#343 - Ice Baths Can 2X Testosterone Levels & Improve Sexual Function in Days | Dr. Thomas Seagar

Summary

Danny Jones Podcast #343 Summary

Ice Baths Can 2X Testosterone Levels & Improve Sexual Function in Days (w/ Dr. Thomas Seager)
Date: October 24, 2025
Host: Danny Jones
Guest: Dr. Thomas Seager (PhD, College Professor, Co-founder of Morozco Forge)

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Brief Overview

In this episode, Danny Jones sits down with Dr. Thomas Seager to unpack the science and controversy behind ice baths, particularly their effect on testosterone, metabolic health, mood, sexual function, and recovery. Dr. Seager, known for chronicling his own health transformation and compiling extensive case studies, argues that the order in which cold exposure and exercise are performed is pivotal — claiming that pre-cooling (cold plunge before exercise) can double testosterone levels and yield substantial health benefits for both men and women. The conversation spans everything from practical routines and scientific mechanisms to industry misinformation, cold exposure history, and the systemic health policies in the U.S.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal Routine & Ice Bath Protocols

• Pre-cooling vs. Post-cooling:
  • Traditional athletic wisdom focuses on cold after exercise for recovery, but Seager's approach is to use cold first — followed by exercise, then sometimes sauna, and finishing with another brief cold exposure.
  • Quote: "You get a big testosterone boost when men cool off first and they don't have to do a strenuous exercise afterwards...and this explains my lab reports...I'm a fat 59-year-old sedentary college professor and my testosterone is over 1000 nanograms per deciliter." (Dr. Seager, [02:34])
• Routine Sample:
  • Cold plunge → Light exercise (e.g. kettlebells, cycling) → Sauna or hot therapy → (Optional) Another brief cold plunge.
  • Both Danny and Dr. Seager report feeling energetic and “fantastic” after trying this reversed order ([02:11]).

2. The Science: Cold Baths & Testosterone

• Mechanism:
  • Mitochondria produce all sex hormones (testosterone, estrogen, etc.). Optimizing mitochondrial function with cold exposure before exercise maximizes hormone output.
  • Studies from 1991 show “pre-cooling” spikes luteinizing hormone (LH) and testosterone; post-exercise cold suppresses them ([04:00]–[05:20]).
• Case Studies:
  • Men and women (including post-menopausal women) report doubling or tripling testosterone after adopting the ice bath-first protocol.
  • Quote: "Readers all over the world are sending me their labs and...getting this huge boost in testosterone, huge boost in mood, huge boost in energy, because they're pre-cooling instead of cooling afterwards." (Seager, [04:37])
• Exceptions & Limitations:
  • The protocol doesn’t work for individuals on certain medications or with extended testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), as their endogenous production is suppressed ([15:50]).
  • Some stacking: People on TRT see additional boosts with ice baths, but recovering full natural production after years on TRT is challenging.

3. Debates and Social Backlash

• Pendulum Swings:
  • After years of Rogan & Huberman pushing ice baths, there’s now social media skepticism (e.g., Dr. Stacy Sims questioning benefits for women).
  • Dr. Seager contends much of the skepticism is a misunderstanding or exaggeration of nuanced positions ([05:34]).
• Women & Cold Exposure:
  • Benefits exist for both sexes, but women are advised to start with warmer temps ([06:10]).
  • Real stories: Fertile and post-menopausal women both saw significant testosterone rises, reversal of hormone deficiencies ([19:11]).

4. Metabolic, Thyroid, and Cognitive Health

• Mitochondria Central:
  • Cold exposure stimulates “mitobiogenesis,” increasing number and quality of mitochondria, improving metabolism, and supporting hormone production ([38:25]).
  • Brown fat, rich in mitochondria, is activated by cold and essential for healthy metabolism, energy, neuroprotection, and thyroid regulation ([42:25]–[44:05]).
  • Hashimoto’s and other thyroid disorders, as well as insulin resistance, can improve or even reverse with regular cold exposure ([44:06]–[45:10], [84:01])
• Cognitive Health:
  • Dr. Seager recounts his own mother’s decline attributed to poor diet/mitochondrial dysfunction and outlines cold exposure’s benefits for brain health ([38:23]).

5. Hormesis, Cortisol, and Stress Management

• Hormetic Stress:
  • Regular cold plunges train the body to handle acute stress more efficiently.
  • Initial cortisol spike fades with adaptation; habitual cold exposure is shown to improve overall resilience to stress ([63:03]–[64:52]).
  • Case: NFL punter Mitch Wishnowsky reversed a dangerous “cortisol bubble” in his eye with breath-work and cold plunges ([66:06]).
• Dopamine & Focus:
  • The dopamine/noradrenaline rush from morning cold exposure can replace or curb the need for caffeine ([62:42]).

6. Vitamin D, Light, and Environmental Mimicry

• UV, Latitude & Biophotons:
  • In the absence of sunlight (UVB), brown fat’s “biophoton” emission upon cold exposure can synthesize Vitamin D endogenously ([46:01]–[49:00]). Recent studies show blood Vitamin D rises after cryotherapy, even without UV exposure ([48:26]).
• Green Light & Headaches:
  • Dr. Seager discusses green light therapy for migraine relief, possibly mimicking the healing light environment of forests (“forest bathing” effect) ([87:54]–[94:17]).
• Diet and Baby Health:
  • Importance of maternal and infant metabolism highlighted for preventing autism and lifelong metabolic disease — with cold exposure as a beneficial tool ([127:27]–[135:53]).

7. Industry, Policy, and Systemic Barriers

• Food Policy:
  • U.S. subsidies for sugar and corn (ethanol, high-fructose corn syrup) encourage metabolic disease among the poor; Dr. Seager advocates subsidizing nutritious foods instead ([120:40]–[125:00]).
• Pharmaceutical Incentives:
  • A legal obligation for public companies to maximize shareholder value undermines consumer health (Dodge v Ford case, [139:10]).
  • Ads and continuing medical education bankrolled by pharma companies perpetuate misinfo.
  • Encourages removing direct-to-consumer pharma ads and shift to B-corp (benefit corporation) models ([140:04]–[143:43]).
• Current Reforms:
  • Recent FDA and HHS reforms now require all pharmaceutical ads to list every side effect, closing the “adequate provision” loophole ([146:19]).
• Pediatrician Incentives:
  • Shocking revelations about bonuses for vaccine quotas, and the economic pressure for pediatricians to drop noncompliant patients ([136:50]).

8. Morozco Forge and the Future of Health Technology

• Company Mission:
  • Morozco Forge is expanding beyond ice baths to hydrogen mineral baths (hot tub with unique water chemistry and electron-rich environment) and phototherapy devices.
  • Seager aims to provide urbanites “the next best thing to nature” with science-backed, grounded health technology ([155:31]–[162:21]).
• Educational Approach:
  • All research and case studies are open-source; Seager positions himself as a trustworthy, unbiased source in an industry rife with conflicting voices ([162:21]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Testosterone is a reflection of your metabolism. Testosterone is made in the mitochondria. And this is what people don't realize, that all sex hormones originate in the mitochondria."
  — Dr. Thomas Seager ([02:34])

• "Everybody who hasn't been listening to Joe Rogan on this is still doing it wrong. They're still doing the ice baths after the exercise. When you reverse the order...huge boost in testosterone, huge boost in mood, huge boost in energy."
  — Dr. Seager ([04:28])

• "My PSA had dropped from 7 down to 1.8. No elevated risk of prostate cancer...my testosterone was 1180 nanograms per deciliter, and the lab report flagged it."
  — Dr. Seager (on his personal health transformation, [09:00]–[11:49])

• "For women, it's different. Only 25% of testosterone is made in the ovaries. The rest comes from skin cells, fat cells, and adrenal glands.... when she started doing ice baths, she went from 14 to over 160 [ng/dL] in testosterone."
  — Dr. Seager ([19:16])

• "Cold exposure stimulates mitobiogenesis...When you get into the cold and you activate your mitochondria...it will reproduce those mitochondria so that you have more and they function better."
  — Dr. Seager ([38:23])

• "Brown fat is not just a nice to have for cold thermogenesis...it will protect the brain, modulate metabolism, correct thyroid disorders...If you don't have brown fat, you are missing an essential organization that, that your body is relying upon."
  — Dr. Seager ([44:06])

• "The dopamine rush from morning cold exposure can replace coffee. Every time I've done the cold plunge before my cup of coffee, I never even touch the coffee. Don't even need it."
  — Danny Jones ([62:42])

• "Cold plunges train your body to handle stress. Over a few weeks, the cortisol spike disappears...You get better at managing your stress response."
  — Dr. Seager ([64:13])

• "We subsidize the sugar industry...I wish we would cut that out. The Midwest is just as bad."
  — Dr. Seager ([121:58])

• "Every U.S. publicly traded company is legally obliged to operate as if...maximizing shareholder value — even if it comes at the expense of patients. That's a systemic problem."
  — Dr. Seager ([140:04])

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Important Timestamps

• [02:34] – Science of “pre-cooling” and testosterone boost mechanisms
• [04:37] – Social media backlash/controversies about ice baths
• [09:00] – Dr. Seager’s personal prostate/T levels journey
• [15:08] – Case studies: Who the protocol works for (and who it doesn’t)
• [19:16] – Impact on women: fertile and menopausal case studies
• [38:23] – Mitochondria, brain health, and cognitive decline
• [42:25] – Brown fat, metabolism, and neuroprotection
• [44:06] – Reverse thyroid disorders, Hashimoto’s, with cold exposure
• [62:42] – Cold exposure as a superior “wake up” than coffee
• [64:13] – Hormetic stress, cortisol adaptation, NFL punter story
• [120:40] – Policy, subsidies, and feeding the poor
• [139:10] – Dodge v. Ford: Systemic incentives against health in pharma
• [146:19] – New FDA crackdown on deceptive pharma ads
• [155:31] – The Morozco hydrogen mineral bath and future directions

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Flow & Tone

The episode is highly conversational, candid, and lively, with Danny playing the curious, practical-minded host and Dr. Seager bringing deep, often humorous expertise. It mixes technical discussion with vivid storytelling—both around personal health experiences and broader policy/industry critique. The tone is passionate and accessible, with a focus on empowering listeners to use actionable, research-backed strategies amidst a sea of health misinformation.

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For Listeners: Practical Takeaways

• Try the “pre-cooling” protocol: Cold plunge (2–4 minutes) before exercise for a potential testosterone and mood boost.
• Cold makes you metabolically flexible. Regular practice improves insulin sensitivity, stress resilience, and can even aid recovery from thyroid and autoimmune disorders.
• Brown fat matters. Adults can re-activate it with as little as 11 minutes of weekly cold exposure.
• Women see benefits, too. Just start at a temperature where you feel safe.
• Morning cold + sun = optimal start. Sunlight and a cold plunge can replace caffeine.
• Policy change is needed. Food and pharma industry incentives often run counter to health.
• Don’t rely on ads or social media headlines. Seek out complete, clinical evidence and real-world case studies.

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For a deep dive into the referenced studies, case data, and more on cold-induced health optimization, check out Dr. Seager’s book Uncommon Testosterone or visit Morozco Forge’s website.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

All right, Tom, thanks for coming down.

[A]

So much fun and showing me how.

[B]

To do a cold plunge the proper way.

[A]

You didn't need anything from me, but it was fun. I watched you get in twice and I like seeing you get in at first. 40 degrees and I'm like, ah, Danny's been at this for a while. Why is he having such a strong reaction? You know, then you told me that you hadn't been in a week. It's been a week. You lose some of that adaptation. It happens to me when I take a week off, then all of a sudden I turn into like a cold wimp or something. Then we did a little routine that was different for you. It was cold plunge first, then a little bit of kettlebells for me, some exercise bike for you. Then we got into the sauna and it didn't. Maybe it was 20 minutes, I'm not sure. I didn't have my time, but it was just long enough to start dripping with sweat. We got into your swimming pool and then back into the cold plunge. So we reversed the order you often use. We did ice bath, exercise, sauna, and then we just finished off with a little bit of ice bath. Just 15, 20 seconds. How did that feel for you?

[B]

It felt fantastic.

[A]

I feel that way right now. Yeah, I feel pretty good. An hour ago we just got out and it feels pretty energizing. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. I usually like to, as I was telling you, do a cardio workout, like a hard cardio workout before and then the. For the podcast. Then I follow that with a sauna and then I do. I finish it with a cold plunge and then come straight here. So now we're trying to reverse it, to see how it feels.

[A]

See, how I do we're doing is called pre cooling. Yeah. And you've probably been listening to Craig Heller. Explain this to Huberman. He's like he was doing per cooling, extracting heat between sets during a strenuous workout. And Heller showed that if you cool the body, the mitochondria will increase their peak power output and they will not get fatigued. So cooling will help you reach a higher level of athletic performance. Now, we're not per cooling between sets. We're pre cooling the exercise. And here's what Heller didn't talk about. You get a big testosterone boost when men cool off first and they don't have to do a strenuous exercise afterwards. Then they do 20 minutes. It could be exercise, bike, you go for a walk for half an hour. I like doing lunges. I like my steel mace. So a little bit of light exercise to rewarm the limbs, they get a big boost in testosterone. And this explains my lab reports because I've been putting them online now for five years. I'm a fat 59 year old sedentary college professor, and my Testosterone is over 1000 nanograms per deciliter. So how do you think that happens? The testosterone is a reflection of your metabolism. Testosterone is made in the mitochondria. And this is what people don't realize, that all sex hormones originate in the mitochondria. So if your mitochondria aren't right, you can't possibly be synthesizing enough sex hormones to have a higher level of testosterone. Turns out there's a study goes way back to 1991 in which they tried ice, well, cold stimulation for recovery from exercise. Just like, you know, your high school track coach says you're supposed to do after practice, right? That lowers testosterone, it lowers luteinizing hormone. Luteinizing hormone is what signals the gonads to make the testosterone. But if you reverse the order, which is what they did in 1991, if you do the cooling before you do the exercise, luteinizing hormone goes up through the roof. Testosterone goes up through the roof. So by reversing the order, you get the hypertrophy, you get the muscle building hormone, plus you speed recovery. Everybody, and this is a slight exaggeration, but everybody who hasn't been listening to Joe Rogan on this is still doing it wrong. And then, you know, whether it's Thomas DeLauer or Peter Attia or Biolane or somebody, and they'll do a video. Ice baths don't work. And they'll get 100,000 clicks because they're still doing the ice baths after the exercise. When you reverse the order, readers all over the world are sending me their labs and then getting this huge boost in testosterone, huge boost in mood, huge boost in energy because they're pre cooling instead of cooling afterwards. I didn't.

[B]

I haven't. I've heard about this, but I have not witnessed this phenomena of people online. Saying ice baths don't work is the main reason they're saying it, because it crushes testosterone and muscle hypertrophy.

[A]

You are on the right track. There's a lot online now that is bashing ice baths. We went for two years where Joe Rogan was saying, oh, Morozko is the best thing ever. You know, I get so much out of it. And he's right. But the pendulum has swung. There are some people who never want to get into an ice bath. And so, especially when Stacy Sims went on the Huberman podcast, she went on Stephen Bartlett's podcast, and then she went on Mel Robbins podcast. Now Mel Robbins has a Morozco. She's a customer. She loves it. She's posted about it. But when Stacy SIMS, with her PhD went on Mel's podcast and said, well, you know, I don't really like ice baths for women, Mel was like, thank you for telling me that. I feel like people have been pushing the ice baths maybe too hard. So there's this social media backlash against ice baths now. But look at the comments under the clips. And the clips have all exaggerated Stacy Sims position. She's like, ice has a role. She even talks about how ice baths will help women overcome endometriosis. Like, there's a lot of benefits for women with ice baths that Sims acknowledges. She's just saying the women should start a little warmer, and it's fine. Start wherever you're ready. When you look at the comments under the headlines on Instagram or Twitter, they run about 50, 50. Half of the comments are saying, I don't understand how ice baths could be bad for women. You know, ice baths saved my life. Ice baths, like, rescued me from depression. Ice baths helped me lose £20. You know, ice baths have given me so much energy. I started doing ice baths, and then I conceived a child. How could they possibly be bad for me? Then? The other half of the comments are like this. I knew it. That's why I'll never do an ice bath. And, you know, and I'm glad I've never done one ever in my life. There are people who don't want to do the really tough things, and they want to hear from social media that science or whatever is telling them they don't have to do that. There's some other reason that they're unhappy or they're lethargic or they have some thyroid disorder or something else. And I don't buy into that. If a cucumber facial and a day at the spa was going to cure cancer, I would be writing articles about that. It just doesn't work that way right.

[B]

Now. You said that this stuff, when you. When you specifically do workouts after you do, like, a cold plunge or do a cold bath, it. It boosts LH and follicle and FSH and increases overall testosterone, like, dramatically, no matter how old you are.

