[00:00:01] Luke: Tom, I'm so stoked to have this conversation.

[00:00:04] Thomas: Thanks for having me here.

[00:00:06] Luke: We've got your book here. I love the title, Uncommon Cold. It's all about cold therapy, cold thermogenesis, ice baths, all the things. I've got my ice bath, sauna, breathwork, repeat shirt on. You can get that, folks, at lukestoreymerch.com. But in all seriousness, I've been doing some form of cold or hot and cold therapy since I was a little kid, long before I heard about anything like biohacking or any of that business.

[00:00:39] And I still don't have any clue about the science of why it feels so good. So I'm excited to have a show with someone who's really put in the work to understand how this affects us biologically. I don't even know where to start. You have so much information in your skull that I think-- yeah, I know where we can start out with. Let's start out what got you interested in jumping in super cold water in the first place?

[00:01:14] Thomas: I can't say that it was anything more than an accident. I was separated from my wife. We were headed for a divorce, and I started reading everything, all the men's self-help literature, trying to figure myself out. What am I going to do? And one of those books said, "Oh, you should take cold showers, toughen yourself up." So I did that. I hated every minute of every cold shower I've ever had. But if I'm going to be tough, that's what I got to do.

[00:01:41] The thing is, I live in Phoenix, Arizona, and the tap water there gets up to 90° in the summertime, so there's no cold shower option. And then a former student of mine, Jason Stauffer, you've met him, had him on the podcast. He said, "Well, have you ever tried ice baths?" Never heard of it. "Do you know Wim Hof?" Never heard of him. But I'm going to get in just to see what a difference.

[00:02:04] One of the things that's changed since you were a kid is there is now this enormous body of scientific literature, most of it coming out of Finland, Poland, Czech Republic, and all these eastern European countries. And maybe it's because they're out of the reach of some of the usual medical science research apparatus in the United States. But these crazy researchers start looking at what happens when people get into cold baths and cold showers. One of those was a study in Finland that compared partial cold water to whole body cold water, and they turned out to be way different.

[00:02:43] The partial will activate your sympathetic nervous system, so it revs you up. You get into the fight or flight, and that was what was happening to me in the cold shower swearing. And I'm like, what the-- and that's how I get through that activation. But it never brings you-- a cold shower will not bring you that mammalian dive reflex.

[00:03:03] Only the whole body will do that. So when I got up to my neck there's ice cubes everywhere, and it's 34 degrees. The first 15 or 20 seconds are all the gasp reflex. The next two minutes, three minutes, whatever you're going to do are the mammalian dive reflex, your heart rate goes down.

[00:03:25] Even though your fat metabolism is revving up, your body knows to conserve oxygen the best it can because it thinks you're preparing to dive. And Jack Kruse just did a really interesting clip on this. He said, all mammals, they're gestated in the womb. When they're born, they have to learn to breathe. Of course, we have an instinct to breathe, but we also have the instinct not to breathe because we are conceived in water.

[00:03:54] And many human beings can be born in water. When does the baby, when it comes out, know to breathe? Not when the water is on its face, but only when it emerges from the water. And then we have the Hollywood, you slap the baby on the butt and then it takes its first breath, but it's not wrong. Jack pointed out that this mammalian dive reflex is embedded in our genetic code because we gestate inside the amniotic fluid of the womb.

[00:04:25] And my head went, ah, this makes so much more sense. The whole body and the partial body can both give metabolic benefits. But when you're looking for that deeper psychological, that meditative experience that can happen in the ice bath, you go colder and you go deeper than just what I was doing, the cold shower.

[00:04:48] So that was a lot of fun, but it wasn't serious. Because I was exploring and I was learning. It didn't get serious for me until I got all my labs back. I'm trying to become more health conscious. I'm trying to watch my weight. I'm trying to go out on the dating market so I get the whole male health panel.

[00:05:07] The lipid markers are in there, but for the male health panel, you get the PSA, prostate specific antigen. And at the time, I was 52 years old. And this is one of the things that men that age are supposed to watch for. Mine came out seven nanograms per deciliter and it was in red because that's too high.

[00:05:25] Now I got to go, to WebMD, Mayo Clinic, or whatever these websites are, which I don't recommend because you spend 15 seconds and you're convinced you're going to die. My catastrophic brain said, that's it. You're checking out this prostate cancer. Of course it says, go to your urologist, have a prostate exam.

[00:05:44] They're probably going to recommend a biopsy. Then of the 16 samples that they remove from a man's prostate, they decide how many positives indicates that it's cancer because the false positive rate in these biopsies is pretty high. If of these 16 three comeback, or four comeback, or six comeback positive for cancer, then what do you do?

[00:06:07] I started talking with men. Have you ever had your PSA tested? Have you ever had a biopsy? Because men don't talk about this anywhere near enough. And I didn't want any of the allopathic sequela, this cascade of interventions that would then result in a prostatectomy because the men that I'd talked to said that it was so awful at every stage. So I said, "I'm going to do something else." Now, I didn't have cancer, at least not that I know of, but in my brain, I thought the choices were death, allopathic medicine, or whatever I could figure out. And I decided what I was going to figure out was ketosis and ice baths.

[00:06:49] I got in there every day, and I didn't get in there because it was fun anymore, and I didn't get in there because I loved it. I got in there because I was afraid. In my imagination I was going to die if I didn't do it. So, of course, I came out, I was cold, and I started, whether it was the jumping jacks or the pushups. I finally got a steel mace. I started doing that, and I would walk into campus.

