Mark Bell's Power Project - Proving Cold Therapy Works & Proving "Experts" Wrong - Thomas Seager || MBPP Ep. 1074

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

In episode 1074, Thomas Seager, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about the benefits of ice baths and Thomas gives his rebuttal on recent push back on cold therapy. Follow Thomas on IG: https://www.instagram.com/seagertp/     Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below!   🍆  Natural Sexual Performance Booster 🍆 ➢https://usejoymode.com/discount/POWERPROJECT Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!   🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎 ➢https://emr-tek.com/ Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!   👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶 ➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject   🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save up to 25% off your Build a Box ➢ Piedmontese Beef: https://www.CPBeef.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150   🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!   Sleep Better and TAPE YOUR MOUTH (Comfortable Mouth Tape) 🤐 ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained:      ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ UNTAPPED Program - https://shor.by/untapped ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza & Get Podcast Guides, Courses and More ➢ https://pursuepodcasting.com/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

Is a cold plunge good for you? Medically, I'm never going to recommend to my patient ever in my life as a physician. He's a clinician and evidently there was never a class in medical school that said, this is when you prescribe ice bath. I have a PhD. I wrote a dissertation. I know how to create new knowledge. That's not what clinicians do.

Seems to be pretty powerful for mental illness. There's some well-documented case studies of people who did not respond to SSRIs and they did respond to cold water swimming. What about utilizing a cold plunge to get an edge in sports and athletics? It's not going to help your gains. It's not going to help you build muscle. Right when you get out of the cold plunge, it feels amazing. Just like how surviving a plane crash would. How did an ice bath get to be like a plane crash? Cold plunging is the most stressful thing you could do to yourself. Since when was stress bad? It's the most stressful thing you can do. Why is that a bad

thing? I'm freezing my ass off. Thanks for that. You still feel a little shiver, right? Oh yeah. Me too. Yeah, I definitely feel that. It'll take a minute. Yeah. I've, I've come here before. Um, you know, if some, a lot of times we, I'll do, I'll do the cold plunge beforehand. And, uh, I think in SEMA is the same way, Andrew's the same way. And sometimes we're all just kind of like, we're all like bundled up. It's like the middle of the summer. We're wearing sweatshirts and everything. But how long does that last for?

And have you personally noticed any, like, you've ever got yourself compromised by doing some of these cold plunges? Yeah. You can talk to Brecca and some other people and they'll say, you'll burn fat for hours. And it's true. Unless you go in the sauna or you do some kind of exogenous rewarming, your body is going to be compensating for all the heat that just got extracted. And it's going to take a while. Now I live in Phoenix. So I used to do my ice bath and then I do a little bit of a workout and then I would walk to campus, which is about a mile.

And it's 115 degrees Fahrenheit. I wouldn't even break a sweat. But then I'd get to class and I'd be rewarmed. So it depends on how much of that heat is coming back from the outside and how much does your body have to generate itself. But what people don't say is that at night, your metabolism will compensate.

Like you have been working your brown fat or maybe your muscles have been shivering and your metabolism is so revved up. Then when you go to sleep at night, your core body temperature will drop. And it could be like a degree and a half to grease. It's a significant drop in your sleeping temperature and a reduction in your metabolic rate.

That compensation allows you to rebuild the fat stores that you burned off during the day when you're doing the cold exposure. So when people start using ice bath for weight loss and they say, I lost six pounds right away. This is like the best thing ever. That's just all inflammation. After that, it's really hard to lose more weight putting yourself into ice water because it's not just calories burned during the two or three hours after your ice bath. Your body has its homeostatic mechanisms to try and defend the status quo. Ice baths are not effective for weight loss. They can help a little bit, but you're never

going to see a before after picture. And I'm like the example, right? Here's how fat he was. And now look, he's ripped. He's down to 8% body fat. All he did was, those pictures don't exist because they don't work. Ice baths don't work like that. It's more complex than some of the more popular videos are gonna make it seem. And your product, the Morosco,

is the first on the market to make ice. Like, so there's actual ice in there. I've heard Joe Rogan talk about the product before. How did you get that started? Because that seemed like a big undertaking to figure out how to make a cold tub. At first it was easy and then it got harder and harder. I mean, at first we were just taking apart like dorm refrigerators and seeing how, you know, what are the right parts that we need and stuff. And we built a coil and we attached to a compressor and we made ice and we had a party and we had our friends come over and there's like chunks of ice in this bath. And then one friend said, well, could I buy it?

And, you know, me and Jason, we looked at each other and we said, well, sure. I thought that we were going to do this little backyard business and we're going to sell maybe like one or two ice baths a week. And it was kind of going to be a side hustle and it would be a lot of fun. And next thing you know, you know, ice baths have exploded. You got Plunge going on a podcast and bragging about how they're doing $100 million in revenue. At Morosco, we're doing like six and it's by far more than I thought we would ever do. So now we got like 36 employees and we're still the only company in North America that makes ice. What got you

interested in this whole thing in the first place? Fear. I think many of the high achievers are driven by some kind of, whether it's trauma or fear or paranoia. There's this great book by Andy Grove. He was the CEO of Intel. He said only the paranoid survive. And Andy's background was in Hungary, Soviet oppression. He had reasons to be paranoid. So whether it's in business or in sports, that extreme hustle, I think in a lot of people is coming from some deep seated insecurity about themselves. And I know that's the case for me. I can't speak for everybody else, but for me,

I was going through separation, which was eventually divorce. And I'm 50 years old and I'm overweight and I'm out of shape. And I'm trying to imagine, how am I going to go into the dating market again? I'm looking at my kids and I'd spent so much energy keeping my kids fit and I'd let myself go to crap. And so I was at this point of low self-esteem and I said, I can't live like this. I started reading everything. What can I do to take care of myself? And so I started eating better. That was first. And the pounds started coming off when I stopped eating junk food and processed food. I stopped drinking. That was a big help. And then I said, I should really get my blood work done. I go to the lab. I get the whole male health panel,

you know? And my PSA comes back seven. And seven's too high. Even for a guy, I was 52 at the time. They said the top of the range was three and a half. And so, you know, I go online, I'm like, oh, what does this mean, PSA? And the articles did not say this, but it is what my brain was telling me. It says you're gonna die of prostate cancer.

You know, like I was convinced in my imagination that I had cancer. So what are you supposed to do? I'm supposed to go get a prostate exam and visit the endocrinologist. Like there's all these things that the medical establishments say, these are the responsible things. And before I did that, I started talking to other guys. You know, can you imagine bringing this up?

So whether they're older than me or younger than me, but my friends, I'd say, you know, I had a blood test. And have you ever had a prostate problem? And then it turns out everybody, every guy I talked to had either had an exam or pain and the erectile dysfunction that is accompanied by the prostatectomy. So here I am thinking, I'm either going to die of cancer or no woman is ever going to love me. So that was a low point that convinced me I was going to do something else. I was going to put my money on dying of cancer if that's what I had to do. I wasn't going to go quietly, but I wasn't going to go into allopathic medicine either. So I said, all right, I'm going to do ice baths. I'm going to

do ketogenic diet. I'm going to see if I can deal with this inflammation and I'm going to monitor my blood. Got my PSA down to 1.8. It was all fear-based when I started. And then of course, when I did the whole male panel, you got to get your cholesterol and your PSA and your testosterone total and free. And I'm so focused on the PSA, but the lab report came back with like this big red exclamation mark next to testosterone. I was 1180 nanograms per deciliter, which is high for a fat guy in his fifties. You know, I wasn't working out. I wasn't doing anything to intentionally raise my testosterone. And here the lab was saying, you got to get that check. That's too high. Are you, you know, are you supplementing? So I thought- And you weren't supplementing.

You weren't using exogenous tests. I wasn't even on magnesium supplements at that point. Like I barely knew what testosterone was, except it's on the lab report and I got to go back to the internet and I got to be like, oh, you know, what is this? Turns out one of my friends who had a prostatectomy was on testosterone blockers

on the advice of his physician who thought that high testosterone, because it's anabolic, would promote inflammation, promote growth of cancer cells. And evidently this is like a standard practice. Brigham Bueller went on the Joe Rogan experience to talk about this. And it is total bullshit.

You watch the studies of the meta-analyses. There is high testosterone protects against prostate cancer. It does not watch the studies of the meta-analyses. High testosterone protects against prostate cancer. It does not increase the risk of prostate cancer. So what happened to my friend was horrible, but I'm reading it online and I'm like, okay, this is a concern. Plus I got a great PSA. Now I can go to the endocrinologist. He's probably going to pat me on the back and tell me how awesome I am for doing it? He had no interest. He only looked at the high testosterone. He said, well, I want to do one more test. Now he's about my age. And he wrote up the orders to get me tested for luteinizing hormone, which is, you know,

signals the testes. And I didn't know what it was, but I have to look it up. And I'm like, hey, wait a second. He thinks I'm juicing. He's looking at me and he's going, there's no way this fat fricking professor has got 1180, you know, cause he sees all kinds of guys. Luteinizing hormone came back, red exclamation mark, too high. I was like 8.9 or something like that. I never heard from my endocrinologist again. It's not like he emailed me or something and said, wow, Tom, this is amazing. You know, what are you doing? I should really change the way I practice medicine. But what is he going to do? Like he can't change the way he practiced medicine. So instead I went online to Morosco and I wrote a little article and I said, look, there's this 1991 study from Japan and they did cold stimulation. They just

submerged half the arm, like up to the elbow. They didn't even do the whole body. And then they did stationary bike. Everybody does cold before, I'm sorry, after the exercise. So the first thing that it was the bike and then the cold stimulation. Luteinizing hormone goes down. Testosterone goes down when you do the cold after the exercise. For some reason, they switched it. They submerge up to the elbow and then they do the stationary bike. It's just 20 minutes. Testosterone goes up.

Luteinizing hormone goes up. I found this study and I wrote my little article and nobody read it. Because, you know, Google is not keyed in to, oh, what did Morosco just post next? You know, so a couple people, Jason tried it. He got his testosterone up doing the same thing, pre-cooling the exercise. And then I went to Iceland.

It was December 22. I'm gonna see the Northern Lights with my girlfriend. You know, the world has opened up. COVID is over, right? And we're gonna do this thing. And I get off the plane and my phone is blowing up with text messages and people are going, you're on the Joe Rogan show. I'm like, hang on. I think I would know, you know, if I was

on Joe Rogan. They're like, no, no, no. He's reading your article to David Goggins. He's pre-cooling now with his ice bath and Goggins goes, how's it working? And Joe goes, it's working. It's really hard, but it's working. So people who saw that, men who saw that program went and found the article, our web analytics, you know, they go through the roof and people start writing to me on Instagram now. And they're saying, I think you found the cure for low T or they're saying, you know, I was in the two hundreds and I felt like crap. And then I started doing your protocol and now I'm up to 700 or sometimes they'll write to me and they'll say, I'm like crap. And then I started doing your protocol and now I'm up to 700. Or sometimes they'll write to me and they'll say, I'm at 650, how do I go higher?

Now, I'm not a medical doctor, I'm an engineer. And I discovered this whole thing for myself accidentally. But some of the guys writing to me are even older than me. This guy in Massachusetts, he's in his 60s. He was on TRT. And I heard you say to Huberman that, or maybe it was Huberman said to you, he's never seen a single instance of someone who got on TRT and then voluntarily like completely left it. But this guy read my article and he said, I don't want to be on TRT anymore. I'm going to try what Seeger's doing. He was up over 1200 and he's not taking his TRT anymore.

people who, one guy, 1500, and he's a little bit younger than me, but he doesn't work out. He's not doing anything but TRT. And I said, so you're going to go off it? And he goes, I don't ever want to go back to what it felt like when I was 250. And I'm afraid to go off the TRT because what am I going to feel like if I'm only 900? Like there's a little bit of fear in a man's mind. only 900 or so. Like there's a little bit of fear in a man's mind. And I said, so you give it a try. You can always go back. Like this is reversible. If you decide, will you write to me again and let me know what happens? Not everybody says that this is a miracle cure for low T. I'd say about 20% of the messages I get say, I got up to 550. What do I do next? Because I feel like I'm plateauing. And I can't really, I can tell them magnesium supplement. I can tell them, listen to Mark Bell's podcast. All I know is that if you do the ice bath after the exercise, you are suppressing

your testosterone response. If you do it before, you get a big boost in your workout and you get the anabolic effects that come with the hormone. So I always exercise after my, just like we did this morning. So this is something that like, one thing is when I've heard this talked about before, a lot of people talk about it like a myth, right? But at this point, you've seen this happen with a lot of individuals that have done that protocol, plunge or get in a or get in cold and then go work out. One of the things that you hear online is, there is no randomized double-blind control study

that says the thing that happened to you actually happened to you. Yeah, yeah. Bullshit. Another thing that you hear is, anecdote is not data. Yes, it is. Of course, you cannot deny someone's experience.

If this is what happened to them, then that's what happened to them. Now you can say, we don't understand how it happened. We don't understand the underlying scientific mechanisms. And the fact is in this case, it's not clear why testosterone goes up if you pre-cool your workout. Like what is the mechanism?

Testosterone is metabolically expensive, not as expensive as pregnancy or as breastfeeding or something, but it's metabolically expensive. And it's one of the places that a man's body will shut down. But like, if they're not getting nutritionally what they need, or if they're overworking, the body might conserve by saying,

I think we need to cut down on the testosterone and sperm production. There's more urgent things going on right now. Testosterone is also associated with a weaker immune system because it is metabolically expensive and your body is trying to conserve resources. Should we put it into the immune system? Should we put it into the testosterone? Testosterone is an expensive hormone for men to be carrying around. So we don't know all the mechanisms because it's psychological as well as physiological. There's just these sort of suggestions. Yeah. But you can't deny the labs.

Do you by any chance think, because like not everybody is able to get their hands on, like there's actually more cheaper plunge type, you know, cold plunges out there now. But can a cold shower replicate any of these effects for people? Because we usually tell people, you know, if you're not going to get in a cold plunge or do any of this, then just take a cold shower in the morning. You'll still feel better. I read a book that said you should take cold showers because it'll make you tougher, you know? And at that time in my life, I'm like, I want to be tough. You know, I was such a child, but I get in the cold shower. Now it's not even that cold.