[A]

I have not measured the fsh. And the LH and the FSH have two different roles. If I'm remembering this correctly, the LH will stimulate testosterone production in the gonads, whereas the FSH is more respons for sperm production. Those things are related, but they're also a little bit different. And I haven't tested fsh. I haven't examined sperm production. For me, it was really an accidental discovery. I had a blood test come back with an elevated PSA. So I'm 59, but at this time I was 52. And a lot of guys will get their blood test, find that their PSA is elevated, and then there's a whole sequence of things that happens. First thing that happens is you go online and you say, what the hell is a PSA? And why is mine seven? Or whatever takes about 20 minutes online. And WebMD is gonna convince you that you're gonna die of cancer. Like, this is what happened to me because I'm prone to these catastrophic thoughts. Then you're supposed to go to a urologist who will tell you your prostate is inflamed, then recommend a biopsy. In a biopsy, they will remove, like, 16 tissue samples out of your prostate. I'm not recommending this. I'm not a medical doctor. I'm a PhD and those different degrees, but it sounds like an awful experience. And the men that I've talked to who have been through it told me horror stories about how painful it was and the false positives that can result. So then they examine these tissue samples and they say, well, is it cancer? The false positive rate is very high. And so you might have nine come back cancerous, and maybe the rest no cancer. And you say, well, I don't know. And then your urologist will say, as a precautionary measure. We should remove your prostate because it could be cancer. After you have your prostate removed, you will be incontinent, almost certainly, at least for some time, and you'll never get an erection again. So this is what happens in my head at the age of 52, when I have a lab test showing my PSA is too high. I'm headed for these painful surgical procedures and a lifetime of erectile dysfunction, and I wasn't signing up for that. I was recently separated from my wife, and I was thinking, what woman is ever going to love me? How am I ever going to have, like, a romantic life again if I go through with this prostatectomy and I can't ever get it up? So I said, I'm going to find some other way to do it. I'm going to use ketogenic diet and ice baths, because both of those are good for inflammation. And I got into. At that time, it was a chest freezer that I got, you know, from Kenmore. And it was this big, ugly, dirty thing. But every day I got into that because I was afraid I was gonna die. Took me four months later, and in the interim, we'd invented Morozco, you know, so there's a cleaner solution that makes its own ice. I go back in to get my labs because I finally got the courage to check again, and my PSA had dropped from 7 down to 1.8. 1.8. No elevated risk of prostate cancer. So I'm like, I've done it. I waited a few more weeks. I got another blood test. I got the whole male panel this time, 1.1 on the P. So I'm in the clear now. I'm going to go to a urologist. I think I'm going to get a big pat on the back. He's going to be like, this is a miracle. You know, I should. How did you do this? I need to know. He wasn't interested in my psa. He didn't care. He's like, yeah, that's fine. What I'm really worried about is your testosterone reading. Because my testosterone was 1180 nanograms per deciliter. And the lab report flagged it. They put it in red. They said it's too high, it's out of range. My urologist is about my age, and he's looking at me, and he's like, there's no way. He's like, I just want one more test.

[B]

He thinks you're on the roids.

[A]

Exactly right. He goes, there's no way. And at that time, most medical doctors still believed that increased testosterone levels would increase the risk of prostate cancer. I even had a friend who had a prostatectomy, and he was on testosterone suppressing drugs because his urologist was saying, we really need to kick the crack crap out of this prostate cancer. We're going to suppress your testosterone. Testosterone is anabolic. It promotes the growth of cells. And according to this theory, we should get your testosterone down until we're sure that you're in the clear. Right. My friend gained like 30 pounds, of course, because he was feminized. He was chemically castrated, essentially. He felt miserable. He had no energy. But it's what his doctor told him to do. So at that time, I'm at the urologist's office, and he's like, this guy, this college professor, he's on the sauce. I want to get his luteinizing hormone checked. I didn't know what luteinizing hormone was. I got to go back to the lab. I got to go back to Google. I got to get another test. Comes back 8.9. I am off the charts, too high. I'm in, like, over sex, 19 year old territory with these sex hormones. So I send the report to my urologist. I never heard from him again. Like, he doesn't care about my psa. He doesn't care about my testosterone. This is how little I know about, you know, practicing medicine. What is he going to do? Change the way that he treats his patients? It makes no sense. Is some guy going to show up with an elevated PSA and now this urologist in Scottsdale, Arizona, is going to say, hang on a second. You know, before I do any surgery with you, you should try the ice bath protocol, because that worked for a patient. I'll put him out of business. It doesn't make any sense. So instead I wrote an article, you know, like, this is what happened to my testosterone when I was doing ice baths to treat my prostate. Danny, nobody reads my articles. Like, I put it up on moralescoforage.com, nobody cared. But then I'm going to Iceland. I was going with a girlfriend I had at the time. In December, it's going to be dark. We're going to see the northern lights. So we're on this plane. I land in Reykjavik, and I got to find this rental car under, like, three feet of snow. I have no. You know, the worst part of the rental car is always trying to find the car. And I have to brush off all this. And my phone, now that it's back on it's going and all these signals. I get into the car and I open up my phone in the cold and all these people are saying, I saw you on the Joe Rogan show. I'm like, no, no, no, no. I think I would know if I was on Joe Rogan's podcast. Yeah, he read my article, he put my picture up there, and he said to David Goggins, I've been doing something different. This is December 2022. I have been doing the ice bath before I do the exercise. I've been doing this three days. And Goggins is like, well, how's that working? And Joe's like, it's hard, but it's working. Now guys all over, they pause the video and they zoom in and they found my picture and they found my article. They're reading the stuff, they're trying this protocol and they send me their labs from all over the world. So I did some pretty. Well, you got it right here. I did the case studies and I wrote them up in Uncommon testosterone.

[B]

Yes. Your first one was cold. And the second one, this more recent one is Uncommon Testosterone.

[A]

Right. This the only one of them can you get on Amazon. So Uncommon testosterone you can get on Amazon. I'll have uncommon cold up there. I think probably a week or two after this podcast comes out, I started writing down the stories of the people who were trying this pre cooling protocol. What happened to them? They send me their labs. So these are documented with real numbers. This is men and women who have way boosted their testosterone levels.

[B]

Listen, I just learned about this badass new feature that YouTube's rolling out called subscribe. Over 51% of the people that watch the show haven't hit our subscribe button. So if you just hit that little red button below, you're going to help us continue to get more exciting guests for you to listen to.

[A]

But I also wrote about two case studies where it didn't work at all. And so you got to why does it work for some people, but it doesn't work for others?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

In one case, there was a medical doctor in Canada and he was taking a medication that suppresses testosterone synthesis. So it didn't work for him. Okay. Another guy had been on TRT for three years and he was one of the unusual men that said, well, I want to go back to being natural and see how that feels. His testosterone came down. He says, I'm going to try this protocol instead. And it didn't, it didn't rescue a low testosterone. He was like, in the 600s or something. He wanted to do better. When you're on trt, even if you're taking the female placental hormone drugs that will maintain your sperm production, your gonads lose the ability, lose the capacity to produce your own testosterone. So you've been on TRT for years. Your body knows you got plenty of testosterone. Instead of signaling the gonads to make more, they're like, hey, gonads, take a break. Because, you know, we're getting it from injections or we're getting it from creams or whatever. We don't know whether this guy will be able to bring his testicles back online, so to speak. But that's his health goal. That's what he wants to try, and he's got to take care of his mitochondria to do it. So I'd like to check in with him in another year. How are your levels? He's making some, but he might not be all the way back. And this is the one thing that. That bothers me about trt.

[B]

How long was this guy on it before he tried to quit?

[A]

Three years.

[B]

Three years.

[A]

There are other people who have been on for longer quit, and from what they say, rebound. They're okay. Yeah. But in his particular case. Now, you and I, we both know Mark Bell. Yeah, he's delightful, wicked smart. He's like a scientist, you know, working on his own body. He's never gonna. Maybe he will, in the interest of science or something, quit taking steroids someday. But he's found something that works for. And I remember Huberman saying, once you're.

[B]

On, yeah, he's a freak who eats Skittles every day before he works out.

[A]

Right now he's trying this sugar diet.

[B]

Psycho Mark Bell, God bless him, because.

[A]

He can go do the crazy things that I don't have the courage to try, and then he can podcast about it, tell the world, hey, this is what happened to me when I tried the sugar diet. And I think that's a ridiculous idea, but he brings his sugar way up, his protein way down, his fat way down, and then he reports what happens to his body composition. And I guess if you do this temporarily, you can get some improvements in body composition. Thank God Mark Bell's a good experimenting. What he's not telling us is what happens when a man decides he wants to go natural. The boost that you get in your mood and your energy and your competitive drive and your motivation when you fix low testosterone. It is like changing the quality of your life as if you've turned the lights Back on. And this is what men are telling me. Men who are in the 200s or the 300s, and they get themselves up into 900 territory, and they're like, I'm never going to go back. So I think a lot of guys will stay, stay on TRT because they're afraid. They don't want to lapse back into depression and low energy. But for those people who are ready to quit, they got to wake their nads back up. For women, it's different. When a woman goes into menopause, her ovaries, it should be clear, are just not as active. But only 25% of the testosterone in a woman's body is made in the ovaries. So the rest of it comes from skin cells, fat cells, and adrenal glands. There's no reason for a post menopausal woman to have low T just because her ovaries aren't as active. If she gets in the ice bath, she stimulates her skin, fat, and adrenal glands. So I got two case studies of women. One who, she's 32. She's still fertile. She's still menstruated. She's on a regular cycle. She doubled her testosterone levels after her ice bath practice. But another woman, she had her ovaries and her uterus surgically removed. She's postmenopausal. She's in her early 60s. She was on hormone replacement therapy. When she started doing ice baths, she went from 14 to over 160 nanograms per deciliter in testosterone. And then her doctor was like, we got to get you off the horn. You are plenty high. So I asked her, are you growing a mustache? Are you. You feeling masculinized? She goes, I feel great.

[B]

I feel great, Tom.

[A]

She didn't sound like that at all. But you get the. You get the point, right?

[B]

What would be the benefit for somebody like Rogan, though? Because he's on trt. He's been on it forever, according to him. And if he's doing the. The workouts after the cold, then, I mean, you can't. Can people that are on testosterone increase their natural testosterone by doing this?

[A]

I don't have any labs from Rogan. I mean, I've watched what he says, what he's told. We can take him at his word here. But I'm going to speak to people who are using TRT and Ice Pass at the same time.

[B]

First.

[A]

One of them was a former airborne. He was medically discharged. He was doing a jump. He broke his hip. So this guy Is a military vet. He's jacked. But he was also depressed and contemplating suicide. His T was down at like 220. His doctor said, let's get your testosterone up, see how you feel. So he got up to like seven hundreds, eight hundred, and then he started doing ice baths. His mood improved, his testosterone went up to 1400. So when he was stacking the TRT on top of the ice baths and then exercise protocol, it's like he got the double extra boost. Whoa. Now that guy, I think of him as an extreme athlete. He's working out all the time and his mental health really requires it.

[B]

So the TRT got him up to like the 700s, and then the ice.

[A]

Bath got him into 1100, 700, totally normal. That's a good reading. Middle aged man in the seven hundreds is doing fine. But the ice bath gave him another, like almost doubling. So. But that's.

[B]

I would be curious to see if people could go on testosterone replacement therapy while doing ice plunges and workouts every day.

[A]

That's what he did.

[B]

And completely maintain their natural production.

[A]

I would be curious, if not elevate.

[B]

It simultaneously while taking exogenous testosterone.

[A]

So I got a couple of case studies like that. But let me finish with this like stacking. There was another guy. He's just a businessman. He's not like special forces or anything. And he's not working out hard. Very similar story. Low T went on trt. He got a good boost from his TRT like he's medically supposed to. And then he got up into the 1100s when he started doing ice baths. So those are two case studies and they show that there's some. There's the potential for this supplemental effect that when you're doing ice baths and then exercise, you're still stimulating the mitochondria, you're still doing the mitoba biogenesis, you're still getting stimulation in your gonads to make additional testosterone. Now you could back off your trt. You could maybe taper off the trt. To my knowledge, neither of these case studies have done that. But there are other case studies, and these are men who were low. And they said, I don't want to do TRT. I want to try natural first. And guys down 400 and below, and then they start doing ice baths and exercise. One guy, 30 days, he tripled his total testosterone. He was down in the three hundreds. He wound up in the nine hundreds. He lost 25 pounds. He was doing a lot of things. He was doing some keto, he was eating Very clean. So all of these things are going to support his mitochondria. And ice baths every day were part of that regimen. He was freezing, like, 33 degrees. He would do 20 minutes, which I don't recommend. I think he's overdoing it. And that 33. Yeah, yeah. Which is pretty freaking incredible. I think that's too much.

[B]

That's psycho.

[A]

Right? I agree. And yet he was doing the rebounding. He wanted results fast, so he was dosing himself way more than I would have recommended. And he doesn't do 20 minutes anymore, as far as I know. Right. But then he was doing rebounding, so very light exercise, just rewarming his limbs, you know, jumping up and down on the trampoline. Boom. Fastest testosterone ramp I've ever seen. Other people have nearly duplicated those results, like over a period of four or five weeks, added 400, 500 points to their total testosterone levels. And the reason is that their mitochondria were jacked up. The reason that their testosterone was low is because their mitochondria weren't working right. When you do, and it only takes a couple of weeks when you do ice baths and you're doing them every day, you stimulate what's called mitobiogenesis. You will recruit new brown fat into your body. You will improve, improve your insulin sensitivity. You will fix your metabolism. And part of that seems to be stimulation of the mitochondria in your testicles, or in the case of women, but men, too, in the adrenal glands and the fat cells and the skin cells that are also secondary sources of testosterone to make more testosterone. Even if you're on trt, which for some guys is a miracle, if you're faced with the choice of boosting your testosterone or checking out of this world, I would much rather have the guy on the testosterone. What I don't want is to see a man get trapped in a pharmaceutical dependency that lasts for the rest of his life. So again with the caveat that I don't give medical advice, I just explain, what do the clinical trials say, what happened to these other guys? In Joe's case, I think he's primarily using it for the mental benefits. He's huge. He's ripped. He's not getting in there going, I want to cut another 1% off of my body fat or something. I feel like I need the extra boost of the muscles. If you listen to him and what he's explained to me is he goes in that freezing cold water, he goes short now, because there is a psychological Thing that happens every day when you do this. He says, you got to kill your inner bitch. No apologies, no negotiation. You just get into that ice bath because it's so hard when you get out. You got the noradrenaline, you got the dopamine boost. Then he will work out. He wants the testosterone boost. You got all the energy that you need to face your day. So I think Joe is going cold and short for the psychological.

[B]

What do you mean short? How long is that?

[A]

Two to four minutes. Okay, 20 minutes. Joe did a 20 minute ice bath. And it was probably the most boring 20 minutes that Joe Rogan has ever posted to Instagram because it's just him.

[B]

He filmed the whole thing.

[A]

He filmed the whole thing? Well, he had to, because the way I understand it, Jocko saw at what temp that was 32 degrees. They're 32 and a half. You know, that's the freezing point of water. He did his first ice bath ever. It was in a Morozco. And I guess according to him, Jocko called him up and shamed him a little bit and saying, minute and a half. What are you doing, man? My teenage son does 20 minutes. So Joe had to set up his camera and prove to the world that he was tough enough to do 20 minutes. This is not the way to do it. Like, we all know you're tough, but if you're gonna make it 20 minutes, I've never seen, you know, a bodybuilder, a football player, really tough it out. The only way to do it is to surrender and be like, that's it. I'm going to die right here. I'm at peace with the world. It's okay. I don't know really what Joe's meditation was like to get through that 20. But there was one of the kids who saw him, and she has cerebral Palsy. She was 13. She did her first ice bath when she was 9. And it felt really good on her legs because she doesn't have the same sensations that you and I were having. Her mother let her do the ice bath because she was reporting how good this felt on her feet.

[B]

Feet.

[A]

She saw that Joe Rogan did the 20 and she said, mom, I want to beat him. So, you know, she got into my ice bath and her mom was texting me and she's like, is this okay? And I'm like, it's fine. You know, I don't recommend 20 minutes, but it's not harmful. You'd have to go for like an hour for hypothermia to really set in. She goes, well, it's been 20 minutes. She just beat Joe. Should I get her out? And I'm like, you know, kids know, kids know when to get out. Turns out, this child, super competitive. Like, even though she knows that she has. She's one of the special needs kids at school, she doesn't want anybody to notice. Like, she has overcome. The doctor said she might never walk. Now she's running around because she has a very strong will. 25 minutes. She looks okay, but I don't know. I'm really worried. She's fine. She'll know when to come out. 28 minutes. I feel like maybe I should take her out. I'm like, I don't know. I don't want to be the one. You're the mom. You know, the kid. I'm not there. 30 minutes. Get her the hell out of there. Like, what is she thinking? You know, she could barely walk. Because one of the things that will happen if you stay in too long, you lose dexterity, you lose motor control. Now, that's not dangerous. You just shouldn't be driving a car or a forklift or anything, you know. Now you need rewarming. Well, fortunately, I live in Phoenix, Arizona, so I have overdone it a couple of times. If I. If I'm trying to impress a girl or if I'm shooting an Instagram video or something like that, I've done as much as 22 minutes, and then I have no. You know, my brain fog sets in. I have no motor control. I can't. The answer is rewarming. If you find yourself in a situation where you've overdosed the cold, get some red light, get a sauna, wrap yourself up in a blanket, rewarm. In her case a second said, put her in the car. In Phoenix, Arizona, you park a car in the sun in the parking lot, it's going to be up to 180 degrees before you know it, right? Just do a car sauna. You can crank up the heat. You can go for a little drive if you want. She rewarmed. Good Rule of thumb is two minutes of rewarming for every minute that you were in there. So that would be an hour, and that's fine. And now she has an experience. She can tell her schoolmates about how, you know, she beat Joe Rogan. I hope she never does that again. Again.

