Undoctrinate Yourself - #5 - Dr. Thomas Seager (Part 2)

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 2 of this two part interview, we dive into cold exposure science and best practices. Tom provides insights into the ways in which intentional cold water immersion imparts incredible benefits for metabolism, psychological resilience, and hormonal health, and outlines recommendations for how individuals can safely begin getting cold and reaping all the amazing benefits it has to offer.⁠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/⁠Support the podcast by becoming a patron on Patreon Follow the podcast on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠@undoctrinateyourselfpod⁠⁠⁠Follow Dr. Alexis on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠@dralexisjazmyn⁠

Hello and welcome back to the Undoctrinate Yourself podcast with me, Dr. Alexis Cowen. This is part two of my interview with Dr. Tom Seeger, PhD. In this episode, we're discussing the science and best practices around cold exposure. I hope you enjoy. Can you tell us about how you got into cold? So you mentioned you started with cold showers. What motivated you to even start there? I read a book and it said, you should do cold showers, you a wimp.

I'm like, well, I don't want to be a wimp. So I'm going to try cold showers. And they were miserable. And I thought I must be doing it wrong. I would get in there. I'm swearing at the top of my lungs and stuff. And thinking, this is supposed to toughen me up. So I'll keep doing it.

But I don't, I must be doing it wrong. And I tried calming down and I tried doing some breathing. And that helped. But I'd never heard of Wim Hof. and I'd never heard of ice baths until Jason, my former student, he said, well, you know, there's this Burning Man group in town and they're going to get some ice and they're going to do some yoga breathing stuff and then they're all going to get in. Do you want to come? I'm like, yeah, sure, I'll try that. It wasn't, the breathing stuff is not for me, but I got in the ice

and I said, this is fantastic. This is like totally, I went down into this meditative state. Of course I'm activated in a fight or flight, you know, to begin with, but then structure my breathing and go down into a state of calm. And I'm like, this is what I want. So we started doing ice baths. Next thing, you know, I'm online and I'm looking at why I want to buy one of these. There just aren't any for sale. And so Jason and I thought, well, we're engineers. You know, we ought to be able to make one. We started taking apart dorm fridges and things to see what kind of parts would we need for this. And we built like the ugliest ice bath you've ever seen. The pictures are still up online, but they're terrible. And then we had a party and people really liked it.

So one guy says, can I buy one? And it's almost like that had never really occurred to me. Like, I mean, it had sort of, when we're building it, we're like, hey, this is really cool. Wouldn't this be fun? But the whole idea of the business wasn't really real until somebody wanted to buy one. So we said, all right, well, you know, we got to figure that out. I didn't know what was going to happen. I thought it was going to be like a nice little backyard business, but somebody found us on Etsy, of all places, and then told a friend who told a friend who knew Ben Greenfield.

Ben Greenfield writes to us, and this is how ignorant I, I don't even know who Ben Greenfield is. And he says, you know, this looks really cool. And a guy told me about it and could I maybe have one? And we were going, I don't know, you know, these things cost us a lot of money. We're going to send one up to Washington for some guy we never even heard of. And we wrote an agreement. And we said, okay, we'll send you one.

But if we're not happy with the results, you know, we reserve the right to repossess it. Totally the wrong thing to do. I'm so glad Ben Greenfield wasn't, you know, offended because he wrote us into his boundless book. Wow. Like, right, he didn't even have it. He was at the galley stage. and he's like, you know, I've seen Rick Rubin's thing and he's doing ice baths and there's this new company and his Morosco forge and I've heard good things and that was it. And then he, we shipped out his

Morosco and he puts it outdoors in Spokane and the first thing it happens is it freezes solid. It is nothing but 20 inches of ice, which means he can't get in. And so all winter, we're like, well, when's Ben Greenfield going to post something about ice baths? You know, and I'm looking at the forecast in Spokane. Is it going to be above freezing? Is it going to melt out? And sure enough, I can't remember exactly when, but let's say it's May or it's April. He posts. And it's unbelievable because I had no idea really about Ben Greenfield's credibility in this community. And as soon as that happened, phones ringing off the hook and we're taking orders and we wind up, you know, four-week lead time, becomes an eight-week lead time,

becomes a 12-week lead. We had no idea what we had gotten ourselves into, and we decided we needed to figure out how to grow up and be a real company really fast. Amazing story. Wait, so when you started doing ice baths, did you notice any specific, like, acute or long-term changes in yourself that really motivated you to want to scale this up? The changes that I noticed to myself did not motivate me to scale it up. Scaling is the only thing that is harder than finding product market fit in the first place. It is an enormous pain in the ass. Jason has a great joke. He says, Maroscoe is both the cause and the solution to all my problems of stress. And so I find the same, you can see mine is on the balcony right over my shoulder. I'm in there every day. And it helps me

manage the anxieties and the stress. But I did experience something that. But I did experience something very important. I was in my mid-50s. And in Arizona, you're allowed to order your own laps. So I'm getting my male health panel done. Check all the boxes. It comes back and my prostate-specific antigen is elevated. And the report says, you know, you should see a doctor. I don't want to see a doctor. You know, that's the last thing I want to do. This is all pre-COVID. But I'm I'm like, before I see a doctor, I'm going to talk to some guys. I'm going to do some internet research and I started reading about elevated prostate specific antigen. All it means is that your prostate's likely inflamed. It is a marker of cancer, but it is an unreliable marker. And even

if it is cancer, prostate cancer tends to move very slowly, but it scared the shit out of me. So I'm like, cancer, you know, what am I going to do? Started talking to guys, older guys, younger guys, and they were all telling me, it turns out guys don't talk anywhere near enough about their health. They all had prostate stories. Biopsies gone wrong. Sepsis infections as a result of a biopsy gone wrong, the pain of it. Prostate ectomy. But just because there was a chance of cancer, not like imminent mortality and stuff. And then what happened after the prostate ectomy? And I'm like, forget this. I'm not doing any of this. I'm going to do some keto. I'm going to double down on those bass, I'm going to see if I can, like, get this inflammation down with cold and keto, with

diet and exposure instead of, last thing I'm going to do is have a prostate exam, because that'll just start a whole cascade of, like, allopathic, centralized medicine procedures, and I will never escape the clutches. So then I, you know, kept getting my blood work done. My PSA comes down from, like, seven to less than one, I think it's nanograms per milliliter. I'm free. I'm out of the woods, you know, this is below normal now. But at the same time, my testosterone had this big red exclamation mark triangle thing, and it said, out of range.

My total testosterone was too high. It was something like, you know, 1140 nanograms per decaliter or something. And for a man, my age, they're like flagging that. and saying, nope, you got to get that checked out. So I figure, all right, I got a, you know, I got a good PSA. I'm going to go see my urologist. He's going to give me a clean bill of health now, right? He's going to pat me on the back.

He's going to say how clever I am. He's going to ask me what I did. He didn't do any of that stuff. All he did was look at my testosterone. And he went, uh-huh. Well, I think maybe we should get one more test. And I'm like, one more test, but my PSA is so good. He goes, we're just going to order one more test.

Alexis, he thought I was juicing because he's never seen somebody my age and I'm not in great shape or anything, right? With a T level that high and he's about my age and he's like, no way. So he sent me back to get my lutenizing hormone measured. Lutonizing hormone is not on the usual panel and it's not one of the ones that you ordinarily can order yourself. And I didn't know what it was. So I have to look that up.