I live in Phoenix, Arizona, and this was the winter time. And so the water temperature is maybe high fifties Fahrenheit. And that was cold enough for me. Like I cursed like a son of a bitch when I was in the cold. Sucks, fuck you, you ben greenfield you know whatever um they made me angry well there's this study from finland and they compared partial body cold water immersion right to whole body and they said physiologically there are different effects psychologically they're different effects partial body your body will shut down circulation in the

part that is getting cold. They will use vasoconstriction to try and slow the blood flow to that part. So you lose less heat. Your heart rate goes up, but when you go whole body, there's really nowhere but your head, you know, which is out of the water and in your core for your body to put your blood. When you go whole body, your nervous system thinks you're going to dive, like you're going to go get lobsters or clams for dinner or something, right? And it initiates the mammalian dive reflex. Your heart rate goes down. Your brain waves change into a more meditative state. So the first time I got into an ice bath, it was a completely different

experience than a cold shower. Metabolically, you can get the stimulation from a cold shower. You can activate your brown fat. You can bring on the shiver reflex. And I think you can probably get the same T benefit because if you work out while you still have that feeling of being cold, a lot of guys are reporting to me, they're still feeling the same performance boost. It's going to be 20, 30% in peak muscle power output. There's a good endurance boost that you get.

So I'm suspecting that this is still gonna work for a testosterone, but the mental effects are gonna be different. What I've experienced is the cold showers, which I hate, make me angry. And I still do them when I'm like in a hotel. But in Phoenix, it wasn't even an option anymore. Like the tap water is 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer.

So you say, well, what's the cheap option? And what a perfect place to start an ice bath company, you know, in the middle of the hottest city in North America, because you can't just run the bathtub and pour in a couple of bags of ice and say, I'm going to ice bath now when you live in Phoenix. If you're in Maine, you know, go for it, just jump in the ocean. And I don't recommend you buy a $15,000 Morosco ice bath when there are more cost-effective ways for you to get started. But when I decided I wanted to

do an ice bath every day, I did the math. I go to go down to the quickie mart, you know, and I get like a hundred pounds of ice and that cost me maybe 250 or sorry, uh, two 50 for a 10 pound bag or something. And then I got to go, it's an hour of this. And I'm like the $20,000 on an ice bath starts to look like a bargain when you want it every day. And that's where I was. Uh, I know Wim Hof has talked about, um, cold for a long time. And you mentioned he was like an inspiration. I think I also heard him talk about how some people have cold hands. Their hands are very cold, and they put their hands in cold water. It helps them to regulate their hand temperature.

Are you aware of some of that? I haven't seen Wim tell that story or talk about that. But the hands are kind of special because they're at the circulatory extreme, just like the toes are. When you get cold, your body has several mechanisms to defend your core body temperature. So these would be thermal regulatory mechanisms. The two most important are vasoconstriction and thermogenesis. So the vasoconstriction is what happens to David Goggins. He suffers from Renaud's syndrome and Renaud's is an extreme physiological, psychological feedback loop that causes too much vasoconstriction.

He posted this maybe a month or two ago, what happened to his hands when he gets cold and they get chalky white because there's no blood in them anymore. The extreme vasoconstriction cuts off the circulation to the hands to the point where it is painful and frightening. I mean, it's hard to imagine anything frightening David Goggins, right? But when you see the color drain out of your hands, you're like, what the heck is going on? And it often takes people hours to rewarm. So my girlfriend, AJK, she's on Twitter. You can look her up. She was one of these that suffered from Raynaud's. Well, her and her daughters, they see me doing the ice bath.

And at the time, her daughter is nine years old. She was born with cerebral palsy. And you wouldn't know it looking at her. Like, you really have to know. She's got some adjustments in her gait. But you look at her, she's just like a beautiful kid, right? Well, she asked mom, could I go in there? And mom's like, well, sure. Cause kids want to do, you know, the adults that they admire, they want to imitate.

So she goes in with her feet and she goes, mom, this feels really good. Could I go in? She goes into her waist. Mom, I really liked the feeling in my legs. She doesn't have the same sensations in her legs that you and I have. And we don't even know because we don't have cerebral palsy what that's like. She goes in up to her armpits and AJ can't even watch because AJ suffers from Raynaud's and she's emotionally connected to the child. When she sees the child get cold, she begins to feel cold herself. She's worried, but she doesn't want to tell the child to stop, right?

Because she's having such a good experience. She thinks maybe this is doing something for her CP. Her daughter looks up at her and she says, when are you going to do it, mom? And she almost like, she feels crushed inside because she hasn't got the courage to do what her nine-year-old is doing. So she says, I'll do it. She has a coach. She goes in, it's sub 40 degrees. It's really cold. And she tells

the story of what Renaud's is like and how difficult it is to rewarm. And she has this image in her mind of her daughter's bravery. She doesn't have Renaud's anymore. So I got to go look this one up. Sure enough, one of the ways to recover from primary Renaud's syndrome is called stress inoculation or exposure therapy. You give yourself a little bit and a little bit. And psychologically, you get accustomed to greater stress until you can handle a stress experience that you never would have been able to handle before. would have been able to handle before. So right before I came up here, AJ and I were in the ice bath together. She did five minutes. Every once in a while when something, some anxieties in her life, her nods will come back. But for the most part, she doesn't suffer from her nods anymore. I don't know how David's going to do it. Like David is like a sheer willpower, like stay hard kind of guy. And the only way that it worked with AJ was sort of this gentle, inspiring, I want to be the person that my child is proud of. Now, Vim, who's also got kids

and also been through like some low points in his life. I've never met him. I don't talk to him, but he's written a lot about it. He might be talking about that extreme vasoconstriction response. And he might be talking about that extreme vasoconstriction response, and he might be talking about how exposure therapy can help people. Physiologically, you can remodel the vasculature, the capillaries in your fingertips. They can accustom themselves physiologically, but I think the physiological psychological feedback loop is what really causes renaissance. What about Dave Asprey talking about dipping your face in cold water? Have you heard about that?

Ask him how he does his breathing when his face is dipped into a kitchen bowl of cold water. Mark, you're going to get me in such trouble. When I saw Dave say that. I just think some of this stuff's interesting. You hear these hacks and you're like, why wouldn't you? That seems kind of painful to like just dip your face into a cold thing of water. Seems like it'd just be easier to actually get in an ice bath. Well, doesn't he have a machine stimulate his muscles so he does not have to do too much lifting?

I believe so. And here you are using your own muscles like a sucker, you know? You should figure it out the Dave way. Yeah, he probably has a machine to help him breathe too. While he's underwater, he just moves his lungs in and out. You only have so many respirations in life. Why waste them? Right.

I wish I could write books like Dave though, because he's a really good author. He's unbelievable. Yeah. All right. Well, there's this video right here. I think it kind of ties in with what we're talking about here. So let's see what we got. Okay.

But go ahead. TRT. No, but it's ahead, TRT. No, but it's just like TRT is an example of people wanting to become faster, stronger, or they say, go into a cold plunge for this exact amount of time, follow this exact regimen, because this is the thing that's going to improve your life and cure disease XYZ. It's not true. Is a cold plunge good for you? If you like it. If you like the challenge. But medically, I'm never going to recommend to my patient ever in my life as a physician to go do a cold plunge.

Why? Or like cryotherapy. Isn't that like the same thing? Yeah. Why? I'm asking you why. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know why people are recommending it.

There's no evidence to say it really does anything valuable. And it's expensive. It's time consuming. Most patients do not live in this world that they can afford to buy a tub, throw ice in it every day. Like it just, it's not about, this is a difference between people

who are excited about information and are researchers versus someone who's a clinician and actually sees patients and the hard time they're having in their everyday lives. And then I'm going to come in there and be like, oh, in my fancy suit,

I'm going to tell you to get a cold plunge. And if you do it for three minutes and not three minutes, 13.4 seconds, you fail. All right, let's pause this guy. There's so many things that I wish I was taking notes. One thing that stood out, he says, this is the difference between a clinician and a researcher. And when he says he's doctor, Mike,

I'm assuming he's a medical doctor because he's got patients. I don't have any patients. I have engineering students. I have a research degree. It's a PhD, not prescribe because he's a clinician. And evidently, there was never a class in medical school that said, this is when you prescribe ice bath. I can't deny. I can't tell him he's doing it wrong. What I can do is say, I have a PhD. I wrote a dissertation. I know how to create new knowledge, which that's not what clinicians do. So what I do is I go to the library and read the journal articles and I get the labs and I gather the data and I say, oh, here's a good reason why you would prescribe an ice bath. Because your patient has type 2 diabetes. Now, cold will activate the brown fat, recruit new brown fat, improve insulin sensitivity, clear glucose from the bloodstream.

Those are all good things for a patient with type 2 diabetes. Here's a case study of cold plunge relieving the pain of rheumatoid arthritis. Like we can go through any, maybe he doesn't see patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Maybe he doesn't see, you know, patients with type 2 diabetes. Maybe I should open up my shirt a little bit more, you know, or something. But he says, still, even if it works and he doesn't know, he hasn't seen any evidence and it's okay. If someone is ignorant, you can't really criticize them for not knowing the things that you know. He says, but it's expensive and it's time consuming.

And so if I had a chance to meet Dr. Mike, I would say, what about a two-minute ice bath is time-consuming? It's like if two minutes is too much out of your day to reverse your type 2 diabetes, I don't know if I can cut that back for you. I might not be able to solve that problem for you, Mike, because I got to admit that metformin is a lot quicker than a two-minute ice bath. It takes you 20 seconds to pop that metformin pill, and it will bring down your blood glucose. It will do it at the expense of your mitochondria. It will undo the benefits of the ice bath and the exercise. If you can exercise in the ice bath, you've got no business taking metformin because it will damage the benefits you're trying to do for your mitochondria through the ice bath and the exercise.

And you don't have to take my word for it. You could talk to one of my customers who called me up and he said, Tom, I'm doing everything. I'm eating a clean diet. You know I'm going on these bike rides. I'm in my Morosco four minutes a day. And yet my blood sugars are stuck. The lowest I can get is like 160.

And after a meal, I'm up to 220. And my doctor has got me on 100 milligrams of metformin a day. He wants to increase my dose. I said, well, you could try quitting the metformin altogether. He goes, but metformin works. It will lower your blood glucose. I said, is it working for you? No, it's not.

He quit. We had a little video call like before I came up here. He got out his CGM. He's eating on the call. He's like, I want to do a postprandial CGM with you. He goes, because I've been running down in the low 100s. And he got it up and he goes, I'm 94. I haven't ever seen 94 on my CGM.

I've been off metformin for six weeks. And we've got the study that says, if you can exercise, don't take metformin. However, Dr. Mike is right. Metformin takes you 20 seconds. An ice bath takes you two minutes. The feedback loop is much different when you're doing things through means that aren't within your own body.

Tell me about the feedback loop. The feedback loop from something like taking something like metformin, which is doing something for you rather than you doing something for yourself, which would be like going on a walk, lifting some weights and so forth. Yeah. Now I think I understand because the body is a complex system and you can never change just one thing. Like vitamin D or something like that. Like vitamin D is a hormone. So I'm not saying that you should never take vitamin D. There could be cases for people to take it. But you need to think about it because it is a hormone. T3, T4, testosterone, all these things. These are great examples. If you are vitamin D deficient or insufficient, take the vitamin D, like fix that right away. And there's no substitute for sunshine. Just because you're taking this.

Jack Cruz has this great line. If your body can make it, you don't need to take it. And I think he's oversimplifying a little bit. Like there are some acute cases where like, no, we're going to get this taken care of right away. And the right way to do that is a vitamin D supplement or something. And then you need a long-term plan because the pharmaceutical industry would have you believe that there is one pill for one condition that will fix one variable. And that's impossible. Your body is a complex system in which you can never change just one thing.

There will always be compensatory mechanisms happening. So sometimes people say, maybe Dr. Mike would take me on in this. Ice baths cannot be that good. They are too good to be true. They can't make you smarter and prettier and like healthier. They can't possibly do all these things. And the analogy is because there's no pill that will do all these things. But exercise does all those things. You know, you do pushups and you get smarter and people have measured this but your brain wasn't doing the pushups. When you work on the body as a system,

everything in the body gets better and cold is one of those systemic interventions. So, you know, I could send Mike some articles and maybe Dr. Mike would open up based upon the research how he decides to treat his patients or maybe his patients will go to somebody who can actually help them. You need to be breathing through your nose at night for better sleep quality because your nose humidifies the air you breathe. It filters the air you breathe. And when you're breathing through your nose,

it allows you to be more parasympathetic, which allows you to be calmer. But a lot of us and myself in the past included, breathe through our mouth when we sleep. And when you're breathing through your mouth, you have a higher heart rate, you wake up with a dry mouth, it actually makes your dental issues worse and your sleep quality becomes much worse too. That's why we use and we've partnered with Hostess Shape for such a long time, because no matter if you're using a CPAP, if you have a beard or whatever you're dealing with, if you're able to breathe through your nose when you sleep, your sleep quality will be better and everything else in life will get easier. Your fitness habits, your nutrition, et cetera, because your sleep is quality because you're breathing through your nose. So get hostage tape on your mouth.

And Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at hostage tape dot com slash power project where you can receive five packs of hostage tape for the price of three. That's almost half of a year for the price of three. That's again at hostage tape.com slash power project links in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. Seems to be pretty powerful for mental illness, at least in the things that I've seen people report. I see just all over the place online, people saying I had depression, I had anxiety. I don't know what the research shows, but like that sounds pretty compelling seeing person after person talk about

it that way. The deadliest psychological disorder is anorexia. And I think that this has come up, like not as a topic, but in passing on your podcast. And what do I mean by that? on your podcast. And what do I mean by that? When someone suffers from anorexia, it can go on for decades and their rates of recovery are very low and their increased mortality is very high compared to other psychological disorders. Now, sometimes in the pro-ana groups, people will say, oh, you should do ice baths because it'll burn so many calories and help you thin. Don't. Anorexia is a contraindication for ice baths. It's a really bad reason to do an ice bath. And I just went over how it's not going to help you lose weight anyway. But the anorexics are familiar with ice baths. What works in anorexia is the ketogenic diet because they're, and not, I can't even say this word, anxiolytic effects. It reduces the

anxiety that is associated with anorexia. So if you can go keto, it's a good way for an anorexic to, to refeed without all of the negative feelings that probably still have some of the negative feelings, but with all of them. When I met AJ, you know, we met online, I'm separated, she's separated. I didn't know what anorexia was. She's six foot one and she weighed 122 pounds. That's what anorexia is. But part of the reason I didn't know is because every time we'd go out or we'd spend the weekend together, I would do the ordering. You know, like, I guess I'm old fashioned in this way. And I'd be like, oh no, no, we're going to have the lamb or we'll have the duck confit. And you know, if you don't like that, we'll get something. Anyway, we would just eat keto and we'd eat this

wonderful and she would eat. Right. So I just, I thought she was naturally skinny because I'm so naive like this. She noticed that her anxiety went down and her health went up. So she wrote an article about the ketogenic diet for mental health and anorexia in particular. Since then, you had Chris Palmer on the show. He wrote a book called Brain Energy. I wrote a review of that book on Amazon and like 600 people have like thumbed up or something. It's a very important book,

even though I only gave it four out of five stars. I'm sorry, Chris. I thought there's more to do. You know, I'm looking for the second edition. Now, the association between metabolism and mental health has gone overlooked for way freaking too long. Allie Houston is another guy who's now a doctoral student in the United Kingdom, and he runs a group called Metabolic Psychology, or METSI for short. Chris Palmer is not the only one, although he's at the leading edge, and he's popular as this idea of metabolic approaches to mental health. How does this make sense? Well, the brain uses like 20, 25% of all the energy that the body consumes. So you

think maybe energy is really important to the brain and what supplies the energy but metabolism? We could sort of common sense this one out, but the ultimate degradation of brain function is Alzheimer's. I lost my mother to Alzheimer's. I had the opportunity to visit her two weeks before she passed. And for a long time, COVID made this too difficult, but the travel restrictions are lifted. I can go see my mom. She didn't know who I was. No recognition. She had no control, no motor control of anything but her dominant hand.

She was so far gone. For breakfast, her nurse was given her cream of wheat made with Ensure and apple juice. And if she finished it, she got a chocolate chip cookie as a reward. It was seed oils and carbohydrates that finished off my mom. And at the state that she was, that was merciful. So I had to go look at, Gary Brekka calls Alzheimer's type three diabetes. It is metabolic in its origins, damn it. And if you take care of your mitochondria, you're taking care of your brain. Some of the things that you have to do when you're struggling with mood disorder is, whether it's cognitive behavioral therapy, but it's cognitive reframing. You have to concentrate to say, is this true?

Is this really what happened? Is this what it means? You need the brain online so that you can reframe the anxieties that exist in your imagination. If you don't have the energy to do that, then why would you ever get out of bed? The association between metabolism and mental health

is much stronger than anyone, and probably even Chris, although he's a strong advocate for it, has come to recognize. We are still peeling back the layers of the science on how mood relates to metabolism. As far as the experiences go, there's some well-documented case studies of people who did not respond to SSRIs, who major depression, did not respond to talk therapy, and they did respond to cold water swimming. So I posted one on Instagram. This is a guy from Estonia, and he reached out to me because he's an inventor and a product

designer, and he admired what we were doing. And he wanted to create a device that measures the temperature and the time that you've been in the ice bath. So you can keep a journal and that's great. He said that he wouldn't be here without cold water swimming. He'd tried to drown himself in his parents' bathtub when he was in his twenties.

And his brother found him, interrupted him. The bathtub is warm, Mark. Well, the next day he's determined. He said, oh no. The bathtub is warm, Mark. Well, the next day, he's determined. He said, oh, no, I feel much better, Dad. You know, I'm going to go for a run. Because exercise is really good now. I feel like I really have the energy. Dad wasn't fooled because he knew his son was going to run down to the beach

and drown himself in the Baltic Ocean or the Baltic Sea. Dad runs after him. Dad's got to catch up. And by the time he gets to the beach, Edgar is already in the water, but the Baltic Sea is cold. Dad dives in after him because he wants to pull him out.

And son's like, dad, I don't want to die. Like the cold shock is one to the mood. It activates the sympathetic nervous system. It puts you in that fight or flight response. And then your parasympathetic nervous system comes over and improves your vagal tone. But metabolically, you activate your brown fat. You stimulate mitobiogenesis. You're making new mitochondria.

So over the long term, after that acute reaction passes over the long term, your brain has more energy to deal with or technically more power. And it helps you maintain a higher mood or a higher state of mental health. You know that there's this study out of Poland that Hugh Ruman cites all the time. You know, you get into an ice bath. It wasn't even that cold in the study, but you do your cold bath and you get 250% dopamine, whatever it is. You get three times. You can't be in a bad mood when there's that much dopamine coursing through your bloodstream. So that's the acute effect.

But longer term, it's all about the metabolic effects. I'm curious about this because there's some people that have come onto the podcast and mentioned, oh, cold plunging is so stressful. And some people probably do have that experience where they get into a cold bath and they have this horrible response to it.

So when it does come to those types of individuals, what do you think may be going on? I mean, there might be a plethora of issues, but for the sect of the population, that's like, oh, way too stressful. What's going on there? PTSD is a bitch. And that's kind of a weird answer. So let me explain. Cold brings up stuff. One of the things about post-traumatic stress disorder, so this is a mental health issue, is that you experience emotional flashbacks. You experience the emotions of a trauma without the trauma actually happening. It's somewhere in your past and everything in your body thinks that it's

happening again right now. This is the flashback experience. When you go in the cold, you activate that fight or flight response. Your sympathetic nervous system is like, boom, on, we are going to die. Every cell in your body is trying to communicate up to your brain and say, get us the hell out of here. What are you even thinking, you know? And it brings some stuff up. And that stuff can, for some people, be overwhelming. Put them in a panic state. You might say, well, then don't recommend ice baths. You know, don't do, and I'm okay with that.

I'm not saying this is for everybody. What I am saying is, if you force somebody into an experience like that, it is not therapeutic. You can't do therapy and abuse people at the same time. So Cold Plunge sometimes gets a bad reputation because you'll see on Instagram, these guys sign up for these boot camps and I know they're chasing something. Like I'm not really criticizing them. They're trying to find something inside themselves that they're really hoping is there, but they don't know how to find on their own.

And so they will hire someone to bully them into doing really difficult things. And if you're going to do an obstacle course or if you're looking for two more reps on the bench press or something, I don't really know how it works in the scene, but I got to use my imagination. Sometimes somebody bullying you is going to help. You cannot bully someone into mental health. somebody bullying you is going to help. You cannot bully someone into mental health. And so you got to get into the ice bath of your own volition, knowing that some things are going to come up. What are you going to do with those things when they come up? It helps a lot to have a mantra. The mantra that was first introduced to me is, this is what cold feels like. Every cell in your body is saying, you're gonna die. And the brain, its job is to communicate back

to every cell in the body and say, this is what cold feels like. This isn't death. This isn't some existential threat. This is cold. Now, my daughter took that to the next level. She does Krav Maga. And you know, that's like the merciless martial art.

It's not even an art. It's like, what is the quickest way to kill somebody? And the Israeli army developed it for this reason, right? It's practiced a little bit different in a competition. But she does this Krav Maga and she was sparring with people who were several levels above her. And they know how

to spar, but somehow her knee gave out or something. And so all these, you know, black belts, I don't even think they have the color belts, but all these more experienced women, they're like, oh no, did I overdo it? Did I make a mistake? Are you okay? And she's on the mat and she's kissing her knee, which is not usually the way, and she's like, it's okay, knee. And everybody backs off. They're like, what is going on? And she goes,'s like, it's okay, knee. And everybody backs off. They're like, what is going on? And she goes, you're still on the team, knee. We're here for you. She's talking to her knee with all this love and support. Like knee's going to be on the DL, but that's okay. We got, you know, when you're ready, there's a spot in the lineup for you.

I was like, what are you thinking? And she goes, dad, I just talked the way to my knee, the way you would talk to me. Like if I hurt myself on the softball field and I'm like, God, when I, when some part of my body, I feel betrayed, you know, when the elbow hurts, I'm like, God damn it, elbow. You know, we're trying to do something. Get with the program here. And my daughter taught me, send the elbow the love. Talk to the elbow like it was my own child. Daughter's wise, man. Right?

Way beyond her years. Hey, you just take a breath. You know, you catch your breath. We're going to get you back in the fifth inning or something. You know, let her know she's on the team. And this is the way to approach the ice bath. Things are going to come up. Whatever that thing is that activates your existential threat, talk to yourself. Like,

that's okay. You know, we knew this was going to happen. This is not that experience. This is different than that experience. And you can do kind of your own exposure therapy, coach yourself through. If all you get is nine seconds, then you got nine seconds. These two guys, they both do jujitsu. Yeah. So maybe next time you guys are about to tap somebody out,

you can say, this is what jujitsu feels like. Help the guy relax a little bit. That makes sense. I tried to take my daughter's craft class, like she's teaching now, you know, and I go,

and I went to, you know, three or four of these things. And I finally said, Emma, I can't do this anymore. And she goes, is it the bear crawls, dad? Because she does a lot of bear crawls. I'm like, no, no. I mean, those are hard, but that's not it. And she goes, oh, well, what is it? I go, it's the choking.

It's too much choking for me. She has an image of me like I'm her dad. And she would always pair me with these super experienced, huge guys, right? Like, oh yeah, you know, we got to find somebody good for my dad, right? And they are experienced and they know what they're doing, but God dang, I can't, you know,

when can I pair with a beginner or something like that? And she wouldn't let me do it. So I stopped going to Croft. We had a guy on the podcast recently, Kyle Newell, who was talking a lot about fasting. And he said, you know, you're going to get hungry and so on. And he just said, this is what fat burning feels like. You know, if you just switch that perspective a little bit, you get into the cold. I got into the cold today.

You know, if you just switch that perspective a little bit, you get into the cold. I got into the cold today. It's been maybe about two weeks or so since I've been into, since I've done something like that. So when I got in today, I got that initial shock and then you learn to breathe through it. And eventually, I know it sounds crazy, but for people that haven't tried it, it does start to feel good. For me, I've been on the road. I just got back from Columbia. There's a workshop there.

It's science. The army asked me to come down and talk about biosecurity and stuff. And did you realize, I didn't know this, but the Caribbean Sea, it's too warm. I'm going in, I'm like, oh yeah, I'm gonna do the ocean. And that's like bath water. They don't even have cold tap water in Columbia. And I know I sound like an ugly American, but I wasn't thinking it all the way through. Like, how am I going to get my cold?

So I spent five nights down there with no cold and I missed it. And you can say, well, that sounds like an addiction. And I guess you can sign me up for the cold addiction because I have a habit and I rely on that habit in the morning to help manage the stress and anxiety and put me in a certain frame of mind. And when the habit got broken, as time passed, I became, I realized how much I valued that habit. So, you know, I land in Phoenix. I'm like, I got to go get in the ice bath right now. And there are different people that have different responses that Cole doesn't seem seem was pointing out some people might just actually hate it right um i don't even know if i'm saying this right but is it a hap flow type or hap flow type do you know anything about any of that um

i don't know if it serves anyone to like investigate that but there are certain types of people that just really effing hate the cold uh evidently gordon ryan is one of them um because he goes on the joe rogan podcast and and he's like, people might not understand this about me, but I fucking hate the cold, you know? And he's doing like 45 degrees and he stays in there for five minutes and he goes on the Joe show and he's like, hey, Joe, you know, be really proud of me, right? I'm doing the cold plunge. And Joe goes, no. You know, he's like not cold enough. Come on, Joe. 33 degrees. Well, Joe's like, kill your inner bitch, you know he's like not cold enough 33 degrees well joe's like kill your inner bitch you know

um and and i admire what he's doing i understand his mentality he posted in january from his backyard and it doesn't get that cold in austin but every winter they'll get a little snow right and it's snowing and he goes there is no part of me that wants to do this right now. And that's why I do it. So I get that there are people who fucking hate the cold. And there's a difference between I fucking hate the cold and I have Renaud syndrome and I got to work on that. So somebody like Goggins, we're not questioning how tough he is. We're not questioning. There's no inner bitch in Goggins. There's just a certain way that he would have to approach it. And so this is why I say you have to do it of your own volition.

Or you get out. And do you feel that sense of accomplishment? Do you feel like you've conquered some little piece of your inner bitch if you're only doing it because somebody was bullying you into it? Not for me. However, Huberman's vocabulary is so much better than mine. Like he'll come up and he'll say, the anterior mid-singulate cortex, you know, which took me a week to memorize how to say on a podcast. He'll say that if you enjoy the ice bath, if you like it, it doesn't do a damn thing for you. It does not build your anterior mid cingulate cortex. Thank you, Andrew.

Like which contains the will to live. So he has Goggins on and he's explaining this part that you have to do the things that you hate to get that sense of accomplishment. Well, if you hate ice baths, maybe that's the reason to do them. Every reason that would keep you out of the ice bath could actually be a reason to get you in the ice bath, but only when you decide you're ready for that challenge. And maybe your ice bath can be a little warmer. We don't need a cold. Are we cold shaming people? What are your thoughts? You can set the Morosco at any temperature you want. So a lot of people will ask me this and I'll say, you know, start at 50, start at 55, take it down one degree Fahrenheit a day. Because if you did 55, you know, you could do 54. They've been shaming Andrew for

a long time. No, not me. No, I brought my temperature up too. Well, that was, I'm going to leave that to Joe because Joe goes, why so warm? And then he was like, oh, I don't know. I can go in there longer. And Joe goes, I don't like what I'm hearing. Yeah, it doesn't matter if the temperatures, I've set it to 55 and I hate it and I shiver the second I get in and I can't breathe. Set it to 60, same thing. 65, I'm like, all right, cool. Let me just see if I can get in the habit of getting in the plunge, you know, and then we'll go from there. No, it was terrible. It's still, I still, it just, it made everything, I couldn't calm down. And then eventually like I could get to a point where like,

okay, 10 minutes in, like I got no shivers left in me. Like, all right, now we can at least relax and make it look cool and comfortable like all the commercials do. But for the most part, it's just not a fun experience. And the hardest part for me is it takes so much to get me to go in there. By the time I get out, I hear people saying like, oh, it's better than a cup of coffee. You don't need caffeine. Once you get into the cold plunge, you're ready to kill the day or whatever. I get out of there. I feel like I got hit by a truck. All I want to do is go take a nap because I have nothing left because it took everything for me to get in there. Do you have any advice for trying to make it not easier, but easier to be more consistent with getting in the cold plunge?