[B]

Good Lord.

[A]

Right?

[B]

That's crazy.

[A]

So when I say cold and short, two to four minutes, I mean, that's all I. I'm in there, like, two, three minutes. A day. Sometimes I'll do twice a day, but I don't. Every once in a while, I'll be shooting a video and people on Instagram will say, how does he do that? You know, I. I can barely put two words together. And the fact is I'm not that great at it. Sometimes I need like three takes. You're not seeing when I screwed up.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I'll be in there for eight or nine minutes. We can get the take right. Then I'll have to go out in the parking lot with the kettlebells. I'll have to get some exercise. I'll have to rewarm. It'll take me a half an hour. There's no long term ill effects, but one of the safety protocols that we publish at Morozco is give yourself time to rewarm before you do anything that requires dexterity.

[B]

So when did this stuff become popular? Like, when did it hit the mainstream dream? Because I want to say the first time I ever heard about doing this was maybe like 2010, 2009.

[A]

You were years ahead of me.

[B]

But, like, it wasn't on podcasts. I would see it, like, you know, in sports documentaries, things like this. And I had never even thought about. About, you know, trying to do it for my own benefit.

[A]

Obviously, you're not the quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Why would you be doing it?

[B]

Right? And then you know, eventually, you know, sometimes you see like, Instagram videos of NFL players, like, in the locker room going in the cold, the cold water after a game or something like that.

[A]

The hockey guys are the most ridiculous. They'll, like, jump right in there in their uniform and stuff. But they're all Canadian, so. Yes, I suppose they're used to the cold.

[B]

Yes. Well, we have some of the best hockey teams in Florida, too.

[A]

I know, I know, ironically.

[B]

But so, like, what. At what. What year? And why did it really start to take off in, like, the mainstream?

[A]

So I think Wim Hof, you know, swimming under the ice and running marathons through Finland and stuff, he did a lot to popularize it. And then Scott Carney wrote a book called what Doesn't Kill Us. And it was the first real popular journalistic account of what Wim Hof was doing. Scott prides himself on debunking grifters and charlatans. And so Scott went to Poland with Wim Hof and he's like, you know, I'm gonna tell the whole world what a criminal this guy is. You know, Scott goes through the whole program. He winds up climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, shirtless and in shorts. And they don't have to stop for elevation sickness or anything like this. So Scott and Wim become friends and Scott becomes a true believer. He's like, what Wim Hof is doing is medically verified. He's been the labs in the Netherlands, they've drawn his blood and they've measured all his, like, body. He's got a twin brother. He's been compared to his twin brother. So we're talking genetically identical. And there are things Wim Hof can do that his twin brother can't do. Great. The book becomes a bestseller. And I think that put Vim on a lot of sort of the podcast sort of circuit. Huberman starts his podcast and he grows explosively. He's a big fan of cold plunge. Think it was like one moment. Unless it was Joe Rogan's first post where he'd had Michaela Peterson, he'd had Kevin Hart, he'd had Vim Hoff, he'd had Ben Greenfield on his podcast. And he's asking all these people, you know, I've been hearing about this cold. He told Vim, I've been dodging the cold my whole life. I don't want to get in there. But we heard through Brigham Bueller, who's a customer, he runs fantastic. The world needs more people like Brigham, as far as I'm concerned. And he heard, heard or we heard that Joe was probably ready for an ice bath. He wanted to give this a shot. So I called bring him up and I said, look, if Joe's gonna do it, I want him to do it in a Morales coat. Bring him like, all right, maybe we can set this up. We sent Joe one. It's in his backyard. And he said, all right, this is the day he livestreams it on Instagram. He gets in and he's like, dang, there's a lot of ice in this ice bath. You know, he has this sort of epiphany experience. And everything changed in, like the whole industry. There were maybe three. One ice bath company and two cold plunge companies in the United States at the time. Now you can't, like Google cold for anything without getting ads from 36 different Chinese made cold plunge companies inundating this market. It is full of deceptive marketing practices and charlatans who all wanted to kind of climb onto the social media trend that Rogan and Huberman were really pushing. Even Carney has flipped now. He's a terrible critic of Wim Hof. He's gone after Huberman, he's gone after Solberg. He's gone after a lot of people who are talking about the health benefits, which he wrote books about and is saying, well, nope, that's not good science. That's all exaggerated and there's a lot more critics.

[B]

This is the guy, I think it's clicking for me now. This is the guy who basically, he has the YouTube channel and he basically like exposes stuff or like he loves that.

[A]

Okay, yeah, it's his thing. And I mean, I don't want to say he's bad at it. He's got a number of books. But he's getting more clicks on YouTube now for bashing cold plunge, bashing brown fat, bashing the scientists than he was when he was promoting it. Now if you're a journalist, you got to live on book sales and clicks, as you know. And so he's doing what's popular and he's left the science behind because the audience doesn't really want to hear it. There's even Joe and Andrew Huberman won't talk so much about cold plunge anymore. However, I wrote the frickin book. I've got 600 scientific citations in that uncommon cold book. So if you're curious about how to use ice baths, about the mechanisms by which ice baths or cold plunge therapy are going to benefit your health now, you don't have to. To follow Instagram accounts or something. Yeah, read it for yourself.

[B]

Well, that lady. Su. Susanna.

[A]

Suzanne. Sober.

[B]

Yeah, the Danish.

[A]

I don't speak Danish. Like they have vowels I don't even understand. So.

[B]

It's such a beautiful language.

[A]

No, it's not. You stick a potato in your mouth, now you can speak Danish. Everything comes out like that. Like your tongue doesn't work anymore. But you know, there are beautiful people there. And I don't want to say anything disparaging about the Danish people in general. I'm just saying that's a very difficult langu for me.

[B]

It is a very different difficult language, but when it's spoken the right way, it sounds very nice, I think.

[A]

Well, she did her dissertation. They're healthy people too. Say again?

[B]

They're super healthy people.

[A]

Absolutely. It's weird.

[B]

They eat like fish is a huge part of their diet. They live in a cold part of the world.

[A]

I spent a week in Denmark and I ate like a king. The cheese, the pork, the bread. I'm, you know, I'm kind of a low carb guy. I'm eating bread while I'm in Den, Denmark. I lost five pounds on that Trip.

[B]

Did you have any licorice?

[A]

She dang right, I did.

[B]

The black lip, like, the first time you try it, it's kind of like. And then you, like, pop another one. It's like, whoa, this stuff's amazing.

[A]

It turns out that there is a medicinal ingredient that happens naturally in black licorice. Like, the red licorice is just candy, but the black, Rick, the black. Yep. It has a farmer pharmacological effect, so you don't want to overdo it on that. But their salty black licorice, I think is the best. So the Danes have a different attitude towards food than we have here in the United States. In the US the food makes us sick. In Denmark, the food makes you healthy. And so I don't eat bread here. I mean, I will indulge every once in a while, but.

[B]

Well, it seems like this is the only place that the food makes you sick.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

No, no, no. Other place I've been to is like. Is like America. It's insane.

[A]

I agree. Which means you really have to travel abroad and experience it for yourself to really believe it. Because we now live in this world, It. It's unfathomable to think that our government recommendations, like, ever since they were teaching us about the food pyramid as kids, are poisoning us and making us sick. Yeah, it used to. It's gonna turn you into a conspiracy theorist if you weren't starting with one. But it's true. It was seed oils and sugar that killed my mother. My mother. You know, my parents met at Harvard, which was the epicenter of nutritional misinformation and propaganda. But they believed every study that ever came out of Harvard in the 70s. So they were like, oh, we should have margarine instead of butter. Margarine is all corn oil based trans fats. Worst thing that you could possibly eat. Right? We should have skim milk inst instead of whole milk. My mother, I watched her health decline into Alzheimer's because she believed everything that the government and those fake studies coming out of Harvard were telling her. Eventually, two weeks before she died, I visited her. She didn't recognize me because that's the way dementia works. She was eating a breakfast of Cream of wheat made with applesauce and ensure. Ensure is poison. You can sue me right now. It's seed oils and sugar. And it polished my mother off. If she ate all of her terrible breakfast, then her caregiver would give her a cookie. It took her an hour and a half to eat that cookie because she had no motor control except A little bit in her dominant hand. And that kept my mom busy just nibbling on that cookie. Two weeks later she was dead because her mitochondria had given up. The mitochondria in the brain are what power your thoughts, your feelings, your cognition. And when your mitochondria start to go, when you become, become insulin resistant because your mitochondria are dysfunctional, of course your cognition starts to go. If you catch it soon enough. There's some good studies about how to reverse cognitive decline, even reverse early stage Alzheimer's in mitochondrial support or using therapies that target the mitochondria. And there's a number of things. It's a complex regimen that I've read about in this clinical trial and most people can't comply with all of it. But it's things like magnesium supplementation, intermittent keto, adding a little bit of or periods of ketosis into your diet to give your mitochondria a break. Get the seed oils out. You know, from talking with Jack Cruz and Alexis Cowan, although it wasn't part of the protocol in this study on cognitive decline. Get your light environment right, get your sleep right. When you do these things that care for your mitochondria, all of the energy processing parts of your body, all their function is going to improve. Now one thing that you can do that is even better than exercise for your mitochondria is get into the cold. Here we have it from animal models, and particularly mice, who are really easy to study. They have a lot of brown fat and it doesn't totally port over to human beings. But in this case, we have good reason to believe that what we're seeing in mice is also a reasonable approximation of what we see in human beings. You get into the cold and you stimulate what's called mitobiogenesis. Your mitochondria have their own DNA. They reproduce of their own accord. They are inherited exclusively from your mother. That is the DNA in your mitochondria come exclusively from your mother. It's not like a sexual reproduction thing. When you stimulate mitobiogenesis, your body will select the mitochondria with the greatest DNA integrity. It will reproduce those mitochondria so that you have more and they function better. So the mice data is very good. We know from human studies that humans can recruit brown fat. Here's the before picture of a cancer patient and here's the after. A month of cold plunge therapy and you can see the brown fat in their PET scan, the tumors shrink, the brown fat grows.

[B]

Why is brown Fat good, because micro. It's dense with mitochondria.

[A]

Exactly right. Thousands of mitochondria in the brown fat. Sometimes I'll talk to women and they'll say, well, I don't want fat. But that's not the fat we're talking about. The. There's white fat, and white fat stores energy. The job of brown fat is to.

[B]

Burn the energy up. It's not subcutaneous fat. It's deep tissue fat. You got it deep in with like between, like the, like below, like even beneath the muscles, like between the organs, like layering the organs, things like that.

[A]

Sounds like maybe you've seen a picture too that Alexis Cowan has, you know, put out on Instagram. The brown fat is located inside the body so that when it generates heat, it keeps your vital organs warm. It's to defend your body, but it does other things. It is also an essential secretory organ. So it will secrete more thyroid, sorry, I should say more active thyroid hormone than your thyroid does. It will take the inactive form of thyroid, convert it to the active form. Brown fat and the thyroid gland are in constant communication. So if you don't get cold and you don't have any brown fat, it's no wonder your thyroid gets dysregulated, whether that's Graves or Hashimoto's. So it could be overactive or it could be underactive. It's got nothing to, to work with. It's got nothing modulating its function because there's no brown fat in the body. This happens in Florida and it happens in Arizona. Then people will get advice from their doctors saying, well, you know, you have an irregular thyroid function and that's why you're not cold tolerant. You should just turn up the thermostat a little bit and try and stay warm and comfortable, which is the worst advice that you could possibly get. The opposite is true. You should be getting a little bit a cold discomfort so that you can bring your brown fat back online.

[B]

Right.

[A]

There are a number of cases of women who have reversed Hashimoto's thyroiditis, which is another one of those supposedly lifetime degenerative chronic diseases for which there's no cure. But there is. You get into the cold, you do it every day, you recruit your brown fat, you can clean up your diet, which is a very good thing for anybody to do, regardless of their thyroid condition. And you can can reverse thyroid conditions metabolically. So the brown fat is not just sort of a nice to have for cold thermogenesis. It's also associated with Increased neuroprotective factors. It's increased rate of healing from traumatic brain injury. So it will protect the brain, it will modulate metabolism, correct thyroid disorders. If you don't have brown fat, you are missing an essential organization that, that your body is relying upon. And 95% of the adults tested in America, zero detectable brown fat. Especially as people are moving south into warmer. You know, they say you don't have to shovel sunshine. You know, one of the things people move to Arizona for, but they're missing the cold.

[B]

That's an interesting thing about bringing it back to Denmark is that there's so little sunlight. Denmark. So it's a very dark, dark part of the world, Right. And it's always cold. So it's almost like nature has this way of balancing out for you, you know, balancing it out for you. So, like, because if you have the lack of sunlight, which is the another fundamental source of mitochondrial fuel, it will compensate for the cold. And another thing Alexis was saying that blew my mind when she was on here was that people up in those northern latitudes, that's why they have lighter eyes, because they can bring in more light with the lighter eyes. And people at the equatorial latitudes have darker eyes because they have so much light, they don't need it.

[A]

Correct.

[B]

They're actually also why they have darker skin, because it protects themselves from the sun. People up there, they have lighter skin so they can absorb more.

[A]

Now, my understanding of Alexis is that the melanin you produce in your skin and your eyes, it does protect yourself from overdose of UVA or uvb, but it's even more than that. She'll say that it is a semiconductor that is activated by the uva, uvb. It's not just protective, but it's also, also useful. It's not my area of expertise. You could guess, but I've looked this up on Ancestry.com, i've talked to my grandparents, my people, they come from the North Sea, they come from the cold climates, and maybe that explains blue eyes. But the theory is that people will survive the long winters up there without the vitamin D that they would ordinarily synthesize when they're exposed to UVB sun sunlight, because they're eating, you know, seal blubber or cod liver or something like that. Now, there is vitamin D in particular in cod liver oil and in some seafoods. But seal blubber is not what kept my ancestors alive a thousand years ago. When you get into the cold and you activate your mitochondria, there's Something called the electron transport chain. These, these facilitate redox reactions, I.e. transfer of electrons from some molecules to others. When those electrons are transferred, they cannot help but emit light. This is what happens in high school chemistry class. This is the way physics works. So you move an electron from one shell, particularly from a higher shell to a lower shell. But when electrons move like that, they emit what's called biophotons. Now, this is where it gets really cool. Suzanne Humphries just tweeted this out last week. Week. This is a study from 2024, 2025. Every living system examined emits biophotons. So these are the mitochondria inside your body producing light.

[B]

Is this Fritz Pop stuff?

[A]

I don't know Fritz Pop, but maybe I should. Yeah.

[B]

He was a German biophysicist. Jack Cruz talks about him all the time. He published papers in, like, I think he publishes papers in the 60s or 70s. But he talks about all about how, how DNA and cells create UV light. Small amounts of UV light, a little bit less than, like, bioluminescent creatures. But it was controversial at the time. But I don't think it's super controversial anymore.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, it is very difficult to detect. They call it ultra weak. Yes, they say ultra weak because they have such a hard time finding it. Well, when the light is being moved, made inside the cells of your body, how the hell are you supposed to detect it? We're not really talking about phospholuminescence, which is a creature that, you know, these happen in the ocean, that lights up. Fireflies are a wonderful example of this. In the summer, if you're in the Midwest and you see the fireflies, they're communicating with one another by producing visible light. But this light, the biophotons, they don't escape from the body at the same rate as phospholuminescent creatures would. So to detect it, they have to multiply a very weak signal. And this is something that has been difficult to do until recently. So there's a lot of misconceptions around biophotons. Things like, well, if your cells are making light in the cold, then why don't people in Scandinavia have a tan? And it's frustrating to deal with these misconceptions. This light is inside. When it's inside your mitochondria, the photons that are in the UVB wavelength and all wavelengths are produced. But that portion in the UVB is right next to the cholesterol molecules. The light doesn't have to travel anymore. When it intersects that cholesterol molecule, it will convert it to pre vitamin D. The molecule has no choice. Again, this is physics. So you're making light inside your mitochondria that intersects cholesterol inside your brown fat cells, converts the cholesterol to pre vitamin D that is then metabolized into all the different forms of vitamin D in your body. And for a long time, and by a long time, I mean, like three years, nobody would believe me because blood serum tests will not show an increase in the form of vitamin D that they typically test for. In a normal blood serum test. You say, well, if you're getting cold and you're producing these biophotons, why doesn't the vitamin D show in your bloodstream? Because vitamin D is fat soluble. It doesn't have to go into the bloodstream. It will stay right in the brown fat until your body needs it and it'll be gradually released. Right. We shouldn't really expect to see it in the bloodstream. But then this is a month ago, study came out of Poland. They were testing women with multiple sclerosis. Now, Ms. Is an autoimmune disorder, and it is associated with difficulties or dysfunctional function in vitamin D production and vitamin D status early in life. So your vitamin D is essential to the operation of your immune system. If you don't have your vitamin D right, autoimmune disorders will emerge. So they're testing these women with multiple sclerosis. They're using cryotherapy, and they test them in comparison to women who don't have multiple sclerosis. The women who do the cryotherapy with multiple sclerosis got a boost in their blood serum levels. Vitamin D. They didn't change anything else. They weren't taking supplements, they didn't have UV lights on them or anything like that. So this is the first evidence of a change in blood serum level concentrations of vitamin D. Why would it show up in someone with multiple sclerosis? And here's a hypothesis, Instagram can quote me on this, and then they'll say, you know, he's being irresponsible in his speculation. But this is exactly how science works. It is possible that because a woman in Poland with multiple sclerosis has a disordered vitamin D metabolic system, that her body needs that vitamin D in the bloodstream right away. That rather than being stored in a brown fat cell. And there's no disputing the fact that the cryotherapy increased the OR is associated with the increase because it didn't Happen in the control group, but associated with the increase in blood serum, vitamin D. But perhaps in a woman with multiple sclerosis, the body's like, I need a. Now I need it circulating in the bloodstream and that's where I'm going to keep it so it can arrive at the cells that need it. Now that's, that's just a hypoth. That's a crazy idea. We ought to be able to replicate that study in other people with autoimmune disorders, whether that's Parkinson's or fibromyalgia or rheumatoid arthritis or type 1 diabetes, which I have a lot of experience with because my son was diagnosed when he was sick when he was six years old, years old. All of these are associated with vitamin D irregularities. The role of vitamin D in the development of your immune system is critical. So what happened to my ancestors? Or what happens in Denmark? Let's introduce central heating. Let's introduce, you know, triple pane, double glazed, whatever the hell are the windows with low E reflectivity. Let's, let's ruin the light environment. Let's keep people out of the cold. Would you expect now to see increased levels of autoimmune disorders and evidence of vitamin D deficiencies? Not necessarily rickets, because you can still fortify the milk. You can still put enough of the supplemental form of vitamin D in the food to prevent rickets. But other disorders of vitamin D that show up in the immune system. System, because the people now live these highly industrialized lives in which they don't get cold. Of course they would. We saw this. There was a longitudinal study that came out of Finland. We saw this as early as the 60s, before my son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. This study had not completed. I didn't know what causes type 1 diabetes or why he had it until about a year afterwards when the study was released. Released. And I stumbled upon it and it says type 1 diabetes originates in vitamin D deficiency in the first year of life. Now you have a four month old and she's very precious. Is she getting enough vitamin D? Where is she going to get it from? There are two forms or two sources. One is mom. Mom's breast milk will have vitamin D D in it. But the other is the sunshine. Now, when I was the parent of an infant child, I was living in northern New York and I had this feeling like I should go out in the winter. It's a beautiful sunny day and I should just like experience nature with my little boy on my chest. I didn't do it. I didn't do it because I was afraid of being criticized. Everybody in your world is saying the sun is dangerous. You should not let your kids out without slathering them up with nanostructured zinc oxide dyed sunscreen. Never mind the organic chemical sunscreen, you know, with some kind of mineral sunscreen or something or. You're a bad parent. No, you're not. Get your kid out there. Get the diaper off her butt.