Comes back. Big red exclamation mark. Lutonizing hormone. too high, out of range. Because the lutenizing hormone is this precursor, it's what stimulates the gonads to produce testosterone. If your total T is high and you're lutonizing is low, then urologist knows you're on something, right?

So I sent him that report. He's like, okay, we never talked about my prostate. He never even asked me, so what are you doing? You know, so. Oh, that's unfortunate. Right? Because there's no incentive for him. What is he supposed to do? Change the way he practices as a result of one guy with one report that he's

never seen before and he's never going to see again. So I wrote up an article. And it's the same thing as like the curve is already flat. Here's the science and here's the experience. So I said, you know, here's my experience. And like, here's a study from Japan in 1991. And they did the exercise. And then they did the ice baths. And then they measure the testosterone and the lutonizing hormone. and all these young men depressed, lowered their testosterone and lowered their leutonizing hormone. But then for some crazy reason, these Japanese scientists, they did it the other way around. They're going to go, well, this time we're going to do the ice bath and then we'll do the exercise. Testosterone, lutonizing hormone go through the roof.

And I'm like, the whole time I thought I was treating my inflamed prostate. I'd come out of my ice bath and I'm like, I'm cold. And I would get my steel mace out and I would do my jumping jacks or something. push-ups or something, then I would walk to campus to try and rewarm. I was doing my exercise after my ice bath. So I wrote my experience and I wrote the science, put the article out there and nobody read it. Until Liver King on Instagram, you might know him. I think he's got a great sense of humor, right?

Liver King gets caught. Like, I don't think anybody really would have cared if he was juicing because everybody knows. Exactly. He's kind of like the circus size. show. You know, you're going to go see the bearded lady or the tallest man in the world. And you can't, you know, like, but it's here for your entertainment. And Liver King is entertaining whether he's on broids or not. So he gets caught and he has to kind of fess up. And that makes Joe Rogan kind of

curious about the whole thing. And Joe Rogan's looking around and he finds my article about natural boost in the testosterone. He has David Goggins on the show in December of 2022. And he says, you know, I was reading this article. Here's this guy. And we might improve Joe Rogan's citation protocols like this guy is Seeger TP 2020, you know. But he just says this guy. He shows my picture and he shows the Instagram post and he reads out what happened to me. And then he tells David, so I've been doing that. I've been going out in the morning in my underwear and it's cold and it really sucks, but I've been doing my cold exposure before I do my exercise all over the world. People found the article. And you have to pause the video and you have to zoom in, you know,

to find like who. And so these people were really working. I have got like a dozen direct messages since then. Guys you say, I found your protocol. I've been doing it. And my T levels have doubled or tripled or one guy in Massachusetts quit taking TRT, testosterone replacement therapy. He started jumping in the pond and doing his soccer mom walk home. That was it. He's not like some power lifter or something like that. He's 62 years old. His T levels are higher than mine. And so there has been this, I can't call it a wave or a revolution, but there's been this community of men who have said, what if I did the same thing that Seeger did? Would I get the same results? And they are, which is magnificent compared to being on some fine.

armacological list of, you know, lifetime users. Sure, especially because TRT and a lot of the pharmacological approaches will shut down your body's natural production of testosterone. So like you're kind of needing to stay on that long term in order to reap the benefits versus the cold. So actually, maybe we can talk about that. Do you know about the mechanisms by which cold could increase testosterone and if that's an acute versus a chronic effect?

Nope. Yeah, I think it's super interesting. We need to do those studies, right? I mean, I think it would be easy enough to do. I don't know that. I don't know that it would be easy enough. What I do know is that men and women are different. In men, of course, the testosterone is made in the testicles. And the testicles exist outside the body. But in women, testosterone is produced in the ovaries. And women, a lot of women don't realize this. Testosterone is the dominant sex hormone in men. We all know that. testosterone is also the dominant sex hormone in women. Healthy women have three or four times the amount of testosterone in their bloodstream.

Then they have estrogen and it is made in their ovaries, which is really counterintuitive. But where are the ovaries? They're inside the body in the abdomen. They respond differently to cold than men do. There's only one study of cold stimulation and testosterone in women. And what it shows is they use the cold presser test. They just immersed the non-dominant hand into Ebola ice water. And then they measured saliva levels of testosterone.

They found that men went down, which makes sense. It's consistent with all our findings. If the man isn't going to exercise after the cold stimulation, he will be suppressed. The women went up. And so there's some physiological difference between the two of them. There are other factors. Testosterone is complex because it is associated with vitamin D. D. If you're vitamin D deficient, you're also likely to be testosterone deficient. It goes through both a 24-hour cycle, peaking in the morning, and it goes through a seasonal cycle that corresponds with your ultraviolet, especially B exposure. But it also is metabolically demanding to produce. You need zinc and magnesium. In particular, I suspect to fuel the mitochondria that are providing the ATP that run almost all of your processes and produce this

metabolically demanding testosterone. So all of those complex biological mechanisms are difficult to decode. And to make it even more difficult to understand, there is a psychological mechanism to testosterone. The feeling of competing, especially winning, will give men a big testosterone boost. So how do I take this feeling of coming out of the ice bath, knowing that I'm stimulating my metabolism, I'm, you know, I'm making mitochondogenesis happen throughout my body. I'm recruiting new brown fat. I'm doing all these wonderful things from my, you know, energy systems. But I also feel like I just cheated death. You know, I've activated my nervous system. I've changed my psychology. And then I come out and I'm cold and I pick up my steel mace and I do, you know, my 360s like I'm some kind of goddamn Persian warrior. I feel victorious.

I think for men, there is something more than just these sort of metabolic or physiological pathways. I think there is a relationship between the psychological experience of the ice bath and the exercise for recovery and their attention. and their testosterone as well. So I don't know that it would be an easy experiment to do, to decode the mechanisms. And none of the guys who are writing to me on Instagram and Twitter and sharing their lab results gave a crap. None of them has said, you know,

I'm really happy going from 320 up to 890, but I just want to know what are the underlying mechanisms? They're like, this is great, Dr. Seeger. I feel wonderful. My girlfriend is telling me, She needs a little break and that's okay. And they don't want a molecular chain of events. They just want to stay where they're at now.

Yeah, I think, I mean, more so I'm just curious if the effect is acute, like, do you have to do cold every day and exercise after to get the boost in testosterone? Or is it going to be like, if you only do it once or twice a week, are you still going to reap a lot of those benefits? I don't know. And nobody's, I mean, I'm doing it every day. My testosterone levels have been elevated for, three, four years now. And I'm getting good reports from other people, but they're also practicing every day. So to do this, we'd have to have some kind of a crossover study where we discontinue the cold exposure and then we see what happens. And as far as I can tell, nobody's done it yet.

Yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean, hopefully somebody can listen to this. And if they're in the research space and they feel motivated to do it, they could do the experiment quite simply, I think. And yeah, I think a crossover arm would make a lot of sense, maybe start people on once or twice a week, track their T levels, then cross them over to like a daily exposure and then see, you know, if those levels are maintained, if they dropped off after the acute exposures or if, you know, they're maintained throughout the entire experiment. I think it would be really cool to know that and also to do it in both men and women just so we can see kind of what the effects are and if they differ. Because something I think spent a lot of time thinking about in general is like dose response for everything. like whether it's exercise, sun, cold, sauna, heat exposure. Like, I think it's interesting to think about ways that we can leverage biomarkers or some sort of readout to know, like, when you as an end of one have done this amount, that's good for you. And for another person, we can make measurements and determine whether that's the right dose for them.

