The Rich Roll Podcast - Better Than Steroids? Craig Heller on Thermoregulation & ‘The Glove’ That Could Revolutionize Athletics

Episode Date: October 12, 2015

Imagine a product that could eradicate muscle fatigue in just minutes. Allow you to train substantially harder and recover exponentially faster. Maximize your training efficiency while significantly boosting strength, endurance and overall athletic performance. Sound too good to be true? Definitely. At least without failing a drug test. Now what if I told you it's neither a drug nor illegal. Impossible? First let's backup. One of (if not the) biggest limiters in athletic performance is elevated core temperature. Exertion causes muscle cells to heat up. Via a process called arteriovenous anastomoses, the body does its best to dissipate this extra heat. But if you continue to push yourself, core temperature will continue to rise, compromising the effectiveness of a heat sensitive enzyme crucial for energy production called pyruvate kinase. The result? Weakness, fatigue and cramping. If one could prevent the escalation of core temperature, it reasons that one could extend energy production and delay fatigue. The study of thermoregulation in the performance and recovery context is hardly new. Athletes have been experimenting with cryotherapy, ice packs, ice baths and ice vests for decades. The problem with most of these techniques is that they just don't work all that well. It has to do with something called vasoconstriction. Overwhelming cold causes blood vessels to constrict, slowing cool blood flow to the core and thus undermining elevated core temperature reduction. Enter The Glove — an apparent solution to core temperature thermoregulation without all that pesky vasoconstriction courtesy of a team of large brains led by today's guest — Stanford physiology and biology professor Craig Heller (and his colleague David Grahn). Essentially a plastic hand enclosure attached to a pump that circulates cool water across the palm's special network of radiator-like heat-transfer veins that specialize in something called rapid thermal exchange (RTX), the glove overcomes the vasoconstriction dilemma by strictly regulating the temperature of the cool water (cool but not too cool) and by creating a slight vacuum around the hand that keeps the blood vessels open. Cool blood then gets distributed directly to the core organs most in need of relief, allowing the body to chill out and the muscles to keep producing energy. Early studies show promise. Positive anecdotal stories are many. A seasoned gym rat and friend of Heller's lab increased his pull-up maximum from 180 to over 620 in less than six weeks by utilizing the glove in between sets. The result seems to neutralize muscle fatigue by cooling core temperature, allowing the subject to push himself or herself harder each workout, resulting in quantum improvement realized in a fraction of the time. Heller deems the rate of improvement unprecedented, exceeding gains expected via steroid use. Enjoy! Rich

Many individuals that are mobile and have multiple sclerosis, they're incredibly temperature sensitive. The ambient temperature goes up a little bit or they get a little bit active, their symptoms flare up. So by having cooling available, they're able to extend their capacity to lead normal lives. That's Professor Craig Heller, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast.

Hey, people, what's happening? How are you? What's going on? I am Rich Roll. I am your host. This is the podcast, the podcast where I sit down with the outliers, the big forward thinkers across all categories of positive paradigm-breaking culture change. Why? To help all of us unlock and unleash our best, most authentic selves. So thank you for subscribing to the show, for giving us a review, for always making sure to use the Amazon banner ad at richworld.com for all your Amazon purchases. The banner ad is right there on the podcast page. Won't cost you anything extra. It's just a great, simple, free way to support the mission. And it really does put some nice wind in our sails. So

thank you so much to everybody who has made a habit out of using it. Got Stanford professor of biology, Craig Heller on the show today. He's going to drop some crazy mad knowledge on us that I think is going to blow your mind a little bit, especially if you're an athlete. But before that, I got much more to say about him. Before that, let's quickly take care of a little business, shall we? All right, so what if I told you that there was a way to significantly enhance athletic performance in a way that is equal to, if not substantially better than steroids, a way that doesn't involve any performance enhancing drugs is totally safe, steroids, a way that doesn't involve any performance enhancing drugs is totally safe, legal, and sort of intuitively obvious. Well, I know what I would say. I would tell you that that just sounds like spam, right? And I hate spam. People that make these over the top claims

that just seem not grounded in reality. Well, that is the claim of today's guest, Stanford professor of biology, Craig Heller, who in addition, quite ironically, to having been my human biology professor back in 1986, is one of the scientists who is pioneering research into a field called mammalian thermoregulation. And he is exploring the implications of this field on healing of the human body and the enhancement of athletic performance. So when we look at the limiters of athletic performance, one of the key limiters, if not the key limiter, is elevated core temperature, right?

And the idea of keeping your core temperature cool or regulated as being important in the context of athletic performance is certainly not a new idea, right? There have been plenty of people who have been studying this and trying to develop products around maintaining core temp for quite some time, ice vests, ice baths, glove designs, et cetera. The problem is, is that none of these products seem to actually be all that effective. But over the last decade, Professor Heller and his team have been pursuing what was initially an accidental find. And that find was that by taking

advantage of specialized heat transfer veins in the palms of your hands by way of this sort of specialized vacuum cooling glove that they devised, they found that they could rapidly, like incredibly rapidly cool athletes core temperatures and dramatically improve exercise recovery and performance at levels previously, never before seen, totally off the charts. And when I say dramatic, I mean, the results that they have seen using this thing

is like, it's crazy. It's nuts. And I'm not going to spoil it. He's going to tell you all about it. But I will say that industrial versions of the product are currently being used by tons of college football teams, including the Stanford football program, NFL teams like the Seattle Seahawks, the 49ers, the Rams and the Raiders, NHL teams. I think the Toronto Maple Leafs use it. and the Raiders, NHL teams.

I think the Toronto Maple Leafs use it. The Olympic men's sand volleyball team and speed skating teams use it. The Nike Oregon Project running team uses it. And perhaps most interestingly, the 2014 FIFA World Cup champion German soccer team used it in the most recent World Cup. So there's that, right? A commercial version of this glove

product called the RTX, Rapid Thermal Exchange, has recently come on the market. And that's sort of part of what piqued my interest in sitting down with Professor Heller. I first became aware of his research during a visit to Stanford last fall for my 25th college reunion. Professor Heller gave a presentation to alumni. I wasn't there, I wasn't able to see it, but everyone was kind of talking about it. So I made a point at the time of saying, I've gotta track this guy down and sit down with him for the podcast.

And I was able to convince him to sit down and explain it all to me. And that's what we're gonna hear about today. Disclaimer, I'm in no way affiliated with this product, with this glove or any of this. In fact, I've never even tried it. I was and I am just super interested in exploring how emerging technology

is helping athletes excel beyond previously imagined capabilities and kind of the implications of that, the theoretical implications, the ethical implications of that. And I just wanted to learn more from the guy who's on the front lines doing the research. So this is a compelling conversation. I tried to make sure that it didn't get too technical and I really hope you enjoy it. There's quite a few links in the show notes if this conversation

motivates you to take your inquiry further. So please be sure to check out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. Okay. Let's step into the Stanford University Biology Department office of Professor Craig Heller and get down to business. Enjoy. It's a treat to be back at the farm. I'm a graduate and I don't make it back here that often. Although I was back here for my reunion last fall. And I believe, was it you or your colleague that gave a presentation on what we're gonna talk about today?

It could have been. I think it was you and everyone was talking about it. And for some reason I couldn't make it, so I missed it. But I made a mental note to look into everything that you're doing. I've been following it with... It's a popular topic when alumni come back or when new students are coming in.