[B]

Well, it's crazy too when, like my. My most recent. My daughter, my four month old, when she was born, she had. What's it called? When they had the jaundice.

[A]

Yeah. Too much.

[B]

And then they brought in this. This blue light machine.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

That wraps them, covers them in blue light. They cover their eyes and put the blue light supposed right away stop the jaundice, which was fascinating.

[A]

I was like, whoa.

[B]

Like, that's crazy.

[A]

Like it's a photochemical reaction.

[B]

And they. She had. They had to do that for like a day and a half, I think. And my wife had a C section. So we were in the hospital for like three days, I think. But just to like, imagine that a baby can be born and not have any exposure to the natural world or any sort of natural light for three days, it was like, wild.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So as soon as we brought her home, we literally kept her outside all day, every day.

[A]

Good job.

[B]

We, like, brought her bassinet out back, like under our little covered lanai or whatever. And she slept out there literally all day long.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

So you're doing great.

[A]

There's an odd practice in Denmark that shocked me. You know, they put their babies in strollers and they're going around Copenhagen or, you know, whatever they're doing, and they're going to have lunch or something, they leave their baby outside on the sidewalk in the stroller. You can't imagine doing that in America. You'd be arrested for child neglect or something. But this is the custom in Denmark. And it doesn't matter if it's winter. They're all wrapped up. This is fairly common tradition in these northern European climates to take the baby out in the wintertime and allow it to be cold to let it get some. Now, in the winter, there's no uv. Uvb. You're not making vitamin D in sunlight that has no uvb, but it is cold. And what is the difference?

[B]

Can you, like, refresh me? What's the difference between the UVB and uva?

[A]

It's the wavelength. So the shorter the wavelength, the more energetic the light is. There's Visible, Right, Right. So you go all the way to blue and then it becomes invisible. Bees can see ultraviolet light. Yeah, we can, can. But a flower that hasn't been pollinated will emit ultraviolet light because it has a static charge on it. So the bee can see it, know that flower hasn't been pollinated, go pollinate it, fly off. And all the bees will know which flowers have been pollinated, which haven't, but we don't see it. So UVA is the longest wavelength in the uv.

[B]

That's the early morning light.

[A]

Yeah, it's the first one that comes online. In the morning. Yeah, in the morning you'll get the infrared, the near infrared. Things are starting to work, warm up. Because the sun is so low in the horizon, it has a very long path through the atmosphere. And so the shorter wavelengths of light are all attenuated or refracted off. The sun comes up and the first part of the UV spectrum to appear is the uva. That's the longer wavelength. You have to let the sun go further up, shorter path through the atmosphere for the UVB to come on. This is very important. There is no exposure in the natural world to UVB light without UVA being present and without infrared and near infrared being present. It's the. By the time you get to uvb, the uv, which is the shortest of the wavelengths, UVA will be there and all the infrared spectrums will be there as well.

[B]

So you're saying that during the winter there's no.

[A]

There's no uvb. There's no uvb.

[B]

Oh, no uvb.

[A]

There's no UVB in the northern latitudes. It's because the sun. Sun goes down so low. Like when I was in Iceland in December, I forget we had maybe four hours of sunshine, but the whole day was like sunset. So it's actually gorgeous. If you're going to shoot a movie or something like Iceland is the way to go because of such great light, the sun is so low on the horizon that it's always a long path through the atmosphere. And there's no UV light in that. So where I was living in northern New York, York, there would have been no UVB light if I took my son outside. But there would have been cold and the cold would have produced light inside his body that still would have made some vitamin D. Right. In Florida, you're far enough south so that even in the wintertime, and here we're recording in September, we're not all the way through the equinox, but you'll still get Some UVB during the middle of the day at the latitudes at which you live. And you should take advantage of it with your daughter as you already are.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I, I, I've said this before, but there's really no other like hack or supplement that I can do that makes me feel better during the day than watching the sunrise. Yeah, down here. I mean, the cold plunge is like probably number two that, that, that, you know, gets me really fired up. And I love doing it before podcasts. I do it pretty much every day. But if I get shitty sleep, if I get three or four hours of sleep, wake up throughout the night from because of my kids or whatever it is, as long as I, if I can get up at like 6:45, 7:00 clock and stay outside for 30 minutes, it will completely reset me.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

It's like, it's like nothing else I've ever tried.

[A]

It's, it's, this is the weirdest thing about podcasting is if you listen to a no, enough Huberman, you develop what's called a parasocial relationship with a celebrity who you've never met, you know, but they, their voice kind of lives in your head. So I get up in the morning and my Morozco is out on my balcony, you know, on the east side of my apartment where the sun comes up and I get that sunlight in my morning, just like Huberman says. And then I get into my cold plunge and I do that in the morning, just, you know, I get my cortisol levels right and I tell my, myself, Andrew Huberman would be so proud, you know, which is ridiculous. Like we haven't done anything more than exchange a couple of text messages. He doesn't know who the hell I am, you know, but some part of my conscience is reminding me to do this for I could skip it, you know, I could get away with it without doing it today. I could sleep in or whatever and I won't do it because, yeah, Huberman lives rent free in my head and I think he's right about that. Morning sunshine.

[B]

So you have an apartment with like a balcony on it and does your balcony face the east or does so. And it doesn't matter though, because as long as the you could be on the other side of the building and you would still get the same benefits.

[A]

Matters to me. So I've heard, you know, just get outside. And I think the logic here is if you tell yourself a story about how well you don't really get the sunrise, then you're going to Cave. You're not going to get up, you're not going to get out, you're not going to get any, anything right now. I think the sunlight in my eyes in the morning, I find that incredibly beneficial. I love that.

[B]

It's the best feeling in the world.

[A]

Yeah. But just because if I didn't have that east facing balcony, it would still be good for me to get outside in the morning, get some of that civil twilight and that dawn light going on, even if I don't have the perfect view. So I don't want people to get the idea that if they don't have a balcony facing east, then they don't have to go outside. They do that.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, when the sun's rising, I can't see it from my backyard. It's not, I can't see it until it gets up past a certain level. But I still feel phenomenal after, after spending the first 30 minutes outside. I can't, I still can't. I still can't get the courage to drag my carcass out of bed and go into that cold plunge first. I, I need a couple hours first.

[A]

Danny, I'm going to be living rent free in your head for a little bit. You're going to get up in the morning, you'd be like, dang that Professor Seager. You know.

[B]

I will tell you what though. Every time I've done the cold plunge before my cup of coffee, I never even touch the coffee. Don't, don't even need it.

[A]

That's interesting. Cuz I'll do both. I go out on my balcony with the coffee in hand. I've never really tried, although I've heard other people say you're not going to need that coffee when you get in the cold plunge. I don't know. My routine is a little bit different.

[B]

Well, the first time I ever did the cold plunge, I, I got out and I felt just like an unbelievable surge of energy and dopamine like nothing I've ever experienced in my life.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

But I, but that's, that's subsided over time.

[A]

It makes sense.

[B]

So how, and I think I asked Alexis about this. I don't remember what she said, but like. Or no, this was somebody else. I talked to you. Is it true that if you do it every day versus doing it maybe one or two times a week, the everyday use will sort of taper the experience and sort of build your tolerance up to a level where you're not experiencing that, that dopamine rush?

[A]

Not, well, a little bit on the Dopamine. The big one here is cortisol. When you first. When you're naive to cold exposure and you get in for the first time, it's a stressful event, you get a big cortisol boost. And so now people will go online and they'll say, oh, cold is so stressful, you shouldn't do it. It'll burn out your adrenals.

[B]

Too much cortisol, it's all bull crap.

[A]

Because if you do this for a couple of weeks, and there's clinical data coming out of the Lithuanian Sports University, coming out of some of the Eastern European universities, Finland's very good on, on this clinical data that track people who do regular cryostimulations, whether that's a cold plunge or in a cryo chamber, and they do this for weeks, the cortisol spike does not continue. It's not like every time you get into the ice, it's not like you fail to acclimate. You actually get better at managing your stress response by using a hormetic stressor. So there's two things about cortisol that are really interesting. One is if your cortisol is already high.

[B]

High.

[A]

The best data that I've seen coming out of the Lithuanian Sports University is even if you're naive to the cold, the cold does not boost it anymore. It's like your body knows you got plenty of cortisol, you're doing fine, you won't need it. And over a few weeks, the cortisol spike, if you are naive to cold, begins to diminish and you get a muted cortisol response. So one of the ways to deal with cortisol irregularities, ironically, is to adopt a cold plunge, practice and to do it regularly. There's other things you can do. Breath work is pretty good, anything that will help you manage stress. But there's a really unusual story that comes from Mitch Wisnowski of the 49ers. And he's like, the position is he. He's the punter. There's this thing happening in the NFL where there are academies in Australia teaching former Australian Rules Football players how to punt according to the NFL rules. Because I guess the kids in Australia, I don't know, there's a lot of punting or something in Australian Rules Football. Like, they seem to understand how to do it. They teach them the NFL rules.

[B]

Their football is only. Their football is rugby.

[A]

Right. But they call it. I think they have rugby, too.

[B]

They have regular American football.

[A]

No, they have Australian Rules football, which is much more brutal than, like, if you, I don't know, take the pads off of them, take the helmet off them, you get these crazy Australians run full speed into one another. Like, I. I don't exactly know how it works, but Mitch knew how it worked, and he knew he wanted to be a professional athlete when he was a kid. Thing is, that didn't work out for him. Instead, he wound up, like, installing windows or something. And when he heard about these Australian academies that would teach you American rules punting, he signed up. He spent, like, a year in Melbourne learning Australian rules punting. He came over to, like, Santa Barbara Community College or something like this, and he walks on and he gets the job as the punter. He transfers to maybe Utah University, but it's a D1 NCAA school, and he's the punter. He wins the Ray Guy Award, which is. Is the best college punter in America. He gets drafted by the 49ers. He's already, like, four years too old or something. But the 49ers say, all right, we'll take a chance on the old guy. The problem is that climbing the ladder like that for him gave him a bubble in the retina behind his eye that was full of cortisol. He experienced these visual disturbances, and he goes to the doctor, and the doctor says, says, you got to get your stress down. You've got, like, you're overproducing cortisol. If you don't quit your stressful lifestyle, you're going to lose sight in that eye. Mitch goes, he's like, what? I'm a punter, you know, Like, I can't quit now. I've got to find something to get my cortisol levels down without quitting my football career. So what does he do? Breath work and cold plunge. He goes back to the doctor and this is months later, and he says, doc, I've been doing this breath work and cold plunge. How does my eye look? And the doc is going, I've never seen anything like it. You don't have a cortisol bubble anymore. What have you been doing? And Mitch is like, I told you, you know, breath work, cold plunge. He goes, well, whatever it is, you just keep that up. Next thing you know, Mitch is in the super bowl, you know, at top of his game, punting. Great. The top. That doesn't speak for the whole team. They'll have their ups and downs. But Mitch is extending his career and managing his stress levels. Doing what most people would tell him is just going to ruin his stress. What people on Instagram believe about ice Baths and stress is not supported by the data. There's something called exposure therapy, or another term for it might be stress inoculation. If you're having trouble with stress. The answer is to titrate the stress to give your body experience with levels of stress that you can tolerate, gradually increasing the dose of stress so that you no longer wind up dysfunctional or disabled by the stress. There's a difference between distress, which will be debilitating, and what's called eustress, which is a good stress. And you can move your own personal tolerance sort of to the right on this graph, where the stress is beneficial for you when you get better at managing it. So, you know, you and me going into the cold plunge before we do a podcast, freaking perfect. Like, we're in a state at which you know what's going to bother us. You know, Steve is late. Who cares? You know, Steve's late.

[B]

We were actually the ones that were late. We were like an hour a half life.

[A]

True. I was just going to throw him under the bus. Right.

[B]

So that Susana Soberg study, they were. That was involving sauna and cold. Right? They were. They were combining the both and they. And the. The outcome of it was they recommended like 11 minutes per week or something like this.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And it was an. It was able to boost metabolism. Them.

[A]

There's a lot of oversimplification what she did for her dissertation, and she's published in Cell and other journals. It's very good. But it's also damn hard to make a living as a PhD faculty member in the European Union. The jobs are just not plentiful. Typically you have to do a long postdoc wait for somebody to die, then a faculty job will open. And the funding sources aren't quite as good as they are in the United States. The university system isn't growing. It's a bleak career to slog it out as a faculty member in the eu. So what she has done, as far as I can tell, is make a career for herself as what she calls a thermalist. So advising people on how to use thermal contrast therapy to improve the quality of their lives. And she probably has a lot of case studies. I don't know for a fact. She blocked me years ago on Twitter because it was something about. I'm not kidding you, Danny. You can look this up. Some disagreement that we had about cortisol. She goes, I measure cortisol. And then she blocked me. So I'm not counting on her to read the book or anything, but I see that her Work in cell is quite good, but it's also been oversimplified and exaggerated because that's what you need to do if you're gonna make a living through social media, coaching people. I don't think that you really have a choice in the matter. Yeah, and I'm not calling it dumb it down. I mean, simplify it and exaggerate it. So let's talk about that study in cell. Her dissertation is essentially in using PET scanning to identify brown fat. Okay, you go back 15, 20 years. Medical doctors were convinced there was no such thing as brown fat in the adult human body. Infants have it, but they thought the human beings all grow out of it. And I said earlier, you know, 95% of the people tested don't have it. But the Swedes discovered brown fat in people who were continuously exposed to cold. These were typically cancer patients that would come in to have their tumor scanned. And they say, hey, what's this? It's showing up on the scan. It was brown fat. Now you can do.

[B]

Why cancer patients?

[A]

Because the way PET scanning works, you inject a radioactive form of glucose. This travels through the the body. Now, cancer cells will preferentially metabolize glucose. So this radioactive tracer gets sucked up into the tumor cells. They will then, bypassing the mitochondria, use that glucose to produce ATP and proliferate. So if they want to image your tumor, they give you this radioactive tracer glucose, and shows up on the positron emission tomography scan because the tumor sucks it up. You got it. Right. So that's a concentration of zero.

[B]

Tumors thrive on glucose.

[A]

Yeah. Now, here's the thing. These instruments are very large. They can run hot. Sometimes you have to keep the instrument room cool just for the instrument. And in some cases, it's cold enough for the patient, you know, who's wearing one of those stupid gowns to get active brown fat going. And so in a few scans, these Swedish researchers saw symmetrical depots that would show up, and they said, that must be brown fat. Nobody believed them until someone at the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York said, I'll show those guys, I've got 10,000 PET scans. I'm going to look at them at all.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

95% of them, no detectable brown fat, but 5% of them showed exactly those symmetrical depots. And those Swedish researchers were proven right. There is brown fat in adult human being who practice regular cold exposure. So by the time Susanna, and I don't know her, I haven't talked to her. But by the time that she's in her graduate program. You can do a whole PhD on this thing. There's been an explosion of brown fat research because it's such a fascinating topic and so critical for human health.

