's primarily free, or at least you have a respite from the non-native EMFs, from the electromagnetic pollution. You can take a lot of abuse during the day. You can stand next to your 5G Wi-Fi router like I am right now. As long as you've got a refuge that allowed your mitochondria to recover at night, you're going to be fine. And that helps me remember the last route to mitochondrial injury. Excess carbohydrates. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with carbohydrates. We are sort of programmed biologically to eat them, but they don't exist in nature without being part of a plant.

So, you know, we extract the sugar from the sugar cane. If you are chewing on the sugar cane, you'd be doing a lot of work. It would taste sweet. You would get the sugar. It would be fine. But when we have the machines do the work of the chewing and the dissolving and the digesting for us and it arrives to us as ultra-processed food, now, look, I love a great croissant. But if that's all I eat without ever taking a break from the carbs, without cycling into keto,

my mitochondria will never recover from the carb load. You got people who think that it's like cruel if their kids go more than two hours without having a snack. Snacks were invented by Frito Le and Procter & Gamble and the processed food companies. There was no such thing as a snack until we had to be taught that somehow we require them. No, you don't. You don't have to be constantly eating. This is where intermittent fasting or intermittent keto allows your mitochondria the chance to recover from the carbohydrate load that you put on them. So there's the four roots. And what's happening with our young men and women, most women don't realize that testosterone is the dominant sex hormone in women as well. Just because they have like one tenth that testosterone are men, doesn't mean it's

irrelevant. They have more testosterone than they do estradiol. And it's for good reasons. both men and women suffer from imbalances, low levels of testosterone in their sex hormones because they suffer from mitochondrial injury. Guys today, they're eating the ultra-processed foods, constant carbohydrate snacking. Too many sea oils in their diet. Their light environment is entirely screwed up, which messes up with their sleep. And of course, we are surrounded by environmental toxins, whether that's the perfluorides or the brominated flame retardants or the microplastics or

whatever it is in our environment that is creating mitochondrial injury. So erectile dysfunction, the first clinical marker of mitochondrial dysfunction. And this is not something that a lot of doctors are telling the young men. They'll give you a pill and the Viagra will overcome whatever the mitochondrial resistance is, temporarily, allow your mitochondria to produce the nitric oxide necessary for basodilation so the blood can flow to the penis. Then four hours later, you're done. A much better remedy is any therapy that targets the mitochondria. So what are those? Get your red light fixed. Get your good sleep for going to sakes and sleep in an environment that is low EMF. Don't sleep next to your Wi-Fi router or

underneath the cell phone tower, please, if you can avoid it. Try to get these heavy metals and these other environmental toxins out of your environment. And again, your body can take a lot of abuse as long as it has a period to recover. Go into keto in and out so that you're, it's okay to spike the carbohydrates every once in a while. Give your mitochondria a break so they can recover. Just like if you're in the weight room doing legs one day, the next day, Don't do legs again. Give your muscles a chance to come back. Your mitochondria are the same way. Men who do this will watch their testosterone climb. Now, that's wonderful. But I'm 59 years old, and I'm, you know, I can go clean, but how would I possibly overcome the sort of the natural,

what my endocrinologist would say, the natural degradation of testosterone levels over time? And what I've realized is that's bullshit. There is no real. reason that a man's total testosterone levels have to go down over time. What I'm doing is cold plunge therapy. I get into my ice bath. It's, you know, right over my shoulder. It's on my balcony here in my apartment building. I get in there. I do three minutes every morning, 34 degrees. I keep it very cold and very short. What that does is recruit brown fat into my body. There are two essentially types of fat. White fat is for energy. storage. Brown fat is for energy burning. Brown fat is what keeps you warm in the cold. And it is

the mitochondria that it packed into the brown fat that make them brown. It is the mitochondria that generate that heat. So you get into the cold, you're recruiting brown fat, you're stimulating what's called mitobiogenesis. Those mitochondria don't just stay in your brown fat. It turns out that mitochondria will move throughout the body. And there was one paper, Martin Picard from Columbia University put me on to this. He cited a friend of his who wrote this paper that showed mitochondria will leave the fat cell and enter damaged muscle cells in the heart and fix the metabolism of those muscle cells. The mitochondria moved throughout the body. And I'm like, that makes sense. You don't make a man doesn't make the majority of his testosterone in his fat cells. He makes it in his

gonads. And however, stimulating the mitochondria through cold exposure improves mitochondrial function throughout the body, not just in the brown fat. Women have it easier. The ovaries make testosterone, but only about 25%. The rest of the testosterone in a woman's body is made in the adrenal glands, the fat cells and the skin cells. Kyle, what is the best way to stimulate activity in the adrenals, the fat cells and the skin cells? Get yourself into the ice path. And this is why women get an immediate testosterone boost.

And when I say immediate, we're talking like two and a half minutes in there, and the testosterone is starting to rise up in their bloodstream. A man, he's typically got to exercise afterwards. He's got to do some rewarming. If he doesn't, he will suffer a temporary testosterone. testosterone and lutenizing hormone dip, but a little bit of exercising. It doesn't take a lot. A good rule of thumb is about three minutes of light exercise for every one minute you are in the ice mat. Now the man's testosterone is also elevated. You said you keep it at 44 degrees so you can, you know,

make it open to your wife and she won't be scared to do. Go in together, Kyle. And if your wife starts giving you like, if there's a little glint in her eye at about that two and a half minute mark, go with this you might not be feeling it but trust me give it give it a world because neurochemically a lot of things are going to happen in her body when she gets inside or gets into the ice bath with you it's testosterone it's norepinephrine it's vasopressin and oxytocin which are associated with love and bonding and romantic attachment one of the best things you can probably do for your relationship is see if you can go with in together They're holding hands, eye contact.