Well, it's an interesting topic, I think for anybody, particularly if you're into athletic performance. So let's dive into it. I mean, I think a good place to kind of kick it off and get into it would be to, you know, just talk a little bit about what happens when we exercise and what are the kind of predominant factors that lead to muscle fatigue? That's a good question because fatigue is something that has been unexplained. It's been assumed that you run out of oxygen. Yeah, sure. If you run out of oxygen,

you're going to fatigue. You run out of fuel, you run out of glucose, you run out of glycogen. Yes, you're going to fatigue. And then one common idea is that it's the buildup of lactate as a result of anaerobic metabolism in muscle. And it's true that lactate builds up when you go anaerobic, but it's not necessarily a cause of fatigue. You can actually perform quite well at high lactate levels. And lactate is actually a common coinage of fuel. It goes from the muscle into the blood, goes from the blood to the liver, and the liver it's converted to glucose,

goes back into the blood and comes back to the muscle. That's pretty interesting because that is kind of the conventional wisdom. If you get lactate buildup, you're gonna seize up and it's game over for you, right? But doesn't that have something to do with the body's ability to flush that lactate? Like people have a different levels of aptitude

in performing that biological function? Well, that is one of the ideas that is quite commonly held, but we, through our work, we've come to, I think, a different hypothesis. And what we have found is that temperature of the muscle is what is most directly causing muscle failure, muscle fatigue. So as the muscle temperature rises,

it reaches a point at which it shuts off. And why does it shut off? It shuts off because it lacks fuel, doesn't have ATP. So why doesn't it? Studies that are not ours that were sort of cellular studies of muscle showed that one critical enzyme, pyruvate kinase, which is necessary for getting pyruvate into the mitochondria to produce ATP. So this is the rate limiting step for getting fuel into the mitochondria. And that enzyme is temperature sensitive. So it shuts down. It's super temperature sensitive, right? Yes. And reversible. So it shuts off at a particular temperature around, you know,

40 degrees, 41 degrees centigrade. And then when it cools down a little bit, it's reactivated. It kicks back, yeah. Now, what happens when it shuts off is that then you can only produce ATP through what we call glycolysis. And that's the end product of glycolysis is lactate. So you can imagine that once you shut down the mitochondria, once you prevent fuel from getting into the mitochondria,

you're gonna build up lactate. Interesting. So then you rest for a little while and you may resolve some of that lactate, but at the same time, the muscle temperature's going down. Right, right, right, right. And whether you're, I mean, I would imagine that, if you're performing this exercise in a hot climate

or in a humid climate, that will be exacerbated. But even if you're doing it in a hot climate or in a humid climate that will be exacerbated. But even if you're doing it in a cold climate, you're still, I mean, we don't have internal markers for our core temperature, right? Those are only on our skin. So we don't know how hot we're burning on the inside. So even if we're cold, we may be overheating in our interior.

And the reality is we have the capacity to cook our interior. And the reality is we have the capacity to cook our muscles. So muscle metabolism during heavy activity can go up 50, 60 fold. The blood flow, which is the only way the heat gets out of the muscle, can't follow that, can't accommodate that. So any sort of extreme activity

is going to result in a rise in temperature of the muscle. So you literally have to shut it off to protect it. Interesting. And is this impacted? Is there a differentiation whether you are performing this activity? Not really, because working anaerobically, you can reach high levels of intensity for a short period of time. Working aerobically, you can reach lower levels of intensity over longer periods of time. So if you integrate the two, you can have equivalent amounts of heat production. The difference with the aerobic is you have more time for the blood to sweep the accumulated heat out of the muscle as well as the lactate.

So I gather from what you're saying is that basically heat really is, this is the number one limiter. Like this is the stop gap. This is where the door shuts. That's what we have found. And that's what we think has not been appreciated in the past. And how did you come arrive at this conclusion? Well, it's very interesting. We actually have worked on temperature regulation for a long time in my lab.

And our interests were mostly physiological. As a matter of fact, we're mostly studying how the brain regulates body temperature, and we worked with unusual animals like hibernators and so forth. And one day, an anesthesiologist colleague said, well, you guys think you know so much about temperature regulation. I bet you can't solve a problem we have in the recovery room. Well, what's that? Well, our patients coming out of surgery may shiver for hours and we apply radiant energy. We put warm blankets on them and they just

continue to shiver. And this is a real problem. Can't warm up their core temperature. So we said, oh, it's trivial. No, it's a very hard problem. And we realized it was a hard problem when we went over to the recovery room and observed. When a patient is under anesthesia, they're vasodilated. In other words, there's lots of blood flowing to the skin, blood flowing everywhere. That's the result of the anesthesia. So they become hypothermic. When they come out of anesthesia and they're hypothermic, they tightly vasoconstrict. So the vasoconstriction keeps heat in, but it also prevents heat from coming in. So it's like

having someone with a fur coat on and then trying to warm them up by putting heat on the outside of the fur coat. Right, right. I got you. All right, so maybe we could take a left turn and just quickly kind of recap how we temperature regulate, right? Through the vasoconstriction and the regulation of our blood vessels that are pumping our blood to our extremities. Right, right. pumping our blood to our extremities. Right, right. So anyway, we produce heat internally and all of that heat comes out of the muscle in the blood and that blood always goes back to the heart. So the heat produced anywhere in the body goes back to the core of the body. Now, the core of the body is only about 10% of your total body mass. It's the internal organs in the brain, okay?

So heat produced peripherally coming back to the core can heat the core up fairly rapidly, okay? So what we have to do is we have to get rid of that heat. So the heart is sending the blood out to the whole body. And if heat has to be dissipated, it sends more of that blood to the whole body. And if heat has to be dissipated, it sends more of that blood to the periphery, to the skin, where it can be dissipated to the environment. But what we have found is that all skin areas are not equal in terms of being able to dissipate heat. There are only certain

skin areas that have the vascular, the blood vessel adaptations to act as radiators to dump heat. And this is what we call the glabrous skin or the non-hairy skin. So it's the palms of the hands, the soles of the feet, and the face above the beard line. Now, why should that be so? We are mammals. Mammals have fur. So they're great at preserving heat, conserving heat, but then when they exercise,

they have to dissipate that heat and they have to do it in spite of the fact that they're wearing a fur coat. So where do they lose the heat? They have to lose it over the non-hairy skin. Those are the pads of the feet. In some animals, the nose, the tongue, the ears. And under these skin surfaces,

there are special blood vessels. These blood vessels are called arteriovenous anastomosis. They are shunts that can take the blood from the arteries directly to the veins, rather than through the high resistance capillaries. They have like a superhighway. A superhighway, right. From your palm or the top of your head or your forehead or your feet, right? Directly to the core. Right. And the veins in these skin areas are arranged in a big network, which is called a plexus. So what happens is high throughput of blood goes from the arteries into these big venous networks, and they act as radiators. Okay? So back to the anesthesia.

Okay? If I may. I'm with you. That's critical. Okay. So we were challenged with this idea. How in the world could we get heat into these cold patients? patients. So we got the idea that if we put an arm in a negative pressure environment, in other words,

a partial vacuum, that would pull blood into that arm. And if we heated the arm, that would heat the whole body. Okay. Well, we did it and it worked unbelievably well. I mean, we were expecting to maybe decrease the rewarming time by 25%. It was amazing. These patients didn't shiver at all. They came back up to temperature in eight minutes, nine minutes, 10 minutes. It was unbelievable. So it counteracted the vasoconstriction, allowed the blood to start flowing

and was a super effective transport for this heat back to where it needed to go. Right, but we couldn't explain it. Even calculating the surface area. I feel like you just explained it though, or did you not know this at the time? No, no, you observe it and you say, wow, and then you start doing the math

and you say, how in the world could this be possible? And we discovered two things. One, which seems counterintuitive, and that is the arm didn't matter. It was only the hand. The other thing we found out, of course, is that what matters in terms of temperature regulation is the core of the body, which is only 10% of the body mass. You heat that up, you stop shivering, and then gradually the rest of the body mass. You heat that up, you stop shivering and then gradually the rest of the body comes up. But here is the amazing thing. We could not explain how we could get so much heat

in through a hand. And then we went into the anatomy and we found out there were these blood vessels that had been characterized there in Gray's anatomy, not the TV program, the book. The real thing. The real thing. Right. They're described in Gray's Anatomy,

but nobody knew what they were for. There was nothing in the literature that said what these blood vessels were for. Interesting. Is this where the bears come in? Well, the bears are of course the obvious example of how fur allows you to conserve heat, but makes it difficult to lose heat. Right. So the conundrum with the bear and looking at the bear is, obviously, in the wintertime, they can conserve heat and do what they do.