And so hopefully, you know, we can kind of move forward and find something like that. So actually when I was doing a little bit of digging in the literature, I was trying to see, is there any biomarker for cold exposure currently identified? And I don't know if you've come across this metabolite before, but this metabolite called N lactoil tryptophan popped out as this like acute phase metabolic responder to cold exposure. And, you know, as far as I can tell, they don't know a mechanism. Like the researchers didn't identify a mechanism by which that might be the case. but could be interesting as a way to, if we want to do a dose response thing in the future, maybe leverage something like that. That sounds really neat.

There is a complex suite of biophysical responses to cold or biochemical responses to cold. One of them is CRP, C-reactive protein. It's a cold shock protein. There's a study came out of University of Rochester this year. They wanted to know, how can a bowhead whale, live 200 years. You know, talk about scientific curiosity. The theory of cancer that suggests cancer exists or originates in the nucleus in defects of DNA replication

says it is impossible for a creature that large to live that long without being riddled with tumors. And so these U of our guys are like, well, so how does it happen? they isolated the cold reactive protein. I'm forgetting, you know, there's a number two and I'm forgetting which one. And they discovered that it facilitates repair of defects in DNA. Now, I don't really buy the argument that cancer originates in sort of random defects of DNA replication. If it does, then we have mechanisms for repairing that DNA.

those mechanisms require energy. That energy has to be produced by the mitochondria. And they say, one of them is this cold reactor, the CRP. They say, well, the bowhead whales, they get plenty of cold exposure being up in the Arctic. And maybe this is the explanation for why they live so long, free of cancer. There are probably dozens of metabolites that we could associate with, as proxies for dose because there is no standardized measure of thermal dose. And there's good reasons for it. We have a lot of ways of defending our bodies against loss or drop in core temperature. Bezo constriction is one where the blood vessels shrink up and they limit circulation to the extremity so we lose less heat through our fingers, toes and limbs. Brown fat is another. The non-shivering

cold thermogenesis that exists in the brown fat, you know, at the base of our neck on both sides. Muscle shivering is another. And so we can measure carefully how much heat is extracted from the body using infrared photography. But it's very difficult to correlate that to the temperature, the conditions that the body is in. Even if you know the temperature, you know the wind, or you know the temperature of the water, the body's defense mechanisms are not, just thermal. They're also mechanical. And then there is the matter of how well acclimated is the body to the cold. Because when you're well acclimated, you don't suffer the same degree of heat extraction. Essentially, it's not the same dose. It's very difficult to get a handle on dose. You probably saw

the paper. I thought it was the paper I've been waiting for all my life, you know, neck deep cold water immersion effects on type one diabetes. I'm like, I printed out 24 sheets of paper for this approved pre-publication draft. And I never got past the experimental methods in the abstract because they used 23 degree C water, which is like 72 Fahrenheit. That's practically bath water. I mean, they called it cool in their defense, but not cold enough to activate your central nervous system, not cold enough to activate a recruit brown fat. As far as I'm concerned, that's dose zero. So why should we expect to see any impact on blood glucose or metabolism? We shouldn't, and they didn't. Totally. And to that point,

do you have thoughts about the optimal water temperature when people are doing cold water immersion? So I know Jack Cruz talks a bit about like between 50 and 55 degrees for a longer period of time being, you know, a good goal for people to have. But do you think going colder for shorter is better or do you think it's up to personal preference? What are you working on? Jack Cruz, he writes a lot about leptin. He writes a lot about metabolism. He writes a lot about metabolism. He tells his own story of losing weight. And a lot of people follow him for that reason. And if what you're working on is metabolism, low 50s is fine. Everything that I've seen. Everything that I've seen. that is measuring what happens at the low 50s. It's all very constructive. But there was a good study in Germany. They took, you know, like a dozen guys, all middle age, all type 2 diabetic. And they said, we want you for 10 days. Here's what you're going to do. You're not allowed to exercise. You can have all the snacks you want, but you're going to be in a room with your pals dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, and it's going to be like 58 degrees. We're going to study cold exposure and see what it does to your insulin sensitivity. Now, you might think that sounds like a

tailgate party. You know, you're just sitting around in a t-shirt and the fall weather, eating chips and not getting any exercise. Ten days later, massive improvement in their insulin sensitivity to the point where many of them no longer met the diagnostic criteria of type 2 diabetes. And so they asked them, were you shivering? And they said, oh, sometimes, you know, a little bit, maybe, were you uncomfortable? Oh, you know, not really. I mean, it was just a little chilly. You're not going to get that response, that sort of subjective self-report from somebody who goes into a 34-degree Fahrenheit ice bath. They're going to say, you're goddamn right, it was uncomfortable. It hurt for going to say. In other words, at the upper 50s in the air, these subjects got tremendous

metabolic benefits, but they were never psychologically activated. We don't know what it really did to their brown fat, because brown fat is typically activated by the hypothalamus through the central nervous system. It is highly innervated. And you're like, what are all those nerves doing in your brown fat? It is there to get the brown fat going when the body needs it. And I doubt because they didn't feel uncomfortable and they didn't shiver, I doubt that they experienced the psychological benefits. So if what you're going for is psychological resilience, if you're trying to boost your heart rate variability, I don't think you're going to do it at 50 degrees. When I'm in there at 50 degrees, it feels like I'm a kid, you know, at the beach, get my snorkel, I can play all day in the water.

It's boring. It has to be down below about 39 for me. to feel a gasp reflex. And if you don't have a gasp reflex, you have not activated the sympathetic division of your central nervous system. You're not likely to improve your heart rate variability or your psychological resilience. So when you say, what's the optimum? Well, I could ask you, you know, what's the best music? And then you would say, oh, no, I like all kinds. Well, what mood are you in? What are you working on? Because if you're working, on stress, go cold, go cold enough to make you gasp, to scare you, to create in you what Victor Frankel called anticipatory anxiety. So you're looking down at that water and you see the

ice cubes floating around and you're like, no way. I'm not getting in that. If you've hit that point and you still go in, you're doing something for your psyche. No, it's great. You get some metabolic benefits too. I mean, stay in there as long. as you feel challenged by it. Once you've calmed yourself down, you've sort of regained control of your body and all that panic response from all the cells in your body that are screaming at you saying, get us out of here, we're going to die. And you get to talk back to them and you say, hang on a second. We're not going anywhere. This is what cold feels like, toes. This is what cold feels like fingers. And then the rest of your body's like, oh, well, brain, why didn't you explain that to us in

the first place? You know, and you relax. You are building your psychological resilience. Your metabolism's coming along for the ride. If you're at 50 and you're like, I am doing this because Huberman told me it was going to be good for my metabolism, then do that because Huberman's right. there's an exchange between rogan and huberman is march and rogan says well you know are you doing your cold plunges he was like oh yeah what temperature is at he was like ah you know 50s i remember this you remember that one yeah rogan says well why he goes oh i get to stay in there a little longer and you remember huberman spent like three freaking hours talking to jack cruz and rick brubman and cruise is not kind about it and so rogan goes what 50s and heurman's like yeah

you know, well, we do have a morose cold, but that one's really cold. Rogan's like, oh, you avoid that? And he goes, you know, I guess I like the other one. Rogan says 34 degrees. It's because he's coming at it from this mental point of view. Gagin says there is nothing in this world that will make you question everything about your life, but cold water. And he's got a lot of experience training as a Navy SEAL. I don't know if he's doing ice baths, but it is that kind of psychological edge.