You can let me know in a private channel how it works out for you later. Hell yeah. Awesome. I'll try it. Good. There's more. I mentioned... Keep going. Keep going. All right, guys, quick break to tell you about one of our longest running show sponsors, lucy.com.

Let's level up your nicotine routine with Lucy. Go to lucy.com slash KKP and use promo code KKP to get 20% off your first order. Lucy offers free shipping and has a 30-day refund policy if you change your mind. That's lucy.com and use code KKP to get 20% off and always free shipping. And here comes the fine print. Lucy products are only for adults of legal age and every order is age verified. Warning, this product contains nicotine.

Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Nicotine is also an awesome chemical. It's one of my favorites. It's one of the best natures ever made. It turns the brain on. It allows you to access memories. Anything you want. Language.

Referencing from books. If you're podcasting, if you're presenting, that's a reason why a lot of performers, a lot of comedians, a lot of writers will work with nicotine while they're writing while they're on stage because of the fact that it helps draw, it's a muse that draws the brain into coherence so you can be the very best version of yourself. And it also feels good. That's probably why it's addictive. It feels good. It feels good to rock nicotine. I love the mint. I rock the 12 mic pouches, but start slow.

Work your way up. There's no reason to jump up. If you jump up to the big boys too quick, you can get it. nauseated. Just go low. Go light. Take more as needed. And it's about a 45-minute window of awesomeness. And there you go. Lucy.com slash KKP for 20% off. Let's go back to Mark Bell, who's wicked smart and hilarious. Like, it's no wonder he's making a living as a podcaster. When I was a younger man and, you know, I was a big baseball fan, and it was Sammy Sosa, and it was Mark McGuire, and it was big.

Barry bombs. Steroids had a bad name. Roger Clemens, he'll give a press conference and he'll say, there's absolutely no way I did steroids. And you're like, what are you crazy? Those guys couldn't admit it because culturally it was somehow, you know, considered cheating. Now we have people betting on baseball games. You know, there are, you can bet on a single pitch and whether it's going to be a baller striking their billboards in Phoenix, Arizona trying to get you to sign up for fan duels or draft kings. And there's like all these cheating is rampant in sports because of the infusion of gambling. And attitudes towards steroids have changed. Even if the rules haven't, the attitudes certainly have. I'm not saying that Barry Bonds, you know, forks up. There's

another sun devil. I'm not saying he's going to get voted into the Hall of Fame. But people... He should. He's the greatest offensive player of all time. Even before the Jews, but with the Jews, he was still the greatest player of all time. Exactly right. He was great when he was Arizona State. He was great when he was on the Pirates, and he took it to another level when he was with the Giants. And I'm also not recommending steroids. Like, you've got kids.

And the last thing you want is for them to get all jacked up when they're teenagers. However, we owe Mark Bell an apology and a debt of gratitude. because it is people like him experimenting with his own body, you know, injecting enough, the steroids that they wouldn't even give a racehorse, you know? And Mark Bell is like, bring it. I want to know what happens. He becomes his own n-equals one experiment. I think he's lost his mind.

He's on the sugar diet now, saying, well, I eat nothing but sugar. What happened to my body composition, you know? I think he's a nut. But he is out there on the edge, like finding out for the rest of us, who don't have to take those risks, what's safe, what works? And then he tells us, like, this is what happened to me. The whole movement towards TRT has been led by people who are in the bodybuilding community sharing information with one another, kind of underground, trying to say, what are the reliable

sources, what's clean, what formulations work, what are the right doses. This wasn't done at, you know, University of California, San Francisco or something like This wasn't done in a lab at ASU. This was done on Venice Beach. This was done by people like Mark Bell and his family. And now men all over the country are saying, I don't know, maybe I should try some TRT. And this is why. Testosterone, we think of it, has like fitness, muscle building, sexual performance.

All those things are right. Probably 80% of my Instagram audience are gym bros. And I'm like, I'm including you now, Kyle. in the whole gym bro, you know, demographics, right? I'm like, what the hell is this? I'm a college professor. I never played football, but they're there because some of the things that I'm writing about resonate with them. Here's what we don't talk enough about on Instagram.

These men who are sitting with T levels, total T, down in like the 200s and the 300s, they feel like shit. Testosterone is a mental health therapy. I don't care what your body composition is. I don't care whether you've got the washboard abs. There are guys out there who could be Instagram fitness models sitting at like 8% body fat, but their mitochondria aren't right and they feel like crap. They are depressed because testosterone is essential to that competitive drive, that motivation that makes you feel like you want to be alive.

I'm not a big fan of TRT, but if a guy's choices are TRT or swallowing a bullet, I want him on the TRT. Like, let's get him to a level where he feels like life is worth living. And cold plunge is wonderful for this. Cold plunge has resolved major depression in people who did not respond to talk therapy, did not respond to SSRIs or other drugs, just were stuck in a malaise. And then they start winter swimming or doing cold plunge, and it lifts them out of that mood. And that's what I want for these guys.

But you are in a slightly different situation. If you stay on TRT too long, your gonads will lose the ability to make their own. HCG is really good for preserving your sperm production function, but it's not going to protect your TRT production function. Your nads are like, hey, we're good, we got good levels, we're taking a break. They will atrophy. And nobody knows how long it takes for them to come back online. Is it years?

Is it months? Is it ever? And so one of the traps that the pharmaceutical industry has set out now for men is TRT. Like part of the reason it's more acceptable is because people like Mark Valle have shown the benefits and helped us suss out the safety and the dosages. And that's great. But the pharmaceutical industry has taken this opportunity and said, hey, let's get them on TRT. my son will be on insulin for the rest of his life because his pancreas will never make insulin. And I'm glad there's genetically modified organisms out there that will pump out human insulin for him.