But how do they regulate their temperature in the summertime with all this fur when they're trying to just dissipate it through their tongue and their paws. That just doesn't seem possible. That's exactly what they do. And if you take infrared pictures of these animals, that's where the heat's coming out. And it's the same way with all other mammals. We've actually taken infrared videos of elephants. And even though elephants don't have fur, they predominantly lose heat through their ears those big floppy ears through their trunks and through their feet and you can do an infrared of an elephant in out in the zoo enclosure either standing in water or standing out in dry land and you can see what they change is they change the blood flow to the ears, to the trunk and the feet. So if they're standing in water, the ears shut off. If they're

out on dry land, the ears turn on and that's how they're dissipating heat. Yeah. I mean, I would assume that that's an evolutionary reason why their ears are so large. Yes, exactly. Now, we have exactly the same anatomy, not the big ears, but the same blood vessel anatomy. So, we predominantly lose excess heat through the palms of our hands, the soles of our feet, and our face. cool or they warm okay you couldn't tell that if you just grab their arm that doesn't change very much right okay but it's the palms of the hands the soles of the feet in the face that's where we dump heat when we have to uh really get rid of it so what we did with these anesthetized patients we were using this system in reverse we had no idea what it was. And then once we realized, oh my God, this is a mammalian adaptation for heat loss, we said, let's study recovery from hyperthermia. So we started that with a lab tech who liked to go to the gym every day after work. So we just said, okay, then would you do your workout in the lab?

We'll build you a pull-up bar. We'll get other equipment. You can do your workout in the lab, and then we'll use you as our guinea pig. We just wanted to get someone overheated, so we could then measure the parameters of getting the heat out. Okay, so he did pull-ups. He liked to do pull-ups. He could do a set of, no, maybe 15, 20 pull-ups, take a rest, and then do another set, maybe 14, 13, 14, and then...

Declining from there, right? Decline, yeah. So over a period of about six weeks, we had him do that. And after he did his 10 sets of pull-ups, we would then have him hyperthermic and we would extract the heat. We'd measure what's the best temperature gradient, what's the best vacuum and so forth. How do you measure core temperature though? Oh, we measured core temperature in the esophagus,

the food tube. So we take a thermocouple, which is a temperature measuring device about two feet long and we put it up the nose. It goes up the nose and down the throat and ends up at about the level of the heart. And the heart is the best integrated temperature. Okay.

But what I didn't tell you is I didn't tell you where the vacuum comes in. Right. Okay. We're getting to that. Yeah, because I mean, the question that I think that would lead into that is, look, the idea of cooling core temperature is nothing new, right?

Endurance athlete, athletes have been wearing ice chests and as an ultra marathoner, I would run with, like ice packs in my hands and things like this. Both of those are bad ideas. I know, we're gonna get into why. And it's an interesting, counterintuitive reason why. But so the overall notion is certainly not revolutionary or new.

Right. But your approach sort of solved some of the problems that a lot of people are doing, they're utilizing these techniques sort of somewhat naively and they're actually could be counterproductive. Right, right. Yep, absolutely.

So anyway, we had Vin do these sets of pull-ups and at the end of 10 sets, we would then extract the heat. And one day after we did this, he went back to the pull-up bar and he did the same number of pull-ups as in his first set. And we said, holy crow, what does that mean? That means that the muscle fatigue was due to the rise in temperature. So we started cooling him after every other set of pull-ups. So in this first six weeks, he went from doing 100 pull-ups in his 10 sets to 180. If you went to the gym twice a week and worked out like that, that's reasonable. The next six weeks, we were cooling him after every other set of pull-ups. He went from 180 to 618.

Yeah, it's crazy. Can you imagine 618 pull-ups? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that was our first, that was our Eureka experiment. Right, I mean, with a population of one, hardly going to survive peer review, but enough to pique your interest and delve deeper.

So then the news got around and we had people wanting to try it out. So we had some NFL football players who wanted to try it out. So they came over to the lab and we asked them, what exercise do you like to do? What are you good at? So one said he liked to do dips and he could do a lot of dips. He could do 40 dips in his first set.

And then he could probably do five sets. That's what normally he does in his workout. And he's totally spent after that. So he came in one day and we actually did this over in the gym. And that's exactly what he did. He did 40 dips in his first set and he did five sets and he said, I'm spent, that's about it. A couple of days later, he comes back and between each of his sets, we cool him. In that one day, he doubled the number of dips that he did. Yeah, I mean, that's not an incremental change. That's extraordinary. Yeah, and so that shows that the heat was limiting, but now does that have a benefit?

So over the next four or five weeks, he tripled the number of dips he could do. And what we found out in that and in more scientific experiments with larger sample sizes is that the cooling enables you to increase the capacity of your workout. You increase the capacity of your workout, you get a conditioning effect. So essentially in order to get the gains, you cool. But once you get the gains, you keep them. So you don't have to keep cooling to have a conditioning benefit.

Right, right, right. I mean, we use the term recovery quite casually and loosely. So perhaps we could define exactly what that means. Well, recovery has multiple dimensions. First of all, it's getting over the immediate cause of the fatigue or failure. So that's temperature, that's oxygen debt, that's blood glucose and lactate, so forth, okay? But then there's longer term recovery.

So when someone would come into the lab and they would show that all of a sudden they could double their capacity, they would do much, much more work than they were used to. They would always say, I'm going to be so sore tomorrow. Never are, never are. They come back and they do the same thing the next day. Right, and soreness is, I mean,

what is the causal factor in soreness? Right, so that is an interesting question. The general assumption is that when you have an extreme workout, you generate lots of little muscle tears. And of course, that requires to be repaired, okay? If they're not repaired, you get inflammation. So delayed onset muscle soreness is characteristic symptom of overactivity. Right, when you're more sore the next day.

It's not the next day, it's the second day. Yeah, the day after. Right, so that's why the delayed onset muscle soreness. So we had two hypotheses about this. One is that when you overheat tissue, you cause the expression of certain genes, which are called heat shock genes. And one of the things the heat shock genes do is they shut down all other gene expression

because you don't want to be producing new proteins in an environment where they'll be denatured. That's sort of the intuitive explanation. So one of the things that we are thinking, and we have no proof of this because we've never actually tested it, is that by cooling, we are preventing the expression of the heat shock genes and therefore the repair genes are active

and they repair the muscle tears and so forth without generating inflammation. Right, and in turn, that's expediting that process. Right. You're shortening that time period. So the muscle is repairing itself more quickly. Right. Now, there's another character

that plays a role in inflammation, and that's a cytokine, a molecule that is released by tissues associated with repair and so forth. And this is called interleukin-6. And interleukin-6 is generated in active muscles at low levels. And what has been found in studies, not ours, studies elsewhere, that if you overheat the muscle and exercise it, you get a synergistic effect. So heat causes the release of interleukin-6 and overexercise creates overproduction of interleukin-6,

but you put the two together and you get a synergistic effect. In low levels, interleukin-6 probably but he put the two together and you get a synergistic effect. In low levels, interleukin-6 probably plays an important role in the repair process. At high levels, it's one of the key factors in inflammation. Interesting. Well, I wanna get into the actual, you know, cooling technology and all of that. But while it's on my mind right now, I'm thinking, you know,