That's what I'm going for. And I'm not going to find it at 50. Yeah. So, I mean, what I'm hearing is it really depends on your goals. And that could change over time too. So it's just a matter of being honest with where you're at. Also, we should talk about like the adaptation process and like what you, if you have any recommendations of regards to how to tape.

on to getting to those very cold levels because, I mean, I'm sure there could be some, we can also talk about the potential harms if we're going too fast or staying in too long. But just first, I just want to go back and talk about brown fat really quickly because we didn't really introduce it, but brown fat are these fat depots that are very enriched in mitochondria. And like Tom alluded to, we're born with quite a bit of brown fat. And these depots tend to dwindle as we age, especially if we're not exposed to cold environments. And something I wanted to ask you about is when we're doing regular cold exposure and generating our brown fat back or making beige fat, which is like browning of white adipose tissue, what fraction of like brown fat do you think is like true brown fat like being regenerated versus white fat becoming more beige?

It's the kind of question that only someone with your training would ask. Is this true brown fat or is this white fat that? we added a bunch of mitochondria to and under the microscope it kind of looks like brown fat, but I, you know, I'm going to say the body doesn't care. Yeah. When you're exercising and you're getting stronger and your muscles are getting bigger, I've never heard anybody say, is that a true muscle cell or is it from different stem line? You're like, I'm lifting weight, you know?

So I get it. When you have that scientific curiosity and you want to know the underlying mechanisms, like the how of things work, then it's a really interesting question, especially because what we're born with is not the same as what we recruit later in life. Now, I think it's fascinating that the body has mechanisms for restoring this. My son has diabetes, which is an autoimmune disorder. His immune system attacked the islet cells, I guess sometimes called beta cells, but attacked the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin. He will never get those back. Even if they extracted eyelid cells for me, spun them down and re-put him in his

pancreas, and they made insulin for him. Eventually, his immune system would re-attack. They will never grow back. It is fascinating when the human body is capable. It has some sort of plasticity that allows it to recreate some function or structure that it had previously lost. So as scientists we're like, what, are we starfish? You know, this is incredible. If we understood that mechanism, could we regrow amputated limbs? Could we regrow eyes? Could we re? Like, it's a tremendous scientific question. And if you're going to reverse your type two diabetes, you don't care where those mitochondria came from. You're just happy that they're there. So it's, I'm an engineer. I, I, I, I, I've found a solution and I'm like, and this is working and it's robust.

And then I typically move on. You're more of a scientist and you're like, no, no, I want to know why it's working. So I can translate it to other problems and other mechanisms. It's a fair question, but is beyond my expertise. Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, I'm mostly curious because I feel like then if, let's say somebody who's very overweight is going into cold, like they have more subcutaneous fat, maybe they have more potential to make beige fat. so maybe they can actually be more cold adapted than somebody who's like, you know, has a lower body fat mass and is going into the cold for the first time. And also, of course, we know that fat serves as insulation too. So actually you could think about using cold exposure as like an initial, for initial weight loss goals or fat loss goals or metabolic health goals, if you're very overweight, you could have an advantage going in there. And I think I've heard you say on another podcast, you know, maybe it's not great as a standalone intervention for fat loss.

But if you're combining it with exercise and changing your diet, then you're going to be supporting your mitochondrial health, which is so important for your bioenergetics and your overall health in general. And it's going to help support your fat loss goals or whatever your health goals are. So I think it's super interesting to think about. I hope more people are going to be doing research. Like Suzanne Soberg is doing really cool research on cold therapy and hopefully more labs also pick it up so we can understand like not only dose response, but figuring out like if people are. are going to be responding well. If they're, you know, not going to respond well, maybe that's predictive and we can start them on like a lesser protocol. But actually to that end, do you have any tips about like adapt, becoming cold adapted and how to kind of wean onto that?

Takes about seven days, both in rats and in human beings to acclimate to acute cold exposure, which sounds actually really rapid. And I believe that there is a progression. It's not like you're flat and then seven days, boom, all of a sudden you're cold acclimated. But, it takes regular exposure. So a lot of people starting out, I mean, they bought a morose coat because it's the coldest ice bath in the world, you know, isn't that great? But they don't want to start at 34. They want to start at 50. And so what I've suggested that seems to be working really well is put it at a temperature that they feel the gas reflex. Whatever, you know, if that's 60, fine. Just put it where you feel like you're getting in. You know, and then take it down one

degree a day. And psych a lot, it's kind of like Tony Robbins, you know, 1% better every day. I don't think Tony Robbins understands the mathematics of exponential growth. You know, he's making a point. Break it down into tiny little incremental pieces and attack only those little pieces because they seem so achievable. You could 59, that's not much different than 60. You can do it. You go down one degree a day. And what they'll find, they'll call me up after two weeks and they'll say, Tom, it's not getting any easier. Like, you know, I'm getting really discouraged. Oh, what temperature you are.

Oh, I'm down to 45. Well, of course it's not getting easier. I mean, you're getting better. It's not getting easier because you're challenging your, you're 15 degrees lower than where you started. Wait until you hit like somewhere around the upper 30s. Just leave it there. And then you will find that it gets more boring.

because you're becoming cold acclimated. I really like the one degree drop a day for easing into it. That's great. Yeah. And also speaking of acclimization, I've worked with some clients who have hypothyroidism, and you actually made some interesting points about hypothyroidism on your interview with Mike that I'd love to hear your thoughts about. But also if you can tie in some information about your understanding of,

so if somebody's like thyroid hormone insufficient and they're having trouble actually mounting a heat response in response to the cold. Like I've heard from so many people with these issues that they feel like they're very cold intolerant, that they're maybe not getting the benefit of it because they're not actually generating that metabolic heat. But then I would love to hear your thoughts about that because I know that you mentioned on the other interview that TSA production goes up in response to cold. So maybe if they give themselves some time to like build up to that, then they actually will ultimately end up benefiting their thyroid health. If I said thyroid stimulating hormone, I probably misspoke.

Okay. The studies that I've said been measuring thyroid hormone. There are some good studies on people who've experienced thyroid cancer, had their thyroid removed, measured thyroid stimulating hormone. And I think that they found an association between brown fat and thyroid stimulating hormone, as if there was a hormone looking for a thyroid that just wasn't there. but in people with thyroid, what I've read is that brown fat is not just for thermogenesis. It is also an essential secretory organ.

It is making hormones. It is making neuroprotective factors. One of those hormones is the T3 and T4, the thyroid hormones. And they make more, brown fat makes more thyroid hormone than the thyroid does in people who have active brown fat. The thyroid and brown fat are in constant biochemical communities. with one another. They jointly regulate metabolism. But we're given all the credit to the thyroid. And part of the reason is that physicians used to think that we grew out of our brown fat and we never got it back. That adults just didn't have brown fat. And that was a universal truth.

Until there was a new way of scanning for cancer. It's called P-E-T. And I forget, like positron, emission tomography, something like this. And so, they noticed that in some of the instrument rooms that were cool, because these P.E.T. machines, they put off a lot of heat, and so you got to have them air conditioned. And some of these instrument rooms that were cool, they were getting symmetrical blotches on the scan that were not cancer. Well, the way PET works is you inject a radioactive tracer. It sounds terrible when I say radioactive, but maybe I'll say radio nucleotide or something that doesn't sound so terrible. And it's glucose. and then you measure the cells in the body that are taking up the glucose.

