Undoctrinate Yourself - #4 - Dr. Thomas Seager (Part 1)

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Dr. Thomas Seager, PhD is an Associate Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University. Seager co-founded the Morozko Forge ice bath company and is an expert in the use of ice baths for building metabolic and psychological resilience.In Part 1 of this two part interview, I chat with Tom about the structural defects within modern day education, science, medicine, and politics that are keeping us sick, tired, and codependent on these parasitic systems. We discuss the importance of empiricism and N=1 in both science and medicine, and the citizen science movement that has gained immense traction over the past few years.In Part 2, we dive into cold exposure science and best practices. Stay tuned! Tom's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seagertpTom's Substack: https://seagertp.substack.com/Morozko Forge Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/morozkoforge/Morozko Forge Website: https://www.morozkoforge.com/

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Undoctrinate Yourself podcast. Today I have a very special guest for you. This is Dr. Tom Seeger. He's a PhD and an associate professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University. You may have heard of him if you're in the cold space and interested in like cold thermogenesis in this whole field, but he's the co-founder of Morosco Forge, which is this ice bath company that actually makes ice and it's well known for this. And we're going to get into, you know, the details of that technology and all the great. things about cold and the benefits it can give you for your health. But I just wanted to start by

introducing Tom and letting him, you know, give a little, you know, brief introduction about himself and then we'll kind of take it away. Thanks, Alexis. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on and for being curious about the science of ice baths and cold exposure. I got curious myself because I started out with cold showers years ago and I hated them. This made me angry. Turns out there's a difference between partial cold water immersion and whole body. And so when I tried the ice bath and had a completely different reaction, I said, this is it. You know, this is what I want to keep doing.

I still do cold showers on the road and it's a great way to get started. But I live in Phoenix, Arizona, and the tap water here is like 80-something degrees Fahrenheit in the summer anyway. So the invention of the ice bath that makes ice was because it was nothing. on the market at the time. This was 2018. And, you know, we were buying hundreds of pounds of ice. It would all melt in the backyard in Phoenix. We wanted a machine that would do this for us. And that's how we started Marosco. Amazing. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that. I was curious about the timeline because I don't know when Cold Plunge came onto the scene. Like, I only just more recently became familiar

with Marasco. Joe Rogan brought it up on his podcast and some other people I know actually have one. One of my friends actually had one from like the early stages. I guess he had one of the early models we were just talking about it earlier today, but he loves his and it seems like they have great longevity and can get much colder than some of the competitors on the market, which is, I mean, we'll get into the details of why that might be beneficial, but I think it definitely makes it stand apart from the competition. It's funny. You mentioned the cold plunge. You know, back in 2019, Michael Garrett, he stopped by our yard where were you making them and he was saying, you know, I'm really interested in this stuff. I really love what you're doing. And we showed

him the way the Morosco works. But instead of buying one and become a customer, he started his own company, called it the cold plunge. And it's different because Jason Stelfer and I started Morosco. We're engineers. And so we were approaching the whole thing as an engineering problem with copper coils and electrical and thermodynamics and refrigeration and that kind of thing. What we're not as digital marketers. So we suck at advertising. We didn't know anything about SEO or affiliate marketing or anything like that. But that's what Michael Garrett is really good at. So he took a bathtub and a chiller that you can buy from China. You drill holes in the bathtub and the it's suck, a chiller sucks the water out, cools it down, puts it back into the bathtub. It is the easiest route

to getting a cold plunge. And then, um, they bought a lot of ads. You know, they gave one to Huberman and Tony Hawk and a whole bunch of other things on the marketing end that we didn't know how to do. We were there going, okay, now, you know, after we got an inch of ice, we want that to release from the bottom

and then melt up that we were working on all of these water quality problems and these technical problems. And finally, investors started reaching out and telling us that we were doing it all wrong, that we didn't know marketing, that we really needed to, you know, Google hated us and what the heck is Marosco. We needed to like change the name of the company to something like best ice bath for you.com

and get on this digital marketing bandwagon. We made a decision that we weren't going to do that. We weren't going to do sales funnels. We weren't going to do a bunch of spam. We weren't going to have, you know, pop up ads that enter your email for a $500 sweepstakes giveaway or all this nonsense. And instead, the people who really appreciate quality found us, whether that's Ben Greenfield or Joe Rogan or Cam Haynes because they talked to one another.

And we grew in more of a word of mouth and I guess a social media kind of way. Yeah, I love that. And I think it's so important just, you know, for entrepreneurs in general to kind of like stay true to their integrity. And I think, I mean, of course, in the short term, selling out, quote unquote, can be lucrative, you know, financially. But in the long term, I think ultimately a product's going to speak for itself. And if you're really focused on quality and delivering the best that you can without cutting corners and trying to like make the best bottom line, I think ultimately that's going to pay off in the long run. So it's really awesome that you guys took that approach when you were thinking about building your company and and making such a great product.

I've never tried one, but I'm excited to hopefully try one at some point. I have a couple friends who have. What about your friend who has one? I need to go visit. I mean, he's down in Florida, so it's a bit of a trip for me. I'm up in New Jersey. Yeah, but I need to check it out. But actually, so, you know, speaking of where I'm from,

I'd love to hear a little bit about where you grew up, where you're from, and like how you ended up going down the engineering path and going into academia ultimately because I know for me personally, it was like a very kind of unique path to get there. So I'm always curious about how other academics get to where they are. For me, engineering may have been a product of some kind of trauma. I went into school in the 70s because I'm 57 years old now, and I was growing up in the city of Pittsburgh, and we were right in the city because my father was a professor of education, and many of his former students were administrators and principals and teachers in the Pittsburgh public school system.

So I went to Pittsburgh public schools all through the tumultuous time of forced busing, desegregation, white flight out of the city into the suburbs. I can't say it was a good experience. One of the things that happened to me were spelling quizzes, which I hated, handwriting, penmanship. You know, they don't teach cursive writing the way they used to. But, gosh, fifth grade was an exercise. in making letter after letter, you know, in cursive writing. And something about it just raised all these objections in me.