There's no reason except in exceptionally rare cases. There's no reason for a man to be on TRT for the rest of his life except that that creates a dividend stream for the pharmaceutical shareholders. I got one guy. He's a firefighter in California. He's in a training accident, crushes a testicle. Of course, his TRT goes down. He's only got one nut left. He wasn't, he and TRT just didn't get along.

So he's riding out this low mood, poor physical function. He's feeling soft because he's not making enough testosterone. He started pre-cooling his workouts. He just sent me his labs. He's like 880. There's no doctor in the world who would criticize a man for being at 880. They would all say, oh, no, you're at the end. upper edge of normal. Now, he'd love to be better. But I think 880 with one nut is doing pretty

damn good because it's all just him. It's endogenous testosterone. Other men can do it too. They have to have enough faith isn't right word. Courage might be the right word to say, I don't want to be on TRT my whole life. And I never want to go back to the way I felt when I was depressed and I was sitting on the couch and they put me on TRT. What do I do? All right, we have a protocol. You can start the protocol of pre-cooling your workout. Doesn't have to be a heavy workout, just a light exercise while you're on TRT. There are two guys I know I have medically documented case reports where they went from high normal like 900s up to 1300 and 1400. The TRT and the pre-cooling stacked on top of one another. And when you get to that 13,

1400, 1400. That's when you can taper off your TRT. You're good. You've got plenty of excess. Just keep monitoring it and you'll be okay. So I think that was... Cool. Yeah, I love that. That spiked it. I was going to say that spiked a huge interest in me, you know, hearing you talk about that with Danny. Like if you're all natural, it's going to work. Male or female, young or old. And if you're on TRT, it's going to work. The only people that it won't work is if you're trying to jump off TRT and go the natural route, especially like in my circumstance five years straight you know and longer on and off uh since i was 17 i'm 43 now right so that's a long haul where i've relied on these substances and um you know there was periods of time

where i would cycle off uh after our second child i was like i think we're good we've got a boy and a girl i don't need to have more kids and the five years straight might have made it so that we can't have more kids you know i mean that that might just be it we i spend a month even had doubled the dose of what was prescribed of HCG and Clomophene. My total test was 346. My free test was 17. And I felt it. I fucking felt it.

And I weighed less than I did. I weighed less than I did when I started juice as a junior in high school. I weighed 205, 6% body fat, still felt good running around and stuff. But that drive you're speaking to was gone. I could get it up, but I had no desire if it happened great. But I like the appetite for it. You know, I want to have that appetite. I want to hound my wife and force myself to stay awake when I'm dead tired

after the kids go to bed because I have the appetite to chase after her and make that happen. You know, so much of, yeah, it is for sure. I mean, I don't know your wife, but if she's like a lot of women, she wants to be chased after, you know, by you. I'm sorry, I don't know. No doubt. No, that was just perfect. I just like framing those kind of those few things here. here's who it works for, natural, here's who it works for on TRT.

And then, but, you know, have caution and understanding. You're not just going to jump off of a test if you've been on it for a while and fix that. I'm glad that's what you got out of it. I'm always looking at things that can help. You know, like from, I'm into blood flow restriction. A lot of things like that that have come along, obviously 30 years of research out of Japan. So it's not new. But, you know, when you're speaking about Barry Bonds and all the baseball guys,

Victor Conti was a mentor of mine. Victor Conte recently passed away at 75 years old. He was the guy who started Balco, Barrio Laboratories Corporation. Marion Jones worked with him. The greatest athletes ever worked through this guy. And he went to jail when he got out. He said, I can't give you anything except my knowledge. And so he taught me everything I know on performance and dancing drugs

and I have a great deal of gratitude for him. Also taught me how to read my own blood work and make sure everything was looking good and clean. And so shout out to Victor. And, you know, to your point on the, on the baseball then, it was like, I remember Congress coming through and it was all about the kids. You know, I was like, all right. To an extent I can understand that having kids now, I understand a little bit more. You know, these are the heroes. Yeah, they're looking up to you kind of thing.

But if people had honest conversations, you'd know Roger Clemens went up to 250 pounds out of fucking nowhere. He's a pitcher. He's for sure on the gas, right? You got a guy who used to be bone skinny and he got tired of seeing all the white guys hitting 60 home runs and he said, fuck it, I'm going to do it too. And you couldn't pitch him up all without him hitting it out into McCubby Bay, right? Of course he's on the gas. And even like you look at the sport like tour to France, everyone with the Lance Armstrong, how could you? That whole fucking sport is on stuff.

They have to be. You can't do a tour to France without engineering your body to be able to recover. recover from that artificially there's no one that can run a tour to france all natural and survive what they do to themselves it's more than the body can handle right so you know i think there's some some things like that yeah i had liver king on the podcast and i thought it was funny because i thought liver king kind of got done wrong because of the fact that it's like duh look at this guy look at him he's of course he's on shit why is there even a debate you know like you should slap yourself have you thought this guy was getting jacked on liver?

Like you should, right? And I don't know him. My kid looked up to him and it's like, I get it. I see it from all sides in a sense. But to a certain extent, it's like, what did you people think? I'm not friends with him. We're not a colleague if we've ever had a conversation. But he could have said, look at me.