I'm just sort of relating it to my own experience and thinking about heat acclimation. Like for example, there are endurance athletes who prepare for super hot races. And they, for example, there's a race called the Badwater 135, right? So you're running across Death Valley, it's 135 degrees. So the athletes in preparation for this race

will quite often put their treadmill in a sauna and get exposed to that environment. And the idea behind that of course, is that they acclimate to that, that their body somehow reaches or approximates an adaptation there. So is that fact, is that fallacy? And how does that dovetail into your methodology,

which would sort of in certain respects, you could make the argument as sort of a contrary protocol. Yeah, I'm familiar with the bad water because we used to have some of those ultra marathoners who would come into the lab after hours and use our hot room to do exactly that. The treadmill in the hot room. So what we found actually is that if you cool

simultaneously with the exercise in the heat, you increase the capacity to work in the heat and- Hold on, all right, hold on. I'm just trying to get that. So you're basically using both. Okay, so here's the experiment. You have a treadmill in the hot room. You put someone on the treadmill,

they work until their core temperature goes up to 39 degrees, which is what our institutional review board says we have to... That's where we have to cut it off. That's where we have to cut it off. Right, right. The insurance policy. Right. So, okay, then if you cool one hand during this exercise,

you can double the time that they're on the treadmill. Oh, so they can actually lengthen the amount of time that they can train in heat. Right, right. And then what you find is that if you do this day after day after day, or every other day or every third day, the amount of time with the cooling increases. So you're getting more efficient heat extraction. Interesting. Okay. And eventually after about a week or two, you start seeing the control days extending as well. So you are seeing a conditioning effect, not just the effect of the cooling, but a conditioning effect. What could that be?

It could be increased capacity to perfuse these tissues. One thing that's been known for marathoners is that practice results in a lowered threshold for sweating. So they sweat at a lower temperature. That's one way to at least slow down the rate of rise of core temperature. But we can't really explain what the adaptation is that results from this conditioning of working in the heat. But we know that by extending the amount of time they can work in the heat, you get a conditioning effect. Yeah, that's very, very interesting. And have you found that people vary in how they sort of, you know, regulate their core temperature? So for example, this is my own personal history that I'm not sure, for example, this is my own personal history that I'm gonna interject here, but my feet are always boiling hot.

My whole life as a kid, boiling, I really, like, I think I live in California just because I don't like wearing shoes. Like if it was up to me, I'd wear flip-flops every day. The minute I put shoes on, my feet overheat, they sweat terribly. It's been a problem my entire life. In fact, right now I have shoes on

and it makes me very uncomfortable. Take them off. And my mother would always say like, what is, you know, what's the deal with you? Like it's, I know it's not normal. Like I, and so my wife will always say, you just burn really hot. So is there a differentiation between people and how we kind of regulate these? Yeah, there definitely is a lot of variation between individuals. There's variation between the sexes. There's variation in the same individual with time of year. Some individuals, they'll come into the lab and they will work out and remain vasoconstricted. Their hands remain cold.

Others, as soon as they start to exercise, boom, those vessels open up. Interesting. So there's quite a bit of variance and we don't understand why. So somebody who is very good at that, just sort of genetically is going to be, perhaps have a leg up athletically when they're performing in high heat conditions.

Sure. And just look at the body types of people who do short-term anaerobic activities versus endurance activities. The thinner and you are, the bigger your surface area, the better you are at losing heat. Interesting, all right, so let's get into the difference between how you approach this problem

versus the conventional approach, which is the ice vest or hold ice cubes in your hands and what's going on with the science and kind of this technology that you guys have developed. Okay, the critical thing is that in order to dump heat efficiently, you have to open up these special blood vessels in the non-hairy skin, okay?

So what controls them? They're controlled both by the internal temperature and by the local temperature. So even if you are overheated, you stick your hand in a bucket of ice water, you vasoconstrict. So you may feel cool because your hands are cool, but you're not losing any heat. Right, none of that coldness is actually getting transported because all of your veins and your arteries have tight clamp down and the blood's not flowing.

Right, and most people have experienced this. They exercise, they're hot, they have to get ready for a dinner party. They go in and take a cold shower and they put on their clothes, they feel great. And then boom, they break out get ready for a dinner party, they go in and take a cold shower and they put on their clothes, they feel great and then boom, they break out in a huge sweat. That's me like all the time. Yes. Yeah. Because what happens when you cool the overall body surface, you feel cool because

that's where we sense temperature, which you said, okay? But that's not how we lose heat. We lose heat through these specialized body surfaces. So if you put on, let's say, a cold vest, you may feel good, but your core temperature is not going down, it's going up. Right, it's actually having the reverse effect that you're trying to achieve. Right. So I think that it's really important to make sure that you keep your heat exchange surfaces open. And the way you do that is by not over cooling your other body surfaces. So your overall body is a great sensor, but it's not a great effector, as we say, and not a good

heat exchanger. So how do you solve this dilemma? You need to cool the hands, but you wanna avoid the vasoconstriction so that the cold can actually get transported. Right, ice water is not a good idea. So you have to control the temperature. So, I mean, the old folk remedy of putting your hands, your wrists under tap water,

well, tap water is not really cold, especially in an environment in which you're overheated. So that's why that old folk remedy works. Right, because it's certainly colder than your core temperature, but it's not feeling cold to you. Right, yeah. Right, interesting.

I just lost my question that I was gonna ask. Oh yeah, so the caveat I would assume would be, if you're running the bad water and you're out in Death Valley, and then you just immerse your entire body into a bath of ice water, then the cold would be so overwhelming that it would overcome the vasoconstriction

because you're just in a complete environment of freezing cold. Absolutely that works. And that is the recommended remedy for hyperthermia. But the problem is how often do you have a tub of ice water? It's not exactly convenient. So back to the dilemma, right? Avoiding the vasoconstriction

and still transporting the cold. So this is probably where a lot of the work had to go into solving this equation, right? Well, so what you, in a practical sense, what you want to do is you want to, of course, get out of the heat, which means in the shade, you may want to take advantage of having some water available. So here's an interesting anthropological note. If you look at the hunters and gatherers,

the, in Australia, the Bushmen. The upper originals. Yeah, the Kalahari. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I'm sure it's, yeah, I think it's the Kalahari Bushmen. They are pursuit hunters. They will run down their prey, okay? And they do it through persistence.

They just keep on going, keep on going, keep on going. They may carry with them a little gourd of water. And what do they do with it? When they feel they're overheating, they stop. They put a little bit of water on their hands. They rub it on their hands. They rub it on their face. And they may sip a little bit.

But what they're doing is they're using that water to enhance heat loss from the body surfaces where heat is mostly dissipated. And eventually the gazelle or whatever it is they're chasing will wear itself out. Right, right, right. It might take a little while, but eventually. Yeah, but they just keep right on going by maximizing their heat loss and sort of titrating out their metabolic energy.

Right, it's an interesting thing because, you know, your intuition is, well, it's good to sweat. Like if you're sweating, then that evaporates and that's cooling you down. But it's actually not a very efficient system when you wanna keep going because you're losing water and you're losing electrolytes. So if you can cool your core temperature down

without sweating or cool it and prevent yourself from further sweating, that's more efficient. Also every drop of sweat that falls off your body does you no good. So you've lost water, which is extremely valuable. Right, you need that water on your skin surface to have it evaporate there to get the effect. That's to evaporate on the skin surface, right?