I turned away from English and the language arts, partly because I felt humiliated by them. I wasn't reading at the level that people I should be reading. I couldn't spell at the level. My penmanship was terrible until I found a, journalism course in high school. And journalistic writing is very different than creative writing. It was the first time that I had a male role model for a teacher teaching me about writing and language arts. All of the other teachers. And this goes all the way from first to 11th grade in English were women. This guy was a no-nonsense old newspaper editor. If you remember like the

original Toby McGuire Spider-Man's, there's a newspaper. editor and he's so irascible and that's what this guy was he's the one who taught me how to write and I went into engineering in kind of a defensive way because I was good at the math and I was good at chemistry and I was good at science and I felt such low self-esteem when it came to the writing part I couldn't even spell my major you know when I was filling out my applicate but I wanted the environment. Growing up in Pittsburgh meant that I was in the bowels of a city notorious for pollution. And it wasn't what my parents would have chosen, but it was where my dad worked. So I wanted this engineering education. Clarkson University was one of the first to start a program in environmental

engineering. I thought, well, that's what I'll go study. Now, here's the irony. I'm now an academic like my father and I make my living writing because it's all journal articles and research articles and writing proposals. If I hadn't overcome this difficulty with the mechanics of writing and practiced over and over, I wouldn't be successful in my current field. So I don't know, maybe you've been on our website, MaroscoForge.com. You can hit the science tab and you are going to see 100,000 words about ice baths. I'm almost done with the first draft of this book. I'm calling it uncommon cold, the science and experience of deliberate cold exposure, or something along those lines, that takes all of these articles I've written in the last three years and compiles them

into stories that are supported by scientific studies of the way people have used ice baths to transform their lives. All I do now is right. I barely touch, you know, an equation. But the background in mathematics and science, it sure comes in handy. Part of doing a PhD right is you ought to be able to teach yourself anything by reading the literature, by talking to the scientists, even outside your field, by dissecting the evidence and seeing what conclusions it might support. Absolutely. You bring up so many good points there.

Just like one nugget that people could potentially take away is like how much important it is to kind of have people like you teaching you so that you have somebody to aspire to or like just to relate to in that way. I think it's maybe a topic that's become more popular to discuss lately. But I feel like it's kind of being bastardized through like the diversity equity and inclusion movement. It's like not actually pushing for real diversity. It's kind of this facade so that you can get funding from the government or whatever else to say, look, I'm diverse. Like look at my student body. But then actually don't really offer support for those students to stay successful within a program. And like personally, that's a whole can of worms on

my side because my partner had this like very traumatic experience at Princeton and he ended up having to get forced out of the program essentially because he didn't have the support that the department should be offering. And it happens all the time. Like a lot of students fall through the cracks because they're just not, there's not like the level of empathy and compassion that they need and also the resources that they need to actually be successful. And another point that you brought up that I thought's really interesting too, is that when you're writing, like, writing can be a real drag for a lot of people, but if you're writing about something that you're really passionate about, somehow that can bring really something out of you. And I think in education

in general, if we're studying things in a way that is like relatable and engaging, then it just completely changes the paradigm of learning and makes learning so much easier. Let's talk about writing for a little bit then. Yeah. The best students for me, I'm not talking about in general, but the ones who work best with me and I work best with them, I've discovered, are athletes and musicians. And this was kind of a weird coincidence when I was thinking about myself and how do I mentor and how does it work. The athletes and musicians rose to the top for me. So what is it about them?

And I realized it was deliberate practice. They understand the value of deliberate practice. The athletes are used to get and yell at, you know, give me 50 more pushups or whatever it is. They're accustomed to critique, but it's more than just receiving critique and in a constructive way and using that critique to make you better. It is that they understand the value of showing up every day and doing it over and over and over again. And there's no trophy and there's no prize and there's no guarantees, but you practice. for the sake of getting better. The musicians, very similar.

A lot of guys I know, they hate listening to themselves on tape, you know, because all they hear is their own mistakes, the audience can't tell, but they're self-critical and they're accustomed to critique. They also value, they understand the value of deliberate practice for the sake of getting better. Writing is like that. If you do not practice, you do not improve. improve. And just like, you know, I was third grade when I started clarinet and I sounded awful.

Nobody wanted to listen to me. And Stephen Presfield talks about this. Nobody wants to read your shit. He says, and yet you have to sound awful. You have to write awful. You have to be able to revise. Our school system typically teaches people you write, you get a grade. It's done when you hand it in. they um what most students don't learn is you write you hand it in it's not good enough you rewrite it uh they become discouraged by the process of writing over and over again they don't want to take everything they had ball it up into a wad throw it into the recycling bin and start over and say that was good practice if you aren't able to approach writing like a musician approaches their craft or like an athlete approaches their sport, then you're not going to get good at writing.

I had to learn this and now I teach this. Yeah, that reminds me of something that Jordan Peterson said in one of his lectures about how you have to be willing to write a bad draft. And like, that's actually a really important part of the process. Like you just need to get something down. And then from there, you can build momentum and through iteration, you can build something that's like, you know, a very compelling argument or whatever type of writing you're doing. But you have to be willing to be vulnerable and not.

be great. And I think that's totally ties in with the musicians and the athletes. Like, you have to start somewhere and then you build momentum from there. Hemingway said, write drunk, edit sober. Yeah. And I'm not recommending this. I'm just saying he said that, but it's a very common theme among writers who give advice. Annie Lamont wrote a book called Bird by Bird. And it's advice on writing. And she named it after an episode that her brother experienced. Her father was a writer and her brother had procrastinated on some six week book report that he had to do on the birds of North America or something like that. He's got 30 birds. He's got to write about in one night and handed in.

And he's despondent at like the kitchen table or whatever. And he says, dad, how am I ever going to do this? Dad sits down next to him and puts his arm around his son and he says, bird by birds, son. My bird. Annie says, you just have to keep slogging forward. So there's a term I use with my graduate students. It was invented by one of my first master's students when I was at Purdue. And she wouldn't give me anything to read. She said she was working on it and I believed her. But where's the evidence? You know, I need a draft. And she resisted. She said it wasn't done yet. And I said, I don't care. You have. You have to be willing to give me a snapshot of where you are. She said, okay, tomorrow I will get you 65 pages of unmitigated crap. So now I love that. Now, you got to imagine Alexis, a master student who turns a phrase like unmitigated crap. Is she going to be a good writer? Like, she's already thoughtful and self-critical and she's got the vocation. She handed this in.