You know, I'm a circus freak. That's why you follow me. You want me like Jack Nicholson. You need me on that. whole wall. You can't handle the truth. He could have admitted it. And everybody would have forgiven him. They still follow him. He still has a career. What got me, Paul Saladino is a clever guy. He's one of the few people that has been willing to change his mind as he learns more. But because he was doing business with Liver King, and after Liver King got caught,

Saladino had to go on YouTube and go, I didn't know. I thought it was the liver supplements. You're an MD, right? You went to UVA medical school. Everybody knew. But it was Liver King. When he got caught, Joe Rogan had Derek more plates, more dates, got very knowledgeable, knows more than me about the action of testosterone in the body. And they started laughing at it and making fun of Liver King a little bit. And that's why Joe Rogan written my article. That's when Joe Rogan, who has a Morosco, got interested in pre-cooling. His next guest was David Gagins. And he goes, hey, David, I'm trying this new thing. I get up every morning and I go out into my Marasco and, you know, I do my ice bath three minutes and then I do my exercise. And Gagons was like a little incredulous. He's like, okay, how's that working for you? And Joe says, it's really hard, but it's working. I've been doing this for three days. And it's because I read about this guy, Professor Seeger, who's pre-cooling, Kyle, since then, I've been getting reports from all over the world, people saying, I read your article, I'm doing your

protocol, these are my labs, it is working for me too. And occasionally, I get lab reports from guys and they say, how come it's not working? They fall into two categories. For the guys, it's not working. Some of them are taking other meds that suppress testosterone. And I'm like, you know, it's not going to overcome this or it's not going to overcome that. And sometimes I'll ask them, well, you get enough magnesium or you're doing enough zinc and how's your sleep? Most of the guys you're writing to me, all the other stuff is on point. Maybe there's a little bit too much seed oils in the diet, but they're doing the right things. The second category of guy who's not getting the boost is the one who writes to me and says, I don't understand why my testosterone isn't good. I work out every day

for two hours. And I'm like, hang on. Would you take it in a double? A, day off, maybe, because they are working their body so hard. They've gone past the other end of the formetic stress curve. This is the upside down you. You don't do enough of something, and your health suffers. You do just the right amount. Your health is doing great. You do too much, and your health suffers. So your mitochondria that are fueling your workout. And if you are going hard for an hour and a half every day, your mitochondria, it's just like eating too many carbs. your mitochondria never have a chance to come back your muscles are always sore what do you think the testosterone levels are at the end of the tour de france it's terrible because the bodies are so

burnt out they don't have the mitochondria never have the recovery time that they need to do things like hey let's make some sex steroid they're so busy cranking out the ATP so that they can fuel your next workout so i've asked some of these guys would you can consider backing off. Part of the problem is, at least in America, if a little bit is good, then too much must be better. We have this sort of mentality that a little more and a little more is always going to be better. And you know it's not. Sometimes it only comes with maturity. When we're kids, we're always like, I can push it extra hard. And then we realize we don't need to do that. Like, would you do a big workout right before the Super Bowl? Of course you

wouldn't. You would go light because this is the most important, you know, event in your career. Last thing you want to do is wear yourself out the day before you're supposed to, I don't know, beat the Kansas City Cheaps or something like that. So too much is too much. Backing off can put you in that sweet testosterone spot for a guy my age with my goals probably an hour and a half exercise like two 45 minutes sessions is going to be fine for me to live a long healthy happy life i'll never look good on instagram you know i'm not going to be ben greenfield or something like that at the rate i'm going but i'm just trying to remember my books you know i'm just trying to write these articles it's okay for me yeah i think you know you bring it up david goggins is is part of

part of the problem you know it's good to be an inspiration of people but you know at the rate at which goggins trains and people try to emulate that is going too much it's going too much for him um say the same about jaco willing sleep habits that's too much it might be fine for him i don't think it is but it's too much for 99% of the rest of the humanity and so when you lead in that way you know that you're going to see people getting hurt and damaged from it um that's it he he had kirk partially come on his podcast no kirk's a friend and he's just on the podcast yeah he's great yeah right and kirk is great because uh kirk has all the sort of masculine competitive credibility that you could ever ask for and he's like hey how about you maybe get eight or nine

hours asleep. This is really how you're going to keep yourself in competitive shape is to rest. He's like, turn that dial down from 11, maybe keep it at 9 for a few days and see if you feel better and perform better. And people in Kirk's world, they do. Yeah. Yeah, Kirk was just on the podcast. He came out here.

He's actually living in your neck of the woods now, helping to build a state of the art center, which is really cool. And I'm hoping he'll move back out of Texas after. But a great, great guy and lots of info. I also have a, you know, coincidentally, Aaron series coming on the podcast here very shortly. So, so small world. I'm super stoked for that. Yeah, I'm going to get his book. You guys know I've tried just about everything when it comes to human optimization, from fasting and peptides to breathwork, but the biggest breakthroughs usually come from getting your baseline right. And that starts with your brain. I've been using a supplement called neuro by Tonum and has become part of my daily routine. It's a research-backed formula built on almost a decade

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and using code KKP for 10% off your first order. Let's dive into some of these other components here. You know, testosterone, especially for most of my audience, is 80% male. The 20% female, this matters for you too, right? Like the testosterone piece does matter. I remember there was a point where, you know, I think Arnold Schwarzenegger had gone vegan,

at least on camera. and James Cameron had made this post about we need to eradicate testosterone because it is a toxic substance, right? And Rob Wolf wrote, it was like the head lead comment, you realize this is the most abundant hormone in the female body as well, correct? You know, crickets, right? So I love, I love framing it that way. It does matter. It matters for both male and female. But let's talk about light.