Because tumor cells are ravenous for glucose, this radioactive tracer will be accumulated in the tumor cells. You get it at the right time and you say, oh, look, this is where the tumor is. Brown fat was showing up on the PET scans because brown fat competes with cancer cells for that glucose. And it wins. When you're cold activated,

brown fat will clear glucose from the bloodstream and starve the tumor of the glucose it needs to proliferate. So these blotches are showing up. They're not cancer. People don't know why they're there sometimes, not there. And most of people don't have them. And then some Swedish team was like, I think we know what that is. I think that's brown fat and adults. And you've got to leave it to the Scandinavians because some of them, you know, they have jobs where they're getting cold,

all the time. They published their paper and then it was someone else in New York at the Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer, whatever. They said, let's look at all the scans. Let's, you know, figure this out. And they found these symmetrical blotches exactly where brown fat would be expected to be in less than 5% of their adult subjects, which is to say that 95% of their adult subjects, which is to say that 95% of these people, these are cancer patients. So their subset of the population had no detectable brown fat at all.

Whoa. Now it's exactly the method that Susanna Soberg used at University of Copenhagen to look for brown fat among her Danish winter swimmers. So PET is the highest resolution way of detecting it. And there was a new paper out of Sweden by Seki at all that came out in 2022 that measured this competitive effect between the tumor and tumor cells and brown fat and found that activating the brown fat will slow the growth and proliferation of tumor cells

and extend the lifespan of mice in which they had injected colon cancer or something like this. So all that's very powerful. But let's bring it back to the thyroid. When your thyroid has no brown fat to communicate with, it becomes dysregulated. because the brown fat modulates the thyroid. And so there's this vicious cycle, also called a positive feedback loop, but not positive in like the sense that it's good, in the sense that it's self-reinforcing. Oh, I feel cold. I'm going to turn up the thermostat. Oh, I feel cold. We should retire in Phoenix. You know, my doctor says that the cold isn't good for me. Oh, I have a thyroid issue. So the thyroid issue

means that the cold isn't good for me because my metabolism is slow, which is why I put on so much way so I should stay out of the cold. This feedback loop diminishes the brown fat, which further like dysregulates the thyroid, which further disregulates the metabolism, which further diminishes the cold tolerance, which causes them to avoid the thing that is uncomfortable. And it is terrible. So how do you fix it? You don't have to start at 34 degrees. You can start in like a t-shirt instead of a sweater. But there is something that is associated with the thyroid disorder and the cold intolerance called renauds. It is a complex, like, psychobiological overreaction to cold exposure. It might be only 62 degrees, but vasoconstriction becomes extreme and painful, and all of the

circulation and the finger shuts down to the point where they feel gray. If you have what's called primary renauds. That is not Renauds that is derived from some other condition. Not Renauds is a comorbidity, but this Renauds phenomenon called Renauds syndrome that is primary. Exposure therapy has been effective to overcome or resolve Renaud's syndrome. So what is exposure therapy? In psychology, it might be a fear of spiders. And so you sit somebody down in a controlled setting. You say, all we're going to do now is going to open up a magazine and there's going to be pictures of the spiders. And they feel like this emotional reaction just to the pictures. But after they learn to calm themselves down, improve their vagal tones,

sort of manage their parasympathetic nervous system, which rests and relax. Next thing, you know, they're going to go into a room and there's going to be a terrarium and there'll be a spider in the terrarium. Oh, and it all comes back. And, you know, by the end of the day, they're tarantulas crawling all over them. And they're like, this is great. exposure therapy, the way it works is you titrate the stimulus to a level that it creates a hormetic response. It is stressful, but is a eustress, not a distress. The hormetic response builds an adaptive capacity. So what would exposure therapy for Renauds or for hypo or hyperthyroid ism

look like? You start with a little bit of cold. It will not be tolerated well. your subject may object and shaming them in like a macho, you know, David Goggins, Jocko Wilnik, bullying them, coercing them, not the way to do it. You might get more pull-ups out of somebody, but you're not going to get a better, you know, parasympathetic nervous system response by yelling them at them with a bullhorn going, brie, motherfucker, you know, something like this. You're trying to improve their vagal tone.

So you titrate the stimulus to the, and Mike Mutzel has a really good video with a woman who suffers from Renauds and he's guiding her through the cold exposure. It's very good for your circulation. The one with a thyroid disorder, give them seven, give them 10 days, begin to build the cold defense mechanisms, including vasoconstriction, improved circulation, that is a recovery from vaso constriction, brown fat, cold acclamation, And when they bring their brown fat back, they might discover that their thyroid comes back into line because the brown and the thyroid are supposed to work together to modulate metabolism. And it's like having one end of the seesaw empty. You know when you're a kid, the seesaw is no fun when you're on there by yourself. You've got to find a friend who's willing to bounce up and down with you. That's what brown fat does for the thyroid. amazing connection there and I actually learned that from you I didn't know about the thyroid brown

fat connection and now I have like a whole rabbit hole to go down that I'm excited to learn more about let's write an article together yeah yeah we should I think there's a lot there especially because of that relationship of cold intolerance in this positive feedback loop where it's like you have to kind of put a wrench into the system at some point and turn momentum in the other direction otherwise it's just going to keep feeding forward and make things worse over time so at some point you have to like make a change even if it's uncomfortable and start somewhere. And speaking of starting somewhere, do you think there's any validity or utility in like people who are very cold intolerant to doing like contrast therapy, like hot to cold to make it like less brutal at first?

Do you think there's benefits to that? Yeah, I do. It's not the way that I do it. I find if I'm going to do contrast therapy, I need to do it with like a traditional dry finish sona. Like Mutzel likes getting his up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. He's got a wood stove in his sauna and he will crank that thing up. And it makes sense because when you come out of the Morosco, your skin temperature is way lower. Your core temperature, maybe he's only dropped to half a degree, depending on how long you're in there. But your skin temperature, people can put a hand on you and you feel cold. So then you get into a, you know, like an infrared sauna and it's 145. But it doesn't feel like anything. You know, it'll take you an hour to start sweating in there. So Mutzel cranks up his wood stove

He gets it up to 200 or something, and he bakes. Now, you can go back and forth like Vim does, like the fins do. And I think you can get a lot of benefit from the baso-constriction, basodilation cycling. And I think it can be very good for your circulation. What you should not do is go from the cold tub to the hot tub. Because hot, that is the wet heat, it doesn't work the same way that dry heat does. when you're in the hot tub, you think, oh, I'm going to sweat. But it is the heat lost by evaporation that cools your body with sweating.