Because you just said set it at 55 and go down to 54 the next day. Well, that next day is it's just as hard as that first day, and it's even worse. I do have some advice. There's two things that I want to say. Three things. The first thing is, it's hard that you're Andrew and Andrew Huberman is Andrew, and sometimes we get them confused. And it's Huberman who taught me how to say mid, cingulate, anterior, whatever. His vocabulary is amazing.

Okay, so then the second thing is you were talking about the commercials, people who post on Instagram, they post their ice baths on Instagram. Sometimes I get a lot of crap like, Hey, has anybody ever taken an ice bath and not posted it or something as if they were narcissistic or something. There's something about the social evaluation. I alluded to it earlier. AJ never would have gotten in the ice bath if she didn't have the image of her daughter and the way she's perceived. In psychology, there's something called the cold pressure test. They take your non-dominant hand, they put it in a bowl of ice water to see how your body responds to the stress. So this is a validated, calibrated instrument. They'll

measure, you know, your sweat glands and your heart response and get a sense of what your psychological resilience is. There's also something called the socially evaluated cold presser test. And this is when you sit down with your spouse or sometimes a stranger or whatever, but you know, you're being watched. Whenever someone knows they're being watched, they can keep their hand in longer. And so part of the social evaluation, like Joe will set up a camera, Rogan, and he'll be like, no, part of me wants to get in. But he knows he's got 18 and a half million people on the other side of that camera watching him. He is not going to wimp out in his mind. He's going to get in there and he's going to shiver or whatever he needs to do because it's socially evaluated. So that's the second part.

The people on the commercials, on the Instagram post know they're being watched. And I do the same thing. Like, I don't want to show my shiver in my post because, you know, maybe I'm narcissistic. But the point is when I want to look good and that's a very human thing to do. The advice for you is go shorter. The worst time, the worst part of the ice bath is the 30 seconds before you get into the ice bath. And this is called anticipatory anxiety. There's even something called anticipatory thermogenesis.

You begin, your brown fat begins to work even before you get into the ice bath because mentally you're in this state of anticipating how much you're gonna fricking hate it. And this happens to me all the time. So I'll get up in the morning and I'll see that ice floating in there and I'll say, I could skip a day.

Nobody would know. It's fine. Whatever. I'll come back to it later in the day. And I can hear myself talking to myself and be like, Tom, you knew this is what? You do this every fricking time. Just get in there.

I think that's what Joe says, you know, kill your inner bitch. And here's how I talk myself out of it on the, I'm just going to do 15 seconds. I'm just going to go up to my waist. I'm just going to dip a toe. Take it down to the minimum level that your psychology can sort of accommodate. And then see if there's a little more and see if there's a little more and see if there's a little more. For you, go shorter.

I don't want you to come out of there and feel like you got hit by a truck for goodness sakes. I want you to come out there and feel like you accomplished something. And then how do you rewarm? Get a little bit of exercise, do some squats, do some lunges, do some pushups or some pull-ups because the sense of accomplishment you feel after just a little bit of exercise, I feel like fricking Superman, you know? And I have just cheated death. Now I haven't really cheated death, but in my own imagination, I'm like a little kid who puts a cape on and he grabs a cardboard tube and he says, look, I'm Luke Skywalker meets Superman all at the same time. Now, you know, he's jumping off the couch, right? That's the feeling that you should be going for. So try a little shorter. In that way, you might have a little more energy

when you come out to do the workout and feel that ecstatic feeling. I know you're not a medical doctor, but is the amount of shrinkage that happens during a cold punch, is this safe? Like, is your willy gonna ever just fall right off? You probably saw, I don't know, you're on Instagram a lot and there's this catchy song,

I Lost My Penis in an Ice Bath. It goes viral and I'm looking at it. That is such a good song. I know, it's catchy, right? And it's really well done. I cannot bring myself to put a heart on that because my experience is different. On the opposite?

Yeah. Wait, seriously? Uh-huh. So Ben Greenfield is not shy like ben greenfield will talk about putting stem cells in his dick and then go on the joe rogan and talk about everything his whole sex life and stuff and i'm i'm a little bit more modest than that so i quote ben greenfield he says ice bath is like Viagra for your body. And he's right. He's right when you talk about the mitochondria and the endothelial cells

and you talk about the vasodilation. So we'll get back to male sexual performance in ice bath in a second. But first we're gonna talk about shrinkage, which is coming from that Seinfeld episode. It shrinks. We know that the testicles are supposed to stay a little cooler than the rest of the body. And that's why they hang outside the body.

But when it gets really cold, they will come up into the body for, so they can get to that homeostasis, like a temperature that's good for them. But when it comes to an erection, like in the right company, ice bath isn't a problem. And I've talked to some other customers. They want to know a little more about the sanitation system. And I'm like, well, what are you getting at? And they're like, is it okay to have sex in the ice bath? And I'm saying, it might be too late. You're not asking me ahead of time, are you? And so I've heard from some customers who are enjoying the ice bath in some surprising ways that are differentiated from that viral video. So sure, there's a phenomenon called shrinkage,

I'm not denying it, but one of the best things you can do for male sexual health is an ice bath. And now, bear with me for a minute. I'm going to try and explain. The penis is enlarged by blood pressure. To increase the pressure in the penis, you have to open up a channel directly to the heart. It's the heart that's creating the blood pressure.

And you've got to get all that pressure into the penis. So this requires vasodilation. Nassim, I don't know what you're stretching for you. If you're feeling uncomfortable about this topic or something. Okay, good. I stretch all the time on this podcast, man. I just don't want to cross any lines. There's no lines to be crossed.

There we go. We have our penis pump right here, by the way, just in case. Is that what that is? That's Dr. Joe. Then I can just speak freely. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, that's what that is. Just kidding.

It is vasodilation that opens up the blood vessels that allows the blood to flow into the penis. Vasodilation is activated by nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is produced by the endothelial cells that line the blood vessels. And for a long time, medical doctors thought because the endothelial cells don't have a lot of mitochondria, there must be some other metabolic mechanism by which the nitric oxide is produced. Nitric oxide is a pretty high energy molecule, so it takes a lot of energy. No, it's the mitochondria. It is the mitochondria that produce ATP, which fuels the production of nitric oxide. When you take care of your mitochondria, you enable vasodilation. So how does Viagra work?

Viagra will overcome insulin resistance. Erectile dysfunction is one of the earliest clinical markers of metabolic disorder. So insulin resistance. Viagra overcomes that. So it packs the glucose into the cell and it gives them the energy so the mitochondria can make the ATP that will make the nitric oxide and produce vasodilation. Viagra doesn't make you horny. It just gives you more confidence and that might help. And it does metabolically what your body needs to get and maintain erection.

But it is systemic. It is also used, for example, to promote blood flow in infants that have suffered brain damage during birth. Because if for whatever reason, the blood flow to the infant gets cut off to the brain, they can suffer tempera. Mostly the brain is plastic and it can recover. And so doctors will sometimes use Viagra to promote the vasodilation, increase the blood flow and repair the brain injury. Women have erectile tissues too, and their erectile tissues also operate in the same way. But Viagra we associate with male sexual performance, but Viagra works by overcoming the insulin resistance that does not benefit the mitochondria. And ice bath works by reversing the insulin resistance,

increasing insulin sensitivity, promoting mitobiogenesis. And so, yeah, one of the best things you can do for male sexual performance is the ice bath. And so the funny video is kind of, it's sending the wrong message. This is not what's going to happen to your dick when you start ice bathing. You are going to experience just the opposite effects, especially if you exercise afterwards. And now you get the T-boost. And I've heard from several men who are in relationships, and they say, my wife's having a hard time keeping up. Do you have any advice for her? And all I can do is say, perhaps I could put her in touch with AJ.

Because that perspective, that end of it is not my specialty, but I can relate to your experience. All right. But to rewind real quick, because again, we like, that's more so in jest. It does like shrink temporarily, but I want to go back. Are you saying though, that when you cold plunge, you don't shrink temporarily? Like you personally, because you mentioned like you, like that doesn't happen to you? It all depends upon my company.

Oh, okay. Okay. I get that contextually. I understand. Let me be explicit. There are no barriers to an erection in the ice bath. You are a healthy, a metabolically healthy man with a good reason to have an erection. Okay.

Yeah. That's the most explicit I've ever been about this. What about utilizing cold plunge? You know I got to go back to ASU and teach, right? Anyway, here I am. You and your leaders had an awesome night. You got dinner or you just came back from the gym and it's time for that fun time. But you look down at your willy and, well, it's not working the way it should.

Where's that blood flow? Well, that's where Joy Mode comes in. And I can read you these ingredients right off the bat because they're all natural ingredients. L-citrulline, arginine nitrate, panox ginseng root, and vitamin C. The thing about Joy Mode is you just slip this baby into a little bit of water, drink it, and 45 minutes later, when you're getting ready to go to the pound town, you will be ready to rock. And you know what I mean by rock. Joy Mode's really awesome because there's a lot of things that people promote as far as sexual wellness tools, but there's a lot of weird ingredients in there. but there's a lot of weird ingredients in there. These are all natural ingredients that's going to help your own production of blood flow. Stick it in some water.

60 minutes later, you're going to be able to stick it into something else. Joy mode's your way to go. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at usejoymode.com slash powerproject. And at checkout, enter promo code powerproject to save 20% off your entire order. Again, usejoymode.com slash power project,

promo code power project, links in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. What about utilizing a cold plunge to get an edge in sports and athletics? I know that you were mentioning a lot of professional teams reach out to you and stuff like that. How are these people using it other than just the recovery aspect of it? There are two things going on on the leading edge. For recovery, Huberman has this right. It's not going to help your gains. It's not going to help you build muscle. It will hurt. If you do your ice bath immediately after your workout, it's going to cut into your gains. He says, wait four hours. And he's read all the same papers. And I think he's pretty much right. It's a good rule of thumb. So, you know, whatever your high school track coach used

to tell you about ice baths, it's just totally wrong. The things that are on the leading edge, Craig Heller at Stanford, who was on Hugh Ruman's podcast to talk about, has done some really good work on what's called per cooling. So this is heat extraction during, it'd be between sets or be during competition. And Heller- It's like that glove thing, right? The cool mitt. Yeah, the cool mitt.

He invented this device that will extract heat out of your hands. Now there's a paper in the United Kingdom that said, well, we tried to replicate Heller's results and Heller has gotten amazing results where he takes a grad student and they do pull-ups. And then they do the cool mitt and he's doing twice the pull-ups.

And these are not like super experienced athletes. They're not at that leading edge. And he's measuring these big gains. And the customers are reporting the same thing to me. I feel a lot of energy. I use the ARX fitness machine. I get a lot of good data. I'm seeing like 30% boost in my peak muscle output

when I pre-cool. So pre-cooling and per-cooling are slightly different things, but it's all about extracting heat from the body so that the mitochondria are protected. So per-cooling and pre-cooling are at the leading edge of sport and performance right now, but there's something more. The 49ers aren't going to have an ice bath on the sidelines.

Like, they're not going to strip off all their, you know, body armor and then plunge into an ice bath. Some of the hockey players have tried this and they report some good results, but the CoolMit device is something, for example, baseball pitchers can use in between innings. It fits in and an ice bath doesn't fit in very well. But how would you use the ice bath to prepare for the big game? And this is a little bit different. The Bronx bomber, Deontayte wilder i don't know if you're into boxing yeah but so he posted from morosco in saudi arabia and he did like 20 minutes at 32 degrees and and this was usually the day before two days before the fight i wanted to reach into instagram and say no d, Deontay, don't do that. You know, when you do this, you are loading up your mitochondria. You're trying to stimulate mitobiogenesis, but you are working everything in your body so hard and you need some recovery. If the 49ers called you up

and said, Mark, how should we, you know, how hard should we go the day before the game? You would say, hey, go light. You know, you don't want to tear up all your muscles. You want to hit the big game at the optimum, right? So you're going to need some recovery. And I wrote an article for them, taper your ice bath down as you get closer to the game. Allow the mitobiogenesis, which takes two or three days, to. So you are at peak metabolic performance when you need it the most. Pre-cooling right before the game will still give you a boost, but keep it short.

Just do like two minutes. You don't wanna go into some extreme metabolic state from which your body has to recover. And I would hate to think that it results in, that it accelerates fatigue, that it brings fatigue on during the competition because your mitochondria were getting such a workout the day before. It also, if you're going to do it before something, it might throw off your coordination a little bit, especially if you're in there for too long. I've experienced that. Because you're, you know, you're shivering, right?

So now you're trying to do something and you're. I did 14 minutes. I overdid it. It was talking about socially evaluated, you know, sometimes if you're trying to impress a girl, you just do crazy things. Right. So I did 14 minutes. It was too much. And then I was supposed to go to hot yoga afterwards, but I couldn't even, you know, operate my phone or anything. I had no dexterity. I had no gross motor control. I had to rewarm. And I drive a stick. So probably the unsafest thing about the ice bath is driving right after you did an ice bath. So I rewarm a little bit.

And then I get myself to high yoga. And I'm late, which is impolite. But the instructor says, come on in. It's fine. And then it's like 120 degrees or so. I don't know how hot it is. And I'm late, which is impolite. But the instructor says, oh, come on in. It's fine. And then it's like 120 degrees or so. I don't know how hot it is. But I'm still discombobulated. And I can't do the half monkey moon twist or whatever those things are.