Let's talk about what happens when we go to the cold. I love your teeter totter, if I can use that analogy. a long time, Cruz has been telling everybody, move closer to the equator. You need more UV light. But what happens to the people that go to these Nordic countries, as you move closer to the poles, cold can then be the thing that makes up for the fact that there's a lack of UV. So I'd love for you to break some of this stuff down and some basic light principles. I can never get enough of them. I think they're very important for people. And if I take anything from Jack Cruz, you know, body electric, John, health and light, the health and light piece has been

an absolute game changer, just understanding that book and beyond it. This is something that the sort of leading edge of people who listen to Jack and are thinking about light environment are just beginning to appreciate. This is biophotons. And part of the reason is that Suzanne Humphreys, you know, it was on Joe Rogan talking about her book, Dissolving Illusions. She put out a tweet and she, you know, quoted a study that says, bio photons have been found in every single living system, tested. Of course they have. Because the mitochondria perform what are called redox reactions. They take electrons off of one thing, which are metabolites. So this could be glucose, this could be fatty acids. They take electrons off of hydrocarbons and they donate those electrons to the oxygen and then you breathe it out of CO2 or as water. That's called a redox reaction where

the electrons are transferred. And the electrons cannot be transferred. without the emission of light. Inside your mitochondria, when they are active, they produce light. And that light is called biophotons. I don't know if you had this in like high school chemistry, but my chemistry instructor showed us this. He would take different metals and he would put him through the flame thing and they would glow different colors. You know, copper might be blue and sodium might be orange and magnesium is white or something. The light, that is produced by these metals when they are oxidized is due to the transfer of electrons and the movement of them from one shell to another. This is physics, not magic. The biophotons

produced by the mitochondria are in all different sorts of wavelengths. Some of those wavelengths are UVB. So this is say 300 nanometer light in the UVB part of the spectrum. When that UVB light, hits a cholesterol molecule. The cholesterol molecule has no choice but to convert into pre-vitamin D. There's a carbon-carbon bond and it opens up and now it's a different molecule. So, biophoton light inside the mitochondria, inside your brown fat, which is produced when you're cold, will create vitamin D. Now I put this out and, you know, a lot of people said that makes no sense because the blood serum levels of vitamin D don't go up as a result of cold exposure. And I had to write back to these people and say, but why would they? When the vitamin

D is made in your skin, it's not stored in your skin. It has to get to your fat cells. Vitamin D is lipophilic. That is, it's going to be stored in the fat. And so it has to circulate through the body. And the metabolism of vitamin D is very complex. There are a lot of different forms of it. And then eventually it's stored in the fat cells. Something like that all makes sense. But if the vitamin D is produced in a fat cell, what would it be doing in your bloodstream? It wouldn't. It's just going to stay there until your body needs it.

What happened, what changed was a study in Poland, they took two groups of women, and they administered cryotherapy. One group of women had multiple sclerosis, and the other, no multiple sclerosis. those in the multiple sclerosis group experienced an increase in blood serum levels of vitamin D as a consequence of the cryotherapy. Those without MS did not. Now, I postulate that I'm taking it as a given that both groups were producing biophotons and producing vitamin D, but why would it show up in the bloodstream of those with multiple sclerosis? Multiple sclerosis is an autoeliorosis, is an autoimmune disorder. Autoimmune disorders originate in deficits or abnormalities of vitamin D metabolism. There's something about that group of women with their multiple sclerosis that meant the

vitamin D was needed in the body right away. That's a hypothesis. You can't disagree with the data unless you believe they're just making this up. And they didn't say anything about bio photons anywhere in their paper. Cryotherapy increased the blood serum levels of vitamin D in these multiple sclerosis women. This makes cold therapy is already good for multiple sclerosis. It's the most effective way of managing the symptoms of multiple sclerosis. But now we have a new mechanism. The mechanism isn't just reducing inflammation.

The mechanism is also producing vitamin D inside the body in a way that a body with multiple sclerosis can use it right away. So this now is on like the leading edge of trying to understand the relationship between light and the health of the body. The revelation is, cold is light. Cold is inducing light inside your body. Cold is compensating for the lack of sunshine. Now, in Arizona, like, I can still get enough sunshine. I can still get just enough UVB, even now, even in December. If I go out in the middle of the day, because it's sunny, enough and I'm south enough. But shoot, I went to school up in northern New York. In Potsdam,

New York, that's like an hour north of Lake Placin. There's no sunshine up there. How do you think the Inuits survive? How do the Scandinavians aren't like drop in dead necessarily. For thousands of years, homo sapiens have lived at these extreme latitudes. And now we have a little bit of a clue. It's not because, you know, baby seal fat has so much vitamin D in. It's because they're making the vitamin D in their own bodies as a result of being exposed to the cold. So what do you suppose would happen if we took these, you know, Vikings and we kept them indoors all winter? They get sick. That's exactly what happens.

If you live up north, you need to get outdoors during the winter. It could be cross-country skiing. It could be outdoor sports. You know, these are wonderful. you. Maybe you should go chop wood or something for your wood stove because the wood stove is a wonderful source of, you know, infrared radiation too. But I don't care if you're making snowballs with your kids. You need to get outdoors. And it is okay if you just put on a t-shirt and shorts and go for a walk around the block. Feel a little bit of that chill. Your body is designed for that seasonality.

if you're not getting enough sunshine, the way to compensate for that is to get more cold into your life. There were two substack articles that went out today. One of them was Dr. Brian Grimm. I don't know if you follow him, but he put out, he was quoting the Polish study. He cited me, which was great. And he said, look, you know, cold will make vitamin D inside the body. And the other one is Zade, and I'm trying to remember his last name.

He put out a very similar one, saying, if you live in the dark, you've got to get the cold. And that truism is very satisfying to our intuitions. Of course, like, you think nature was going to screw this up? You think, like, our bodies just had this wrong all the time? No, there are, of course, there are compensatory mechanisms that our ancestors enjoy it. The problem is, now we have our heated leather seats and our SUVs, and we're never be uncomfortably cold ever. And we think that that's like somehow a good thing. That comfort is killing us and it's doing it slowly. If it was fast, we'd all know. We'd respond. But instead, you go to the doctor and says, well, you know, you're getting older and now we've got to put you

on a statin and we got to have you on something for your blood pressure. This is normal to be your age and be on five different prescription meds. No, it's not. My grandfather wasn't taking five. My nana didn't take five prescription meds in my age. She lived to be 99. She never ate a vegetable. Like, we need to get back what our ancestors considered hardships. We now think of as therapy.