Right, okay, so let's get into the solution, right? Which comes down to this vacuuming. Okay, the vacuum, right? So back to our experiments on the patients in the recovery room, we got the idea of applying a vacuum from some work that was being done by NASA back then. They were doing experiments in which they had people in bed rest for months, for 60 days, and they were trying to simulate weightlessness. And then they were trying to see if they could mitigate the effects of weightlessness

by using a vacuum to pull blood into the lower part of the body. So they had skirts on the individuals that they could evacuate and they could use that to pull more blood and increase the circulation of the lower part. Right, right, because that becomes a big problem, right? That and like bone density loss. Right, so that was where the idea for the vacuum came in.

And we said, well, if we can pull more blood into an arm and we can heat the arm, then we'll increase the rate of warming. Okay. So that's where the vacuum came in. And then when we came to realize that what we were dealing with were these heat exchangers, these venous networks that act as radiators, we realized that what the vacuum is doing is it's essentially putting the radiator of a Mack truck in a Honda. Mm-hmm. Right, right, right. that what the vacuum is doing is it's essentially putting the radiator of a Mac truck in a Honda. Right, right, right.

We're just making it possible to extract so much more heat out of those surfaces. Yeah, you're putting a turbocharger in there. Right. And we can get a maximum of, in some cases, anywhere between 40 and 60 watts out of a hand, which is a lot of heat. Yeah, interesting. And it's not a lot of a hand, which is a lot of heat. Yeah, interesting. And it's not a lot of vacuum pressure, right? No.

It's just a slight exertion. It's a slight amount of vacuum because if you use too much vacuum, you'll get edema, swelling. Right. Okay, so it's about as much vacuum as you can suck through a straw. So you develop this essentially a glove that has circulating coolant.

It has a surface that is a heat sink that is in contact with the palm. And then the hand is in a negative pressure environment, a partial vacuum. So, you're increasing the diameter of these veins. You're increasing the blood that flows through those veins. And therefore you're enhancing the amount of heat that you're bringing from the core of the body

to the surface and the amount of cooler blood you're sending back to the core. Right. And the cool water is circulating in this glove because it has to keep moving, right? Because your hand will heat it.

If it's static, it will lose its impact. It's circulating. Yeah, how many prototypes did you guys go through before you were able to lock it down? Oh, I could show them to you. And it's still not locked down. So it's commercialized now.

It's being sold by a company called AvaCore, A-V-A-C-O-R-E. Which stands for arteriovenous. Arteriovenous and astimosis core temperature, Avacor. Yeah, so, and what they have available commercially and which is being used by many athletic teams and individuals is a standalone device. So it is something that's portable. It doesn't require being plugged in.

It uses as cold source, a thermos of ice slurry. And you use it by sticking your hand in it for a few minutes and taking it. So our football team, for example, they have them under the bench. And when they come off the field, they stick their hand in it for a few minutes and taking it. So our football team, for example, they have them under the bench. And when they come off the field, they stick their hand in and it takes enough of that excess heat out

that when they go back onto the field, they're refreshed. Right, and what have you found in terms of optimal use? Like how long do you leave? What's the optimal amount of time to have your hand in there? And how frequently do you need to keep doing it? We find that three minutes is a really good interval. And we just sort of stumbled on that because most people who are exercising don't want to sit around too long. Okay. Right. But it's

important to dump a significant amount of heat. Now, if you look at the rate of temperature decline with use, duration of use, it's sort of an exponential curve. So you get the most benefit early on. So you get the most benefit in the first three to five minutes. I see. So if you want to use it for 10 or 15, great, but you get most of the benefit in the first three. Right. And is there a sort of a law of diminishing returns as well, if you're using it like every 20 minutes throughout a two or three hour workout as opposed to every half an hour? Or you haven't found like any kind of,

I guess it's really gonna depend on the athlete, the temperature, what kind of activity they're doing, all that kind of stuff. And is there an impact, like is there a differentiation between using it periodically throughout a workout versus just doing it at the end of a workout as like a sort of post-workout,

you know, one boom, you know, one time recovery thing? Well, those are two different benefits. Using it during the workout extends the capacity of the workout. Using it at the end speeds up recovery. Right. Okay. So those are two different phenomena.

And well, this is amazing stuff. I mean, for any athlete out there, expediting recovery is the holy grail. When we're talking about elite athletes in any discipline, we're talking about the most talented, the hardest working, they have everything dialed in, their lives revolve around high performance. And this seems to be a new frontier

that is paving the way for gigantic performance gains. I mean, this is kind of an amazing breakthrough. And I've been watching it ever since I found out about it last fall. And I know that there are NFL teams using it and athletes, it's out there, right? But I also feel like, why aren't more people talking about this?

Like what's the journey been like of trying to create this prototype and bring it to market? And, you know, obviously, you know, you're first and foremost a professor at this university, but this is kind of an entrepreneurial thing as well. And, you know, what has that journey been like for you? You put your finger on it. I'm a professor. I'm not a business person.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, well, first of all, how does it work at a university? I would imagine, you know, does Stanford own the patent on this? Stanford owns the patent. They license it to a company. Right. And do you have any say in that? Are you involved in that? Well, I guess we have- I don't want to get you in trouble. No, we have an advisory capacity. So, our office Technology Licensing will listen to us, but they don't necessarily take our advice. Their goal and their mandate is to do what is best for the technology. This goes back to government legislation, which was actually put in place to make sure that the benefits from publicly funded

work get back to the public. Right. In other words. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I gotcha. Yeah. So, that's their mandate. They have to do what is.. So if they get a request for a license from a company that is really well positioned to do great things with the technology, they will go for that. Interesting. And is that kind of a university-wide policy? Yes. So basically any professor on this campus, by virtue of the research that they're doing onsite here becomes the property of the university and then become subject to that same procedure.

Right. Interesting. So I would imagine there's some politics involved there. Well, no, I think it's actually a way of avoiding politics because everything is dealt with in the same way. And actually, as I just said, professors are not necessarily the best people to take things into the market. They're not necessarily the best people to take things into manufacturing. People think that the research is really the hardest step,

but no, you can do the research and then find a huge number of hurdles in actually getting that research out there, getting it implemented, getting it- Yeah, birthing it into the real world as a whole. That's a different animal completely. Yeah. A businessman told me once, he said, you know, his calculation is that if it takes you a million dollars to develop your first prototype, you have to at least multiply that by 10 to get it to market. Yeah, that's daunting, right? Yeah, right. Yeah, even in this haven of entrepreneurship where we currently reside, right?

Right, right. Interesting. So right now, I mean, the first kind of model of this that went out into the world was kind of a more industrial strength version, right? Which I think is available to purchase. It's like a thousand bucks or something like that. Well, the first one was 3,000. 3,000. And the reason for that, once again,

is that when you come up with a prototype, you are not necessarily concerned about making it as simple, as streamlined as you can. So you end up with something with lots of parts and lots of unnecessary components. So then you have to put that together. So it takes a lot of labor. So the first devices that the company came out with had too many parts. They were too complicated to put together. You couldn't make them in mass quantities because it wasn't engineered for that. So now they have simplified the technology so that the prices come down by two-thirds.

by two thirds. Right, so right now there is an Indiegogo campaign going on to sort of fund the consumer version of this, which is, the campaign's almost over. You guys have raised, you're well above your threshold on that, but the consumer model is gonna be available for like $330 or something like that. Right, I think that's what they're saying.

And when you say consumer, it'll be simpler, it'll be smaller, and it'll be designed for personal use. So if you can imagine one of these devices being used by a whole team, it gets pretty cruddy pretty fast. Yeah, you're gonna want the industrial strength one, right? That's right. And then you have to clean it out and so forth.