And she's trying to correct me. And it's going nowhere. She comes over. She puts her hands on me. And she twists me around. Wonderful. And oh, I get it. After the whole thing, I go it. You know, after the

whole thing, I go up to her in the hallway and I say, thanks for letting me come in late. You know, I'm sorry I disrupted the class and that correction you gave me. That was wonderful. And she goes, oh, no problem. That's the way we do it here. But I have a question. What? She goes, was it hot enough in there for you? I go, well, I don't know. Didn't the thermometer say like 115, 120 or something? It seemed pretty hot. She goes, no. When I put my hand on your back, you felt cold. And I thought, I really got to crank up the heat. What kind of hot yoga is this? Those effects, they lasted for a long time. And the dexterity and the motor control, the proprioception that an athlete relies upon, they were all gone. If you're going to prequel, go short.

It's interesting, too, what you mentioned there. I mean, if anybody ever goes to a bathhouse, some of them sometimes have a cold and a sauna in there. If you ever go in a cold for like three or four minutes and you go into a sauna, you won't feel that sauna for a good 15, 20 minutes until you start feeling hot. So you can feel that rather immediately. I experienced this just the other day because all we have at our studio at Morosco is an infrared sauna. And I'm not even going to apologize. What a piece of crap the infrared sauna is. Like some people are really into their infrared.

But it is not the way to pair with cold plunge because my phone will cut out, but I get in there and I'm bored, right? And I'm like, okay, I'm going to go see what Mark Bell's doing on Instagram or something like that. And my phone goes too hot. And I'm going, this isn't hot. I'm not even sweating because the infrared that we have only goes up to 145. And then I went up to Seattle and I did a podcast with Mike Mutzel. I don't know if you know him. High intensity.

He's going to be here Wednesday. Oh, that's fantastic because he's science-based and he interprets it really well. And so sure enough, I got into his Morosco and he's got a Sona. But Mike doesn't have one of those finished 220-volt heaters. So he has a wood stove and there's no limit to how hot it's going to be. So he cranks up the wood stove for me. It's like 220 degrees. And I'm like, this is a sauna. If you're going to pair ice bath and sauna, do it with a

traditional Finnish dry sauna and get it wicked hot. This is a Pete Nelson goes on Cam Haines podcast. And they were talking about this. And Pete said that the research that comes out of Finland, it's not done at 145 degrees Fahrenheit infrared sauna. All the research is done at the 175, 180 and up. So the infrared companies want to claim these benefits of sauna. And I think that they're not entirely wrong. If you're not pairing with cold plunge, you get in there and you work up a sweat and there's probably some benefits. But those are not, the studies that they might cite or suggest are not done with a product like theirs.

They're done with a product like Pete's or Nordic sauna or Salus sauna, the people who are really getting hot. And now I'm like, I got to get myself one of these that, I'm not going to do a wood stove in Phoenix, Arizona, but one that will get me up to that 200 degrees so I can go back and forth. Here's what Pete didn't say. Do not pair your ice bath with hot tub. Hot tub is warm and it feels good. And you might say, look, I'm getting thermal contrast therapy, but no, you're not. Even though it's warm, the hot tub is also wet. And there's a phenomenon called hydromiosis, which I might not even be pronouncing correctly. If you Google

hydromiosis, Google's going to think you meant something else. It's not even going to take you to hydromiosis. Your body knows when the skin is wet. The thermoregulatory mechanism of sweating only works when the sweat can evaporate. That's what takes the heat off. If your skin is wet, hydromiosis is this phenomenon where your body will not sweat into wet skin. So you go into the hot tub, you sweat through your head. If your arms are out, you sweat through your arms. You can lose water weight in a hot tub, but you're only sweating through those parts of your body that are undergoing vasodilation. Everything else, vasoconstriction, because your body will reduce blood flow to your skin to try

and reduce the heat that is being pushed into your body. When you do the ice bath, it's vasoconstriction. When you do the hot tub, it's also vasoconstriction. So go back and forth when you're doing thermal contrast. I'm not really crapping on hot tubs. They feel great. People enjoy them. But when you're going for thermal contrast, dry sauna, wet, cold, and that gives you vasoconstriction, vasodilation. This works your smooth muscle tissue. And I'm waiting for the study that shows you get even better cardiovascular benefits. I'd like to do this study myself at ASU because I'm not able to point to the paper. Instead, I'm putting this forth as a hypothesis that when you go wet, cold, dry heat, it will accelerate your acquisition of cardiovascular and circulatory benefits. When it comes to the sauna, I do believe there's,

some people have talked about it, accelerating some of the benefits of like zone two cardio. I don't know if you've heard that before, but that might be exactly kind of what you're referring to by going from the cold to the heat and accelerating some of that as well. I was surprised to find how high my heart rate went when I was in the sauna. I'm like not even doing anything or whether it's hot yoga, I'm doing, you know, whatever, some, I'm doing downward dog. How can I possibly be elevated? But then you measure it. You're like, wow, my heart is really working. There is a cardiovascular workout. There's something called a mimetic. So there are exercise mimetics. And what the term

means is it's not the same thing, but you get a lot of the same benefits. So maybe it's 80% of the benefits you get from exercise you can also get from the sauna or from the cold. Because whether it's metabolic benefits or increased endurance, you might not get the same strength and muscle tone, but you will get some of the other benefits that exercise would ordinarily confer by doing the ice bath. I know Mike Mutzel also has talked about this idea of just like cold therapy period

rather than just thinking of cold always being something that you're doing in water. And he mentioned to me years ago the positive impact of even just walking outside. And I think you said it earlier, being like underdressed a little bit and just feeling that cold and then just getting chills, right? It's kind of what you're looking for, shiver. Huberman has popularized this term called deliberate cold exposure. And I used it for a while because it doesn't mean just water.

It could also mean cryotherapy. It could also mean underdressing. The deliberate is really important. Not accidental cold exposure, but deliberate. So it's intentional and you're under control. So I think he's got a really good term that envelopes cryotherapy, like the cryo chamber, just going out in the wintertime and maybe you're shoveling your sidewalk. You probably don't have that problem here, but I grew up in Pittsburgh. I made a lot

of money shoveling sidewalks when I was a kid. And you do it in a t-shirt instead of in your full parka. You're getting a little cold into your life. When you think about our ancestors, ancestors could mean my grandparents, you know, who didn't have their heated leather seats in there as they got cold, but they didn't do it therapeutically. Whatever my Nana did, you know, to survive the depression and survive the world wars and things like that, she didn't do it and say, oh, I'm going to podcast about this later and, you know, post it on social media so everybody can see how tough I am. If I had gone to my grandma, she looked till she was 99 and said, hey, grandma, you can make it to 100 if you do some ice baths. She would have told me to go to hell. I mean, she's more polite than I am. Right. But no, she was tough. Nobody would make her eat broccoli

either. Cause she didn't like it. You know, she said, I've had enough hardship in my life and I'm not going to argue with the woman. She, the hard work that my grandparents did have made it a lot easier for me. And the irony is I now have to go find the discomfort that was thrust upon them. So I really like what Hugh Ruman says, like the deliberate cold exposure. It is now why I use the term cold plunge therapy. And the therapy is meant, it's intended to be therapeutic.

Like if it stops me in therapeutic, then don't do it. And because I'm an ice bath guy, I'm about the water. A lot of the research on cryotherapy, so cold air, ports over to cold water really well. But we're starting to see more and more people just study the cold bath, like the whole body immersion. The thing about Mike that I think is really interesting is he came up with this triple stack protocol. First you do the cold, then you do the exercise, then you do the Sona for recovery from the exercise. Now people have studied exercise and Sona and they've studied cold and exercise, but nobody has ever done a scientific study of this triple stack. And so I got a feeling he's been experimenting when he

comes on the show, tell him, oh, so Zeger says you're doing a triple stack and see what he says. It's a really good idea. Now there's this. Cold plunging daily is one of the dumbest things you can do, especially if you're already stressed and have low thyroid like most people today. Sure, do it every now and then, but it's not the panacea it's made out to be. Cold plunging is the most stressful thing you could do to yourself. Your body doesn't know you're in a nice Los Angeles studio cold plunging. It thinks you're on the Titanic sinking. In nature, falling in cold meant you were going to die. As a result, it massively spikes adrenaline and all of your stress hormones. Right when you get out of the cold plunge, it feels amazing. Just like how surviving a plane

crash would. You thought you'd die and then you didn't. Most people today are already overly stressed and low body temperature from low thyroid function. Our body temp needs to be around 98.6 for optimal function. The last thing they need is more cold. If this is you, you're basically just aging yourself faster for a mood boost. Don't blindly hop on this bandwagon just because it's sexy. The most stressful thing you can do to your body. It's like a plane crash,

like the Titanic actually. Wow. Have you had anybody who was on that Alaska Airlines flight where the door blew out on your podcast yet? Did you ask them if they felt euphoric and they wanted to do it again? Like, yeah, that was awesome. Let's do that again. I'm a stat.

How did an ice bath get to be like a plane crash? And I'll tell you how. How many likes you have on that one? How many click-throughs on that one? When you make these sensational hyperbolic claims and you do it with beautiful models who are, you know, it's very visually attractive. It's super well done. You go into my Instagram and you're going to see the crappy cell phone like stuff that aesthetically, I think I should probably up my game. But that's not what I object to. When someone is an Instagram

entertainer, you got to expect them to do entertaining things, right? They're going to exaggerate. They're going to make claims that sound ridiculous because they are ridiculous, but that's what gets people on their channel. What I object to is Carnivore, she put up like a graph. Wait, you just said she? Do you know who Carnivore? I've never met Carnivore Aurelius. I don't know who Carnivore Aurelius is. I don't know how she, he identifies like gender wise. I don't know what Carnivore's politics are, but Carnivore is anonymous. And if you're thinking Carnivore is a he,

I would say, well, why do you say he? And I can tell you why I say she later on, but I'm going to complete the objection. There's a scientific paper, right? And Carnivore says, look, body temperature, you know, and it's been going down. What Carnivore never said was inside that paper, the authors claim the body temperature has been going down over this decadal timeframe because people are getting healthier. Carnivore misrepresents the science. Now, you can be a clown or a magician.

You can do illusion tricks on Instagram and get a lot of clicks and I'm not going to begrudge you. Okay. Maybe 10% jealous because you know, I got my 15,000, not even little followers, but the day I cross 15, I'll be like, Hey, you're really making it. I'm not, that's not a moral objection when people are doing entertaining things. But when you take the science, you put my profession up there and then you deliberately misinterpret the science, try and make people think that the study says one thing when the authors of the study said, no, this means something else. Body temperature is going down over time because people are healthier. When you get sick, you get a fever and that's to help you fight the infection. People are less infected. They are less sick. And so their body temperature is going down. That doesn't,

that doesn't conclude. I'm not claiming that the ice bath, you should reduce your body temperature or you should shoot for lower body temperature. What I'm saying is that the ice bath, you should reduce your body temperature. You should shoot for lower body temperature. What I'm saying is Carnivore deliberately misrepresented the science to put like some science flavoring into an entertaining video. And I was going to ignore it, except it kept showing up in my DMs. There are, I don't know, 250,000 likes on that video. And if I get to 250, I congratulate my media team and say, you guys are doing a great job. That was practically a viral hit right there. And they know that we're a tiny little account and would hardly make a dent in the public awareness of ice baths. But the people who follow me and follow Morosco, they are the true believers.

They want to know like the science that we're putting out. And they kept saying, but Professor Seeger, what's your rebuttal? So I said, all right, I'm going to have to do a rebuttal. Me and AJ, we wrote out like, these are the six points. You know, I think we called it an ice bath is nothing like a plane crash, you know, being on the Titanic. She's referencing another satirical video. They're like, did up a fake podcast to try and make seem like everybody on the Titanic should have lived forever because they were thrown into the North Atlantic ocean. And it was funny. It wasn't even meant to be serious. You only go into the ice bath of your

own volition. It is nothing like being thrown into the North Atlantic Ocean against your will. So we made these points. And for me to get through every single one of the points took three takes. And she had a really good idea. She's like, and Tom, do it in the ice bath because we don't know who carnivore is. We carnivore really says never posted her labs. She's never posted a picture of herself in the ice bath. You know, she's never said, and by the way, I suffer from thyroid disorder. And so I did an ice bath and it made my thyroid work. There's no personal experience. She's get in the ice bath and do the rebuttal from the ice bath. Nassim, 22 minutes later, I'm like on the third take and I can barely talk. And AJ goes, well, do you want to talk about the connection between the sexiness and the ice bath again? I'm like, no,

I'm freezing. We'd like this as a cut and get me out of here. The day I see Carnivore post her labs, get into the ice bath and tell us what happened to her health and her body is the day I'll start taking this seriously. Other than that, I'm just, I'm posting the rebuttal because people ask me to, because they don't want to see, you know, the bully on the playground making fun of them or something without the truth being out there for the people who know what their own experience is, there's a little bit of validation when they hear me say it. The thyroid thing that was mentioned, is there something to that, the low thyroid?

Well, the video claims that most people suffer from an underactive thyroid. And that's kind of interesting. Not most people I know, but it is true that there are a lot of women who suffer from hypo or underactive thyroid or thyroiditis. They have a thyroid disorder and it knocks off their metabolism. It causes them to become obese

and they don't feel good about it. Now, if I'm trying to sell them something, you could say, like, I'm trying to sell them an ice bath. But the way that you sell to these people is you say, well, you deserve to feel better. You feel bad. And I can give you something that's gonna help you feel better.

That might be a spa day or a facial or something. Look, an ice bath doesn't feel good. So if I'm trying to sell it, what am I going to do? No, you need to kill your inner bitch and get into that ice like Joe. You know, it's not the sales pitch that resonates with that demographic. And women spend like 80% of the discretionary money in America. Now, how are you going to, well, you know, you need a wine, you need a mimosa, you need a mimosa brunch. That's going to make you feel better. When you're selling to people's feelings, you do it exactly like this. The truth of the thyroid and the ice bath, totally different. You want to fix your thyroid? Get uncomfortable for the 30 seconds that's going to scare the crap

out of you. Because when the thermal receptors in your skin sense the cold, they send a signal to your hypothalamus. Your hypothalamus signals your brown fat and it says, get busy, brown fat. And all this stuff is happening in your sympathetic, and you hate every minute of it. And then 30 seconds later, you're like, oh, I wonder what I was worried about. So a lot of these people who might be doing this alone and experiencing like, just like, again, the PTSD you mentioned earlier in the podcast, maybe they need somebody to walk them through. Maybe they need to start at a slightly higher temperature, but it needs to be a gradual process, not just dunking yourself into 33.