We need to get back into incorporating some of what was part of their regular life into our life and do it intentionally because, frankly, our lives are too easy. you know 100% i'm thinking a life's too easy you'd mentioned um davidson clare you know it's it's comical uh just you know the who's it who's leading the longevity stuff and i don't mind guys that that you know want to take a look at that um scientifically and try to find the magic bullet like resveratrol and rats and you know intravenous injections whatever the thing is i i like it Maybe something useful will come with that. But when Sinclair told Rogan, he runs like once every two weeks.

And I literally, I was like, how are you talking longevity right now when you're missing every foundational pillar? Like we, it just, just to move, even if you don't work out, like to not move that often, right? To not pick up something moderately heavy that or to never do that, you know, and to not do anything that's somewhat high intensity. you know like some high intensity interval stuff every now and then doesn't have to be long duration but to miss all those from a movement standpoint to miss all the dietary pieces which are foundational principles lifestyle you know the epigenetic on-off switches and just to find the one magic thing it's like dude we're miss the mark completely here and uh you know anybody that says they work out once every two weeks i got to scratch my head unless you're killing yourself like uh dug mcuff body by science

You know, he does the ARX trainer once every seven to 14 days and just smashes his whole body. I think he's also on TRT. You know nothing wrong with that, but he's a, Tim Ferriss had him on. And there is some benefit in doing that. I enjoy movement. I enjoy moving. I enjoy the neurochemical shift. I don't like busting my ass anymore.

I did that long enough in football and fighting. But, you know, when I, when I jog in the morning, it's for my brain. It's for my outlook on life. And yes, it might be for longevity, but that's like five days a week. It's not once every two weeks, you know, and it's easy for me. It's not hard, but it's something that that brings me joy. Punch in the bag is something. I uniquely need to hit shit.

It's something that just scratches an inch I have to have. And I enjoy that. You know, it's for as much for my mental as it is for my physical. But, yeah, I like that 59 years old, two sessions of 45 minutes, you know, is kind of the minimum standard. I think that that totally works. I'm thinking of my dad right now. I was going to turn 75 this year.

And he still kind of has some of the old bodybuilding routine. You know, I'm like, get out of arm day, get out of leg day. You know, you push, pull legs. That's fine, but you don't need to crush it. I'm trying to get into more like body weight stuff that's integrative, that's going to help retrain the brain and open up the neuroplasticity through movement patterns the way jiu-jitsu does. You know, my dad, my dad was a black belt and jihitsu.

Hasn't been on the mats in a while, but I'm constantly thinking of things like that for them. this is such a cool piece on the cold and on the light because these are levers we can we can have full function you know cold baths do costs a lot but they are fucking worth every penny i've talked a lot of people say i don't have the time you know to sauna for an hour some days i don't have the time to sauna for an hour but every day i have time to get in the ice bath and if i'm not it's just me make an excuse you know so we're something that handles that many levers i think it's it is highly worth the investment especially considering you know the world we're living in right now.

Something to talk about there, too, Kyle. Everybody wants to know how do you take a cold shower? How do you take a cold bath? Or what's the right time and what's the right temperature and it drives me up the freaking wall? Nobody comes to you and says, hey, Kyle, you know, I want to start some weight training. What's the optimal weight? What's the perfect number of reps?

Because you're going to say, well, it depends on how strong you are. You know, like what's your state of weight conditioning right now? And then you're going to, like, give me a rule of thumb, and we're going to adapt from there. Cold is the same way. If you have read a paragraph from some Ph.D. who says, oh, the best, you know, temperature is 50 degrees. The right amount of time is 12 minutes or whatever. They're lying to you. They don't know because they don't know your body.

There might be some certainty in this. You're like, oh, now I know. I know the protocol. And it's bullshit. start off cold enough to gasp. If you feel the gas reflex, then you know you've activated your sympathetic nervous system. It's cold enough for you. Now, for me, that's 34 degrees. For Joe Rogan, same thing. He's in there every goddamn day. And if he's like me, 40 degrees is freaking boring. We're both looking for cold enough to scare the shit out of us, because that's part of the routine.

Before the ice bath machines were invented, people had to get a whole thing. People had to get a horse trough. They had to go to, you know, the Quickey Mart or whatever. They had to get 100 pounds of ice. And if you're in Phoenix, it melts in like 15 minutes because it's so damn hot. When someone went through all of that trouble, first of all, you couldn't get the water down below about 45 because that's just the system that you have. And you spent 45 minutes setting this up. You invited your buddies over. You're like, God damn it, I'm going to get my money out of this. I'm going to do, you know, 25 minutes in here because I've spent so much time. So there's one protocol that says you go 50 degrees for 25 or 30 minutes, and it's fine.

But now that you have a machine, there was no such thing as Moroscoe until 2018 when we invented it. There was no such thing as a machine that made its own ice. But that's what I wanted. Now I can go out here and I don't have to do anything but lift the lid. So I go 34 degrees. Wicked cold. I just do three minutes. If I want to do two of them in one day, I do two of them in one day. I don't have to haul anything or prepare anything. And it enables a different protocol. The different protocol is much colder and much shorter. Where some people can make a mistake is don't go 34 degrees for 20 minutes. Like Joe Rogan's done it. It was probably the most boring 20 minutes he's ever posted on Instagram. was him just shivering, you know, in his morocco with chunks of ice up to his neck. If you start shivering, you've done all the work you need to do. Like you've activated your brown frat, you're stressing your thermogenic systems,

you're getting that hormetic cold adaptation. You can get out. If you're not training to break Andre Bilobie's cold exposure record, if you're not Lewis Pugh saying, I'm going to go swim to Antarctica or something, you know, You don't have to be in there any longer. And after a couple of weeks, if you've been doing this every day when you've recruited your brown fat and you've got good vaso constriction going on, you don't even have to shiver. Just do your three minutes.