[B]

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[A]

This holiday season at the Home Depot, she's doing PET scans and she says, I'm going to get these Danish winter swimmers. So these are people who like jump in the fjord and they swim around for fun in Denmark. And she scans them and she says, lo and behold, they have active brown fat. I've shown it in and this is wonderful. She does a survey and she says, okay, how often do you go? How long do you stay in there? Do you also sauna? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there's a whole variety of responses, as you might imagine. So she averages them out and she says, of the Danish winter swimmers surveyed, they do an average of 11 minutes a week. Now, if you're going to oversimplify and exaggerate this, then you'll go on the Huberman podcast and you'll say, oh, 11 minutes a week, that's all you need. That's the dose that you should have. But we don't know that. It could be that there's a minimum effective dose that is less than nobody's ever really done, like the comprehensive study. What we do know is that these people did on average 11 minutes and they all had brown fat. Maybe you could do five. You know, a PET scan is not something you want to sign up for.

[B]

And where did Huberman get this? And you might have already told. I don't remember if you told me this on the podcast or before we started, but where did Huberman get this idea of ending on cold?

[A]

That's a metabolic recommendation.

[B]

Okay?

[A]

When you're somebody studying brown fat, you're all about the metabolism. You're saying, what would cause the brown fat to suck up glucose or triglycerides or fatty acids from the bloodstream? How would it be active? What kind of calories are burned in the brown fat? What's the effect of brown fat on the metabolism? If what you're doing is going to the cold plunge because you want to maximize the function of your brown fat finish on cold and have your body rewarm itself using its own. Own thermogenic mechanisms. So from the perspective of a brown fat scientist, finishing on cold makes all kinds of sense. You're going to get the most brown fat activity. If you go straight into the sauna after you do the cold, Then it's kind of like you're giving your brown fat a break. There could be great reasons for it. The ice bath is vasoconstriction. So this is smooth muscle tissue closing off the blood vessels that supply blood to your extremities. This is to protect your core body temperature against the. The cold. Your limbs will get cold, but your core stays warm.

[B]

Your organs, your deep, your internal organs suck up all the blood to stay alive.

[A]

You got it? It'll go into your head because usually your head is not submerged in the ice bath. This is good for perfusion in the brain. Vasoconstriction is like a workout for your smooth muscle tissue. Then you might say, and then I want to go into the sauna. I want to get that vasodilation when I'm sweating. And this will be good for my vasculature, which it is. The end on cold, when you're doing thermal contrast therapy is a metabolic recommendation. Maybe metabolism isn't what you're in there for. Maybe you're getting in there for psychological reasons. Maybe you're using the cold not so much to recruit brown fat. You're not worried about losing weight. Maybe you're doing it for other reasons. And in that case, there's no reason to end on cold. What you and I did this morning was kind of flip your usual routine. Routine. We did cold, we did exercise, we did sauna, and then we just did like a little micro dose of cold.

[B]

Very.

[A]

The energy boost. Right.

[B]

I do it for only the energy boost. That's the only reason I do it.

[A]

That's cool. And it seems like it's working.

[B]

So would that, would that hinder the energy boost? If you go in the sauna after.

[A]

You tell me, give it a shot and see whether you feel that that dopamine rush that you get is wearing off.

[B]

Well, I feel great right now. Right now. Today's my first day trying it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

With the sauna at the end.

[A]

The reason you do it at the end is because there's really good research on using sauna for recovery from strenuous exercise. So if you do a hard workout, you know, Huberman has told us this, and he's right. Do not do an ice bath after a hard workout.

[B]

Right.

[A]

You will blunt the information. You will reduce the hypertrophy. If you're going for muscle growth, then wait at least four hours. He said, right, well, and that's fine. If you do the cold before your workout, you will speed your recovery, boost your testosterone without delaying or blunting that hypertrophy. And this is a remarkable finding that is partly coming out of Craig Heller and is substantiated by other sources. Do your cold first, then do your exercise and you'll get a testosterone and.

[B]

You can lift way more and you have way more endurance.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, this is interesting. I've talked about this before, but I, I, I, a couple times I've done this seven day fast where I only drink water.

[A]

I heard you talk about it and at the end, it was incredible.

[B]

At the end of the first time I ever did it on like day five, I went to the gym on no food for five days. And I, I can, I was able to do like five times the amount of pull ups.

[A]

You feel like you can dunk the basketball now.

[B]

Right. I played full court basketball for an hour with no, no cramps, which never happens to me.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I was just stunned. I'm like, where am I getting this from? Because I have no food, I have no, no glucose in my system. Not a single calorie in my system. I don't know how I'm doing this stuff.

[A]

Hang on, let's talk about that through.

[B]

But it sounded similar to what Heller was talking about.

[A]

You did have glucose in your system. If you do not take in glucose, you know, carbohydrates in your diet, you will produce glucose from other non carbohydrate sources like amino acids.

[B]

Well, I was also drinking, I was drinking the. What was in it? It was like lemonade with syrup. Maple syrup.

[A]

That sounds like Paul Saladino would approve.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. It was like a, it was like the Beyonce thing. I learned it, I learned about it from Kelly Slater talking about it, but I think Beyonce does.

[A]

Kelly Slater, the surfer?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

So that's a little bit of car, but that's not going to get you through an hour of full court. No, no. Gluconeogenesis will do that. So you take amino acids and other non carbohydrate sources. Body knows to maintain a healthy glucose level by synthesizing its own glucose. After a seven day fast, full court basketball. I'm guessing you were in ketosis. I'm guessing that you were fully keto adapted and that you felt like an infinite reservoir of energy. Because you have plenty of body fat, your body cannot store energy in the form of carbohydrates. It can store some as glycogen in your liver and it keeps it there for emergencies. For example, when you get into the ice bath. Ice bath, you activate the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system. So this is a fight or flight. Your liver will release glycogen stores into your bloodstream. We have this continuous glucose monitoring data that will show a brief spike in blood sugar levels when a healthy person gets into the ice bath. Type 2 diabetic with elevated blood sugar. It doesn't happen because their blood sugar is already too high. Yeah, but when a healthy person gets in, boom, brief spike, they might go up to 140. And then that glucose is cleared from your bloodstream by mostly muscles, I would say doing thermogenesis, but it could be by brown fat as well. So for you seven day fast, where you're doing some lemon juice and maple syrup, you're probably in ketosis. Ben Greenfield talks about how when he goes into keto for exercise, he's fully keto adapted and he feels an infinite pool of energy. Ordinarily, if you're not in ketosis and you're gonna do an hour of full court basketball, you're gonna run out of your carbohydrate reserves pretty frickin fast. Your liver will release glycogen, which is a polymerized version of glucose. It'll break down into glucose. Your muscles are running on that glucose. It's no wonder you get a cramp, because you're not ready to transition into a fat metabolism in the middle of your basketball game. There's something called metabolic flexibility. And roughly, it describes how fast can your body go from carbohydrate based metabolism to fat based metabolism. Most people, they talk about the keto flu or the discomfort that they experience when they first try keto. And it's one of the reasons that people have difficulty complying with the ketogenic diet. But I don't experience that. This article I did, which isn't famous, but people have been reading online on ketosis and Thanksgiving. I love pumpkin pie. It's like my downfall every Thanksgiving and at Thanksgiving, you know, I'll eat everything, but the day after, I'm all about the leftover pumpkin pie. So for me, I ate a half a dang pumpkin pie. There's a lot of carbs in that. And it took me 20 minutes to, you know, for food regret to sink in. I'm like I should get in the ice bath. I'm going to burn off some of that glucose. Glucose. I did pee on the stick. Two hours later, I have ketones in my bloodstream. How can you possibly be in ketosis after you just ate all those carbs? And the answer is, I cleared them out of the system with the ice bath. That those carbohydrate reserves in my liver, they get released, they get burned up, and I switch right back to fat metabolism. Metabolic flexibility is something that you can train your body to do so that it will go from carb to fat, back to carb, you know, just in response to your diet. You don't need three days.

[B]

So the cold burns off all the glycogen reserves.

[A]

You got it. In type 2 diabetics, I've seen this in continuous glucose monitoring data. They'll go from, let's say, 220, which is an unhealthy elevated blood glucose level, and they might go down to 120, 140. They will still stay there for hours because the cold plunge will improve your insulin sensitivity. Now, if you believe Ben Bickman, which I do, he's a BYU professor, he wrote a book called why We Get Sick. And the data all supports what he says. Every leading cause of death, that is every chronic illness in the United States, that's on the leaderboard of chronic cause of death, it originates in insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is killing this country. Heart disease, insulin resistance, Alzheimer's, insulin resistance, cancer, insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is at the core of every leading cause of death from cause. Leading cause of death from chronic illness in the United States. Interesting. You fix your insulin resistance, you improve your longevity, you improve your energy, you improve your metabolism, you reduce the risk rates of all of these chronic illnesses. That's type 2 diabetes, that's stroke, all the cardiovascular complications. So why wouldn't you want that? Why wouldn't you want improved insulin resistance? How do you get it? You go keto every once in a while. That's good for your mitochondria. You do exercise, regular exercise, good for your mitochondria, improves your insulin sensitivity. But the best way to improve your insulin sensitivity is to increase, to get cold every once in a while, because that's the best way to stimulate mitobiogenesis. And exercise can't do it at the same rate. So I was going to say that we did cold, which activates your brown fat, gets your mitochondria going up. We did some exercise, which rewarms the muscles, going to boost the testosterone. There's good science on using sauna to recover from a heavy workout. Sauna is good for the circulation. It opens up the blood vessels. It. It helps the muscles get the nutrients they need to build. There's really good research on doing exercise after cold, especially in men, to boost testosterone levels, to improve mitochondrial function, to boost luteinizing hormone. There is no clinical study on what we did this morning. Cold exercise and then sauna. Nobody's ever done the triple stack in that order.

[B]

Well, and then what about. About what about ending it on cold? Like a dip in the cold after. You wouldn't want to do that after like a super heavy lift, right?

[A]

I think if you're going real quick, I think if you're going like a.

[B]

Real, like a little splash, I don't.

[A]

Think it's going to be a big deal. I don't think you're going to blunt your hypertrophy if you're doing 15 seconds at 38 degrees or something. But I don't have any clinical data to back that up.

[B]

Do you ever get headaches when you dip your head under at like 33 degrees?

[A]

People report to me that they.

[B]

That's happened to me once.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I had a headache like a week.

[A]

So there's two things about headaches in the cold. Headaches can be associated with metabolic dysfunction. So somebody getting migraines might start a cold plunge. Practice, improve perfusion in the brain, improve their metabolism and find that it helps their headaches. But somebody else getting into the cold might force blood up into the brain, increase the pressure up there and make their headaches worse. Worse. There's a trend of people just dipping their face in the water because, you know, somebody says, oh, you get all the benefits of cold plunge. And that's a bunch of nonsense. You will get the dive reflex, which is one of the benefits of cold plunge.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But you also might get the headache. I don't recommend ice baths for headaches. I have a different recommendation for that. I brought it down. I'm glad you asked because want to show you what's called the migraine lamp.

[B]

Migraine.

[A]

It's green light therapy for headaches. So I'm going to shine this self on. I'm going to shine this on my eyes because you use it like this. If you're in a therapeutic setting, you would set it on like a little cell phone stand. You'd put it in front of you, you'd close your eyes and you let the green light come through your closed eyelids. Nobody knows why this works, but it works. I was on Mark Bell's podcast and his producer, Andrew, he's had migraines ever since he was a kid. And so he asked me about it. The invention was kind of accidental because I had a girlfriend with migraine headaches, and I was looking at red light and UV and phototherapy, and I think Google must have known that I was doing this library search. And, you know, it's, hey, maybe you're gonna like this one or something, because they watch my every move, you know.

[B]

That's odd.

[A]

Yeah, right? And it was about green light and photophobia for people who suffer from migraines. When you have a migraine, most migraineurs want total darkness because the light will make their headache worse. So they shut themselves in a closet or in a dark bedroom or something. It's terrible. But at Harvard, they tested all the wavelengths of light, and they found that green had a pain relieving or analgesic effect. University of Arizona picks this up and they start making devices with just green LEDs in them for migrainers to use, and they get a significant reduction in the frequency and severity of migraine headaches. Among those people who used green light phototherapy, the mechanisms remain a mystery, but I'm reading about this and I'm like, oh. I go to a friend of mine, you know, this is just a red light box. And I. I say, could you make this, you know, with green LEDs in it instead? And I gave him the wavelengths that I wanted. And sure enough, the prototype came from his manufacturer.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

And he turned it on and he was like, this is terrible. You know, it's going to give me a headache. And he calls me up and he says, tom, we can't market this. I said, well, I have to see it. I got to, you know, maybe I'll figure something out. I drive out there with this woman that I'm dating at the time. She gets headaches all the time. And I'm turning this on, and I'm agreeing with my buddy, and I'm like, ah, it's awful. She says, let me see that. And she takes it out of my hand. She puts it right up against her face. She closes her eyes and she says, this feels really good. So I'm like, I think we just invented the world's most powerful green phototherapy device for pain relief. Brought it.

[B]

Do you have any speculation to why it could help headaches?

[A]

Can I see it? I'm going to get there, yeah. I sent one to Andrew from Mark Bell's podcast just to try it out. He said it Works great. Reduces his need for medication. He tried it with his wife, and his wife is not the same kind of chronic migraine that he is. Sorry, I hit the wrong button on. How do I turn it on? There's a power button and then there's controls for all the different wavelengths that go with it and a timer and I. I might have.

[B]

Did we break it?

[A]

Yeah, probably. I put it on like. No, I put it on the. The zero dimness settings. So now you're back up to max. Wow. Yeah. Andrew says it's fantastic. Other people tell me the same thing.

[B]

Is it okay to look at it okay or not?

[A]

There's no harms that I've noticed from looking at it, but the way that it has worked best is through closed eyelids.

[B]

You just charge it with like a normal iPhone charger.

[A]

USB charger. Yep. Wow. So I have a clinician in Utah, uses this with his patients. He sends me case studies post concussion headaches, sinus headaches, stress headaches, migraine headaches. All of these relieved by green photo theft therapy. And you were saying? Well, could we make a guess at how it works? The. The PhDs doing this research, they're like neurologists. I'm an engineer. I make machines. I don't understand how the optic nerve or the brain works, but I understand how forest bathing works. In Japan, they have forest bathing.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

So it's an expression that translates this Japanese word that I forget what it is. But the. The English interpretation of this Japanese practice is you go into the forest maybe four or five hours a week, and you bathe in the forest, metaphorically. You don't get wet, but you're. You're allowing the air and the light environment of the forest to be your.

[B]

Environment, taking in the forest atmosphere.

[A]

There you go.

[B]

Forest bathing describes the mindful practice of immersing one's senses in a natural environment. Environment that makes so much sense.

[A]

Shinrin yoku, I guess, is the term that Google is telling us now. You probably, like, get the point. Yeah. You go out in nature, you're going to feel better. Everyone's had this experience.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Clinical trials show that you don't just feel better, you heal faster, your mood improves, your health improves in every dimension. When you go out into the flesh. Forest. Not only that, but if you just paint a mural of a forest on the wall of a dentist office, the patients will report lower pain readings. Really? Exactly. If you give a hospital patient a window and outside their window is like a cityscape, it's a little bit of benefit, but if you have trees outside their window, it will reduce their hospital stays because they will heal faster. So they. There's something about the green. Well, in the forest, you know, there's all kinds of clean air and wonderful things. But the light environment is unique every, for every shady forest throughout the world. And people have brought spectrophotometers and measured this dominated by two wavelengths of light green. That makes sense. You know, the leaves are all green and near infrared. And that part doesn't really make a lot of sense sense. But it turns out that the trees are emitting two wavelengths of light that they can't really use.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Green and near infrared. One of them is visible to us and one of them is invisible. Now if you live in Phoenix, Arizona, like I do, you don't get green. There's no green. A palm tree is not a shady forest. So you are removed from that forest bathing environment. You got to drive 2 hours hours up to Payson or Flagstaff or something like that. If you want to find the forest in Arizona, it's beautiful up there, but I don't have all day for this. The theory is that we can bring the green light of the forest, which I am in deficit of because I live in Phoenix, we can bring it into my home, we can bring it into my eyes. And then we can give me one of the benefits of forest bathing. That is the light environment of the forest in my apartment, you know, in a high rise in Phoenix. That doesn't say how or why it works, but that is kind of a naturalistic explanation for us to investigate.

[B]

That's fascinating.

[A]

It sure is.

[B]

So I've had. I have a friend, Paul Rosalie, who moved to the Amazon when he was, when he was a kid. And he describes when you first go to the Amazon, from being indoctrinated into to technological society, came from Brooklyn, New York and went down there. And the way he described it was that like being out there with all the natural sounds of the birds and the insects and the sticks breaking under your feet and the river, the Amazon river flowing. He was like, it does something like the undescribable where it unlocks these deep senses buried with inside like these ancient senses, senses that are inside of us that have been atrophied from us being exposed to technology 24 7. Yep. And I think there's really something to that.