When you're in the hot tub, your body kind of knows you're not going to evaporate. It does vaso-constrict, which is the opposite of vasodilation that happens in the dry heat of the sauna. That vaso-constriction, it's what make your, you know, fingertips all wrinkly and stuff. And that's to defend your body against getting too warm in the hot. tub use cold water, cold, sorry, wet cold, dry heat when you're going back and forth. The part of what came out of talking with Mutzel is he was looking at this work using Sona for recovery from exercise. Very promising. You do your marathon and typically, you know, your high school football coach say, well, get in the ice or something like this. Mutzel says, get in the sona to recover from your

exercise. He's got a whole long list of benefits. And so something that came out of that conversation was like this. What if we did the ice bath, then we did the exercise, then we did the sona. No one has ever tested this protocol. But we do have a study that says ice bath and then exercise. And we do have a study that says exercise and then sona. Well, shoot, we could put together the trifecta, ice bath, exercise, sona. And maybe we're just like triple stacking these benefits in a way that they are more than additive.

and if there's somebody out there trying it, I want to hear from them. I want to interview them. I want to write an article about how it's working for. Amazing. Yeah, maybe I'll have to clip that and we can put it up to our followers to give it a try and give us some feedback about it because I think it's a really interesting idea. Yeah, and it's easy enough to give it a shot and see how you feel. And if you're tracking your own labs, you can keep track of that too, try it for a month or

something and see what happens. I think it shouldn't, well, it might hurt physically, but it's not going to like hurt you. It should be beneficial at some level. I mean, the independent interventions are highly beneficial, and then we can see already the dual combinations having these major benefits. So let's see what happens when we do the trifecta. Agreed. Let's also talk about the effects of cold on neurotransmitters because I think there's some interactions of dopamine and noropenephrine. And also I'd like to hear some things about because you mentioned the cold makes you calm.

I've also had the experience of like a calm focus and like a very like meditative, feeling being in the cold and how that could be a good substitute for something like Ritalin or Adderall if people are having issues with focus and attention. I hadn't thought of that. I've never tried Ritalin or Adderall. And I've never asked somebody who uses those medications to report to me what the effect of a cold plunger and ice bath would be. So I don't know. Well, I can tell you, I've used Adderall and I've used cold and it's very similar. I would say the cold. So the cold is much better for me. Like it tends to be more sustainable and less of that like burned out, fizzling out feeling at the end. Like when the adderol comes down, it's just like you're kind of flatlined. But the cold doesn't give me that feeling at all. So I think there's something there. So I'm making some notes. I think that's really cool. There's probably an article in there. There's probably some studies on the neurochemistry of adderol and cold exposure that might explain your, experience and it would be fascinating to co-write something. There is, however, a relationship between

cold and the brain that is multifaceted and we're just trying to decode. So I'll tell you some of the things that I'm aware of. I got a message from an opera singer in Massachusetts. So this guy, you know, he's like super bass and he sings opera and he posts some of his stuff on Instagram. He has a chest freezer that he modified. And he made a post of himself singing in the chest freezer. And people were like making requests, you know. And so he was singing like frozen. Let it go or, you know, whatever. He was yodeling in that. And so somehow he found me and he tagged me on something. And he said, hey, look what I can do. And I wrote him, you know, why are you doing that? He says, it helps me remember the lyrics, the blocking, and the translation when I'm rehearsing for the opera.

I will do a rehearsal and then I will get myself into the cold and I find that I remember things better. And I'm like, this actually makes sense. because we are hardwired for what is called the surprise response. Surprise is a basic human emotion, like disgust or happiness. So it is a universal human emotion that everyone in every, it doesn't have to be learned. And it serves an evolutionary purpose. It can have positive or negative valence. We come around the corner, blueberries. Oh, this is fantastic. And surprise opens up our perception. When you think about it, our eyes go up, our mouth opens, our head goes back, even our limbs open up so that we can better perceive the world and our memories become more salient

by that elevated emotional experience. What were the sounds and the smells and the light and the wind doing the moment your ancestors discovered blueberries? And then, There's a bear in the blueberries. You know, now the negative, and it's all the same thing. You can see this in Judy Garland, Wizard of Oz, Dorothy. She's walking through Oz for the first time. Oh, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, Toto. The surprise response has this emotional and physiological expression

that prepares our brain to update our misconceptions and turn them into new beliefs. He gets himself in the cold, and it's not surprising. He knows what's going to happen, but it activates all the same nervous system structures. It opens up his perceptions. It consolidates his memory, and it shortens his practice time. I'm like, that is incredible. You can use the cold to study. And that's what people are using Adderall and Ritalin for to stimulate. That's the weirdest thing that, you know, your hyperactivity disorder can be like resolved by a stimulant. But college students are saying, okay, I'm studying for the test. I got to pop my riddlin to improve my memory. And so there might be an analog between what

happens in the cold and memory. So that's one relationship between the cold and the brain. There is more. Cold will stimulate the production of hormones and neurotransmitters. The the systems that defend the body against cold are particularly tuned to defense of the brain. So one of the things that brown fat will do is produce FGF21, Fibroblast growth factor 21, which has neuroprotective properties. In addition to the CRP, in addition to all the neurotransmatter that it's producing, your body responds to the cold exposure by saying, we got to protect the brain. And cold turns out to be really good for the brain.

Infants with hypoxic brain injury because they went too long without breathing used to be treated with cold. They're now treated with Viagra. And it's because Viagra will overcome insulin resistance, improve the function of my, it's temporarily. I don't like the idea of it. But they used to be treated with cold. The mechanism by which cold worked was more complex and I thought more comprehensive. but Viagra can improve the circulation and the function of the endothelial cells. The other thing that cold did under brain damage was prevent further damage upon

reperfusion. So the blood returns to the brain and can cause inflammation and other damage. Cold would slow that down. So cold has been used to treat traumatic brain injury. That's fascinating. But it's also used to help people fall in love. And you would be amazed that this is not prescribed. there are three different what Helen Fisher calls brain systems engaged in love. And there are really three

different ways of thinking about love. There's lust. There's like a romantic crush, you know, that Romeo and Juliet type stuff. And then there's love that is called attachment. The love you would have for a pet, the love that you would have for a sibling. It's not romantic. It's not exclusive and it's not lustful, but you would be a liar to say you don't love your sibling or your dog or whatever it is. Those three brain systems are associated with different chemical signatures. Testosterone is the lust hormone in both men and women. So a woman puts a cold hand in a bowl of ice water, boost her testosterone levels, and all of a sudden she's getting horny, which sounds like a really good idea for, you know, guys on a date or something like that. If you can just convince her to try it, men have to get

a little exercise afterwards. But as far as the first brain system, cold has got it. All right, let's move on to the romance, the jealous passion that we feel, well, that's dopamine. Guess what an ice bath does. It elevates your dopamine in nor epiope. which are the sort of neurochemical signatures of romantic attraction. And it takes them up two, three times. You cannot be in a bad mood in the ice bath. You come out and your brain has no choice, but to respond to the dopamine and the neuroepine that your body has produced. And that is romance. Okay, so what's the third one? The neurochemical signatures of this familial attachment are oxytocin and vasopressin. Those are the bonding hormones. And guess what? Cold stimulation

boosts oxytocin and vasopressin. So you and your partner get into the ice bath together. Breathe together. Hold one another's hands. Stare into one another's eyes. And you will have no choice. Your brains will fall in love across all three different. brain system understandings of love. And then, you know, maybe you'll invite me to the wedding or something like that. Well, that is so interesting how there's these three different pillars that are all being engaged with cold. And in a lot of ways, it also makes sense because like you mentioned earlier, this is an ancestrally consistent condition that we would have found ourselves to be in that's kind of been engineered out of modern society that we need to

rediscover in order to just, you know, create a balanced healthy body on so many different levels and psychology. So it's like both physical body and psychological mental health. And it's just so helpful on so many different levels. Yeah, I love that. So only a couple more things because we've been going for a while. But I'm curious to hear your thoughts about any sort of drug, cold interaction. So we mentioned metformin earlier. Metformin is thought to work by inhibiting complex one of the electron transport chain in mitochondria, which kind of makes it a low-level mitochondrial toxin. So I'm wondering if you've had any experience with people taking metformin, having more cold intolerance or less adaptations, or any thoughts on that. Ben Bickman was the one who alerted me

to this. Metformin will lower your blood glucose. There's no dispute about that. The dispute comes in as to whether that's a good thing. At what expense will it reduce your blood glucose? blood glucose. And as you said, it can be toxic to mitochondria. The reason your blood glucose is elevated is because your mitochondria are already damaged. Metformin will overcome that damage. It will get more work out of damaged mitochondria, but it can come at the expense of further mitochondrial damage. Talk about a vicious cycle. The next thing, you know, you need a larger dose of metformin to get even more out of the few, like the diminished mitochondria, it's terrible. Ben Bickman taught me, if you can exercise, do not take metformin.