She went straight to her defense and one of the faculty on her committee came up to me and after and she said, that was the best written master's thesis I've ever seen. And I thought, well, I guess the crap got mitigated. Oh my goodness. Oh, yeah, that's so true. I think, I mean, she clearly had pretty high standards for herself, but didn't really want that criticism from other people, which I mean is totally relatable too. But I also think that's a really important part of the education process, especially like in graduate school. Like you're going to get feedback. And actually, that's a good thing because it's going to help you be better. Of course, you know, nobody wants to hear what they're doing

isn't great, but, you know, ultimately it's going to serve you and help with your writing process. And we can't do anything. Like, nobody's an island and we need to have each other to support our professional growth and personal growth. And we need to be willing to be vulnerable and do that. This is what people often miss about science. I call it the myth of Isaac Newton. It's the idea that Isaac Newton labored in isolation. And that's a myth. Can you repeat yourself real quick? You said he labored in isolation? Sorry, it froze for a moment. The myth here is that Isaac Newton labored in isolation, working his math, inventing his calculus, keeping it to himself. until he was able to release his Principia in all its genius in one, you know, unfettered

masterwork. What a crock of shit that was. Newton probably never would have had the guts to publish anything if Leibniz hadn't already beaten him to it, you know? And Newton did it better, but Leibniz is the notation that we use in calculus now because Newton was a jerk. And people gravitated more towards those scientists that had social skills. And it's true that Newton was corresponding with several of his contemporaries improving his ideas in this correspondence, in these conversations. Science is a social process. And yet we pretend, especially in the STEM disciplines, that somehow we're supposed to be antisocial. As a matter of fact, it is unethical if you do anything but your own work, all the principles of academic integrity that we teach

before college and at the undergraduate level come down to this idea of do your own work. Plagiarism, it wasn't even a term. It didn't even exist until after the printing press because books were just copied over by hand. Copying was exactly how people published. But after the printing press, so this is somewhere around the mid-1700s, people were like, Wait a second. Now it's so cheap to print. I think I own that combination of letters in the English language that I arranged that way. And so we had to develop these ethical principles. And I'm not disagreeing with the principles. I'm saying that one of the unintended consequences of those is to create this myth that our work is supposed to be done in isolation. It is not. The best way to test an idea and improve it is in conversation. It's a lot cheaper than the lab. And if you have conversations with the right kinds of people, you give ideas, you get ideas, the ideas sort of belong in the collective spaces between the people rather than to them. So then we get to our annual performance evaluations as academics.

And there might be five authors on a publication. And at least at Arizona State, I am expected to partition the amount of credit due to each author of the publication, 50% here and 30% there and 20% there. And I asked my director, am I expected to add it all up to 100? And he said, yes, of course. The percentages must add up to 100. That's a mathematical certainty. And I said, I don't see it as a mathematical uncertainty at all. He said, but that's preposterous. I said, okay, suppose the paper was fraudulent. Suppose we made up data. Suppose there was some serious ethical violation in the paper. Would I only be 25% culpable? And he said, no, you're all to blame. And I said, hang on if we are all culpable in

whatever the transgression was. Why do we not share equally and 100% in the credit? He said, because the spreadsheets that we do evaluation with don't work that way. Okay. Yeah, this is a really important point and actually reminds me of a story that I heard. It's kind of a horror story from Harvard that no specific labs, but just like I have a couple friends who are faculty there and students there and have heard that like labs down the hallway from each other will sabotage each other's work to try to get ahead if they're working on similar topics like, you know, going in and maybe messing up some samples or taking some samples and like this whole cutthroat mentality with regards to science, which is actually fueled by the way

that it's structured today where everybody's competing for the same grants, competing to make the next big discovery, instead of, like you said, this collaborative nature, which actually helps propel all of us further and helps us learn so much better and so much more in shorter periods of time. But the whole system is just, and I actually have a whole course on like scientific literacy that I taught to some lay people and was amazingly enlightening for a lot of them, and a lot of them were shocked at just how like fundamentally corrupt the current system is. in that it's just so misincentivized to just make more money

for basically the, you know, the pharmaceutical industrial complex and not actually to do good science. Agreed. People do respond to incentives. And we have created incentive structures within the university because the university is now modeled after the factory.

Sometimes we even hear faculty, talk about how students are our raw material and we sell graduates. And this pushes the metaphor way too far as if students were on an assembly line like, you know, like Henry Ford chassis or something. And my job was to bolt on some civil engineering and your job is to bolt on some microbiology or something like that. And that we do quality control as the students advance from year to year, occasionally having to send them back for rework, you know, know, because they didn't do, I don't know, physical chemistry properly and they have to retake it. After they pass the specs, we release them out, you know, to employers.

This whole model, it comes out of a reformation of the university that probably originated in the land grant. That is the moral act of the late 19th century that funded universities around the industrial and practical arts. I'm not saying there was anything wrong with that. I'm saying that it changed what people thought universities should be like and how they should be organized. That predated the industrial revolution. But then you bolt the industrial revolution and the power of the factory on top of that. And we somehow get it in our heads that the university as a workplace is a place where we should all operate in this factory mentality. Contractual. Contractual. that with someone like Claude Shannon who used to roller skate down the hallways of Bell Labs,

because what we've done is strip the playful element out of the university. Partly, it is because of the bureaucratic oversight, whether it's an NIH grant or an NSF grant or a DOD grant. We all have to fill out our reports telling our bureaucratic overseers what we have done and how it conforms to the schedule that we proposed. And these things have their advantages because they are more reliable systems for detecting fraud or abuse of funds. Unfortunately, they also strip the play out of the system. And there are so many essential scientific discoveries that have either come from accidents or from a playful curiosity that we have, by stripping the play out, we have kind of redacted the creative component from science. The key to getting funding now is to say,

this is the way that my proposal is exactly the same as everybody else's proposal, but just a little bit different and guaranteed to work because I've already got, you know, 25% of the data in the can. There is no room for, you know, we could call it the revolution, but it's not the right word. There is no room for the paradigm shift that Thomas Kuhn talked about in the structure of scientific revolutions, because that paradigm shift will be rejected by the metaphorical antibodies of the funding mechanism, and you will be ostracized by your colleagues at your home institution for failing to conform. I'll give you an example.

Andrew Huberman is someone whom I admire. He is doing for the 21st century what Carl Sagan did in the 1970s. He's taking science and communicating it to the public using a technology that didn't exist for scientists of the previous generation. the generation that trained him. So here comes Carl Sagan. And I remember those elementary school days when they would wheel in a big television.

And you knew it was going to be movie day in the classroom, you know? And then billions and billions of stars would, you know, come through the screen. Sagan was using television and then cable television to communicate science in ways that weren't available to his predecessors.