[A]

Man, you have the most interesting friends in the world, as far as I can tell. Like, you know, people with these crazy stories. And I think he's right. I grew up in Pittsburgh Inner city in the 70s, you have to be able to shut down the sensory inputs and focus just on those sensory things. I mean, sometimes it's a life or death situation, whether you're a kid learning to cross the street or you're like, what bus am I going to get on for school? Or whatever. The urban environment is overwhelming. It would be sensorily overload if you did not shut down some senses and focus on others. So the classic example is learning how to drive. When you first, you know, you've passed your permit test and you're driving, everything seems significant to you and you have to learn how to ignore, ignore some things and just focus on that one traffic signal. You know, is it green or is it yellow? What's it doing? And the only way to do that is to tune out. Then you go, you know, I was down in Peru for this like ayahuasca thing and it's off grid. Thank goodness there was some moon light and it's quiet. And now all of a sudden your senses can open up again because, because you don't have to shut down just to find the one or two signals that are going to keep you alive in that setting. I think I was only there for seven days. You know, your friend probably had a sensory awakening that he's now much more in tune with things that he hadn't experienced or he'd been trained to ignore.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, there's definitely something to that, man. And you know, when it comes to this green light, I'm, I'm just super curious to like, is there, is there any, like, incentive to try to figure out what it is specifically about the green light? Like, because first of all, do we, do we know how many different causes are there for migraines or like, extreme headaches?

[A]

Yes. Approximation infection, Infinity.

[B]

It could be, it could be just a myriad of cascading symptoms all coming together. Right.

[A]

You know, this is one where talk about oversimplification and exaggeration and how that sells in social media, 60% of what Gary Brucker says is true. The difficulty is sorting out the true things from the things that are oversimplified and exaggerating. So Breca will say, hey, I can cure migraines. You know, it's always an electrolyte deficiency. You get your electrolytes now. He's not wrong. Electrolytes are good for your body, good for your brain, and many people will find themselves in electrolytically depleted state. But there are more causes of migraines than just electrolyte depletion. So if you find that you're trying electrolytes and that still isn't working for you, you might get really angry at Gary because he's oversimplified and exaggerating.

[B]

Yeah, well, that's the problem with social media is that the only way to get people's attention on their. To get it fast. And you're not going to do that by exposing nuance. And that's one of the things I recently had this dude, Nick Norwitz and Paul Saladino on here together debating seed oils.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And it was a good idea. It was fascinating because there's a lot of nuance about seed oils. It's not, it's not just seed oils are bad. There's a so much more, especially if you go through and look at all the studies like it. It is not. Seed oils are not all bad. And it's not. It's. There's a lot of factors that go into it. Like are they heated? And just so many other things. And like how you consume them, where you get them from, how, how ultra processed are they. What. And not all people get bad outcomes from ingesting sea dolls. It's just like there's obvious, there's obvious things where it is always all, all bad. And that's with like eating french fries and eating fast food and stuff like that. That.

[A]

Yeah. So you know, Norwitz and Saladino, they both went to medical school. They have medical degrees. I'm the engineer, I'm going to listen to the debate. I can guess sort of how it comes out. And Norwitz is really interesting because he will do these, you know, bombastic thumbnails and he'll say, hey, I ate Oreo cookies. It worked better for reducing my lipids than statins. Well, statins are ridiculous poison and. But so are Oreo cookies. Down it, Nick. All of that nuance and complexity is interesting in a scientific sense. And if you're eating like canola oil, hydrogenated, detoxified aged French fry or would you just cut that stuff out? Like there are some things that, because our standard American diet is so bad so too that you can do immediately with, without trying to understand the difference between sunflower oil and peanut oil or some nonsense like this. It is true that we need a certain minimum level of omega 6 fatty acids.

[B]

Right.

[A]

We need some of that linoleic acid a little bit. But in the United States, we are so overdosing on the omega 6 that we can go on social media and we can say cut the seed oils out of your diet. And for 99% of people eating in the United States. It's really good advice. Now, Saladino and Norwitz are operating at a much more complicated level where they're like trying to understand the science and super optimize. I'm just getting the seed oils out. I'm not super fanatic about it. You will burn. That is, you will metabolize some of that linoleic acid acid. And so in the sense that those fats can be metabolic fuel, they're not all that damaging. But you also build your cell membranes out. Your cell membranes are made of phospholipids. So you're going to grab the fats out of your diet and your body will incorporate them as material, not just for energy. When you build the cell and the mitochondrial membranes out of these phospholipids, they have to choose what are the fats available from your diet. Diet. And they're expecting a certain mix of omega 3, omega 6, a certain mix of animal fats and some fats from plants. And for most people, that mix is way out of whack. Yeah, you might think, oh, nuts are good for you, but no, nuts are not going to help your omega 6, omega 3 balance if you don't have enough omega 3s. So your body grabs what's available, incorporates it into your cell membranes and, and the structure of omega 3 and omega 6 free fatty acid, they're different. And that means your phospholipids are different. That means they operate differently. That means the transport functions that they're supposed to perform can become degraded if they have too many of these omega 6 in particular, linoleic acid. So I'm not a fan of seed oils. And I'm not trying to contradict anything that Nick is saying or actually anything that Sal. I don't, I don't want to pick a fight with either one of them. I just don't want to eat the seed oils. It will take three years for your body to exchange the fats that are built into your phospholipids and restore the proper membrane function that you are meant to have. If you rebalance that omega 3 to omega 6 free fatty acid ratio.

[B]

It's just silly to me. Like how we look for the number one thing is that companies want to do or the government wants to do to try to signal to the public that we're trying to make America healthy again is cook our french fries at fast food restaurants in tallow and put real sugar back in Coke. There we go. We're doing the right Thing. We're making Coke a little bit more natural. And we're cooking your French fries from McDonald's or wherever it is in tallow. Like there's. It seems like it's so dumb.

[A]

What are you doing, man? Yeah, I had no idea who you were until you had Jack Cruz and Kali Means on the podcast at the same time.

[B]

I'm sorry that you had to learn about me that way.

[A]

It turned out to be wonderful because God dang it, Jack. He has a good point. Food dyes. Did you think that was going to make America? You're worried about the color of your Froot Loops? It's still. There's marshmallows in your cereal. You know, who cares what color they are? And that resonated with me because that's the way I was raised Mom. You know, it was Lucky Charms. It was whatever the cheapest cereal was at the time. And she believed it was good for me and my sisters because it had all those sprayed on vitamins on it, right? It was.

[B]

There's a marshmallow that looks like a vitamin.

[A]

You know why we have that nutrition label? We have the nutrition label on the side of the box so that General Mills and Kellogg's and whoever these people are can sell you sugar as if it were nutritious.

[B]

Right?

[A]

So now you got Cinnamon Coat Toast Crunch, which my kids love. Cuz that stuff is delicious.

[B]

And did you know delicious.

[A]

It's made with whole wheat, so it must be good for you. It's all about.

[B]

I had a bowl of frosted Mini Wheats the other night. It was. I bet you fantastic. Oh, my gosh, it was so good.

[A]

Yep. It's. It is killer us. And it. In a way, it sort of matters what color it is. And in a way, it doesn't. But here's why I'm not mad about it.

[B]

It's cereal.

[A]

It's not good.

[B]

It's like if I want to smoke a cigarette, I know I'm smoking a cigarette. Like, you don't need to make my cigarette 2% healthier.

[A]

I was at this science conference, like, Leading Edge conference. It's called a Gordon Conference, which you're not supposed to quote, but we have them all over the place. There's on nanotechnology and this is before. And there was a poster. He was an advisee of one of my colleagues at Arizona State because, you know, I teach engineering at Arizona State, and I'm all about the environment, health, and all that kind of stuff. And here's the poster that shows the powdered Sugar on the donut has nanostructured titanium dioxide in it. Danny, did you know that? And the hidden toxicity of the nanostructured. And I go, it's a powdered sugar donut. Did you think it was gonna be healthy? Like, none of my colleagues wanted to hear it. Because there was good funding available for nanostructured science. Wow. Yes, we should get those artificial food dyes out of the kids cereal. And we should get the kids cereal out of the kids. But here's why I'm not so mad about it. A lot of people have been on social media and they've been sort of apologizing for the pace of change in hhs. They've been saying, we know that we want to prohibit all the MRNA vaccines. We want to know, get that off the childhood schedule. And they're really adamant about. And Cruz is right. If you're injecting 25,000 kids a day with poison, then what are you worried about food dyes and high fructose corn syrup for? But those are political decisions. You get to do some things and you get to move. I hope the people who are sort of undecided in the middle of this political spectrum more to your side by. I'm hoping. Let's take some little wins. Of course we should get the artificial food dyes out. Of course we should reduce the amount of high fructose corn syrup in the whole American diet. Of course we should revise the food pyramid. These things are all still wins. The question is whether you believe the people who think that this is a savvy and politically practical approach that will lead to bigger victories or whether this is all just a sham, like a smokescreen for a propaganda campaign that will leave the core of the pharmaceutical business intact. I'm voting this way. When you get the food dies out, then the politicians say, well, how do people respond to that? When you say, well, Coke is going to switch to sugar, and you say, well, how does Pepsi respond? Every single one of these little ridiculous things is, I'm hoping, a political trial balloon. When Pepsi sees that Coke has Trump tweeting about their product because they said, I'm going to go sugar instead of fructose, Pepsi's like, hey, wait, about us. You know, we do a lot of corn. We want to change, too. When some senator sees that people don't want food dyes in their children's cereal, when someone else sees that people are responding politically in support of these tiny little victories, they're like, oh, yes, maybe those people have more credibility. I'm thinking Every single one of these is a trial balloon for the politicians who run their positions on the basis of the polls rather than on the basis of science and nutrition and health. If we have moved the polls for those politicians to the point where we can say, maybe we shouldn't be funding MRNA vaccine research, maybe we shouldn't have any of those. And Jay Bhattachara went online and he said, MRNA vaccines are politically inviable. We cannot devote NIH funds to them anymore because nobody believes. He didn't say scientifically won't work. I'm kind of a Bob Malone guy. I'm like, stop messing around with our messenger rna. But Bhattacharya said, politically, there's no point to funding this science. If you're going to win a political game, then the scientific data is irrelevant. Then the truths that you and Jack are pointing out, that I'm agreeing with aren't the way to win the game. Because here's what I've learned about teams teaching. You have to start where people are familiar. You have to start with things that they know. You have to start them going, oh, yeah, you know, that makes sense.

[B]

Jack wanted to fix.

[A]

He.

[B]

Jack wants to fix a clock with a hammer.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

And you can't do that. You. That's not the way it works because.

[A]

You make people feel stupid for changing their mind. If you want them to change your mind, you have to do it in a way that they feel smarter for having done it.

[B]

Yeah. And it's ironic considering the fact that he's actually a brain surgeon. But. But he, you know, him and. Him and Mary, you know, they. They're very patient, focused.

[A]

They.

[B]

Their history is actually working on people and. And saving people's lives with their bare hands. At least Jack for sure. So I can understand the sentiment there, and I can understand his attitude. For sure. I can. I can sympathize with that. But, you know, my whole perspective on the RFK thing and the for. And even Cali means, for that matter, which I agreed with him on, was that he can't just get. Go in there and get confirmed by the Congress and the Senate by saying, I'm going to wipe out these scenes and completely make. Wipe them off and make it so nobody can get them. I'm going to completely ban them. Because you're not going to get through these pharmaceutical companies. They have a higher GDP than most countries.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Like, and they're so powerful. Like, that would be the equivalent of me saying, I'm gonna go on my podcast and I am gonna Talk out and expose all the evils of these R MRNAs and, and talk about how all these vaccine, these pharmaceutical companies are evil. And guess what's gonna happen? My channel is going to get deleted off YouTube. And then what? Then I can do nothing.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I'm back to square one. So that's not the way you're going to get it done in Washington either. You have to be able to get your foot in the door and then try to slowly and incrementally make change and make change that's going to last. And then now it seems like that's what he's doing with these recent, this recent hearing that just happened and now what he's actually saying. It seems like he's actually taking a hard turn now.

[A]

Yep, there's. Kennedy's such an interesting guy. I don't know him. I've never talked to him, never met him. But could you imagine a family in, in which to grow up in that would, could any other experience you have better prepare you for dealing with narcissists, personality disorders, incredibly strong vocal personalities in Washington D.C. political backstabbing. Like his whole family has been on the inside of Washington. Both, both on the power broking end of it. I mean, his Uncle Ted was like an extraordinarily powerful senator for a long time, has been steeped in controversy. I can't imagine an upbringing that would better prepare someone to navigate all the weirdo personalities. You got Bernie Sanders, who will both stab you in the back and then say that he's your best friend or something. I don't know Bernie personally either, but he said some bizarre things. Things probably Kennedy can take a lot more of that abuse than I ever would be able to. And I'm not a psychologist, but I'm attributing it to his unique upbringing. There's nobody else that I would rather have in his position at the HHS than Kennedy. He strikes me as courageous and honest and not so ideologically minded that he is unwilling to make practical compromises with the world to get what he really wants.

[B]

Did you see that video that Trump posted on his thing the other day about thimerosal? Yeah, that was crazy.

[A]

I didn't understand that.

[B]

I don't know how recent that video was shot though. Like, that seemed like a relatively modern video at least, like in, at least in like the 2000s.

[A]

What I saw was Kennedy testifying in front of, of the Senate. And he acknowledged that this was all theater. This was all just made for, you know, Hollywood and social media. And Elizabeth Warren said Are you saying she's lying? And Kennedy said, who is he? Who is she talking about? She was talking about the former director of the cdc, who. I don't think she lasted even four months. Kennedy was giving directions as her boss, as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and she wasn't carrying out those directions. This is a very frustrating environment for someone in an executive position to be in, where they're being lied to by their subordinates who will fail to follow through on the vision that they're trying to create. So he had just fired five people from the cdc, and it was one of the focal points of his recent Senate testimony. When Elizabeth Warren asked if that woman was a liar, Kennedy said, yes. And that's what I love about Kennedy. The idea that him being inside Washington actually muzzles him is very discouraging to me. Once you accept an appointment in Washington, D.C. there are things you're not allowed to say. There are things you're not allowed to tweet. There are opinions you're not allowed to express. When Kennedy was outside the system, he could say whatever the hell he wanted. He could go on the Joe Rogan show, and he could say, the CIA killed. Killed my father. And then he could say, this is why I say that, you know, once you get inside, you now become part of a machinery that dictates to you how you are allowed to express yourself. Since Kennedy. Since Kennedy fired. I'm trying to remember who it was, and it escapes me. But since he took control of his own Twitter account like this, there was Kennedy in person, and then there was Secretary Kennedy on Twitter, and it didn't seem like they're the same person. He fired some people, and now Kennedy's voice is on Twitter. It's in his Senate testimony, it's in social media, where we can hear it again. The idea of Kennedy being able to speak with the same freedom he has when he was an outsider and do it from the inside is very encouraging to me. He's probably smarter about it than anybody else I. I could name, but that's. Politics is not my area of expertise. I'm hoping that I can create the machines that allow people to take charge of their health. Whoever's in the White House, whoever's at the hhs, we got a friend of mine, Jay Bhattachara. He's now the director of the nih. The NIH funds more research than any other single federal government agency. So you got the DoD, you got the NIH, and then NSF is way below them. So Jay is in a position where he can direct the allocation of resources at the nih. But he isn't really like, there's only so much that an executive can do. Well, Jay's been at Stanford his entire life. He's been an academic, so he's an academic insider. To put him in Washington, you know, God bless him, I wouldn't be able to do that job at all. Because the set of requirements for someone on the inside is a different set of requirements than what will make them successful on the outside. And they have to be learned. So I'm one of these people who, even though I acknowledge the truth and everything Jack says, and I appreciate the way that he's revealing the truth to me, like on your podcast, I'm one of these people that says, I don't get Washington, like, that's not my area of expertise. And if I, when I try and empathize, I would have a multi year learning curve before I really understood how it even worked. So I got patience with the people that I know who are doing the job that I'm incapable of doing. My job is to make it so you don't care whether the NIH funds something that winds up useful to you six or seven years from now. When those studies come to fruition, I want you to take charge of your, your health with the machines that I'm building for you that bring you closer to nature, that even though technology is making us sick, I can build the technologies that will repair some of the deficiencies in our technological environment. Now, who cares who's president? Who cares who's hhs, who cares who's running the FDA or who's running the nih? Because you know what to do to take care of yourself. The thing for me, you know, Jack says Maha is haha. And he's ridiculous.

[B]

Is that what he says? Is that new? I haven't seen that.

[A]

He's good with the rhymes because he resents something about it. And I'm not blaming him. He's the last guy I want to pick a fight with. But I don't think of it that way. The only way that we make America healthy again is when Americans decide to make themselves healthy, regardless of like what color the mushrooms or sorry, the marshmallows in your cereal are. When Americans say, I'd rather eat eggs, I'd rather have an omelet than Lucky Charms for breakfast. That's when America is going to get healthy again. When America says, I'm going to fix my light environment, then America will start to get healthy Again, when America says, I didn't realize I was supposed to get a little bit of cold into my life, I didn't realize brown fat was an essential secretory organ. Then I saw this crazy Professor Seeger talking to Danny Jones and I thought, all right, maybe I'll try a tap water bath. Maybe I'll try a cold shower. See how that works for me. That's when America gets healthy again.