Now, there are some people who can't exercise. And he would rather, you know, if the doctor's prescribing metformin, because the blood glucose levels have gotten to point of like dangerous neuropathy, then he's not knocking it. But he taught me to read this study that came out of Colorado State, and it came out of Fort Collins. I forget which one. Metformin will undo the mitochondrial benefits of exercise. So if you're exercising, you get mitobiogenesis, you get improved mitochondrial function, because during your recovery period, you're mitochondria proliferate. Great.

if you are taking metformin during those periods of recovery, the mitochondria will never reap the benefit of this hormetic like stimulus from the exercise. As a matter of fact, it does damage. Well, this is a revelation. I would much rather have people in the ice bath to stimulate their mitochondrialogenesis, to improve their insulin sensitivity and exercise than taking metformin. So some people have asked me about berberine. Burbrine and metformin are different chemicals. You just look at their structure and you're like, well, these are hardly analogs. But the intuitions are stimulated by the idea that if a drug or anything has short-term benefits,

that maybe it comes with long-term negatives. Here's the difference between, I'm going to call them the big three, cold exposure, exercise, and sunlight. The difference between them and a pill. when you do something that works systemically on the entire body, it's good for the entire body. Exercise is miraculous. Exercise improves your mental health. But was it your brain doing push-ups? Like, I mean, in a way, it doesn't make any sense. But when you are exercising all the side effects, I'm just putting that term into air quotes because it's such a be bull crap term. The side of it are positive.

when you get sunshine and darkness, it affects your metabolism, not just your vitamin D, it affects your mental health, it affects your mental acuity. Everything gets better. When you get cold, not chronic cold, but acute cold exposure and then recovery, it works systemically. The pharmaceutical industry has taught us that there is one disease with one root cause for which you take one pill and everything else that happens in your body. is an unfortunate side effect.

And I say if it is creating damage throughout your body, that's because it isn't good for you. You take an antibiotic and, you know, and that's going to heal your pneumonia. Terrific, but it wrecks your gut flora. And now you have to, after the pneumonia is gone, rebuild your gut flora. Because antibiotics are not supposed to be

part of your routine exposure and stimulus. You take the big three. Sunlight, darkness, cold, heat, exercise, rest. And these will promote health in every aspect of your body in a way that some people are like, well, nothing can be that good. It must be miraculous, you know. Now last time I checked, if I recall correctly, burberine, like some other foods, hot chili peppers, things like that, will also stimulate, will activate brown fat. It works differently than metformin. There's some things that we should really think of them as nutraceuticals rather than pharmaceuticals.

They exist in foods. We've extracted them. We've concentrated them because we want a more acute effect. Burbrin metformin are different. But when it comes to drug interactions, antidepressants are something to be careful with. I'm getting this from a gastroantologist. He's in France and he runs a winter swimming club. And he published a book, Icomondius.

I'm trying to remember his name and it escaped me. But he published a book on his experience as a physician doing winter swimming. And he discovered that one of the drug interactions, which is a contraindication for cold water immersion, are many of the typical antidepressants. Now, I don't know the mechanisms. But when you think about what I just said about the neurochemistry of cold exposure and the way that antidepressants, like SSRIs are trying to operate at the neurochemical level by blocking serotonin re-uptake, for example, that's enough for me to notice that I don't want to mess with it.

There are people with major depression who have been resistant to antidepressant medications and resistant to therapy who have resolved their major depression using cold water exposure. It would, what I'm suggesting is according to this contraindication that they do them independently, They don't use antidepressants and cold exposure together. If the antidepressants aren't working, there's no point in taking them. And then you could discontinue that, at least under the supervision of the physician who prescribed them, and try the cold exposure instead. That's great advice. Have you heard anything about statins and cold?

So statins could be mitochondrial toxins too. Do you know anything about any sort of cold intolerance caused by those? No. I haven't looked into it because statins are poison. Yeah. They don't belong in anybody's body. So here's a story. Talk about n equals one. My mother died acute Alzheimer's and it was terrible watching her slip away. She was in a nursing home and I got a call from my younger sister and she said, Tom, it doesn't look good. Mom is acting out. She's having tantrums. She's abusing her caregivers. She won't take her pills. The doctor says she might have six weeks. I said, okay, you know, we knew this was coming.

She won't take her pills. Stop giving her her pills. But she needs those pills. For what? Well, they're for her cholesterol. Oh, my God. What does a woman with six weeks to live give a crap about her cholesterol for? If she's having these tantrums and abusing her caregivers because she doesn't want to take the pills, just don't give her the pills.

And my sister said, yeah, that makes sense. Talk to the doctor and talk. said, it's fine. You know, she's going to die soon anyway. Like, she doesn't need that. Took her off all the statins. Mom, calm down. Mom lived for another four years. Wow. Right. Now, mom lived on a diet of insure and chocolate chip cookies and apple juice. Like, if it were up to me, I would have put her on a keto diet. And it might have brought back some brain function. And at the end, she didn't even have, but like the most rudimentary control of her one dominant hand. She could barely get those cookies like into her mouth. Her brain was far gone.

But on statins, she was a lunatic. And I made this association between the statins and her mental health. Well, sure enough, you don't have to dig around to find a lot of studies that show the metabolic destruction that statins will wreak inside your body and the way your brain suffers from the impaired metabolism. So I haven't bothered to look at cold and statins because if you're doing cold exposure, you're probably one of those people who's already very skeptical of statins. If there's somebody out there who has noticed an improvement in their metabolic health, their mental health, their cholesterol markers as a result of doing cold exposure while they're on statins. I mean, I'd be very curious, but I don't think statins have a role in medicine.

And somebody's going to watch this and somebody's going to tweet at me and say, you're wrong, Professor Seeger. You know, in this one case, there's one instance of how this one thing happened. And I can't dispute it. If that's their experience, then more power to them. I don't want them anywhere near me or my mother. I mean, I totally am on the same page as you. I really see the whole LDL cholesterol story really being a false flag for insulin

resistance anyway. And like by using statins, we're making insulin resistance worse. And so we're not actually dealing with the underlying issues within the system. So I'm totally on the same page there. It's so disappointing, you know, Peter Atia. He's got this outlive book. And he seems like a smart guy. I know.