So the personal use one will be obviously something that one person would use and, or a couple people would use. Right. It'd be cleanable of course. Right, right, right. And you have the anecdotal kind of reactions of these athletes that are using it. I know the Seattle Seahawks are using it,

the San Francisco 49ers are using it. There's some Olympic athletes, a speed skater, a professional or a beach volleyball player, the Stanford football team. Are the swimmers using it here? I'm not sure. Some have, I know. Gotta talk to Ted Knapp, the coach over there.

Yeah, we should. Get him on it. So the benefit for the swimmers, of course, would be in the gym. The swimmers spend a lot of time in the gym. They do a lot of strength conditioning. But actually, there was a student up at University of British Columbia who did his thesis on this. And up at the University of British Columbia, they have two Olympic-sized, they may have more, but they have two Olympic size pools at different temperatures. So one is kept cool and the other is kept a little warmer. And so what he found was that if swimmers doing sprints

use the device, that it increased the performance of those in the warm pool to be the equivalent of the performance of the pool pool. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So you don't think about overheating when you're swimming because your skin is cooled by the water, but you do generally.

You definitely are overheating even in the cold water. And I can tell you, you know, those days where you show up and something went wacky with the heat and the water's too hot, like you just blow up, like you can't go and you're like, what's wrong? Like it doesn't, and it doesn't really feel that hot, but you get overheated really quickly.

I mean, I could see, you know, benefits with them using it, you know, in the pool as well. So it's very, very interesting. And beyond that, there have been some peer reviewed studies that have come out on this as well. So it's not just, oh, hey, you know, Joe from the gym did 600 pull-ups. Like there's some real science here too.

So maybe explain a little bit about what that's all about. Well, we've done several studies with typical scientific design. You have a sample size in the subjects and you do a crossover, for example, half with, half without, and then reverse. So one of the first ones we did was with a number of members of the Stanford wrestling team. And this was following up the original observation. This was a pull-up study in which we had them do essentially the same thing,

10 sets of pull-ups, three-minute rests, with or without the cooling. And with these, we started with the cooling. So we showed that, once again, over six weeks, they increased on the average two and a half fold, so 250% increase. Wow. Okay.

And then when they stopped cooling, they plateaued. So they kept their gains, but they didn't continue. So we found the same thing with bench press experiments. We found the same thing with other kinds of activities. Have the studies generally been set up where you're using the cooling glove and not, or have they done ones where you're using the cooling glove and then the other group is doing ice baths or some other kind of similar type of protocol?

No, we haven't done that. We haven't done that. What we usually do is either with or without, or we'll have the device set at different temperatures. So one of the experiments we did, for example, was with a group of obese women. We wanted to test whether or not we could increase the capacity of obese individuals to use exercise as part of their weight loss program. Because if you are overweight, you're carrying more weight so that your exertion is greater and also you're more insulated right so so you have two things going against you so we had a group of people

who signed up for the study and we set them up in such a way that they all were using the device but half of them it for half of them the device was set at a temperature that had no benefit okay so what we found was the ones that had the benefit the cooling they rapidly increased their their exercise capacity and they were losing weight interesting but the most interesting thing was the compliance the individuals that were not getting the effective cooling, they had all sorts of absenteeism, all sorts of excuses why they couldn't come in that day or another day. And the women that were getting the cooling, they had practically 100% attendance. For them, the exercise was pleasant. And for those who weren't getting the cooling,

the exercise was not pleasant. Interesting. So we didn't expect that at all. And the those who weren't getting the cooling, the exercise was not pleasant. Interesting. So we didn't expect that at all. And the reason to setting it up that way, I mean, was the thinking behind that, that you wanted to account for a placebo effect? Yeah, yes, yeah. Another time we did a placebo effect,

we had an experiment with a group of students and we told them that, these were totally naive students. We said that you know that when you work in the heat, you get tired, but you also know that it's important to warm up before exercise and therefore we want to see the benefits of heating versus cooling. So we had three different conditions, one in which the device was set at a warm temperature,

one in which it was set at a cold temperature, and one that it was set at what seemed to be a neutral temperature. Well, as I told you before, cooling too much causes vasoconstriction. So the students immediately got the idea that it was a cold one that was the beneficial one. No, it was the one that was neutral. Neutral, interesting, interesting. And is there like one sport over another where you would find better results? For example, like, is this better for strength athletes

or just as good for endurance athletes, or is there some kind of differentiation? Well, obviously because the device is not something that's currently wearable, it's better for episodic use. Right. And that means short burst activities, sprints that may, or short distance runs that are not going to take that long.

Interval training on a track or something like that. So anaerobic activities. But we are building right now, we're prototyping wearable systems. So the first one we built, interestingly enough- This isn't gonna get really interesting now. This brings up a whole other thing that we could talk about,

about the future of sport in general. So the first systems that we built are for military working dogs. All right, explain that. Dogs overheat, right? When they overheat, they probably can't smell as well. When they overheat, they pant. When they're panting, they're not sniffing. When they overheat, they pant.

When they're panting, they're not sniffing. So we were able to build a system which went on the paws of the dogs and they wore the cooling control components on a backpack. And we used it in Iditarod dogs, tested it out on Iditarod dogs, and it's worked quite well. So that's a prototype. So then we immediately took that this past year because of the Ebola epidemic, which was very much in the news.

We challenged a class that we were teaching to first of all, characterize the heat stress associated with working in Ebola gear and then quantifying the mitigation of that heat stress by wearing a wearable cooling system. So essentially we took the dog system and then built it for humans

so that we were actually cooling the hands, but under Ebola gear. Right, like a hazmat suit. Hazmat suit, exactly, exactly. And so that was the challenge for the class for the quarter. And by the end of the quarter, we sent a couple systems over to Sierra Leone for the Ebola workers to test that.

We haven't gotten results back yet. Yeah, very, very interesting. I mean, yeah, it's getting into this thing. I wanna talk about like, you know, uses beyond athletics and performance, but just while we're camping out here on this subject, I mean, you know, at some point you will develop a wearable version of this.

And so immediately I foresee, you know, every marathon runner, you know, running with gloves, every cyclist having them, every athlete. And so it brings up a very interesting philosophical conversation about the direction of sport and where is that dividing line between pure clean sport and performance enhancement? And where do we draw that line?

And, you know, 20, 30 years ago, okay, steroids, you know, we get it, it's drugs or it's not, you're clean or you're doping, but that is becoming a much grayer area as we blur these lines and we start getting into genetic manipulation and all kinds of crazy stuff that is becoming a much grayer area as we blur these lines and we start getting into genetic manipulation and all kinds of crazy stuff that is gonna make, this world of sport become very murky and cloudy.

And I think it's, I don't purport to have an opinion on that, but I think that it's something that we all need to be talking about and being aware of, because I'm just thinking, well, if I'm in Hawaii and I'm running a double marathon on the Kona coast, and I'm wearing this glove, I'm gonna have a huge, and I can continually replace the ice or whatever

and keep it cold. The advantage is extraordinary over the competitor that doesn't have it. And so is that fair? Is it not fair? Yeah. That's a very interesting world that doesn't have it. And so is that fair? Is it not fair? You know, that's a, that's this very interesting world that we're getting into here.

Well, I agree. But what you're doing now is you're just essentially enhancing your body's normal cooling mechanisms. So if you wanted to rule it out, let's say for a football team, then wouldn't you have to also rule out the misting fans? Wouldn't you have to rule out the-

That's what I'm saying, it's very gray. Yeah, right. The gradation between what's okay and what's not starts to become, it becomes very, very difficult to parse that out. I mean, so, you know, right now, multi-sport athletes, cyclists, triathletes, a big thing to do is to use these Norma Tech boots, right now, multi-sport athletes, cyclists, triathletes, a big thing to do is to use these Norma Tech boots, right?