[B]

Yeah, well, it's, I mean, it's, it's obviously people who have the time and the luxury to pay attention to this kind of stuff and read books and listen to podcasts and they have a, a decent income. Income. They are able to make themselves healthier or they're able to figure out how to, if they can't afford to buy one, at least build their own cold tub. Or you buy, go buy ice and throw it in their bathtub and like figure out, you know, these things about diet and cholesterol and circadian rhythm and, you know, cost no money to watch the sunrise.

[A]

Exactly right.

[B]

But the problem is like, the people who don't have the time to pay attention to any of this stuff, who literally, literally get all of their information from the mainstream news or their co workers at work because all they can afford to do is wake up, go to work, come home, make dinner, feed the kids, and that's it. And those are the people that are the most unhealthy, the fattest, most obese people in the country are the poorest.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

So, you know, that's one of the problems is like, how do you, you know, you can talk about things and, and explain and teach people on the Internet until the cows come home, but you're not gonna to affect that. That segment of people, the low, low income people who are the majority of.

[A]

The country, you can reach those people. And here policy is important. Even though I was saying, you know, make yourself healthy again. And I stand by that. You make a really good point because not everybody, you know, has a PhD or has the all day to go to the library or listen to Hugh Ruman or Seager or whatever policy can reach those people. Right now we subsidize the sugar industry. Most sugar farmers are in Florida. We also subsidize the sugar beet industry, which should be in Minnesota. The reason we do it is because we're so damn mad at Cuba. Sugar is really cheap to grow in Cuba. Yes, but look, we had a whole Cuban missile crisis and Soviet Cold War, and so we prohibited, prohibited sugar imports from Cuba and instead said, we're Going to have our own domestic sugar industry. We're going to pay Floridians so much money to grow sugar. Look, we'd be better off just paying them as if they won the lottery and say, never grow sugar again, please. Because the state of sugar subsidies in the United States is ridiculous.

[B]

It's crazy.

[A]

It's nuts.

[B]

And it also pollutes, it causes. It's one of the biggest red tide in Florida.

[A]

It's terrible because all of of the fertilizer, the nitrogen, phosphorus required, it leeches off into the groundwater and it creates these algal blooms.

[B]

Algae blooms.

[A]

Exactly right.

[B]

It's insane.

[A]

So I wish we would cut that out. The Midwest is just as bad. It wasn't enough to subsidize the sugar farmers in Florida. Now we subsidize the corn farmers in the Midwest. And that corn doesn't even feed people. Most of it doesn't even feed cows. After Katrina, the capacity to export corporate through the port of New Orleans was devastated by the damage to the infrastructure. So corn prices went way down inside the Midwest because we couldn't sell them internationally. And a weird thing happened. The refineries during Katrina that had been damaged, they couldn't make gasoline. So the spread between the cost of producing ethanol and what you could sell it for at the pump expanded and expanded. During the Bush administration, the banks looked at this spread and the. And they said, oh my gosh, this is amazing. Bush passed some new legislation that said we need more corn ethanol plants. The state of Iowa temporarily became a corn importing site, which makes no sense. They filmed Field of Dreams, you know, in a corn field in Iowa. All of Iowa is covered with corn. But because so much of it was going to produce high fructose corn syrup or being fermented into ethical. Iowa became corn importing to fuel the new ethanol production plants that had been built in Iowa. So both the corn syrup and the ethanol production industry is a subsidized, sick making bullshit policy. We could reach the poor or people if we stop subsidizing sugar, corn syrup and other highly processed foods and gosh damn it, making them so cheap, then these people wouldn't be attracted to getting the subsidized food that they're getting from the Kwik E Mart or whatever because it has a shelf life of infinity. That's partly why it's so cheap. Well, what would we do instead? We would subsidize eggs, we would subsidize beef, we would. We used to give away free cheese. My kids, because I was a graduate student My kids were on the WIC program, so that's women, infant and children. And I got a good look at the free things that you could get from the government. Cheerios, peanut butter, dry lentil, beans and some cheese. I guess that's not the worst thing in the world. We never ate the damn beans. But they're laborious to cook and nobody wanted them. And it turns out that they're not good for you. But peanut butter, Cheerios, cheese, they don't seem like the worst things in the world. Meanwhile, we have this big debate about whether SNAP should allow people to buy soda pop. It's ridiculous. We can change what happens at the poorest segments of society if we change the economic incentives and decide to subsidize some things, which we have programs available for and decide that we don't want to subsidize other things.

[B]

Also, isn't there a big lobby where companies like Pepperidge Farms and these companies that make like, you know, the worst possible snacks and cereals and stuff like this and like donuts and stuff can be purchased on food stamps? So people that are on food stamps, they, they lobby these. I forget the name of the organizations that are in charge of this food stamps or whatever, but they, they're basically lobbying to get their food items included in the food stamps when they're the most unhealthy food items ever.

[A]

I've never been on food stamps, never use snap. My only experience is through the Women Infant Children's Program. So the WIC program. And my impression was the WIC program was halfway decent and it could be better. Like the, the foods in there could be even healthier. But what you've said is something that I've heard from other people. What we choose to feed the poorest people in our society is criminal. That includes the school lunch program.

[B]

Yes. Where.

[A]

You know, some people claimed that prisoners eat better than our kids in the schools do. Now, I don't know if that's true, but I never ate the dang school lunch and now I did. I'm glad that. Yeah, yeah. Because what's on there?

[B]

The American Beverage association lobbies for Coca Cola, Peps and Pepsi and other non alcoholic drink mix makers and spent 1.7 million in the first half of 2025, more than double its outlay during the same period last year. That figure surpasses the group's annual lobbying in total but one in all but one year since 2010. A Bloomberg government analysis of the latest federal lobbying disclosure shows what it's to.

[A]

Include it into the snap.

[B]

Oh, that's the snap.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What does SNAP stand for?

[A]

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. It doesn't say supplemental empty calorie program. It's supposed to be about nutrition. And there's no nutritional standards in that program. No wonder America's sick, right?

[B]

And another crazy thing is all of the. The baby formulas in the US it's impossible to find them that don't have seed oils in them. So like my, that we with our first kid, we were looking to buy baby formula and my wife had to order the baby formula from Germany because there's they this the same company, same exact logo, everything just. You cannot buy it in the US without the seed oils in it.

[A]

When my children were little, you know, we wanted formula. I wanted to be able to feed my kids. For me, breastfeeding was their principal source of nutrition. But we had the formula as a backup. And for whenever I was watching the kids when it came time for they were starting to grow teeth and we're going to give them some solid foods. I feel terrible about this to this day. I did what my mother told me, which was to start them on Cheerios. I should have started them on salmon. I should have started them on scrambled eggs. I should have started them on steak or high quality protein. I didn't know at that time. I believed the nutritional lie that my mother had taught me from childhood. So there are some people out there that are sort of formula purists. I don't care what's in the formula. You shouldn't be feeding your kid formula anyway. I'm not one of those people. Right, yeah.

[B]

Some people can't produce milk naturally. They have trouble. They can't.

[A]

There's some babies with no mom. Like we need formula in this country both for emotional, economic and practical reasons.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And should be good goddamn formula. And then. And the babies are going to be on it for several months, which is a very short period of their whole life, but a critical period for neurological development and immunological development. So this is the brain and the immune system during those periods of rapid development of the immune system and the brain system. If you don't get things right, you will either, like with my son, result in some atypical immunological trajectory of development that leaves him vulnerable to autoimmune disorder, in his case type 1 diabetes. That's the immune system which relies on vitamin D or in the neurological system, you will orient that child's development in some atypical function that lives them vulnerable to autism. Autism. Now this is something that Kennedy And Bhattachara have been talking about. It's September. We're supposed to get Kennedy's announcement about the causes of autism. And there's a lot on there about Dean's cause. Autism. If I put something on autism and mitochondria on Twitter, I'm going to have people push back on me and say, you're an idiot. We know it's the MMR vaccine and that's the only. Or whatever it is. Not a vaccine advocate. Advocate. I'm not a aluminum or mercury advocate. These things are toxic. They're neurotoxic. They would certainly result in neurological damage, especially to a child that's on the edge. But they are not the origin of autism. It is that late stage pregnancy and the first several months to two years of life in which the brain and the nervous system is developing more rapidly than at any other stage. Stage in which the metabolic state of the mother and the child is critically important. Metabolism, it has two components. There's what's happening in the gut. The gut produces everything that goes into the bloodstream that feeds the mitochondria. That includes glucose. It includes free fatty acids. So the mitochondria are downstream of the gut. And if the mitochondria aren't in a healthy state, because it is the mitochondria that guide the development of the brain, impaired mitochondrial function will lead to atypical neurological development. Just like my son was vulnerable to the onset of type 1 diabetes because he didn't get enough vitamin D. If the mitochondria of the mother or the child are impaired during those critical stages of development, they become vulnerable to neurological regression. So this is the child speaking words, making good eye contact. Contact. They're social. But then they experience a fever. The fever causes inflammation in the brain, and this tips them into neurological regression. In other words, they have a fragile neurological system because their mitochondria were impaired during its development. Even if you fix the mitochondria later in life, the development of the brain can still be vulnerable to the onset of autism. You give a vaccine now, the vaccine increases the toxic load on the mitochondria. It's absolutely true. Get the aluminum, for example, the hell out of the vaccines.

[B]

Well, they say that it can't with the thimerosal. The vaccine can't even be stored without the thimerosal. Right. Like, oops. Yeah.

[A]

Oh, well, maybe we'll come up with some other way for the children to get chickenpox. Like, it makes me a little angry.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But I'm not the I'm not me making a vaccine specialist argument. What I'm saying is that children will often have fevers in response to a vaccine. This is a normal sort of response. It's not even counted as vaccine injury. It's a immunological activation that creates a fever in the child. That fever is associated with swelling in the brain. That fever can be the onset of neurological regression. Now, the experience of the parent is I had a perfectly healthy child. I went in for one of those bogus, well, child visits. They loaded up my kid with vaccines. 24 hours later, he's banging his head, he's spinning and he can't speak how. You cannot tell that parent anything. But the vaccine caused the child's autism. That is their experience. And I'm not, I'm not contradicting it, but their child was made vulnerable to that injury by impaired mitochondrial function earlier in the child's life. So what am I saying? We must take care of the metabolism of pregnant women. The most important factor that will modify or increase the risk of autism later in the child is the metabolic state of the mother during pregnancy. If her metabolism is impaired, the child's neurological system, it will not develop in a typical and healthy way. It will become more vulnerable to other toxins. So one of the things that Kennedy put was there's an association between Tylenol use and autism. And there absolutely is. The evidence is very strong. There's also an association between ibuprofen and autism. Autism. What do you give a child when they have a fever in response to a scene injury or anything else you give them? Tylenol. It's not the Tylenol. And Tylenol is not good for young kids. It's toxic to the liver. It's not good at all. And you should especially not give it to infants or young children. But the reason the parent is giving the Tylenol is because they have the fever and the brain inflammation. So we need to look deeper than just the superficial co causes.

[B]

Autism originates Tylenol specifically, or is it any other medication similar?

[A]

Ibuprofen, Tylenol, Motrin, all of them are associated with an increased risk or frequency of autism diagnoses. Now, Tylenol popped up and I Forget this is Dr. Walker's research. If I'm remembering the name correctly, Tylenol popped up as higher than ibuprofen, but both of them were associated with elevated risk. That's not a method mechanism. And again, Tylenol has side effects that make it dangerous, especially for young children. But it's the reason that you're giving the Tylenol that you really have to look at for the origins of autism. It is in. And I have a good interview with Dr. Richard Fry on this. It is in mitochondrial dysfunction. The mitochondria are responsible for forming and pruning the neural connection. If the mitochondria are impaired, the brain doesn't go right. And so we'll see what Kennedy and Bhattachara say later this month, I think. I mean, I know they're aware of the mitochondrial theory of autism and we'll see how much that plays in what is one of the best things that a pregnant woman can do to heal her mitochondria to boost her metabolism? Get in the cold plunge. There are a number of women who have written to me and practiced this, had excellent birth outcomes. There's good epidemiological data on cold exposure during pregnancy and improved birth outcomes. So it's a wonderful thing, especially late stage in pregnancy, if you can't exercise, you can't fix your diet, your sleep is disrupted by your pregnancy, you can at least get into the ice bath for two minutes. Inflammation will go down, mobility will go up, sleep quality will improve and mitochondrial function function will improve.

[B]

Steve, can you pull up that poster I sent you?

[A]

Did you get it? Can't wait.

[B]

This is. So we, we have been looking for a new pediatrician for our kids because they're about to kick us out because we've been delaying and delaying and delaying the shots for four years.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And now she's just basically saying that, you know, we can't, we can't keep you here anymore. So this is. I came across this post. Post. Go click the right arrow. It says doctors or. I don't know how true this is, but it Sundays doctors earn $40,000 in bonuses from insurance companies for hitting quotas. These quotas. Blue Cross Blue Shield pays pediatricians for fully babies under 2. So 100 kids fully 40k and 200 kids fully is 80k. Keep going.

[A]

What's the catch?

[B]

If fewer than 63% of their patients are fully including the flu shot, they lose the entire bonus.

[A]

That's why they kick you out.

[B]

So your decision individually to say no thanks on the is not just $400. It could cost them the entire 40,000 to $80,000 bonus from the insurance company.

[A]

Your children are next one, the denominator. So there's the number of kids who are vaccinated in the numerator and then the fraction is calculated over the total number of kids in the practice. Your kids are in the denominator and they're making the fraction lower. They got to get rid of your kids if they want the bonus.

[B]

Yep. And that's why it says that's why the doctors pressure, guilt, and shame parents. It's not just about health. It's about their money. You're governing crazy. I want. I like low key. Want to ask our pediatrician that.

[A]

Our. Our.

[B]

When we go in for our last visit after the kids kick us out, before they kick us out.

[A]

Why low key?

[B]

Is this true? Just ask your Instagram post I came across. Do you guys get any bonuses from your insurance companies? Yeah, My wife's like, you are not. Why you are not going in there with me. And it could embarrass me in front of the pediatrician. Whenever this topic comes up at dinner. There's so many memes about this. Whenever a topic comes up at dinner and we're like, with friends or whatever, and the topic comes up, she's like, kicking me on the table. Don't say a word. Because people get so. People.

[A]

People.

[B]

People are very sensitive when around these types of. Types of topics.

[A]

Human beings, I mean, we're highly social creatures. So embarrassment, humiliated. Humiliation status. I mean, we can't help it. It activates parts of our brain that are involuntary. It takes a lot to override that. And you probably don't have to ask. I mean, you already know.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Part of you. Of you wants to know if your pediatrician has the guts to admit it.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

That's exactly what it is.

[A]

It's more important to ask the next one. Ask the next pediatrician. How important are those bonuses to you? Because for you to take. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right.

[B]

It's sad. And, you know, I would love to see something like that, like some sort of law get passed in Florida or any state where they're not allowed to do that. Like the insurance company companies should legally not be allowed to incentivize their doctors to inject these experimental drugs into children for. For thousands of dollars.

[A]

Here's a big problem in the United States. This dates back to like, 1922 or something. Don't quote me on the year. But it is when the Dodge brothers decided to sue Henry Ford. The Dodge brothers were invested in Henry Ford's automobile company. And I'm going to bring this back. Back to pharmaceuticals. But bear with me. This case went all the way up to the Supreme Court because Henry Ford did not want to pay the Dodge brothers or any of his shareholders a dividend he said, I'm going to take the money that we're making, I'm going to reinvest it in making the product better, the working conditions better, the vehicles safer, and the factory more productive. And the Dodge brothers said, screw you. We want a dividend all the way up to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court says that whomever is running the publicly traded company has a legal obligation to maximize shareholders their value. This is not a moral principle anymore. This is a legal principle. So now you take the chief executives at Pfizer.

[B]

What was the name of that case again?

[A]

It was Dodge Brothers versus Ford. You can look it up. A Supreme Court decision. Maximize shareholder value and you will get the right case. So you don't have to take my word for it. Since the early 20s, every executive, executive of every U.S. publicly traded company is legally obliged to operate the company as if he was maximizing shareholder value. Now, a guy like Steve Jobs didn't give a damn about shareholder value. He never paid a dividend, didn't have a stock buyback or anything because he was so, I guess, obstreperous or something, you know. But as soon as Jobs died, what did Tim Cook do? He started paying a dividend and he started shareholder buyback. Jobs felt like if you're using your cash to return to investors, it's because you don't have any more good ideas to invest in. But he was an iconoclast. The executives of the pharmaceutical companies in the United States, they are organized as C Corps. They are legally obliged to maximize shareholder value. They are not legally obliged to maximize shareholder value unless you make some people sick. If it comes down to whether they would put patient welfare and well being first or put shareholder value first, they have a legit argument to say, I am obliged by the Supreme Court of the United States to maximize shareholder value, even if it comes at the expense of patients. As long as it's been approved by the FDA and I'm within the regulatory requirements, I have no flexibility. That is a bullshit reason to poison people, make them sick, to create people who are lifetime dependent upon your project. I'm not defending it on a moral or ethical basis. What I'm saying is we have a systemic problem with for profit healthcare in the United States and we cannot rely upon the pharmaceutical companies to fix it. We can't shame the pharmaceutical companies into behaving better. What we need to do is, yeah, get them off the air. We waves. They're the biggest advertisers, so of course they own the mainstream media channels. So Shut that down. But we also need to move them to B corporations instead of C corporations. A B corporation is allowed to be for profit, but it's organized for public benefit. It's not a nonprofit. It's a for profit corporation organized for public benefit. We must remove from them this crazy ass constraint that says for profit healthcare is more obliged to the shareholders than it is to the patient. So that's another policy change that we can make. The idea that we could murder or shame our way to better behavior inside these publicly traded C corporations is a fantasy in the extreme. We need to reorganize the way for profit healthcare works in the United States to change the incentive constructors and constraints under which they operate. So I'm not defending murder. I'm like real bad with that. And I'm not disagreeing with the people who are criticizing the executives who are lying, cheating, stealing, moral scum in the way that they have behaved. What I'm saying is we need to operate at a higher level, a more systemic level to dismantle the mechanisms that is the infrastructure of healthcare in our country that has gotten us to this miserable state where life expectancy in the United States hasn't improved since like 2012.