I'm glad you said that. Cause part of me is right there with Joe. No, Morosco sucks worse, kill you and your bitch. And part of me is like, go easy on yourself. sucks worse, kill your inner bitch. And part of me is like, go easy on yourself. Don't judge yourself relative to what Joe Rogan is doing on his podcast. You are not a famous person. You are not out there. I'm not speaking to you, Nassim. I'm speaking to you, right? I know you're famous, right? You're not out there for clicks or whatever. Keep an image in your mind of the person that you wish you were and work gradually, incrementally towards that image. I really like what Tony Robbins says. And Tony Robbins is a cold plunge guy, but you know, he keeps his like 50 degrees. And I don't know Tony, I've never communicated with Tony, but if he ever shows up in my life, I'm like, Tony, I'm not

walking on any of those coals until you get into that ice. You know, I'm like, how can you be extreme in all aspects of your life? But no 50 degrees. One of the things he says that I really like is 1% better every day. Tony's not a mathematician or an engineer. Like he doesn't really understand exponential growth, but he definitely understands psychology. Could I do 1%? Could I do one degree?

And so when I say go easy on yourself, I only mean that in the context of the pace at which you are challenging yourself. If you like gotta get it all done right now, right away, you're just setting yourself up for failure and feeling like crap. If you say, maybe I can't do a workout today, but I can put my shorts on,

I can tie my sneakers up and I can go do a workout today, but I can put my shorts on, I can tie my sneakers up, and I can go to the gym. To me, that could still be a win. If that's all you have today is to go to the gym and say hi to some people who are working out and say, well, I don't really feel it today. But I wanted to see what people were working on because maybe I'll learn something. That's progress. And that's the context in which I would want people to approach the ice bath. The thyroid is only part of what regulates metabolism. Brown fat is the other part.

And the thyroid and the brown fat have to work together. They are constantly signaling one another. Brown fat takes T3 because there are different forms of thyroid hormone and will convert it to the more active form of T4. And so if you suffer from a thyroid irregularity, it's likely because you don't have any brown fat left. When you do 7 to 10 days of regular cold exposure, you feel that shiver, you will recruit new brown fat. And this gives your thyroid something to communicate with.

The brown fat modulates the function of the thyroid. So you got underactive thyroid, brown fat will moderate it, bring it up. Hyperactive thyroid, brown fat will moderate it, bring it down. These two have to work together. And if you don't get regular cold, your body has no more brown fat. No wonder your thyroid is dysregulated. Carnivore seems very concerned about people with thyroid problems. And I'm sensitive to that too. Let's get them in the cold. Since when was stress bad? Like, I'm going to say, we'll just grant this part.

It's the most stressful thing you can do. Okay. Why is that a bad thing? Because Kelly McGonigal did a whole TED talk. She wrote a book called The Upside of Stress. Kelly's a Stanford psychiatrist, right? And her TED talk, millions of views. One of the things that she wrote in her book is about the cold pressure test and the standardized instrument for, then she goes, it's so difficult to do. It is so stressful that if you immersed your entire body in ice water for more than two minutes, you would die. And I'm paraphrasing.

She said, you die in a few minutes. I don't know. Here I am. Mark, you're not dead. You know, last time I checked, she's wrong about that. And it's so wild because she's into physiology. And now she's on Instagram going, you know, your muscles are a secretory organ. They're not just for strength and movement, but they're essential to your metabolism. Oh, she just made a mistake in her book. I mean, she was kind of exaggerating the stress of the ice bath. I get why people exaggerate to make a point and her point survives that exaggeration, but we need stress. And the upside of stress, she discovered that it is your beliefs about stress that are more important than the experience of the stress itself. I hope I don't need to say this, that people understand it's only eustress or hormetic stress, beneficial stress, up to a point. You can injure yourself.

There are things you can do that can kill yourself. But hypothermia takes a long time. You've got to have been in there half an hour before your core body temperature really starts to go down. A constant thing that's been beneficial for all of our health has been intaking enough protein, but also intaking quality protein. And that's why we've been partnering with Good Life Proteins for years now. Good Life not only sells Piedmontese beef, which is our favorite beef. And the main reason why it's our favorite is because they have cuts of meat that have higher fat content like their ribeyes and their chuck eyes, but they also have cuts of meat like their flat iron. Andrew, what's the macros on the flat iron? Yeah, dude. So the flat iron has 23 grams of protein, only two grams of

fat, but check this out. Their grass-fed sirloin essentially has no fat and 27 grams of protein. There we go. So whether you're dieting and you want lower fat cuts or higher fat cuts, that's there, but you can also get yourself chicken. You can get yourself fish. You can get yourself scallops. You can get yourself all types of different meats. And I really suggest going to Good Life and venturing in and maybe playing around with your proteins. I mean, going back to the red meat,

there's picanha. There's all kinds of stuff. There's chorizo sausage. There's maple bacon. That stuff's incredible. The maple bacon is so good. Yes, the maple bacon is really good. Maple bacon is really good. Yo, my girl put those in these bell peppers with steak and chicken.

Oh, my God. It was so good. But either way, guys, protein is essential. And Good Life is the place where you can get all of your high-quality proteins. So, Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, you can head over to goodlifeproteins.com and enter promo code POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your entire order. Links in the description as well as the podcast show notes. I love that saying where they say,

if you want to get something done, give it to the busiest person in the room. You know, and probably the least busy person in the room probably feels really stressed, where the person that's getting all this other stuff done has figured out a way to navigate it to where it's not, you know, landing on their shoulders so heavily. If you're one of those people who's like, oh, the stress is killing me. You're right.

And if you're one of those people who's like, oh, this is tough. Yeah, let's get into this challenge. Jaco does this. He's like- Is that part of your engineering, you think? Your engineering background? Do you think it has to problem solve a little bit or does that come from somewhere else? So this is the way I teach engineering.

Engineers are wonderful problem solvers. But where do the problems come from? And all their engineering education, the problems come from me. I'm the professor. They come from the book, right? We're handing them the problems. Well, who decides what problems are worth working on? Because it's not actually engineers.

We don't teach them problem identification or formulation. It's a guy like Elon Musk says, you know, I want an electric car. And then he starts hiring a bunch of engineers and they figure it out. It's like President Kennedy. He says, I want to go to the moon. I want to come back alive, you know? And then the next thing you know, we got NASA and we got a whole bunch of engineers. Engineers are great problem solvers.

Need direction though, huh? Yeah. Who's giving them the problems? Because that takes imagination and creativity. And the worst thing about saying that you care about something is you open yourself up to criticism. And think about this from, you know, the playground days. You're being criticized for whatever. And every child learns, I don't care. I don't care. Like, ooh, you still, the playground days, you're being criticized for whatever. And every child learned,

I don't care. I don't care. Like, ooh, you still like Power Rangers? You know, whatever that- No. No, I don't like that. I don't watch Barney. And then inside, you know, there's a six-year-old and some part of him is dying because his peers disapproved and he has to fake apathy to just to manage his own feelings. When you come out and you say, this is what I want. You open yourself up to criticism from people who could say, ooh, you want that? You know, there must be something wrong with you. It's a very brave act to say, I care about this and I want this thing.

And people are going to come out and ridicule you for it. You were mentioning earlier hot yoga. And then you mentioned this like triple stack from Mike Mutzel. And then you were, I don't know, just some of the stuff you were mentioning. And you're mentioning, you know, warming yourself back up after you're done with some cold therapy. Do you think there'll be a point where there's and i heard you talk about the research on the 60 degree room which maybe you can get into a little bit of that but do you think we're going to start to see some pop-ups of some cold uh cardio classes uh you know because i think that

there could be some efficacy around that helping people to burn a little bit more calories burn i mean why wouldn't you want to burn a little bit more calories burn a little bit more calories burned. I mean, why wouldn't you want to burn a little bit more calories, burn a little bit more fat while you're on your bike or whatever it might be? There's an entrepreneur in Arizona. Um, and I'm trying, I'm searching my brain for like, what am I not allowed to say? Um, because, uh, he's got some really good ideas about combining exercise and cold. He's not the only people who have them. So this is what I'm allowed to say. You remember Rocky, like you're about 10 years younger than I, I was 10 years old, you know, when Rocky came out and I thought it was like the best thing ever. So my daughter's really into movies. She works on the movie business now. And I think this is my fault because when she was young,

I was getting her, I'm like DVDs. This is great. I was getting her all the movies of my youth and I was having her watch them. And she's, sometimes she's like, dad, you had no business watching, you know, my cousin Vinny with me when I was five years old. Or, you know, sometimes when I look at Yellow Submarine, I'm like, what was I doing to my kids? That was stupid. But some of the classic movies of my youth, I wanted to share them with her. She goes, dad, if Rocky knew he was going to lose, why did he even get into the ring? And I'm like, oh, Emma, you have to understand. He needed to know if there was something inside him that was worthwhile, you know?

Well, he gives Adrian the speech. He said, I want to prove that I'm not just another bum from the neighborhood. That's exactly right. Because his life wasn't worth living anyway. If he doesn't get into the ring, what does he have to live for? And that's a heavy duty concept, you know, for an eight-year-old girl. But then she grows up and she does Krav Maga.

So this is why I say, like, this is my fault. Where did Rocky go to train? He goes to Russia. No, that was a sequel. Oh, he goes to a dirty, stinky gym. It wasn't even a gym. He goes, I mean, yes, that was his boxing facility, right? But he goes to the meat locker where Paulo or whoever it was, right? And he starts punching the meat and he's punching it out of anger, right? And he, I think you broke the ribs, you know? And then he goes back to the meat locker and he goes back and he goes back. He's punching it out of anger, right? And he, I think you broke the ribs, you know? And then he goes back to the meat locker

and he goes back and he goes back. He's training in the cold because he discovered something. It worked for him, you know? You remember the scene, it's called Philadelphia Morning. The very first time he runs up the steps and he's like, he's got all his sweats on and he can barely make it.

And then the second time he runs up the steps and it's the winter time. He's like this. He doesn't look like he's all, he's got all his sweats on and he can barely make it. And then the second time he runs up the steps and it's the wintertime. He's like this. He doesn't look like he's all bundled up anymore. So the Rocky movie is unconsciously orienting us to train in the cold. Now, no scientist has ever come along and said, oh, I wonder if Rocky's onto something. You know, I wonder if that actually works. And say, hey, let's measure some VO2 max. Let's measure some heart rate under, you know, high strain. Let's put somebody on a treadmill. Like, see, he's got his hat on

and he's got, right? He wants to stay warm until he discovers how to train in the cold. And so I'm ready to go. There's the human performance lab at Arizona State. It's run by my friend, Marco Santello. And I'm like, I want to do the Rocky study. I want to put people in the freezer and I want to see what happens to the measures of their metabolism while they're training

and see if we can tease out the Rocky effect. You're not going to be able to sell it the same way that hot yoga is sold, I don't think, you know, I think that's the only issue. I'm not much of a marketer. What's this a 60 degree room study. I think that's really interesting. This is, if I'm remembering right, it's 2015, it's Hansen et al. This is out of Germany. And he takes a group of type two diabetic, I'm going to call them middle-aged because I'm 58, right? And they're a little older than me. He takes these guys who are type two diagnosed. He's going to run an experiment over 10 days and it's going to be in cold exposure.

Well, he brings them together and they're not allowed to exercise because he wants to remove the confounding variables. They got to eat the same way that they eat. So here's snacks and you can watch football, you know, you just got to hang out in a cold room. And he gradually makes it colder over the course of the experiment. And he gradually puts them in there longer. He asked them, did you shiver? Almost none of them shiver. Were you uncomfortably cold? Well, only sometimes, you know, about 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Although I don't remember because they did all the reporting in Celsius, you know, not even that cold is the point. At the end of 10 days, they get a 60 to 80% improvement in insulin sensitivity. It is so dramatic that I'm guessing if they had rerun the diagnostics, several of them never would even meet the diagnostic criteria for type 2 diabetes.

Imagining that you can reverse type 2 diabetes in 10 days without drugs, without changes in diet, without exercise, that's how powerful the cold is. And how does it work? By activating and recruiting the brown fat to improve your insulin sensitivity. Now, you don't need an ice bath for that. That was just like keeping the thermostat low. But a lot of people who are sensitive to the cold will get exactly the wrong advice from their medical doctor. Oh, you know, you should bundle up and you should stay warm and you should make yourself comfortable

because that's what we do for people who are terminally ill. The advice that the typical medical doctor is not going to be hormesis it's not going to be stress it's not going to be these are the holistic measures that you can take to reverse what we would otherwise call your chronic illness because there's no money in that. There's only money in sick people. Sick people are a constant stream of revenue for the pharmaceutical industry, constant stream of revenue for what Cruz would call centralized medicine. Why would we bother to heal them? And that's a pretty cynical view. And it doesn't apply to all doctors. My experience of doctors really started in 2010 when my son was six years old

and he was diagnosed with type one diabetes. I didn't know what was going on. And our pediatrician at the time was also our next door neighbor. I find that people have a lot of affection for their individual doctor, even if they're angry at institutional medicine. And this is nothing I say is a criticism

of my next door neighbor who diagnosed my son, who's a wonderful human being. But when he came up to me in the hospital and he handed me an orange and he handed me an insulin syringe, and he said, nobody leaves this hospital until you figure these things out because your son has diabetes and your life is going to change. I was like, what the fuck? Well, we met with the dieticians. We met with the endocrinologists. Like, this became the focal point of my life. And they're full of lies. They're saying, the American Diabetes Association will say, you know, here's a healthy plate for diabetics.