Here comes Huberman and says, it's not about TV anymore. It's about podcasts. It's sort of the talk radio of the 21st century. It's about YouTube. It's about social media. Now, if you look Huberman up on scholar.gov.com, you're looking at the track record of a guy who is not going to ever be promoted to full professor. I don't know if that's the case. I hope Stanford does promote him. But I'm now, I've made choices. in my career that will leave me at permanent associate status. Last meeting I had with my director, he's like, why aren't you writing more proposals? I think, you know, we can put you up for full. You're pretty close. I said, it's not what I want to do anymore. There's a different emphasis to my career. And it is no longer going to be National Science Foundation grants, which I was really good at. It's going to be health. It's not going to be the infrastructure and the life cycle. assessment that I used to do, I said environmental engineering has always been about protecting the health of the public. And we've gotten away from that because the sensory experiences of pollution,

the polluted air, the polluted water that used to kill people with infectious disease and the toxicology of it has changed. What we learn from COVID is that each individual is responsible for their own health. You might like your doctor. You might be thankful for the CDC. You'd be delusional, but you might be thankful, you know, for the FDA or I don't know, but you are responsible for your own health and your own choices. There's something very Lutheran about this. The Protestants believed that each individual was entitled to their own personal relationship with God. And so they broke from the Catholic Church and they said, we have got to translate the Bible into languages that people read. Get it out of Latin, put it in German, put it in French, put it in English. They did that. They said, we have to teach people to read so that they can read the Bible and develop their own personal relationship with God. I feel this way about health because our university is founded to a large extent on values that were first, our articulated in the Protestant Reformation and then promulgated throughout the higher education.

Not even the secular institutions regard these values like freedom of speech, at least until recently, quite sacred that your own, you know, a liberal education is supposed to liberate the mind to think for itself. I now feel this way about health. You are responsible for your own health. You are entitled to the information you need to make informed decisions about what you're going to do with your body. Where are we going to get that information? Well, I got news for you at at n.aH. It's a wonderful repository of journal articles that nobody, except a few with specialized training, know how to read. So Huberman's going to read them to. So I'm going to read them to you. So Joe Rogan's going to have physicians like Malone and McCullough come on the show. He's going to have

Huberman on the show and even have Peter Hotez on the show and say, okay, so tell me about this, tell me about this, had Rhonda Patrick on the show. And this whole diversity of views shows up on Joe Rogan. And there are things that make sense to Joe Rogan and things that make no sense. now the people who listen to this sort of this public communication and interpretation of science, they can say, well, that's right for me or that's right for me or that's not right for me. Track their own. We have such great wearable devices. We have access to a lot of lab information that we never would have had without going

through a physician, track their own progress towards their own goals and become sort of in their own individual. relationship with their own health. That's what I want to do. That's the rest of my career. My department chair will not understand any of it. And it's okay. Tenure does not guarantee me a job, but it does guarantee me an orderly dismissal. That is, I'm very difficult to fire. And one of the things that tenure is supposed to do is grant me the intellectual freedom to pursue things in that playful, curious way that could lead to breakthroughs. One of the things that I've discovered is that cold exposure is essential to our health.

It's not a nice to have. It's like exercise. It's like sunshine. It's like protein and healthy fats. It is essential to our well-being. And it is no wonder that we lapse into a state of disease when we're not getting enough cold. There are good reasons for it, and they have their origins, like all the reasons related to health, in evolutionary biology. We are aquatic creatures. We are meant to wade and dive and swim. It's why we have these anatomical features that are more like aquatic mammals, like dolphins or manatee or whales, and less like chimps or bonobos or gorillas.

because if you've ever seen, I don't know, an orangutan trying to cross a stream, they look much more human walking upright so their heads can stay out of the water. That's why our ancient ancestors learned to walk on two legs instead of four, because they were living in the water. Not all the time, but that's where they fished. That's where they foraged. That's where they got the DHA and the omega-3 fatty acids that are required to build such massive brains. And that's probably where they gave birth, because water births help

ameliorate the pain and the discomfort of childbirth. And in particular, there are a few women who have tried cold water births and discovered that that cold analgesic effect doesn't stop just because you're in labor. It's likely that our ancient mothers gave birth in the cold streams that were melting off the glaciers during the ice age. And that's why human babies have an instinct to swim and are loaded with brown fat to keep themselves warm in the cold water. Human babies don't know how to crawl when they're born. They know how to swim. So when you examine the evolutionary origins of our body and the bottleneck through which our ancestors had to adapt to evolve, it becomes clear that no matter where your sort of near-term relatives are

from, it could be the Caribbean, it could be equatorial Africa, it could be Norway, for goodness sakes. We are all in our origins wired to expect some cold. And if we don't get enough of it, our brown fat disappears, our metabolism dysregulates, we become susceptible to these chronic illnesses that at least in the Western countries are associated with aging. I had a toxicology professor. He was very well known and he told me in grad school, old age causes cancer. I said that sounds like a bunch of malarkey. I was not very popular with him either. It turns out he's wrong. Maybe he's telling himself the story about his own cancer. But looking back, he was morbidly obese. He had unhealthy skin, he didn't know how to take care of himself or he wasn't sort of motivated to do it.

There is no reason for us to age in the way that we watched our parents age, except ignorance and lifestyle choices. So maybe you know that cartoon that where the person, the patient is visiting the doctor, and they have what's called a lifestyle disease, you know, like type 2 diabetes or something. And so they asked the doctor, well, should I change my lifestyle? And the doctor says, heavens, no. Here's a pill. You know, take metformin. Don't change anything about your lifestyle just because you have a lifestyle disease. For me, it's broken and I want to get it fixed. Oh my God. Okay. So I have a lot of points that I want to circle back to. And I really want to then talk about the mechanisms of cold. And also metformin and cold, remind me to come back to that because there might be something. there that we should discuss. But I want to circle back briefly just to mention about the whole idea of playing it safe in science and how it's like incentivized by the current grant funding model and how it's kind of ruining the discoveries that we're having because people aren't

motivated to actually make, you know, discoveries that are kind of out of the box because, you know, you're not going to get the funding to do that. And I think from my understanding, prior to the 1950s, a lot of scientific research was blue sky research. So it was like you were funding the person and you were believing in that person to do great things. You weren't funding specific research projects. And that's like a completely different paradigm that we got away from that also kind of coincided with the whole like academic journal model and how that's a whole other can of worms. Like I don't know how that business model actually exists. The journal is paying, like making people pay to be in it, making people like review the articles for free like pro bono.

and then you have to charge the institutions also to purchase the journals. So it's like they're literally raking in all the cash and nobody's getting anything for it. So I have no idea how that ended up, you know, becoming a thing. But in general, I think it's leading to just very, very poor science. That's also kind of speaking to the idea of how, you know, the NIH isn't going to really help you as an individual. And that's because we're funding science that's really looking at averages and looking at what happens to people on average and what happens on average may not be relevant to any one individual. And we're, even though we have great computational power and, you know, technologies

today, we're still not to that point where we're even looking at end of one science and like end of one medicine to understand, you know, what's happening in your body. And I am hopeful that we're kind of hopefully moving in that direction because ultimately I think that's where our model is really failing. It's that we're trying to shove people into these boxes that don't fit them. And then we're surprised when, you know, we have all these unintended effects and people are getting sicker and sicker than ever. And it's ultimately because we're not tailoring any one treatment to an individual. All right. Let's respond to several of these in kind of a random order. Sure.