If you're at 40 degrees, make it four minutes. That's okay. There's a time temperature, just like there would be in weight training. And then call it good. You're going to feel the difference. Your skin will be cold. You will get that dopamine activation. And then you're going to do a little bit of light exercise.

And like you said, you're going to feel the, pump when you start whatever it is, whatever your training routine is. It was at ARX fitness because those machines are amazing that first put me on to this whole pre-cooling thing because I got a call from ARX in Austin. And they were saying, hey, our guys, they're all telling me they're getting 20, 25 percent more. Those ARX machines are so computerized. They're constant displacement. Mostly we're accustomed to constant resistance. So you have a constant amount of weight and it's you know it's up to you to move it but the constant displacement machine it has the the velocity of the plate that you're pushing against is always the same you provide

the force and through some kind of technology it matches your force and the computer will give you an integrated curve of the maximum and total power output and their curves were saying pre-cooling leads to a 20 to 25 percent boost in what the muscles can do. So I get this call, I'm like, I don't know. I had to go to the library and find Craig Heller's research from Stanford. He's extracting heat from his athletes in between their sets. And this is an exaggeration. But, you know, as a first approximation, there was no limit to what the professional athletes. These were 49ers football players. And they were doing hundreds of dips. As long as Heller could extract enough heat, there were like infinity reps, which no one had ever.

I got to play, I got to play with that technology. It was a, it was a glove. You could stick your hand in. I was, you know, I was born and raised in the bay. And I remember, buddy of mine, yeah, I was like, this is, this is really cool technology. At that point, they hadn't, they hadn't developed it yet. You know, they were just, they were just using it on the Stanford players. Then, of course, the 49ers got it first.

But yeah. It's hard because basal constriction will cut down the blood flow into your palm. You can only lose so much heat. And so their technology applies a vacuum to suck, to keep the blood, and extract more heat. There was a group in the United Kingdom, and they published a paper. They said, that palm cooling technology doesn't work. And I'm like, what the hell is this? And I'm going through their paper. And I'm looking at their data. And I'm going to, I can't contradict their results. I had to dig into their methods. They had no vacuum. Like, it didn't

work because basal constriction cut off the blood flow. If you don't have the vacuum that's in the coolment, the dang technology isn't going to work for you. So it was complicated. Now, it's also something you can use during a timeout or you can use it on the sidelines. Nobody but the freaking crazy Canadians are jumping into an ice bath, you know, between periods. The hockey players who have Morosco, they tell me, in particular, the goalies are nuts. Like, they'll go do their ice bath, but they grew up in, I don't know, Thunder Bay, Ontario or something, and they're playing, you know, the Stanley Cup in Florida. So I guess they understand cooling. But the football guys aren't going to strip down their pads and get into the ice bath during a timeout or during the

half time. They don't have time. Coolment fits right into your competition. But for training, the whole body ice bath is a great way to pre-cool your workout. You're going to set a personal best. It's not really a promise. I don't know what everybody's individual circumstances are. What my readers are telling me is like, I just spiked all my numbers. Like, I can't believe. that this is actually happening. This is physiological. It's not like some kind of placebo psychological trick. Your mitochondria are able to do more work when they're not subject to heat. Fatigue is a phenomenon programmed into your muscles to protect your mitochondria from long-term damage. When you extract the heat, you don't get fatigued. This is the kind of thing that people can play with at

home when they have their own machine. And you're damn right, they're expensive. Like, what do you want me to do? I don't drop ship from China. I don't have slaves in Shenzhen making this stuff. I've got Americans in Phoenix, Arizona, who are, you know, shaping wood and bending steel and putting copper in these things. And we warranty them against all manufacturing defects for longer than anybody else would. So Rogan had a little bit of a post on this. Maybe he was talking to Louis CK or something. What is it worth to you to reverse your type 2 diabetes? What is it worth to you to fix your testosterone levels without getting on pharmaceuticals? What is it worth to you to be able to play with your grandkids or to live an extra 8, 10 good years? That's worth a million

bucks, Marasco's only asking for 12 grand of it, you know? Like, people can afford a used car. They just don't have it in their head that they should get an ice bath instead of a used car. And that's beginning to change because there's more testimonials. There's more word of mouth. There's more like, I had no idea that a regular ice bath practice was going to be such a big, like, boost in my quality of life. But you go to Twitter, you can follow some of the guys you respect and they will tell you this 100% yeah i've been a fan for years i too was a guy that was loading up a horse truck on amazon delivered and i'd run down the street and grab a bunch of bags of ice and it was just a pain in the ass then i did a do do it yourself with a chest freezer and i

have to get like a redneck above ground pool pump to pump all the water out you know because there was no filters so after about a month when it started getting murky you know i'm i'm like a little like what what percentage of food grade hydrogen peroxide will this handle of my skin won't react to putting fucking borax in there you know all the things just to make it last longer but yeah having the ice bath it's such a it truly is a game changer we think of things that we can put towards our i don't have a fan of biohacking i'm not a fan of the the term i'm not a fan of looking for you know the the the quick fix bullet but when you think of like where you can invest in yourself from mentally physically emotionally like cool technology is for sure you know one of the it's in the top three. I couldn't order that, but I'd say, like, it for sure is. And I have things like a juke light. I get plenty of sun. I watch sunrise and sunset as often as I can. I lean into the seasons, you know, me and the team here at the farm will run midday in May in South Texas. Like, that's the way we lean in. Do you want heat shock proteins? We got sonnas, but like, let's just go for a run when it's midday. And, you know, that's a different feel. It's a different

feel. It's going to work. You can't go as fast, but we're for sure creating the heat shock proteins. So any of you, what, you know, I know I'm going to jam here in about nine minutes or eight minutes. Is there anything else you've written a book now? I'm curious to dive into it. But tell me, is there any other levers that we can pull that really move the bar for people when it comes to, you know, our general quality of life, right? Because you think metabolic flexibility, we can get into the science of that. And a lot of people get lost, but it's like, imagine having better energy. You know, that's the whole thing behind mitochondrial health.