[B]

Right. Well, it is optimistic to see. I just saw this, I think yesterday that there. And maybe you can find this Steve to confirm. Confirm it. But I saw that they or RFK did something where he made it. So advertisers now, pharmaceutical advertisers now have to list every single one of the side effects on all. On all of their ads. And that was.

[A]

What was your reaction to that?

[B]

I thought that was incredible. That's a huge step in the right direction.

[A]

But I listened to these ads. I thought they already were listening. Yeah, explosive diarrhea, instant death.

[B]

They are, but they all. They only have to list a small percentage of of them. And they can also say. Go here for more details. But before I guess 1997, I guess they had to do all of them. And that literally would like triple the length of their commercial.

[A]

Okay. So the FDA recently sent out like I think it's more than 100 cease and desist letters to advertisers because of this policy change. The ads must change immediately. And I guess the FDA has said you need to pull those ads down now because they know.

[B]

So when did this happen, Steve?

[A]

When.

[B]

When did this actually get implemented?

[A]

This is very recent. Yeah, like even in the timescale of podcast.

[B]

This is talking about the. What you were talking about. No, no. Find the new thing. The new Thing, Right.

[A]

I'm still looking for it. If you search for the cease and desist letter, you'll probably find it.

[B]

Yeah, it should be like the top of the news. Like it should be on the top of every single news site right now.

[A]

I was really happy to see see that. Because pharmaceutical ads target patients because they work. Like, they wouldn't be spending all this fricking money if they didn't. If bypassing the physician didn't work. Ask your doctor if Stipicell is right for you or whatever the hell. So this is FDA launches crackdown on deceptive drug advertising from September 9th, which was two days.

[B]

Two days ago. There we go.

[A]

And I was GLAD to see U.S.

[B]

Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration today announced sweeping reforms to reign in misleading direct to consumer pharmaceutical advertising. Today, the FDA is sending thousands of letters of letters warning pharmaceutical companies to remove misleading ads and issuing approximately 100 cease and desist letters to companies with deceptive ads. In addition to enforcing existing law, the FDA's insinu. Or in initiating rulemaking to close the adequate provision loophole. Okay, that's what it was called, the adequate provision loophole, created in 1997, which drug companies have used to conceal critical safety risks in broadcasting and digital ads, fueling inappropriate drug use and eroding public trust.

[A]

So this is. Marty Macary is running the fda. I think he's called the commissioner of the fda.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Before he was a. He was a Johns Hopkins professor who was vocal anti lockdown. He's like, these lockdowns aren't helping anybody. These policies are hurting people. He wrote a book called Blind Spots. And in this book, he was cataloging important medical misconceptions, things that medical doctors believe that just weren't true and needed to change. One of those was hormone replacement replacement therapy for menopausal women. Stands out in my mind because it's related to ice baths and cold plunge and sex hormone balancing. What he did not include in there was this relationship between testosterone and prostate. Doctors used to think that elevated prostate or, sorry, elevated testosterone would increase the risk of prostate cancer.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Absolutely false.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Dr. Abraham Morgenthaler, he's down here in Florida and he has done exhausting of work revealing that misconception. So part of what fuels or perpetuates these misconceptions, and we have reams of data that you think would overturn it, but part of what fuels that is two things. One is advertising to the public these drug ads that lie to the public about what the Drugs do. And the other one is called continuing education credits. That is, is advertising essentially to doctors, to physicians, to people who have advanced degrees and are licensed to practice, calling it continuing education to try and bring them up to speed on the latest drugs or whatever it is. These continuing education credits, which are often required to maintain licensure or status within professional societies, they are all funded by pharmaceutical companies when it comes to medicine. So there's two levels of. Of advertising. This one that we're seeing, which it looks like Marty Macri is working with Kennedy to shut down. There's a whole nother level that we don't see, which is the pharmaceutical companies that are writing the textbooks is the pharmaceutical companies that are giving away the seminars to the medical schools is the pharmaceutical companies that are running the continuing education programs for physicians so that they can continue to brainwash otherwise intelligent people into thinking that something like a testosterone blocking drug would help their patient, when in fact the data says increased testosterone is associated with protection against prostate cancer. So incentives are screwing up everything in medicine right now.

[B]

And there's the other hidden layer that a lot of people don't see where pharmaceutical companies are responsible for tons of content on the Internet being buried and suppressed, which is another huge problem, depending.

[A]

Upon which data source you cite. Iatrogenic injuries. So these are medical errors or these are injuries caused by medical treatment. Iatrogenic injury is either the third or the first leading cause of death in the United States. You don't see it on the leaderboard when they say, hey, these are the top 10 leading causes of death, or something like that. They always delete medical errors or iatrogenic injury. But when you include it, it either shows up number one or number three, depending upon which state or which data set does iatrogenic mean? So it's one of those fancy words that I had to learn because we don't learn anything.

[B]

Is that Greek word or something.

[A]

We could look up the etymology of iatrogenic.

[B]

Iatrogenic.

[A]

Yeah. I can hardly pronounce it when I'm like, recording for my audiobooks. It's very, very embarrassing. So we can just say medical injury. And that can result from surgical pharmaceutical interactions of people weren't aware of accidental overdoses, prescribing the wrong drug to the wrong person, being unaware of medical allergies.

[B]

That's from Greek physician producing.

[A]

So iatrogenic healer. Yeah. Produced by a physician.

[B]

Wow. Wow. Yeah. We were just talking about this the other day, how it's like the number two cause of death in the U.S. yep. You want to make America surgery at all costs.

[A]

I wouldn't say that. Look here in a car crash. I want an ambulance.

[B]

Oh, well, I mean, you have no choice.

[A]

It's true. And they cannot deny you emergency care, regardless of your insurance status. Those people are going to get treated for their broken bones. They're going to get blood transfusions, they're going to to get the emergency treatment that they need. And nothing in Marty's book is criticizing emergency medicine or this acute care. It is chronic illness that is the problem in our country. And so you say you need a new pediatrician. And I'm like, but do you. Do you really? Right now, mom is probably like, we have to have a pediatrician. You know, just in case, right? As a dad, I'm like, yeah, you know, is anything broken? Yeah, you know, why do I got to take my healthy kid, right? To like, the kid will let me know.

[B]

Yeah, that's true.

[A]

Right?

[B]

That's a good point. Well, Thomas, thank you so much for doing this, man. This has been amazing.

[A]

I'm so glad you invited me.

[B]

What. Tell me about the what's next. What the. What's the future of Morosco Forge?

[A]

Morosco right now, Forge is an ice bath company, and that's wonderful. And the world needs more than ice baths. The knowledge crisis in this country is nobody knows who to believe. I mean, should you take advice from Peter Attia or Brian Johnson, or should you do everything Gary Breca tells you to do? It's ridiculous.

[B]

I'm taking my advice from Liver King.

[A]

Exactly right. Saladino. Because Liver King and Saladino were in business, and after Liver King was called, caught doing steroids, as if there was any doubt, Saladino has to go on YouTube and say, I didn't know. You know, I thought he was totally natural. I'm a medical doctor, but come on, the guy's a clown. And that's the way social media works is you must be entertaining to have any kind of audience. So this leaves the viewers with a serious problem. Who do you watch? Who do you listen to? What's the credibility of the information that you're getting? So people need more than just good information about ice baths. They need more. They need reliable health information and need technologies that are going to help them heal. So in ice baths, we kind of have that down. I wish Marty would issue a cease and desist letters to them.

[B]

She looks like she's having fun.

[A]

That's Shayla. Shayla is a bodybuilder. She has. Has been using Morozco for, like, Three or four years. This is another model that we hired. She's a mom. This is Alex Blue. Alex Blue is a celebrity chef. He won Hell's Kitchen. So I'm just taking you through the. The video on the Moroz CO screen. We also have. Our employees are in the ice bath all the time, and they're not gorgeous. And I don't have abs, so I don't go on the home page. But we all do what we preach. The next thing for Morozco is a mineral bath. There are hot tubs all over this country, and they feel great, but they make you sick. There's three things wrong with them. For the most part, you can't put minerals in them. The ocean has minerals. Every natural hot spring in the world is coming out of some ancient volcano. And it's got plenty of minerals. Minerals. It's part of the salubrious effect of the health of the hot spring is the minerals in the water. But your hot tub doesn't have minerals. It's got chlorinated fluorinated tap water. So that's one. The other one is the oxidation reduction potential. So this is some sophisticated water chemistry. But for your hot tub to stay clean, you gotta put a bunch of chlorine. That gives it an oxidative potential to kill the microorganism. Every natural hot spring in the world. I might be exaggerating slightly, but when the water comes out of the volcanic ground, it is reductive. That is, it's not oxygenated. It has got a negative orp. That means instead of stealing electrons, it's ready to donate electrons. And it's typically the sulfur sulfate redox chemistry that controls the oxidation, reduction potential or oxygen ORP of the water. So we want to make a chlorine free hot tub. We're using ozone. But to get that reduction, that negative orp, you can switch it to hydrogen. So you turn the ozone off, you turn the hydrogen on. Twenty minutes later, the bath is full of hydrogen. There's Epsom salt, which is a sulfate salt, other minerals in there. So we solve the mineral problem, we solve the reduction problem. And then the third thing that's wrong with hot tubs is they're not grounded. You got your acrylic, your fiberglass tub. There's no grounding anywhere, which means you have no access to the electrons from the earth. But a Morozco, we call it the hydrogen mineral bath. I don't even know what to call it, Danny. But if you. If you look for the Morozco mineral bath, you'll find it. It's hot, 104 degrees. It has hydrogen. It's grounded, and you can put all the sulfate minerals in it that you want.

[B]

Is there a picture of it on there?

[A]

You can find it online. Steve, you go to Morozco, you go.

[B]

To our shop page, Marozco Hydrogen Mineral.

[A]

Bath, something like that. I should probably know. You know, my own product. But go all the way over to the right. You'll see a button called shop. You hit that, and then there it is. Morozco Hydrogen Mineral Bath. Whoa. The first one ships next week. It's going to Noah Sinegard, who used to pitch for the Mets, and now he's like a. A big maha guy. And so you can see it has this barrel stave look, and it kind of. It looks like a boat in some ways because you got the tub, and then you have a trunk and you have a hood, and that's where the mechanical equipment is contained. See?

[B]

I kind of wish I had a hot tub instead of a sauna, because then you don't cook your head.

[A]

No, you don't. I'll tell you why. For two reasons. The first one is, this thing is incredible. Incredibly expensive. Like, it's in Noah's budget. He texted me, and he's like, can't you make a hot tub? And I said, well, you know, it's been on our roadmap, right? The retail price, $50,000 only.

[B]

Let's see some more picks.

[A]

Like, Noah can do it right now. There's a video of me in the prototype. All right, so we had. Here's a customer and his wife. They came over. They got in house the hot tub. You can see we have the green light in there for calming. And in that video, I start trying to explain things. But we will have better media next week because we're gonna video record the crap out of our hot tub before we ship it to Noah.

[B]

And why don't I want a hot tub versus a sauna, though? I mean, I think I do.

[A]

I'm the worst salesman, like, ever. I should be trying to talk you into this. I should say talk. My sales director, Scott, we got a new lead. Yeah, but the sauna and the hot tub are different. When you get into the sauna, you get vasodilation.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

The principal way that you cool your body is to sweat, and so your body will open up the blood vessels and bring the blood to the surface of your skin, where the evaporation of your sweat will cool the blood. That's vasodilation via Sweating. When you get into the hospital hot tub, your body knows that you can't sweat into the water. The only parts of you that are sweating are like, your head or your arms are out. They will sweat. But there's a principle called hydromiosis, which Google thinks is a spelling error. Everything that is saturated with water cannot sweat. So to defend your body from the heat in the hot tub, you will get vasoconstriction.

[B]

Really?

[A]

Ice cream bath. Vasoconstriction in the hot tub. Vasoconstriction. So I'll tell you why the hot tub is good. But for thermal contrast therapy. Sauna, dry heat, wet, cold. Got it. And that will be the smooth muscle workout. Maximize your cardiovascular benefits. Sounds great. Hot tubs, they're relaxing. They're good in some other ways. The whirlpool was invented. Invented by an Italian American. He was an immigrant named Jacuzzi. You probably. It's a very famous brand, Right?

[B]

Sounds familiar.

[A]

Yeah. So he had a son with rheumatoid arthritis. And the kid was young. He was like 3 years old or something. I forget exactly. But he's preschool age. And he discovered that a hot bath with a whirlpool jet would give his son some relief from pain. So instead of driving 45 minutes into this hospital in Berkeley, California, to get his son regular treatments, he invented the whirlpool jets so they could have hot water at home. Boom. The whole Jacuzzi brand is built upon what Jacuzzi invented to relieve his son's pain. It's a wonderful story. Well, the Jacuzzi was operating at a different time, you know, in the 50s and the 60s. It wasn't seed oils, and it wasn't like chronic oxidative stress. Right. The ice bath does different things in the hot tub. The ice bath revs up your metabolism. The hot tub doesn't do that. People who do regular ice baths do not suffer from chronic oxidative stress. It relieves the pain of rheumatoid arthritis. Like Jacuzzi could have done the same thing. But refrigeration is a lot harder to invent than a whirlpool pump that you put into a regular tub. People now do not get the same benefits from the high hot tub as Jacuzzi's kid used to, because they have suffered from different health states. If you ice bath all the time, you don't suffer from those conditions. But not everybody's going to get into an ice bath like your wife, who hopefully your son is going to talk her into it. Right. But a lot of women out there are like, you'll never catch me in one of those things. Those people can get many of the same benefits. That is relief from chronic I oxidated stress, reduction of inflammation in a hot tub. As long as the hot tub is grounded, the minerals are great. They feel good. They're good for muscle soreness and has hydrogen. So I disagree with Gary Breca on some things. I think he's exaggerating when he says, you know, hydrogen therapy is the single most underrated biohack that anybody can do. But that doesn't mean he's wrong. There are benefits to hydrogen therapy. When you get into a hot tub with hydrogen bubbles in it, that hydrogen will be absorbed through your skin. It will relieve chronic oxidative stress. For those people who can't ice bath, boom. Hydrogen bath is the way to go. And the best way to do that is in the heat. We might come out with a hydrogen oxygen for cold tub just because if Brecke is going to keep talking about about it, people are going to buy it. But I can't get behind, like, this super health benefit.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So we're going in. You know, what's next from Roscoe? We're going into hot tubs. We are going to do phototherapy. I was telling you about the green light.

[B]

Green light.

[A]

And Alexis has me convinced, like, we have to fix light environments. The red light industry is really big. It's full of deceptive marketing practices. Lots of stuff there is overprotective priced, marked up from China. People don't really know what to buy. And I think the industry is just scratching the surface. I think it needs better science and better technology, and it needs to be combined with other wavelengths. We're going to get into that business this winter. What I want to be is a trustworthy provider of technology, of machines that will be what we call the next best thing to know nature. I would rather that you get out into the woods or you get into the Gulf. I would rather you go surfing than, you know, get into my ice bath. Your water's a little warm, but during the winter, you can get some cold activation.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

The next best thing to being in nature is to be in a Morozco. So I want to create the technologies for people like me, you know, who live in the urban environment, who are disconnected from. From nature that help make up for that deficit. And I want people to think that they're trustworthy. They're backed by science. You can read every single one of my articles for free online. You don't have to buy the book because it shows up online first anyway. But the book is good for people who like to write in it, like I do. So if you want the hard copy, you can get that from us, too. Part of my role as a professor is. Is to teach, is to spread reliable knowledge. And that's why everything we do is predicated in science and experience. I'm mortified by the idea that I might give somebody a finding or an experience that was harmful and incorrect. It's going to happen. I have a big mouth, and I will make mistakes. And when that happens, you can point it out to me. I will fix it, and I will get it right in the writings, because there is an acute need for reliable. I want to say unbiased, but I don't know if you can ever pull all the bias out, reliable information that works about health. And I want Morozco to fill that need.

[B]

That's amazing, man. Well, I mean, I am the biggest fan of it. It's changed the game for me. I have one at my house and now at my new studio.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So now all of our future guests are going to be able to take a dip in that ice plunge, which is fantastic. Especially when you get those freaking jets running in the. In the plunge. Holy smokes.

[A]

I like it when the bubbles are coming under my level.

[B]

Oh, yeah, it's coming up my legs. Under your arms. It's like. Yeah, that. That vertical plunge is next level, man. So thank you for hooking it up. Thank you for coming down and doing this. And we'll link it down below from Morosco Forge, anyone who's interested. And thanks again, man.

[A]

This was an honor. This was fun. Thank you, Danny.

[B]

All right, good night, everybody.