The n equals one is very important. You know, I'll go on Twitter and I'll say something about testosterone and cold exposure and the medical doctors will show up on Twitter. and say things like, there's no peer-reviewed, double-blind, randomized control study that says the thing that happened to you actually happened to you. What a jerk. The only thing that counts is your N-Equels-1 experience. I don't care what kind of p-hacked statistical study you have. You got your 0.001 significant, whatever the hell it is. When you go to a specific individual, they're entitled to know, well, I'm in the 99% part of the bell curve, or am I the 1% that didn't work that was insignificant? Every single scientific study is a source of a hypothesis that may or may not apply to you.

So n equals 1 is not like a pejorative criticism. it is the only thing that matters at the scale of the individual. And I only got one body. Perhaps, you know, if I clone another one out of my head as if I was Zeus, you know, birthing Aphrodite or something, then I'll get interested in N-Equal-2. But until that sort of supernatural occurrence, I'm one and I'm interested in the study of me. So there's that. The averages were developed because we didn't have the computational power to track the whole statistical ensemble. So I don't know, we needed like the Bernoulli's or something

to invent mathematics that allowed us to work with large ensembles without all the computational power that we have now. There's no reason to be comparing averages anymore. We have enough computational power in our laptops to compare distribution. but we're not tuned, we're not trained in the statistical methods at an undergraduate level to think in terms of doing mathematics with distributions. So we still use sort of the computational shortcuts of the average despite the fact that it hides

so much information in the tails. One of the things that happens as a result of that bias against n equals one and the myth of Isaac Newton is that we divorce science from experience. There are multiple ways of knowing. There is knowing through your sort of structured scientific investigation. That's one way. Another way of knowing is the experience. The difficulty is that people only come to understand to make meaning through stories. And experiences are the raw material. of our stories, not statistics and not graphs and not, you know, falsifiable hypotheses. So until we can take the structured approach of science, which is reliable and generalizable,

and then turn it into a story that makes it meaningful for people, they don't know what to do with it. The difficulty about the storytelling approach is it is not reliable. It is not generalizable. It's confounded with context and circumstances that somehow, get left out. We need both science and experience. Social media allows us to trade both, to share both. And so when the two are integrated, then we have powerful ways that motivate people to sort of become the heroes of their own journey. And I've realized this way back. This is April

2020. There's a writer named AJK. And she wrote this one called The Curve is Already Flat. And it was an anti-lockdown article. And she came to me. We had this disagreement. You know, many of my colleagues in academia were up in arms about COVID. And I had a lot of questions. And we started doing a YouTube series. But my colleagues were saying, this is the big one. And she told me, no, it's bullshit. And I go, hang on. You know, I've got a friend and he's been cited tens of thousands of times and he does disaster response and health care. And he tells me like, this is the one that we've been afraid of for decades. And she goes, no, it's bullshit. And I'm like, why do you say it's bullshit?

She says, well, I've looked at the data. That gets me interested. So we go to the CDC website. She says, these are all the influenza like illness reports from November 2019. that tested negative for all nine known strains of flu. That's 110,000 reports a week. Oh, but how many were, you know, 2018, we need a control group to compare.

She says about 6,000 a week. COVID had been here for months. The lockdowns were a fraud. So she wrote this article, but she said, here's why it's important. It happened that she had a, tumor on her liver. Now, because there's a risk of a bleeding disorder in her medical history, and the liver is nothing but blood vessels, she's in the hospital, she's in acute abdominal pain,

and this is happening months before COVID. She's got four daughters. She's raised them herself, and the doctor said, you've got a tumor on your liver. We cannot biopsy it, a biopsy, it, because there's a danger of it bleeding out. We cannot try. treat it or remove it. So we've set it up to the hospital tumor board and we decided that the thing to do is watchful waiting. Watchful waiting for a tumor that came out of nowhere is a death sentence for a mom with four daughters. She was like mortified. What am I going to do? And I said, this is what you're going to do. You're going to cut out all concentrated carbohydrates. You're going to put yourself on a ketogenic diet and you're going to start doing ice bats. She did. She reported back

for a scan. Damned if that tumor hadn't shrunk a centimeter. And so she went from death sentence to there is hope for me in my life. I know how to take care of myself. I have to monitor this thing constantly. But at least if I do these things, I am not going to, you know, expire and leave my daughters without a mother. So she wrote, the curve is already flat. She said, here's why it matters. The hospitals are closed to all elective procedures. And you might not know what an elective procedure is. An elective procedure is anything that can be scheduled, including my scan update. I can't go back. I can't monitor the growth of this tumor or non-tumor. I can't get feedback on how, you know, my changes in diet, my changes in exercise, my changes in cold exposure are keeping up with my

health. And it frightens me way more than a bad cold. That thing went viral. She put it up on medium. She was kind enough to give me credit for helping her with the graphs, you know. But it was her story and it was the combination of the science and the personal experience, you know. And here's how the science connects to human meaning. Something like two million views in 24 hours. Wow. Medium took it down. She was the second person ever censored for writing an anti-lockdown story.

And that was the moment I knew we were in like uncharted waters for me, that everything had changed. She, I mean, she was second in a long list of people who were censored. I became persona non grata. I became the object of media attacks for my own views on COVID. And who at Arizona State would come up to me and say, I love what you're doing. You know, we need these voice. Nobody. Because there was this monolithic, institutional pushback.