Which are kind of a variation on a theme as to what you're doing. So what are those boots do that's different, that is beneficial? Like they're not cooling, but they are, my understanding is that they're helping the blood flow increase, right? So they're flushing out the muscles and they're helping the blood flow increase, right? So they're flushing out the muscles

and they're reducing the inflammation. And that has some impact on the body's ability to recover. But if you could compare, if you could combine these two products, if you could actually have coolant, using your technology and combine that with what the Normatec boots are doing, that would even be, that would be an extra boost, I would imagine so yeah you're right it's gray area but you know in sports you are

always improving equipment so better tennis rackets better shoes better skis uh now the contrast in my mind is that with things like performance enhancing drugs, is that you are pushing the body out of normal. Whereas what you're doing with cooling is you're enhancing the return to normal. So you're getting rid of the heat. Now, if you want an interesting comparison, we did one. We did a comparison study in which we looked at the values in the literature for the effects of anabolic steroids on strength conditioning versus the sorts of things that we were doing.

And I've just told you about some experiments in which we were getting over a period of six weeks getting 200, 300% improvements. you know, six weeks getting 200, 300% improvements. Multiple published reports on using bench press as the metric show that use of anabolic steroids results in a 1% per week. Right, so it's not even comparable. Not even comparable. Which is why when you have all the side effects. Which is why when you sit down and you start to Google what your work and you put it in there,

you get the click baity headlines, like better than steroids, you get kind of these extreme headlines. But yeah, that's quite amazing without the testicular shrinkage problem. It doesn't leave a residue, right? Yeah, I know. It's all, yeah, it's all very, very interesting.

I mean, to kind of follow that philosophical thread, you know, what you're doing is really just giving the body a means to do what it would ordinarily do. But what would the, like, if we're having like a Manhattan project on this idea, if you were to take some kind of pill that would prevent the vasoconstriction

and you could put your hand in ice or something like that. Like, where do you, how do you distinguish those things? Like here you're, okay, you're taking a foreign substance into your body. So that is qualitatively different. The impact is the same. Well, there is such a- You're using an external technology.

There are a couple substances like that, of course. Dark chocolate. Oh yeah. Causes vasodilation. Let's talk a little bit about just inflammation and overall health, right? So, you know, a lot of the exercise to induce stress, you know, without this device,

I mean, your body's natural reaction, you have an immune system response, you get inflamed around these areas that impedes the recovery process. Your technology is sort of short circuiting that, preventing a lot of that inflammation, but you can also, there are other ways too, like diet and other ways to keep that inflammation down.

Right. Definitely keeping inflammation down is beneficial. And it may well be that our technology is not the best for treating inflammation due to injury. So for example, if you have a sprained ankle ice is good and what you're doing is you're actually cooling that ankle very much below body temperature whereas our device would lower the overall body temperature a little bit but it's not necessarily going to give you the therapeutic cooling that you get with a direct icing or something like,

well, some of the devices that are out there on the market, game ready, for example, which is a really good way of cooling a shoulder, cooling an elbow, cooling a knee that has been sprained, injured, has inflammation. Yeah, that's interesting. And beyond kind of the world of athletics, you know, the applications for this, I would imagine are still evolving, but beyond like DARPA super soldiers and dogs that can smell really well and go all day,

like what are some of the other applications that you're starting to see? Well, one that we're very happy with is helping patients with multiple sclerosis. So individuals with multiple sclerosis, when they still have mobility, we can't cure the disease by any means. We probably can't change the course of the disease, but we can improve the quality of life because many individuals that are mobile and have multiple sclerosis,

they're incredibly temperature sensitive. The ambient temperature goes up a little bit or they get a little bit active, their symptoms flare up. So by having cooling available, they're able to extend their capacity to lead normal lives. So instead of having in the summer to remain in an air conditioned house, they can go out and go shopping, play golf, you know, go for walks and so forth. So that is one thing that we've been very, very happy about. That's interesting. Yeah. I'm thinking like, let's say, you know,

That's interesting. Yeah, I'm thinking like, let's say, this becomes like a sort of household consumer product. If everybody has these gloves, maybe a future model has a dial on it where you can make it warm or make it cold. Then suddenly the ambient temperature of your home becomes less important, right? You could save energy costs on air conditioning and heating

because if you're regulating your core temperature through this device, then it doesn't necessarily matter as much how cold the room is or warm the room. Exactly. We actually are working on a project right now funded by the Department of Energy to do just that. That's amazing.

To develop not the extreme heating and cooling that we've been involved with, with the recovery from hyperthermia and hypothermia, but just increasing the thermal comfort zone for individuals. The Department of Energy has calculated that if they're able to broaden the dead band on thermostats by four degrees, in other words, office buildings and apartments, so forth and so on,

you could save the equivalent amount of energy of taking 25% of the cars off the road. Because when you're heating or cooling a room, it's a very inefficient use of energy. You're heating or cooling everything in that room, all the furniture, the walls. And it dissipates quickly. Yeah, yeah. So if instead you could make individuals more comfortable in a thermal environment that is either warmer or colder, you could save an enormous amount of energy. colleagues at SRI to develop not only functional devices for the hands and the feet, but also attractive, fashionable ones that people would be inclined to wear and increase their thermal comfort. Some big knit that you can't type on your computer.

Right, no, that wouldn't quite work. Hardly a fashion accessory, right? Right. But I mean, conceptually, could you sit in a very cold room with this glove on that's keeping your core temperature warm and not feel, and you would be comfortable? Yes. That's super amazing.

We just did it with, once again, one of our classes. We had them for two hours, twice a week. They had to come into a particular room where they would sit and work on their data. And the room temperature was cycling up and down, ramping up and ramping down. And every five minutes a buzzer rang and they just had to punch a number

into their computer on a scale, one through six, indicating the thermal comfort, three being absolutely comfortable, six being too hot, one being too cold. And so what we did is we then put their, had them keep their feet, their bare feet on little heat exchange pads. So all we did was ramp the foot temperature and antiphase with the room temperature.

And what we were able to do is, and they're doing this quite unconsciously. Every five minutes, they push a button, they push a button. They're not thinking about it, okay? And what we showed is that we could increase their thermal comfort by four degrees. Wow, interesting, that's amazing. You know, back to the athletic context,

I'm thinking, you know, a type A athlete who has access to this, does it make it more likely that they could over train? Because suddenly, you know, they're pushing themselves too hard. They feel good. They feel like they're recovering and suddenly they've increased their training load too quickly.

And whether that leads to injury or some kind of burnout or something like that, I could see that potential existing. Absolutely and that's why we have trainers and coaches. Yeah, it's possible no matter what you're doing to over train or to overexert yourself. Yeah, it's possible no matter what you're doing to over train or to overexert yourself. Yeah, absolutely. Right, I mean, cause if you're not feeling sore

and you go and you do way more pull-ups, I mean, you could just tear your muscle right out. Eventually you will feel the pain. Yeah. I mean, pain is a wonderful, wonderful phenomenon. But the body kind of is evolved to, you know, sort of naturally signal you when it's time to stop, right? And you're sort of removing a little bit of that.

Well, not necessarily, we're removing one of the, so we're actually removing the phenomenon that causes the damage. Okay. The hyperthermia, the overheating creates damage. But you're still creating those muscle tears. Presumably, which is part of conditioning. No, the reason we stopped our very first experiment on the pull-ups

was that our lab assistant was beginning to get sore tendons in his wrists. Right, right. And so, I mean, 620 pull-ups. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pretty good. Because they can't acclimate as quickly as the muscle, right? Is that the idea behind that? Well, tendonitis, you know, you can damage your tendons

and they don't heal up very rapidly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So sure, and that's why the devices over in our department of athletics are in the hands of the trainers. So the trainers are advising the athletes how to use them. Is there any indication that use of this could have some impact on longevity or disease prevention beyond the multiple sclerosis example?