But he's like, oh, no, you got to get more refined information about your A-pop B. and your lipid droplet distributed. You don't need any of that nonsense. By the time you're pushing a theory that far, you're saying, well, this part of the theory didn't work, and this part of the theory didn't work, and this part of the theory didn't work. But if we go to this super granular,

we might be able to find a signal in the, just throw that freaking theory out the window. Get your triglyceride to HDL ratio. This is the one thing we need to know about the lipid profile in your bloodstream. get that right and everything is going in your direction. You get it wrong. And I don't care what your A-pop B lipid droplet-sized distribution stuff says

because there's so much signal in that one number ratio of triglycerides to HDL that overwhelms any of the other subtleties. Mm-hmm. Totally agree. Yeah, I think also I think Peter's really smart too, but I also feel that he's trying not to piss off the mainstream model much and he's like skirting around these big issues instead of being honest about them, I ultimately think he'll come around. We'll see. I guess we'll see what time says, but yeah, it's unfortunate.

Jack Cruz doesn't give a crap what people think. He'll offer his unsolicited opinion of David Sinclair or Peter Atia. And I only understand like 20% of what comes out of Jack's mouth. But when he says, Atia is wrong. I understand what Jack Cruz means then. Yep, absolutely same. So one more thing I just wanted to cover because I heard you talk about it on Mike's podcast and I thought it was really interesting. The idea that the Morosco is grounded and why that's important. And also your use of different salts within your ice bath. I would love to hear about that as well. I should talk about grounding more. And I should do more research into the benefits of it. This is how far I got. Your red blood cells have what environmental engineering, we would call a zeta potential. That is, they have an electric charge on the surface, and it organizes the water and the electrons around the red blood cell that will either resist coagulation or promote coagulation. When your body builds up a static charge, because it is not electrically connected to the earth, it's not grounded, or if you're British, it's not earthed. The zeta potential of the red blood cells is such that it promotes their aggregation. the viscosity of your blood goes up the further from ground you get.

Because the viscosity in the aggregation is going up, the tendency to clot goes up. And that means the risk of deep vein thrombosis, the risk of stroke, the risk of heart attack are all going up because they're caused by blood clots where the clots don't belong. When you discharge that static charge by putting yourself in an electrical connection with the earth, The red blood cells disaggregate.

This is physics. The zeta potential, that is, the electric charge on them, changes, and it promotes their fluid, free movement. There's a graduate student on Instagram and Twitter. Jessica Genetics might be her handled. And she went outside, grounded herself, barefoot in the grass. She spent a half an hour walking around. She pricked her finger, put the blood on a side.

slide took a picture. She compared that to a picture of her red blood cells that she took a slide before she grounded. And the visual evidence of this, you don't have to know Zeta potential. You just look at the two slides and you're like, holy smokes. And then she putters around her lab. And an hour later, she pricks her finger again. And they're already reaggregating. So grounding has so many benefits. It promotes wound healing. It promotes the immune system. It promotes mental clarity, but just this blood circulation benefit should be enough to convince you that you want to stay in electrical contact with the earth. Even an hour of being disconnected can cause you to build up a static charge that begins to re-aggregate your red blood cells. And you say, well, that's fine,

Professor Seeker, but I don't have half an hour to wander around in the grass. And you don't have to, Although it's wonderful, the forge, that is the Morosco Ice Bath, is 20 times more effective for electrical grounding than barefoot in the grass. It's the only ice bath that is third party verified for its grounding properties. Brian Hoyer from Shielded Healing. He went up to Spokane and he met with Ben Greenfield. And Greenfield's very particular about these kinds of things. And Hoyer made some measurements in Greenfield, sent me an email.

And he's like, wow, this is fantastic. And then he did a little post on it. Luke Story, you know, he's in Texas and he said, well, I want to know too. So Brian goes out to Austin and he measures Luke Story to get some good video on this 20 times faster. How could that be? Because water conducts electricity better than grass does. You get your whole body in there and it's practically instantaneous. You don't feel a spark. It's not like, you know, when you rub a balloon on your head and then you touch a doorknop. It just happens throughout your whole body.

How? The tub grounds the water. Well, what grounds the tub? The copper coils that are underneath the tub that produce the cold. They ground the tub. Well, what grounds are grounded by the compressor? The compressor is grounded by the electrical system. The electrical system goes into the grounded prong of your home and straight into the earth.

So the whole system is grounded, not just some component of it for electrical safety, but the water in the tub. So I should probably talk about this benefit more. When you get into the Morosco, you're getting the cold therapy. That's good for your circulation. But you're also getting this instant rebalancing of your electrical field with the earth. And it's the only one because you can't ground the water in an acrylic bathtub. You can't ground the water in a fiberglass, you know, hot tub. You have to build out separate circuitry if your tub is not made of metal. We chose a metal tub because we wanted to make ice.

And metal is the only thing that will conduct heat out of the water to allow the ice making. It was super convenient that it also allowed us to ground the tub. So now you can stack those two therapies. Where it introduces some complication is in the salt. If you have a fiberglass tub and it's not grounded, if you have an acrylic tub connected to some Chinese chiller and it's not grounded, then you don't have to worry. You can add any salt you want. You can add like Himalayan sea salt, dead sea salt. You can add table salt. And there's nothing in there to corrode. Because the water is not in contact with any metal, the salt will not corrode any metal element. But in our tub, we use stainless steel, which is corrosion resistant, but we do not

recommend chloride salts. Do not recommend Dead Sea salt or Himalayan salt or table salt. We recommend magnesium sulfate because the sulfate is less corrosive than the chloride salts. The magnesium is wonderful for you. You will get a transdermal magnesium absorption benefit. And brown fat need magnesium. If you don't give your brown fat magnesium and you're practicing regular cold exposure, then your body's going to steal it out of your bones. Like something like 90 some, it's like 98% of the magnesium in your body is stored in your bones. And when your brown fat need it, your bones release it into the bloodstream where the brown fat can get at it. It must be replenished or you will have a magnesium deficit in your bones.

So the Epsom salt is great for that. The sulfate is less corrosive than the chloride. So I recommend you add magnesium sulfate. It softens the ice. It gives you the magnesium benefit. And then, of course, people are asking me, well, what else should I add? Well, okay, I add some zinc sulfate. Zinc is an important mineral for fostering metabolic health.

I add some potassium sulfate, all sulfate salts, no chloride. I don't want any interaction between the chloride and the ozone, for example. I tried adding copper because copper is an algoside and a baccicide and also a micronutrient for people and it will strip the zinc right off your galvanized stock tank. If you have a zinc galvanized tank, do not add copper. But in a stainless environment, a little bit of copper, the stainless steel can take it. So the advantage of using metal is you get grounding, you get to make ice. The disadvantage is it places some constraints on what you can do with salt because otherwise it might shorten the life of your tub by promoting corrosion of the metal. Wow, that makes a lot of sense. And I think it's very interesting,

too. We can think about all the ways that we can optimize this cold bath experience to improve health on so many different levels like mineralization, grounding cold. And maybe if you have it outside or near a window, you can also get some sun involved too and like get the whole party going and then do your exercise after. This is just like, it seems like the recipe for being a superhuman. And I'm just so thankful that you came on here and shared all this with us. You've been just a wealth of knowledge. And thank you so much for being so generous with your time too.

I wasn't expecting us to go this long. But I think it's been an incredible conversation. I hope it was fun for you too. It was. Thanks for asking all these great questions. Yeah. Yeah. And we definitely should write some articles together and stay in touch.

I think there's a lot to unpack here that would be of interest to like all these and of Wonders out here. I agree, Alexis. I'd like that. All right. Great. Well, I hope you have a great day. Thank you so much for coming on and we'll talk soon. You're welcome.