on what you and I would consider real science in an effort to weaponize the science, to advance political policies that made no sense from the standpoint of public health. What happened was the rise of the citizen scientist, and social media has enabled this. This is not grant funded. This is not institutionally supported. This is not subject to the incentive structures of annual performance evaluations, H.A.K. and a number of other people who sort of discovered one another on Twitter and other platforms began running the data themselves. They said, this doesn't make any sense. Those people are still out there publishing studies on whether it's the death certificates or vaccine efficacy. There was this enormous upswell

of citizen science. And it was post-publication reviewed. We're accustomed to this pre-publication review. And it's a model for when paper is very expensive, you know, because you can't invest all the money in typesetting and color glossy and mailing it out unless you know it's really good. So you have to have pre-publication review. But PDFs are wicked cheap. And so we can share all the crazy ideas we want and do post-publication review. And we're seeing this in all the pre-pub outlets. Like bio-archive. That's the one. Yep. And there's Med Archive. There's physics archive. There's just a ton of them out there where you put out your best shot and then you allow people to sort of pick it apart, critique it before you go to a journal. So we can talk about

the journal's response. The journals used to do something that was expensive. Typeset, print, mail. All those costs have come down. They've with it. to nothing. Nobody needs the journals anymore. And so journals have stopped being offset printing and distribution machines, and they become brands. You can say there are always sort of brands, but if you're in nature or you're in science, or you're in cell or something, it lends prestige to your work. Presumably, you've been through a rigorous peer review process and only the best work shows up or the best funded work. We've learned from the retractions at Lancet and the retractions at New England Journal of Medicine and the retractions throughout the medical journals that peer review

isn't doing the job of protecting the resources, the expense required. And frankly, that expense is irrelevant. So we see this massive decentralization and democratization of science by allowing individuals to make contributions, even if they're very small. You know, it might be one comment on one public paper, one correction. And this doesn't build a whole career of citizen science, but that incremental contribution can now make somebody else's work better. It is an incredible reorganization of what I call the topology of science. It used to be that the tree of knowledge was organized in branches and they were all very specialized. But now, you know, the internet has connected all of those branches as if, you know, citizen scientists were spiders, you know,

making a web throughout. It's very powerful. And of course, it threatens the institutional, the sort of centralized business model. Journals have found a new profit mechanism. You know, they don't make money selling ads anymore. They make money charging authors. And why is that? Because the institutions of science evaluate people like you and me, the authors by how many publications and what allocation of the credit. They've turned it into, it's kind of like a video game, you know, you accumulate publication experience points and then you level up and you go to the associate level. Because it's been gamified, people game the game. They take their grant money and they pay a journal for the privilege of publishing so that they can add it to their CV and tell their department chair what a great job they're doing.

I met an esteemed colleague at a conference and we're having lunch next to one another and he kind of bragged and he said something like I published 160 journal articles last year and this guy's a national academy member. and Alexis, I have a big mouth and I couldn't stop myself and I go, oh, did you read any of them? Because I don't know where you would find the time to read 160 paper, much less author them. It has become a caricature of itself, you know?

The scientific publishing is now like an editorial cartoon because it's become so exaggerated in the level of important, that we place upon it and we are underestimating the power of citizen science by comparison. We should be like resourcing, fostering, training citizen science because it's cheaper than it has ever been and it is extraordinary in the way that if it's done right, it allows reliable knowledge to come up to the top. So let's talk about how we wound up here. There was a report written by Vannever Bush. It was called Science, the Endless Frontier.

And it was supposed to be prepared for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but it was delivered essentially to Harry Truman. And it was a particular moment. Maybe you saw the Oppenheimer movie, which I thought was very entertaining. And then you remember when Oppenheimer met with Truman and Truman said something at the end. He's like, you know, don't ever let that crybaby in here again or, you know, something like that.

I don't know if that's an accurate portrayal of Harry Truman or not, but there was a special time in science. And it was the Manhattan Project. The Department of Energy Labs grew out of the success of the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project created the myth that if you take a bunch of scientists and you, lavish them with resources and you sequester them in New Mexico or Tennessee or Hanford or some remote place on this world and you oversight them with bureaucrats and you know structured mind and force them into schedules and things like that they will come up with transformative breakthroughs the Manhattan Project led the federal government down this pathway of

like the bureaucratic management of science. And Vannever Bush was clever enough to both capitalize on that and defend science against it. So he wrote the science, the endless frontier. And it was a very optimistic view of what the federal government could achieve if they would only fund science. And Vannever Bush argued it has to be basic science. You know, it has to be science, you know,

without the expectation of a product that's useful, and Harry Truman bought into that. It was lucrative for those institutions that had good connections to Washington, MIT, Princeton, for that matter, those that were closely tied to the kind of engineering, the physical sciences that were associated with the Manhattan Project. And it changed the business model of the university, and it changed the, the, the, the, the, way universities thought of their mission. Now we're going to be very research focused, but a particular kind of research, government-funded research. Those are the universities that you and I have grown up in, and it is a departure from the way journals actually started.

Journals were, I guess the first journal might have been the proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences in London or something like that. What was happening was, people were writing letters to one another. You know, Newton writes to Leibniz, and Leibniz writes back, and he says, well, I think you're wrong. A lot of those letters were like savage. Yeah, right? In a way, it's like going to a philosophy conference, like knowledge proceeded through hostile discourse. And in philosophy, they don't run experiments. Their experimental method is still hostile discourse. And I find it distasteful. But if you don't have a lab, I don't know. What else are you going to do to test your ideas? So they're writing back and forth to one another, and somebody said, you know, this stuff is really useful. We should probably share it with people. And so they wrote down their crazy ideas and put them in, you know, the proceedings. And they called it a journal, as if it was a diary of correspondence. It has become way more professionalized and bureaucratized than that now. You can't publish just any crazy. idea in a journal anymore. And I'm supposed to be reviewing for nature communications this morning.

And I think it's an uninteresting, unoriginal paper. And I'm going to reject the crap out of it. But is that really the way that it should be like, what am I really protecting the nature brand, the expense of publishing and mailing this out to libraries, or some kind of smug moral satisfaction that I know more about the literature than these authors do. Peer review is fraught with weird incentive structures that are actually antithetical to the improvement of ideas and the reliability of knowledge. So in a way, Twitter has replaced, you know, the proceedings of the National Academy. And that sounds like a preposterous statement. and it is it's not 100% correct.

But let's say, you know, it's like 35% correct because so much great information has been published on Twitter, reviewed on Twitter, improved on Twitter, or in social media, that our public understanding of what is true has improved to the point where people don't trust the institutions anymore as they shouldn't. Yeah, amen.

I actually think that was a real big blessing of COVID that really exposed how much of a house of cards the centralized model was. And I think from there, I mean, as challenging as that time was for some people, I mean, personally, I found it to be quite a nice break. I enjoyed the lockdowns quite a bit, honestly. And I think a lot of people were experiencing burnout, too,

who finally got to stay home and, you know, be with their families for the first time and however long. And actually a lot of people didn't end up wanting to go back after that because they realized how much work they could get done from home. And so I really think it just shook up society to the point where we actually needed to, to allow a certain percentage of the population to wake up to the real serious issues that we're facing and also the solutions that could be offered in response to that.