And there's carbohydrates all over it. They'll say, oh, he can eat whatever he wants as long as you bolus for it. Or at that time, I mean, bolus is a term used with an insulin pump. At that time, it was all injections. As long as you shoot enough H into his bloodstream, he can eat whatever he wants. And Mark, there is no amount of insulin that will prevent a blood sugar spike in a six-year-old boy who eats an Oreo cookie. At least that's my experience. So we kept scrupulous records of his exercise, his diet, and his insulin. And we discovered that we could not trust the advice we were getting from the medical community. So now when I approach, you know, what Cruz calls centralized medicine, it's only a slight exaggeration to say,

I don't believe any of it. I got to go to the library. I got to find the studies. You tell me my LDL cholesterol is too high. And then I go to the library and I find out low LDL cholesterol is associated with increased mortality. High LDL cholesterol is associated with longer, healthier lives. So what is this bullshit about my lipid panel? You know, I don't trust any of it. Okay. I want to rewind real quick when you mentioned the reversing type two diabetes with the cold and without the change in nutrition or like what, where was that done? Because when somebody hears that, that's where like someone's alarms go off like, Oh God, this is ridiculous. But can you explain that a bit further? I mean, I know you did, but can you, can you elaborate?

Type two diabetes is a lifestyle disorder. It's reversible by making changes in your lifestyle. Sure. And exercise is great. Getting the seed oils and the carbohydrates out of your diet is great. That is, just because this study went without exercise and without changes in diet, doesn't mean I recommend it.

Change your diet, improve your lifestyle, get your exercise. The study excluded changes in diet and exercise because they wanted to isolate on the cold. Okay. Okay. It was done in Germany, which has a good reputation for doing good science. And there are other studies that corroborate these findings. I happen to cite this one because it's so dramatic and it came with some really good graphs that show the improvement on insulin sensitivity. But it's almost 10 years old.

And there are other studies that have backed up what this study has found. Okay. If you are suffering from type 2 diabetes, and maybe your doctor has you on metformin, and maybe you're doing insulin, you're doing a lot of damage to your body. insulin, you're doing a lot of damage to your body because you are reducing the blood sugar. That is, you're treating this marker of the disease. You are not healing the disease. So I got Ben Bickman on the phone. He was gracious enough to do a video interview with me, and he knows more about insulin and mitochondria than I do. He was the one who alerted me to the damaging effects of metformin. Well, I told Ben this hypothesis, right?

I can't tell you that this is a scientific fact. But the question is, which comes first, the mitochondrial damage or the insulin resistance, because the two are closely associated. Here's the hypothesis. Insulin resistance is your body's attempt to protect the injured mitochondria. The mitochondria suffer from overwork without recovery. So that could be too many seed oils that alter the membranes in the cell and the membranes in the mitochondria and result in insulin resistance and mitochondrial dysfunction. It could be a disruption in your circadian rhythm. It could be that your light hygiene isn't very good because mitochondria make their own melatonin and melatonin is a powerful antioxidant. When your mitochondria are working really hard, they will produce reactive oxygen species

like stray electrons. The melatonin will donate to those reactive oxygens. Their electrons kind of sacrificing themselves to protect the mitochondrial DNA. Light hygiene, referring to getting outside and so forth. Get your sunlight. Yeah, keep it dark at the night and keep it light

during the day. There's a lot on blue light. And God, I want to remind people that the sky is blue. Like blue light is okay during the day. And then after sunset, lay off the blue light because the sky is dark now. And so this is what I mean by light hygiene. Putting light in proportion or in sync with the circadian rhythm allows melatonin to protect your mitochondria from damage during overwork. And it's okay to overwork your mitochondria sometimes as long as you give them times to recover. Ketosis is another one because ketosis is metabolism without the carbohydrates. And this allows your mitochondria a break. Mitobiogenesis can take over. So all of this is great. We're talking about mitochondrial therapies when we're talking about cold exposure,

magnesium, ketogenic diet. The mitochondria are at the core of life itself. That is, life is a thermodynamic process of energy flowing through your body, a constant fight against entropy. Without the thermodynamics, there is no life. What's the difference between a dead body? You know, all the cells are in the right place. All the molecules are in the right place. In a live body, it is just the flow of energy through the body and mitochondria are what control that flow. So the theory is that insulin resistance is your body attempting to protect your mitochondria from further damage.

Like we're gonna keep that glucose in the bloodstream for a little while and we're gonna slowly meter it, like the mitochondria exposure to it. So the mitochondria can convert it into forms that will be stored within the body. This is a compelling hypothesis to me. And I don't know if Ben Bickman really knew what to say.

He's not validating it. And he's not saying it's wrong. He's saying, well, that's an interesting way to think about it. And everything that he tells me he knows in mitochondria doesn't suggest that I'm misunderstanding. I'm not qualified to run that study. I wanna meet back with Ben and say, what would it take?

What's the experiment? Who is qualified to do it? How do we fund it? And how do we figure out whether insulin resistance and high blood sugar is just a symptom of this underlying cause, which means your mitochondria are already damaged. You heal your mitochondria and you will fix your high blood sugars. Since type two diabetes are all measured about blood sugar, then you no longer

meet those diagnostic criteria. Guess what? You don't have that disease. You got something over there, Andrew? Is it cool if we switch gears a little bit? Yeah. We talked a little bit before in the gym. Quick, quick background. In elementary school, I had tons of migraines, took me out of school for a long time. As I got older, they slowed down, but it was more of probably just like dealing with it than anything. And then as I got older, they kind of never went away. Went to the doctors when I was a kid, migraines and, I'm sorry, MRIs, all kinds of medications, nothing really truly worked. Up to this day, I get about one to two headaches a month.

Not like it's like clockwork at this point. You have a device that could potentially help someone like me. If you have, you know, worked with somebody with similar conditions as mine, how did that work out? And if so, like, what is it about this green light that seems to be able to help out people? I want to help people find mygreenlamp.com because Google hates it. You'll never search for it. But I sell these green phototherapy devices at

mygreenlamp.com. I co-invented them. Yeah, there you go. And I'm going to tell you another story about AJ, but I need to preface it. She's beautiful and smart and wonderful to be with. And every time I say, you know, well, she had this health issue. And then, so we started working on it together. I don't want you to get the wrong impression, but she gets migraines. Just at the time that that became important to me in our relationship, I suggested acupuncture because I had a friend who said that worked really well for his girlfriend. And his advice was, but it's got to be like that old grandmother, Chinese acupuncture, or it's not going to work. And so she did, she tried it. And she came back to me and said, no, acupuncture didn't really work for me. I said, was it an old Chinese grandmother? And she goes, no, no, it was an American who said she'd studied

in China. I'm like, no, no, you got to find. And it worked when she found the right acupuncturist and then it wears off. Well, I was working on UV light. I was working on light hygiene. I have a friend, Scott Chiaveri, he founded a light company called Mito Red. And for whatever reason, I don't know, Google Scholar sent me some notification because it knew that I was working on light. And it was a paper out of Harvard and it was green light and photosensitivity for migraine. All the visible wavelengths of light will exacerbate a migraine. It's called photosensitivity.

And Andrew, I think you were explaining to me that you find like a dark room when you suffer a migraine because of this photosensitivity, except 530 nanometer green light. Would this help with someone with a hangover? Because someone with a hangover, sometimes aren't they like that? I have one friend who's tried it and he said, no. And I'm like, I'm so disappointed because I'd make a billion dollars, right?

And he goes, it's two headaches it won't touch. One is hangover and one is a high estrogen headache among women who are perimenopausal. Traumatic brain injury headache, stress headache, sinus headache, migraine headache, post-concussion syndrome headache. And I've got great reports from clinicians and from patients about the green light. University of Arizona did some follow-up studies and they confirmed the Harvard results. So this shows up and I call up Scott and I'm like, Hey, could you make one of your red lights, but just put green LEDs in it? And Scott's like, well, I don't see why not. You know, and, uh, comes in a couple of weeks later, we've got

this prototype. He calls me up and he says, this is garbage. I'm like, what's the matter? He goes, oh, it's never going to work. It's too bright. And, you know, I told him not to do this and blah, blah, blah. So I'm with AJ and I go, well, I got to see it for myself. And we drive over to his office in Scottsdale, which is terrible because he's got the fluorescent lights. And, you know, for a light guy, he needs better light hygiene in his office. AJ gets there and she's already got a headache just walking into the room. I pop open this green light and I'm like, oh, Scott, you're right. This is terrible. It's way too bright. She says, give me that. And so she takes it, she closes her eyes and she puts it

right up against her face. And she says, this feels really good. This takes my headache from a seven down to about a three and you're not getting it back. She wants this thing. And I turned to Scott and I'm like, I think we just invented the world's most powerful green phototherapy device. It will work through closed eyelids. So I've been selling these two. And the reports that I'm getting

from the doctors who are using them and the patients who are using them are 80%. This is a miracle. And 20%, this didn't work for me. It seems to either be super effective or% this didn't work for me. It seems to either be super effective or it just doesn't work at all. Nobody knows why. The Harvard researchers, they don't know why.

The University of Arizona, they don't know the mechanisms. But there is a story that goes behind it. 1992 paper compiled data from all over the world and they said these are the wavelengths of light that dominate shady forests. Well, of course they're green and then the invisible near infrared. Those are the two wavelengths in the forest.

And there's something called forest bathing. What does forest bathing do? You go out into the forest just a couple hours a week, promotes healing, improves mood. And people have done this with patients recovering from surgery, patients recovering from chemotherapy. And there's a fairly consistent pattern of the health benefits of forest bathing. I live in Phoenix, Arizona. I can't get to the

forest. Like even if I could, you know, drive up to Payson or something, it wouldn't be shady, you know? So I'm bringing the forest light into my apartment, into the city. And there's something about it that reduces anxiety, reduces the pain of fibromyalgia and reduces the pain of the migraine. The really wild thing is it did not take away other symptoms of migraine.

So AJ was having a migraine and I said, well, you know, you gotta, you gotta pick up your daughter at school and you gotta do this kind of thing. You get like, there's never a good time for a migraine. Will you try the green goggles? Because she has this characteristic pattern of progression of her migraine starts with the visual disturbances. And she knows when those begin to end, she's about to get acute debilitating pain, but she also knows how to manage it. You know, the dark room, the remove the disturbances. She's like, ah, you know, I think I got a handle on this one. And I'm like, please try the goggles. I will go pick up your daughter at school. We'll do this together. She does, pain gone.

Everything else, the visual disturbance is there, the brain fog there. And so I asked her to turn on her phone and narrate her experience. We're driving, we're waiting at the high school, you know? And I say, do you remember your daughter's names? And she's like, I think so. You know, and she's kind of confusing

like their birth names and their nicknames, which she gets all four of them. The other symptoms did not disappear, but the pain, gone. And for her, it was like a surreal experience. Also the duration, sometimes a migraine would knock her out for like two, three days. Nope, so two, three hours. And so there was some incredible analgesic effect and something

else going on. I got one more anecdote for you because here's what the Harvard and University of Arizona scientists have never done. In science, you make your living as a specialist. You go to the conferences. If you're a headache guy, you go to the headache conferences. You read the headache literature and that's it. Nobody branches out because there's no incentives in science to do this. But what the hell? I'm not a light guy. I'm not a headache guy. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just on, you know, I'm an engineer. I'm building devices and things. And sure enough, there's a paper. They took rats and they conditioned them for fear response. So this is the kind of thing where like total Pavlovian, you give them a scent or you play a sound and then electric shock. And they learn how to associate the fear of the shock with the scent.

So now you don't even need the shock. They smell this thing and they're going to a panic. And then they drill a hole in their skull. What we do to rats sounds terrible, you know, but this is in the interest of science. They drill a hole in the skull. They insert a fiber optic thread and they shine green light on a particular portion of the brain.

It extinguishes the fear response. They no longer panic at the exact same stimulus, whether it's a sound or a scent. Then they take the fiber optic cable out and the fear comes back. What is it about the mammalian brain that can extinguish anxiety and pain with green light? And so I really have to stretch my imagination for this one.

And I'm like, okay, let's imagine our ancient ancestors, wherever they are, I don't know, East Africa or something like this. And the threat shows up. Where would you go? Would you go right up the tree? Because that's where I'm thinking I'm going to go. And if you're in the forest, like how would you know to do that? If we are wired instinctively to seek the comfort, the shade, the protection of the shady forest, then would it make sense that we were like going toward the green? And I know this is like story time.

This isn't science, right? But the source of hypotheses is our own imagination and creativity. So hypothesizing that the green does something we don't understand in our brain that takes our anxiety down, that takes the pain away, because there's some kind of evolutionary element that we have yet to discover. And I'll send you a light. I want you to try it and let me know whether you're in that 80 or that 20 category. Yeah, I'll be happy to report everything back.

And so you're saying like the other, like I'll say side effects of a migraine or a headache don't go away. Because one of the things that is huge for me is when a headache starts coming, I get, they're called floaters. You know, they're just like kind of these, I mean, I have them right now. They're just like black spots all around, you know, my vision. And so I know then it's like, okay, shoot, I have like two more hours until it starts to come on. This one's not going to be bad.

I already know I'm going to be able to work through it. But in about four hours, my vision is going to go. And so that's why I was hoping that, you know, the green light would at least maybe kind of push like that out even further. Or if maybe if I can mitigate the even slight headache, then potentially it could, you know, again, help mitigate the like the after effects of having bad vision. like the after effects of having bad vision. But even if it just makes the, the time and the duration of a headache shorter, because the last, I want to say when we almost lost my mom the first time,

I had a headache for like two weeks straight. Like it just wouldn't go away. No matter what I did, I tried everything. And these guys know, I don't really mess around with too much. Like, like I'll do like psilocybin from time to time,

but like weed, all that stuff. Like I do not like it. I tried everything. i did everything i could and it just wouldn't go away and so if i could have access to something like this to even like from one from two weeks down to one like oh my gosh like that would it would be life-altering i wish i could um promise you something uh because it sounds awful The experience that people are reporting to me is that the pain goes away. The duration of the episode is shorter, but the other symptoms persist. And that actually isn't a bad thing. And they're telling me this is not a criticism. I'll take it.