Like people get, oh, it's the powerhouse of the cell. and the ATP and all this other stuff. It's like, yes. And if you want real energy that comes from clean fuel, not just from caffeine or modafinil or flipping switches like this, this is the key to that. So anything else you want to provide the listeners with that, that I think is something of real value. I'd love for you to cover that before we jump out. I've got more emails about that Danny Jones podcast from talking about the green light than I have about the ice baths. And, you know, we only talked about green light for like five minutes. Partly, that's because I'm I don't understand it. Discover this by accident. Some people get migraine headaches.

And this green light takes them away. I get notes from customers. They don't even believe it. Like nobody on social media believes that it works. But I got a note last week. She says, I've tried 1,300 different medications. She's exaggerating, right? Nothing works. She says, I spend 10 minutes with your green light and my headache is gone. So I don't know the mechanism. Jack says he knows hemoglobin absorbs green. That's why hemoglobin is red. And I'm not disputing that, but I think it is more complex than that.

I think there's something happening in the brain with the optic nerve. Nonetheless, green light is analgesic. It will take away pain. One woman I sold the green light to for headaches. She used it for menstrual cramps. She put the light on her abdomen. She said 20 minutes later, the cramps were gone. I don't know, Kyle. I'm not sure what's going on. But there's a story behind it that I told Danny. We are meant to be in the shady forest. I'm in Phoenix, Arizona. What am I going to do? Drive two hours up to Payson or something like that. I'm in the concrete jungle. A palm tree is not a shady forest. There is something about my body that is expecting green light exposure. And I know everybody is talking about red and near infrared. and what a miracle that is for your mitochondria.

I don't think green have anything to do with the mitochondria. Jack will correct me if I'm wrong. But green light through the eyes will relieve pain. And it's possible that green light shone topically, like this was menstrual cramps. I haven't tried it on joint pain or something else. Might relieve the pain in other parts of the body. So this is another one of those super leading edge things

that people are just starting to displace. because it's not in the mainstream. Now, they're good clinical trials, but the, you know, the Ben Greenfields and the Dave Aspreys, they're not talking about this stuff. It's only like super nutty, leading edge people who are able to say, hey, have you tried green light yet? Is that working for you yet? Mark Bell's got one and his producer, Andrew, has one because Andrew said he's been suffering from migraines since he was in middle school. He doesn't anymore because now he has green light. And I think it's because it simulates the effect of being in the shady forest. There's a lot of good science on forest bathing for health, promoting mood, promoting wound healing,

reducing the risk of cancer. I think there's something about the light environment of the forest that is healing. And you get one of these little lamps and it gives you some of that healing green light. Mostly it's women that suffer from migraines. And like we were saying, 80% of our audience is men. What's the male approach to a headache? Suck it up, Buttercup. You know, like that's not even worth complaining about, right? You're not in pain. But that's optional. The firefighters, they get headaches because they've been breathing smoke. And so the guy was telling you about with the testicle injury, he uses one of the, these two. When he's experienced oxygen deprivation and he's got a headache, he

recovers with his green light. Headache goes away and he can stay on service. There's something about the green that is calming that I'm still exploring. So that's the last thing I want to leave you with. That's fantastic. Well, where could people get a hold of you? Where can people get, obviously, link to Morosco Forge and some of your articles here. Where can people get a hold of Is the green light for sale publicly yet? It is. It's on mygreenlamp.com. All one word, spelled like it sounds.

Mygreenlamp.com. But after Danny Johns, I sold out. And so I'm not going to have more of them until January. You can buy one and I'll put you on the order list and I'll mail it out. There's a 90-day guarantee. It doesn't work for you. That's cool. Just mail it back.

And I'll send your money back. And I'm going to send it to somebody for whom it does work. because we don't know for sure. About 80% of the people who try it say, this is incredible. I don't even need meds anymore. But 20% of the people say, eh, didn't do a thing for me. You don't know until you try it. So mygreenlamp.com, moroscoforge.com, everything I've ever written about ice baths is available for free on Morosco. Joe Polish tells me I'm an idiot that, you know, I should collect email addresses and I should have sales funnels and things like that. But I didn't know. I'm just a scientist, and I put this crap out there where people can find it.

If you want it in book form, the uncommon testosterone is available on Amazon, but the uncommon cold, right now it's only available at moroscoforge.com. That's also where you can buy ice pads. If you want to read about what gets me in trouble with my dean at ASU, then you want to follow me on Twitter, where I am S-E-A-G-E-R-T-P. Instagram's more visual. Twitter. I got a big mouth and it gets me in trouble. And then I put other red pill stuff on SeegerTP. Substack. Like sometimes I get ideas and I have to write about it, whether that's

epigenetics or trauma or some of the kind of relationship thing. And I try and keep that away from the ice baths, but I don't know, people have a way of finding me wherever I am now. Cool. It's been a pleasure getting to know you. I'm so grateful for you coming on the podcast. And please, let's run this back face to face when you're here in office. We've got a lot of mutual friends. It'd be awesome to do this face-to-face, and I'll show you the farm and everything we're up to out here. That'd be fantastic. I'll go for a jog with you. Let's do it. Let's do it. I jog nice and slow. I'm more of a sprinter, but jogging. Jogging is for the mind. Beautiful, brother. Thank you so much, Thomas. Take care.

Thank you, Kyle.