And so I think we're on a good path towards that. And I mean, I can tell, you know, I hope. there's more faculty like you out there. I don't know any personally over here. There was a lot of, I mean, probably a lot of posturing too that people are scared to speak up about their actual thoughts due to that monolith like you mentioned before of like cancel culture and just, you know, losing their careers, their credibility. And thankfully, people have been more open to coming to speak out, especially as like more data comes out that like a lot of what we had was wrong. And so it becomes less of a risk to actually speak up about these things now. But

I am hopeful that we're moving in the right direction for that reason and that, you know, a lot of credible voices are coming out in support of these topics that we're talking about, which is, I think, so important, like, as a next step towards making a better model. And the other benefit of, I think the current model is, like, kind of imploding on itself. And so we're just building something better and moving on. And, you know, we don't think we really have to fight that model. It's just kind of killing itself from the inside. The experience that you described of the lockdowns, it's typical of 100 million people.

There's a term for it called the laptop class. The people who work through computers, they're not paving roads. They're not ceiling cracks. Nobody cares where their drywall comes from. They just want it on their walls. And so the experience that you had was true. for a lot of people who are highly educated and working in what we used to call white collar jobs, although none of us even wear collars anymore, you know. However, the lockdowns did extraordinary

harm throughout the world, especially to those in third world countries, the supply chains were disrupted in ways that were very damaging. The medical system was disrupted in a way that was very damaging. AJK wrote a follow-up to her curve as already flat article, and it was called The Lockdowns Are Killing More People Than COVID. And she, you know, went into the data and she made her argument. I sent it to Governor Doug Ducey's office. David, she published it, said, you need to read this. Two and a half hours later, he lifted the ban on elective procedures in the state of Arizona. Different states had done. different attitudes towards the lockdown. But when Ducey read AJK's article, he said, God damn it,

we have to let people have access to health care. And I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, yes, the lockdowns were terrible. On the other hand, I'm aware of the studies that say when all the cardiologists are at some national conference in Atlanta, mortality goes down in Chicago. You know, the medical errors are now the leading cause of death in the United States. There's something so wrong in what we call our healthcare institutions. We spend more money per capita on health care than any other country in the world, and it's not even close. It's like by a factor of two or three, I can't remember exactly, but it's extraordinary.

And our mortality has, by this, I mean, life expectancy has played. plunged. It peaked in something like 2014. This isn't a COVID thing. But the recent plunge in 2020 or 2021, I'm trying to remember what year I have the most recent data is related to lockdowns. It's related to mandatory vaccines. It's related to the ban on elective procedures that took place and all the delayed care. We don't have like the worst health care in the world. despite the fact that we spend so much on it, we have it because we spend so much on it. And we are in desperate need of reform of our institutions. So where are we going to start?

We're going to start right here. The first thing I'm going to reform is me. If I get run over, I hope they take me to the emergency room. I hope there's somebody there to set my bones. I am not going to ever do chemo or radiation until. I've exhausted all of my sort of natural pathic options first. And there are years of exhaustion, you know, experiments to try. These n-equals one trials that might keep me in good health before I check in to the intensive care unit.

Totally. I think that when we talk about like the amount of money that we spend per capita on health care. It's, I always, I always kind of find it kind of funny when like politicians or so are talking about this and they're saying it as if they think that it's like a terrible thing, but really, like it's what's a major fuel of our economy. I think it's in, it's like one fifth of our GDP or maybe even more. And so like if we were to actually get people super healthy, that's, that whole sector is going to like shrivel up and a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money. And so there's no incentive to actually make that number smaller, which is why it's so important. for people to, like you said, take self-responsibility over your own health because that system's not going to do that for you.

It's not built to do that. It doesn't want to do that. And also, like you alluded to, the trauma care system is great. Like, I feel like our medical system is really good at acute care dealing with injuries, like in a pinch, can keep you alive in a pinch. No problem. But when it comes to chronic disease, we're using the same model to try to treat chronic disease. And it just doesn't work there. And we're not getting that. And so that's where, it becomes so important to take care of yourself, inform yourself, and find people that you can trust with good quality information so that you can make your own decisions and live your life in a way that allows you to avoid that system altogether. GDP is not the be-all and end-all of like the moral good of the economy that it's trumped up to be.

It was a measure that was invented during the Roosevelt administration because we were in the middle of a depression. And Roosevelt said, well, what are we going to do? And people came in and they said, well, you should cut interest rates. So you should raise interest rates. So you should cut government spending. We should raise government spending. There was, in this experimental time, economics as a profession prior to the Depression was more of a humanities and less of like a mathematical, what they try and claim is science. And to bring some, actually, I can't even call it rigor.

to bring some of the rituals of physics to economics and to raise that profession in its prestige, they said, oh, we need measures. Oh, we need equations. Oh, we need to be able to do derivations and mathematics. The measures are not necessarily a bad idea in the crisis of the depression. We're going to try this experiment. How do we know whether it's working? I mean, the Works Progress Administration, is that a falsifiable hypothesis? You know, how would we be? show whether, I don't know, the Hoover Dam does us any good or whatever it is that we're going to build. I'm not objecting to the measures that were promulgated at the time. I am objecting to the prestige that economists seem to have accrued since the Depression. I kind of want

to say, weren't you entirely discredited by the great financial crisis of 2007, 2008? I mean, wouldn't that just like put an end to your entire field? And the answer is, nope, nobody could have seen it come in. Are you crazy? Like there were, you know, articles on the front page of the New York Times saying that this is fraud, that this way of, you know, assessing the risk of bonds is just a made-up nonsense fraudulent. My dog just got a mortgage for a half-million dollar house in Maricopa, Arizona. How can you possibly justify this as positive economic activity? You know, know, these sort of anecdotal, experiential reports that were revealed by the movie The Big Short, the economists somehow came through the massive failure of their discipline with their reputations intact.

That brings us to 2020. Somehow, like medical science has somehow survived, at least to date, this incredible, like, disruption of health and the extraordinary failure of our responses to COVID with its reputation intact. And I find it just as flabbergasting as the idea that any economist is worth anything after the catastrophe of the great financial crisis. I don't put much stock in GDP because many of the things that it measures, as if they were a positive, are the exact kinds of things that don't make our lives better. When mom's got two kids and, you know, they're young, their preschool age, and she quits her career so that she can care for her children at home. GDP goes down. Labor force, you know, participation goes down. Income goes down. But the

quality of life of her children and her family presumably go up. And then mom and dad are sitting down in the kitchen table and say, well, we just, we can't make it. You know, there's, we can't afford this mortgage and we got to pay for the car and like you're going to have to go back to work. And mom says, okay, I will put the kids in preschool. I will pay somebody else to watch my children and care for them during the day. I will go back to work and 80% of my after tax paycheck will go to fund the preschool, but we'll keep the 20% and that's how we're going to pay for the additional cost of groceries or we're going to pay for the, or whatever the heck it is.