Well, it doesn't prevent multiple sclerosis. This is just improving the quality of life. There are a number of other medical conditions that we're interested in pursuing. So one set of conditions are things that happen with diabetes, so peripheral neuropathy, ulceration and so forth. So we're interested in finding out whether or not increasing blood flow to those parts of the body by using the heat and the vacuum would decrease the probability of getting peripheral neuropathy and ulceration. So I think, you know, if indeed the technology encourages people

to be more active and to be active later in life, that will be an indirect avenue towards increasing longevity and preventing degeneration. Right, right, right. towards increasing longevity and preventing degeneration. Right, right, right. Right now it's very popular to kind of do this protocol of getting in the ice bath and then going into the sauna and then jumping into the ice bath

and kind of doing that routine for however long. And there are plenty of people out there that really, not only they love it, they will tell you that like this is the secret of youth and this is keeping them healthy and disease-free and helping them recover from their workouts and all of that. I mean, is there a basis for that in your mind? Is this something that is good to do? I mean, what is your, you don't know. I don't know. You don't know.

It feels good. If you like it, do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As someone who went swimming at the North Pole, I can say that it felt good. Oh, you did? When did you do that? It was a number of years ago on a trip on a Russian icebreaker to the North Pole.

Wow. It was sort of on a dare from the Russian crew. And you just jumped in? Yeah. How long did you last? Oh, it was just a very short period of time. A couple minutes probably. Amazing.

Are you familiar with this guy called Vim Hof? He lives in Amsterdam. Oh, he's the guy who was frozen in a block of ice. No, he's just this, he's sort of a, I don't know how you would describe him. He's sort of an expert on like mindfulness and meditation, but he's a big proponent of like cold water therapy. And he does these amazing swims

where he goes underneath the ice for incredibly long periods of time. And he's a very dynamic, charismatic guy. Look him up in the internet, I'll send you his website. But he's sort of like a big proponent of this idea of being in cold water as sort of this, I mean, saying fountain of youth is a little exorbitant, but as sort of a huge recipe in his wellness equation.

Well, it certainly is a way of generating a big sympathetic nervous system response, shot of adrenaline will activate blood flow and all sorts of parts of the bodies. And maybe, you know, that's good for you. Right. I don't know. Or some more research will be, will show, right?

Right. Well, this has been amazing. It's super, super interesting. I'm going to be watching how this unfolds with a keen eye. Well, we've got to get you to try it. Yeah, I know I'm here. I haven't even tried it myself, so I'm gonna to be watching how this unfolds with a keen eye. Well, we've got to get you to try it. Yeah, I know, I'm here. I haven't even tried it myself, so I'm gonna check it out.

Oh, we have a pull-up bar over here. I saw you got like a little gym over here. I was like, are you running experiments on students out here or is that for you? You got a treadmill and a bench press like right outside your office. It was all for experiments, but indeed after hours, I can hear them clanking. Students come and use it after hours i can hear them clanking students come and use it after hours

and are you engaged in any specific research at the moment oh yeah we have several projects at the moment one is this one i told you about with the department of energy to improve thermal comfort another one which is just getting started is a project with the Navy to develop systems for casualty transport. In the field, casualties become hypothermic very fast. And they have to, with a minimum of equipment, get casualties back to a field hospital. can develop a system that weighs only a few pounds and could be employed directly when the first responder gets there to stabilize temperature. We have another system like that, which is about to go on market for veterinary application for veterinary surgery. We have another project that we are engaged in with, as I explained, the wearable system under hazmat gear to bring that to a level that it can be manufactured. Yeah, I mean, I would imagine, you know, firefighters could wear this.

Exactly. There's all kinds of applications for that. There have been firefighters who have used the systems that we have now, and they seem to generate a lot of benefit. And then we have another little project, which we're engaged in right now, and that is using the technology to treat migraine headaches.

Oh, wow. So we don't have any results yet, but. Well, my wife might wanna talk to you. She's had a lifetime of battling migraines and always looking for solutions. She wants to be a subject. I think she probably will. Okay, we have our IRB clearance, so we're ready to go.

All right, I'll talk to her about it. Very, very cool. And before I let you go though, an additional kind of fascinating fact about you is that this is not your only field of research, right? You have an expertise in learning disabilities and Down syndrome and also in sleep. Well, yeah, our basic research

is in sleep and biological rhythms. And we've recently been carrying that into the field of learning and memory. And specifically, we got involved with Down syndrome as the most common genetic cause of learning disability in humans. It's one in 700 births. It's huge. And we think that we can greatly improve the quality of life of these individuals. All of our work so far has been on mice.

We have a mouse model of Down syndrome and we can normalize its learning. And that has led to a clinical trial, which is just coming to a conclusion now in Australia. So we should know very soon whether or not this therapy is as beneficial in humans with Down syndrome as it has been in adults. But what is the effect on the syndrome? This is a drug therapy. And what it does is it decreases the level of inhibition in the brain. And when the therapy is used used the learning ability comes back so the simple idea that led to this was that the problem is is due to increased inhibition in the

brain the brain you know people think of the brain as working like a a puppeteer, pulling strings and the muscles respond. But the brain is more like the concert conductor, bringing some things up, lowering other things, speeding some things up, slowing other things down. And inhibition is just as important as excitation. So it turned out that in the mouse model, if we just paired that inhibition back a little bit, boom, the learning came back. Amazing.

And we're now hoping that we'll see the same effect in the humans. Very cool. Yeah. Well, maybe I can come back and talk to you about sleep. Oh, that'd be fun. Yeah, if you'll have me. Oh, yeah. Did we do okay?

Oh, yeah. Is it all right? Yeah. Yeah? Feel good? Did I miss anything? No yeah. Is it all right? Yeah. Yeah. Feel good? Did I miss anything? No, there's always a lot to talk about. No, I could talk to you for many, many hours.

Well, I appreciate your time. Super fascinating what you're doing. And again, I'm gonna be tracking it. It's gonna be interesting to see how it plays out and evolves over time. But I appreciate your time very much. If you're interested in learning more about this product, go to avacore.com, right?

Lots of information up there about that, as well as a link to the Indiegogo. But I think by the time I post this, that might be closed. But I'll also put up a whole bunch of links to articles about the product and Professor Heller's research in the show notes. So be sure to go to richroll.com

and you can check that out, right? You have to be sure you go to avacore.com because if you go to avacor.com, you get therapies for baldness. Oh, okay. We don't want that, right? Well, some people might want that. Well, some people might want that. Well, some people might want that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course, Professor Heller is always available at office hours. So you can feel free to drop in on him and have a conversation like I did, right? Absolutely. All right. Well, thanks so much. It was a pleasure. Thank you.

Peace. All right, I hope you guys enjoyed that. Thanks for taking the ride with me. Again, make sure to visit the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com to read up, learn more, and take your knowledge base and podcast experience beyond the earbuds for all your plant power needs visit richroll.com check out our new book the

plant power away lifestyle guide 120 plant-based recipes to please even the most finicky meat-eater in your family we're really proud of that book we have signed copies of that as well as signed copies of finding ultra if you want to get a signed version of these books. We have our amazing organic, 100% organic cotton Plant Power t-shirts. Rock the message as best you can. We also have running tech tees, Plant Power running tech tees.

We have some nutrition products. We've got temporary tattoos. We've got stickers. We've got fine art prints. We've got all kinds of cool stuff. So peruse the store at richroll.com and let us help you take your health and your life to the next level.

I'll see you guys in a few days. The next time you hear from me, I'm gonna be recording from Europe, looking very much forward to that. And I hope you guys are having a great week. Speak to you soon. Peace. Plants. Thank you.