If I can take my pain from a nine to a two, that it feels to them miraculous. They'll live with the other stuff. It almost seems like whatever is causing the headache still is running its course, right? Like if the vision is still going, if I still have that like weird, blurry, fuzzy thing in the corner, and then as it moves over and then the migraines here, if that goes and runs its course, because I know once that blurry, it's like a weird spot if you guys have ever experienced it. It looks like an old-time TV with the squiggly lines, but it's just like a patch. And I could be looking at Encima,

and I actually don't see anybody there. But I know he's there, so I'll just look in that direction until that fuzzy spot goes all the way over, and it literally passes through the other side of my eye. Then the migraine is gone, or least it, you know, it's like sore at that point. So in my opinion, I think that's maybe it is a good thing because it's like, you're not, um, you know, almost like an antibiotic. Like if you just like explode everything, it's like, well, shoot, I think we needed that fever. We needed our body to run its course or whatever. So maybe that is a good thing when it comes to

a headache. That would make sense to me. to me because I've been talking to other people who know more about headaches than I do. And some people say, well, it's a hypoxic condition in the brain resulting from a valve defect in the heart. Well, it's an imbalance of electrolytes. And these things may be true, but what I'm convinced is correcting the condition will not result in immediate resolution of the headache. That you could like do the hyperbaric chamber and remedy the hypoxic condition if that's what it is. You could take the electrolytes and remedy that, but something still has to run its course.

You're probably wondering why am I wearing these glasses? Well, it's because I'm being bathed in blue light and blue light isn't necessarily bad. There's blue light in the sun, but if you're in your office, if you're indoors, if you're in front of a screen during the daytime, it's not a great idea to have your eyes being bathed by blue light all day long. That's why EMR Tech, a company that we've partnered with,

has blue light daytime glasses and blue light blocking evening glasses. These glasses right here are meant for you to wear during the daytime when you're in front of screens, et cetera. But if you're outside, take the glasses off and get the natural sunlight. And if you're at home in the evening when sun sets and you need to be in front of the TV or you need to be in front of your computer or on your's red light therapy devices, you will actually feel how much stronger the output of the red light is on those devices versus any of the competitors. They also have some of their smaller red light devices like their Fire Wave, Fire Dragon, and Fire Storm. And then if you want to get some of their bigger panels, they have their Fire Hawk, which is their biggest panel, and the Inferno panel. These are literally the best red light therapy devices on the market. And if you want to save on them, Andrew, how can they do that? Yes. You got to head over to emrtech.com.

That's E-M-R-T-E-C-H-T-E-K.com. And at checkout, enter promo code POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your entire order. Again, that's emrtech.com, promo code POWERPROJECT. Links in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. Do you think some of the cold criticism that's out there is maybe just because people are not understanding it very well? I think they're willfully not understanding it. The critics that you played, Dr. Mike, I guess it was, he's so absolute and so lacking in curiosity. And he's saying, I would never, ever for any of my patients ever. Some of the horrible things that medicine has done to their patients is when you look at the history of abuses.

What is it that is so terrible about this thing with no adverse side effects whatsoever that would make him so adamant that it is absolutely unquestionably out of bounds? I don't know. What I do know is that some people will resist it because it feels like crap. I mean, those 30 seconds before you get into the ice bath reduce me to an anxious, like, I feel pathetic. Like I'm going to procrastinate. I'm going to make excuses. It's not the person that I want to be. I don't want to confront those aspects of myself that are scared or anxious. And then I get in and I freaking do it. And then I say, what was I even worried about? You know, why do I go through this every time, Mark? Not on the positive we did today. Like I knew they were pretty warm and by warm, I mean, maybe low forties or something. That wasn't the big deal. But when I stare down at 18 inches of slush in my Morosco, I'm like, God dang it.

So that might be a reason to defend yourself against that expectation. People don't want to be expected to do this thing. Don't make me do that. That's a terrible thing. I have seen videos where one guy claiming to be a medical doctor said that all of the ice bath videos were fake. And he illustrated this by, he had a glass of water and it was like 120 degrees Fahrenheit. And he put an ice cube in the top and he said, see, you can have warm water with an ice cube floating in the top.

And so some people came onto the Morosco Instagram and said, oh, that's totally phony. You know, that's not good. I don't know what to tell you. Get in and see if it works for you. There is nothing that matters more than your N equals one experience. I don't give a crap what the P value on the randomized control. Are you in the 99%? Are you in the 1%? And until people say, I tried ice baths, they didn't really work for me. I don't see what there is to listen to them because there's no point in advice

from people who have never been where you're trying to go. How many times should someone give it a try before they kind of maybe might recognize that it's for them or not for them? How many minutes? And then temperature, we talked a bunch about temperature, just kind of start wherever you can with temperature, right? Let's take it from the top. How much should they try? I have a friend in Florida, I met him at a conference. He just couldn't do it. The emotions were too much. He would get in and he'd do like six or seven seconds. And I'm like, okay, breathe. Now we're going to structure everything.

He's can't do it. He's got to get out. Now you could say he should try one time. And one time if it works, you're like, okay, I'm going to do it. But in one time if it doesn't work, but he knew like somewhere in his unconscious, why it wasn't working. He knew that that was a challenge he had to have in his life. He didn't want to be that person who was having a panic

attack and had to get out. So he's like, all right, I'm going to keep working on it. Now he posts like three minute videos, you know? So in his case, the idea of whether it's working for you is a little bit ambiguous. Like, did you feel euphoria? Did you feel proud of yourself? Did you feel ecstasy? That's great. Then it's working for you. He felt something different and yet it was still working for him. Like his intuition was saying, this is the challenges you need in your life. So I don't know that I can say, oh, you have to try three times. Oh, you have to try it seven times or something like that. I think you should reflect on every experience. What does working for you mean?

Is it challenging you in a way that is bringing you closer to the person you really wish you were? Then it's working. Then on temperature, I have a friend with Parkinson's and he's a medical professional. He does not want to do L-DOPA. He knows that this is going to kill him. And he knows that the medical doctors are saying, well, you can do this and you'll feel better if you do that. And he's very skeptical.

So he's tried a little bit of L-DOPA and he's tried a little bit of that and the other things. And he says, I read your article about dopamine in the ice bath. And I have it in my head that maybe if my body is making the dopamine itself, instead of getting it exogenously, it won't burn out my dopamine receptors. Perhaps it will extend the quality of my life.

Could I give it a try? Of course, I'm not gonna put him in at 34 freaking degrees so we warm the thing up to like 46 and he had a difficult experience because

he at first couldn't tell the difference between thermogenic shivering and his Parkinson's tremors and it scared the crap out of him and I felt

like crap 46 what was I thinking I should have started him at 60 you know he bought him a Roscoe. He started it at 60. He says, I get hours of relief from the cramping in my foot, from his posture irregularities. He moves better. He does it with his wife. And so there's like a bonding

experience that happened between them. I'm like, oh, this is great. Now I feel more successful as a friend. I feel more successful as a scientist. I feel more successful as a businessman. He says, I'm going colder. And part of me was like, I want to be, no, don't do it. But he has to, he has to kind of explore that edge. He texts me two weeks later and he says, I'm down to 44. Is it ever going to stop? Like, am I ever going to like not shiver and have these things? And I go, hang on a second. You've been going a degree Fahrenheit colder every day, right? And he goes, yeah.

I goes, well, you're constantly acclimating yourself. No, it's not going to stop at this pace because you're challenging yourself. How about you just leave it at 44 for a while and see how it goes? You know, a couple of months later, he's going, great. It's going great. He's also doing methylene blue. He's doing everything he can to take care of his mitochondria. And he doesn't know if he's improving.

But if I, last time I saw him, I'm like, you look really good. Like you're standing up better. You're moving better. And his wife leaned over and said, yes, I've been telling him that too, but he doesn't see it. You know, he looks at himself in the mirror. He sees the same guy. And of course he's got every right to be anxious about this and kind of down about it, but he's going to keep doing it. What do you think of methylene blue? Can it enhance cold therapy and sunlight therapy and stuff like that?

Here's the only thing I knew about methylene blue. When I was a kid, we couldn't have a dog because my dad wouldn't allow us, right? The only pet we could have was fish, like in a fish tank. And when they got sick, I gave them methylene blue and then they got better. And this is all my knowledge of it. So because methylene blue will support mitochondrial function, you got to think maybe there's a stack in here, cold and red light and sunlight. Maybe there's like a super mitochondrial stack. We'll put some magnesium in there. It's for somebody else to do. And I hope that they will write to me

and tell me what they've discovered. What have you found that people like realized about breathing and the cold punch? Because one of the biggest things that's been beneficial for me through the years and every single time that I do it, there's still always that friction. That never goes away. But whenever I get in, I'm able to immediately start breathing in a way that can help me calm down. It's not fast breathing. I'm actually able to slow down. And that's something that I think is super powerful from it. I'm also one of those people that after I get out, I feel great. So it's one of those things where I know after I'm done, I'm going to feel great,

but I have to just get inside first, which still sucks to get that benefit. Seema, I've experienced the same thing. For me, the breath is critical to the experience, to the benefits of the ice bath. When I first started, I tried the Wim Hof breathing. There's a little bit of hyperventilation, some breath holds as you do, never in the water. Don't do the hyperventilation of the breath holds in the water, but it's part of the Wim Hof program. And I did it and it was boring. And I know that I bore easily, right? So probably not my fault and it works for, probably not the fault of the program

and it works for a lot of people, but I don't have the patience for the Wim Hof breathing. When I get into the ice bath, then I focus on my breath because breath exists between the voluntary and the involuntary systems. You don't have to tell your stomach to digest. Your stomach just does it, right? That's parasympathetic, like structuring. You don't have to tell yourself to breathe when you're working out or you're doing something. Your body just seems like, yeah, we're going to

take the breath up now. But you can override with the breath, the involuntary breath control, and you can make that voluntary. So this is what I mean. It exists on the border between the voluntary and the involuntary, on the border between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. So now when you take conscious control of your breath, you're taking control of a part of your body that could work involuntarily, unconsciously. And I've read that there are people, you know, whether they're monks or whatever, who can slow their heart rate down intentionally.

Wim Hof says he can activate his brown fat with his thoughts. Once you gain control of your breath, are there other parts of your body that operate, you know, outside your conscious awareness, outside that sort of voluntary control that you can learn to take control of too.

And what I'm reading is, yeah, there are. So there's something about your nervous system and tapping into its power that will change your experience in the ice bath. All these involuntary things are happening in the ice bath. And you're saying, wait a second, I'm gonna slow this breath down. Sometimes it's like, I'm going to go in on three, out on two, or in on four, out on three, or whatever your pattern is going to be. The point is you designed it, you control it,

and you're telling your body, my brain is in charge now. Your experience of the ice bath is way different. I found that the breathing that you suggested a while back was really helpful. It was Wim Hof, like guided breathing session. And I think he even recommends, you know, don't do this in the water. So you might want to be cautious, but that's the way I do it. I've done that before too. It kind of like helps me stay warmer almost, or at least feel warmer. It's an interesting thing. Like, yeah, for some reason that helps almost, or at least feel warmer. It's an interesting thing.

Like, yeah, for some reason that helps, that can help you feel warmer. But one thing that, the thing I do now is I'll actually just take like a four or five second inhale, six to eight second exhale. The exhale is always going to be longer than the inhale. Then I'll just hold for two or three seconds and then I'll inhale, exhale and hold for a few seconds. And that's actually something that, it's from Patrick McEwen. It's like the Bottecchio type breathing.

I don't know if you ever heard about it, but it's something that has actually helped me be, it's helped me feel extra calm in the cold for some reason. Right. And there's nothing special to it. It's just a longer exhale than an inhale, than a small three second breath hold back to inhale and exhaling. But it feels pretty special.

Like the effects feel pretty special, but there's no magic to it. I mean, how long did it take you to master that technique? Oh, not very long, right? Yeah, so. Vim is explicit. Do not hyperventilate in the cold water. But he's got some videos out there that make it look like he's hyperventilating

in the cold water. And the reason you do that is because carbon dioxide signals your urge to breathe. When you hyperventilate and you purge your bloodstream of all that carbon dioxide, you will lose the urge to breathe, which is a dangerous thing to do in the cold water. So some people, free divers will hyperventilate,

but free diving is so dangerous. And then that will extend the time that they can breath hold underwater. When people combine the hyperventilation and the ice bath or the cold water swimming or the outdoor swimming, they put themselves at risk of losing their awareness and drowning. Now, in the Morosco, it seems a little bit less risky, but sometimes people drown in bathtubs. So one of our safety protocols is Morosco, like ice bath sober, for goodness sakes. You know, if you're under the influence of alcohol or other mind altering drugs, would you just stay the heck out of the ice bath? Do me a favor and my liability insurance premiums a favor, you know? my liability insurance premiums a favor, you know?

But the other one is never hyperventilate in or right before your ice bath because that can also create a mind altered state. And I want you totally conscious while you're in there. And if it feels like it's way too much, just get the hell out, right? Yeah. I mean, there's nothing wrong. You gotta accept defeat for that day

and then maybe come back the next day. It's not even defeat. The way Rogan put it was, you never win. You're never gonna defeat the ice bath, you know? So go in there, like Rocky, you're going to lose. The point is, you know, how many rounds can you go before Apollo either knocks you out or kills you, you know? And that's all you're trying to find out today is I do two to four minutes and sometimes there'll be a two and a half and I'm done just because that's what I came here to do. I don't need to prove that I can get to four or five

or something like that. I'm ready to move on to the next thing. For me, 39, 40 degrees, unless I have like company like you to talk to, it's just boring. I'm like, I could be reading an article. I could be doing something with my life. But the 33, 34 is challenging to a certain point. And I feel like I proved my point. And then I'm going to go do a little red light in my steel mace and get on with my day. Where can people find you and find out more information from you? Moroscoforge.com. Everything that I write on ice baths is available for free at moroscoforge.com. If you need it in a hardbound

book, you want to write in the margins, then we sell the Uncommon Cold book. AJ edited it. She did a great job and you can buy that at Morosco, but it's, I feel like knowledge should be free. ASU pays me for the knowledge. And so we put it out there. You can read all the articles. ASU pays me for the knowledge. And so we put it out there. You can read all the articles. I'm on Substack if you want to read some of my other stuff. So it's sigertp.substack.com. I got in a lot of trouble for my Twitter.

So don't follow me there. Or, you know, my director is just going to get more hate mail. But I'm out there in social media is the point. Great. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.