GDP goes up as if everything in the world is moving in the right direction. And we know it's not. So I don't put a lot of faith in the GDP measure except just to some kind of gross, aggregated, vague sense of, well, are we in a crisis or not? I mean, I feel like a lot from like the politics standpoint, it's just where, kind of we're focusing as a society on making money and where we're making money isn't necessarily benefiting us as individuals or on the whole. It's just, you know, a way to kind of inflate numbers and make us look good on the outside, but it's really a facade and quality of life

just sucks right now in general. There's a difference between money and value. Yes. Bet Foreman makes people money. Yes. Getting someone off of foreman adds a lot of value, even if the GDP goes down. Congratulations on your improved health, your improved quality of life. The fact that maybe you don't go blind or have to amputate a foot, that you're no longer at elevated risk for heart disease and stroke and every other chronic illness that's killing people in the United States. When we get too caught up on the money, we lose track of the value.

This is something that entrepreneurs understand well. You have to create a ton of value to start a new business. And then you have to say, how much of that value that I'm creating am I able to keep, you know, by charging a price that leaves the customer with more value than they have paid me and allows me to pay all my suppliers the cost of fulfilling that order. So typically in a startup environment, you're thinking about value, value, value. But then you get to be a mature company. And you're thinking about money, money, money.

How can we release the iPhone 35? They now have more iPhones than they have Rocky movies. And that is astounding to me. because Stallone has like extracted as much as he can out of the Rocky franchise. Maybe he'll come up with another one, but I don't think he's going to catch up to Tim Cook. They're like, okay, it's the iPhone 16. And I think we can make another nickel if we add a third camera or some nonsense like this. When a company matures, it typically loses track of value and instead it becomes preoccupied with money.

Yeah, that's a very interesting evolution. I mean, I think that's not inevitable in all cases. I mean, I think as an example, Marasco Forage, you guys didn't make that transition to money. You're still focused on value. And that's also where like the integrity part of the conversation really comes in and just not being a sellout. And I also can empathize with people, especially in this economy where it's like we need money now. We, you know, can't necessarily afford to focus on value. But I think ultimately, if we're thinking in the long term, we need to be. be thinking about what we're externalizing harm-wise to other people and if it's worth it. And clearly the American government doesn't see the value in having a healthy population or we would be focusing on that. And so that's where we really just need to value ourselves and have high self-worth so that we're like, you know, we're going to do better for ourselves and not rely on this broken ass system. That sounds right. There's a book that Rory Sutherland wrote. It's called alchemy. And it's got nothing to do with chemistry or physical scientists because he's a marketer. He's an advertising man. He's at Ogilvy. And he wrote this book, Alchemy, to make a point that people are not

logical. They are psychological. One of the things that he keeps coming back to in his book is the opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. And he uses the example of Red Bull. At the time that Red Bull was coming along, the whole business model behind the soft drink industry was to like sweeten the beverage to the saturation limit of high fructose corn syrup or something, and then add lots and lots of caffeine to addict the children who were too young to buy cigarettes or alcohol or something. And then you plus it up to a three-liter-sized bottle and you charge another 25 cents because your margins will improve and you buy out the shelf space at the convenience stores and the grocery stores so that no competitors can possibly reach the customer.

Red Bull comes along and they say, how are we ever going to break into the soft drink market? They held focus groups. You know, this is in Thailand or something like that. And they said, what would you sample our new soft drink? And the focus group said, this is awful. It's terrible. I mean, I want to be polite and everything. And usually, you know, I might say something, well, it's not really for me. But this is the worst crap that I have ever tasted. Don't ever invite me back for another one. And Red Bull wrote that down. And they said, we think we got it. Red Bull said, well, instead of making it, you know, in a massive three-liter bottle and charging 69 cents, What if we put it in in a small can and we charged them like several dollars?

And everybody said, well, nobody's going to go for that. You know, why would they buy your soft drink that is so much more expensive and tastes like crap? And they said, instead of putting it in the aisles or at the end of aisles and these huge displays and stuff like that, what if we sold it like up by the cash register where the candy bars are and the cigarettes are behind the counter and stuff like that? And people said, well, you're freaking nuts. Everybody knows that the soft drink industry doesn't work that way. and people bought it because if it tastes like crap, it must be really powerful. It must work, yeah. Right?

Because only medicine tastes like crap. And if it comes in a small bottle, like five hour energy, you know, it's just tiny little thing. And it's expensive, then it must be powerful. And only the dangerous things, the things that you know or no good for you are sold up by the cash register, right? It's like candy bars, cigarettes, and Cosmo magazine. Those are the, and they're all toxic. And they're the only things that they said. And so the younger people were like, I want the one that tastes like crap that is powerful

and expensive. And it's sold next to all the other stuff that I know isn't good for me, but I'm invincible and I can take it. And they drank it. And they felt invincible. And Red Bull became a huge success, despite the fact that they broke every single. single rule of the soft drink market. And Rory Sutherland says the opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. I really like his book because here I am at Marasco Forge and I haven't done anything

right. I mean, we've built a wonderful machine. But as far as marketing, I'm still a faculty member. I don't buy the right Google ads. I don't have a Facebook page. And my goodness, Alex, says, I don't know how I'm supposed to sell anything online without viral TikTok videos, but I've never touched TikTok, right? I sat down with a woman from Scottsdale in very early on who was giving us some feedback about our product design and the website. And she said, this isn't going to work. You know, what you've got to do is you've got to have like the sleek, plastic,

molded, high tech, fashionable. And I think that, you know, that will appeal to the marketplace. It goes to the med spa. and things like that. You know, that's what float tanks look like. I said, I don't think that that's the right look for us. She said, but you can't sell this. It looks like it's built in a barn.

I said, I wish I had a barn. Like right now, I'm in a backyard. It's 115 degrees out there. We're swinging, you know, screwing these things together. But we wanted something that was rugged, that was natural, that did not look high-tech. Something where, like, if your kid took his cramination, and rode all over it. It looked like it was supposed to. Something like where you dented it with your kettlebells in the middle of the workout, you'd say, well, that just made it better, you know.

The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. So we called it a metaphor that nobody knows how to pronounce except the Russians. And whenever the Russians see me, oh, it's Morosko. You know, I'm like, I can't even say the name of my own company, but it's a wonderful fairy tale. People stumble. over it. And when we first started, the search engines hated us. We were practically impossible to find. But now, we are the top-ranking Google hit on four different misspellings of Morosco. Because it means something to people. The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. Because when it comes to human beings, it's not logical. It's psychological.