[00:07:15] I made this part of my routine because I wanted to get that PSA number down without having surgery or a biopsy. Took me three or four months, and it came down. Guess what went up? Whole male health panel also includes total testosterone. And I was in pretty good testosterone shape for a fat 52-year-old college professor. But I went from 770 up to 1180 nanograms per deciliter, and now the testosterone was in red.

[00:07:46] My PSA was something like 1.4, which was fine, totally normal for a guy my age. And when you look, we go to the library, these things are supposed to work in opposition. The science of cold plunge therapy has revealed misconceptions. The medical community used to think that high levels of testosterone, because it's anabolic, would encourage prostate cancer. It would encourage the growth of cancer cells. It turns out it's the opposite.

[00:08:16] High testosterone is associated with lower rates of prostate. And so one of my friends was put on testosterone blockers because he had those positive prostate cancer cells. They ran his testosterone all the way below sub 200, and his medical doctor told him it was good for him because it would retard the growth of cancer cells.

[00:08:36] The medical doctor was entirely wrong. I don't know if he'd been reading the wrong journal articles, but one of the things that I've figured out is that the MDs don't have time to read. They're meeting, and they're treating. I'm a PhD. I'm constantly doing research, and I live in the library. But it was really Brigham Buhler that popularized this.

[00:08:54] He went on the Joe Rogan show, and he said the only reason testosterone made it out was because Dr. Morgan Tyler did the research. He did the review articles. He did the studies that showed low testosterone is associated with higher rates of prostate cancer. High testosterone is associated with lower rates of prostate cancer. So this is what the library says.

[00:09:18] But I'm finally ready to go see my urologist because, look, I've got a clean bill of PSA health, and frankly, look, I'm a little proud of my testosterone reading. So I make the appointment, and I go in there with my labs, and I say, "Doc, look, I'm good now." And I'm thinking I'm going to get a big pat on the back.

[00:09:35] He says, "I want one more test." "What's that?" "Luteinizing hormone." Which I had no idea what it was. It turns out luteinizing hormone is what stimulates a man's gonads to make testosterone. So this guy he's about my age. He's thinking who is this coming in here 50 something years old, 1,180 nanograms per deciliter? He's juicing.

[00:10:00] I'm going to get his luteinizing hormone because if that's low he knows I'm on some replacement therapy and I'm not telling him. But if it's high, then I would be natural. That thing came back 8.9 in red, off the charts high. Which meant I was totally natural. I sent him my labs. I've never heard from him again. Because what is he supposed to do? Change the way he treats men based upon me and my-- he can't do it.

[00:10:30] Conventional or what you call centralized medicine, if you listen to too much Jack Kruse, is stuck. It can't incorporate these kinds of findings because you have to be a rebel to be a physician and say, "I'm changing the way I treat my patients because I've noticed these patients have success with these alternative therapies, and these patients are not having success with everything that they taught me in medical school."

[00:10:54] Most physicians aren't going to take on that responsibility. So we have a number who are customers. They treat themselves one way at home with an ice bath. But what do they prescribe for their patient? All the standard sorts of things that aren't going to get them sued.

[00:11:11] So I have made it my mission to find the clinical trials, to find the n equals 1 trials, to find the anecdotes and piece them together and put all of this science and experience in a book like this. There are some 400, 500 different citations. Lots of footnotes, and some of them are personal stories, and some of them are, "Here's a study. Here's another study. Here's another study that suggests, here's the mechanisms for what's happening."

[00:11:39] The world needed this book. I don't know if they really want to buy it. You can only get it right now at Morozko. I didn't even put it on Amazon. But most of all, I needed this book. Because this is what I do. I teach engineering at Arizona State. I'm not a physician I'm a doctor of philosophy. And so I read these journal articles, and I try and piece things together. How is this working?

[00:12:03] It's all available for free. Every article is up there. But if you want it in one place, you buy the book. Nobody really reads what I put out there, Luke. We're not the most popular healthline.com. I'm not Joe Mercola. Nobody's really paying attention until Rogan put up my picture, and he'd read my article on pre-cooling your workout.

[00:12:27] You do the cold before you do your exercise, which was accidentally what I had been doing. And that's where you get the testosterone boost. This was December 2022, and he's talking with David Goggins. He says, "I heard about this guy." Now, I'm in Iceland with AJK. We're going to go see the Northern Lights. And when I get off the plane, turn the phone back on, it's all lit up because my friends are saying, "Hey, Rogan read about your article."

[00:12:57] And I said, "I've never been on the Joe Rogan. This doesn't make any sense." We dug it up, and sure enough, he talked about how he now gets up in the morning and gets right in that ice bath. He keeps it at 33, 34, super cold. He hates the 15 seconds before he goes in. He is always negotiating with himself. And then he does it, and he feels that sense of accomplishment, and then he does his exercise.

[00:13:27] He says to Goggins, "It's really hard, but it's working." All of that is now in the book. Where are the metabolic benefits? You can get those at 40. But where are those deep psychological benefits, the ones that Goggins says make you question everything about your life? What am I doing? Getting into 33-degree, ice up to my neck water?

[00:13:50] And all of the athletes and the high performers who I've interviewed since say, "It's not for recovery." It's not for the joint pain that they feel. It's not for the muscle soreness. It's for that moment when they have conquered that hesitation inside themselves and found the will to do the really difficult thing.

[00:14:14] Luke: Wow. What a great way to kick this off.

[00:14:18] Thomas: I'm glad because I remember you posted recently you were in your Morozko. It was delightful. And you're trying to explain to people nothing about brown fat or metabolism. You said you were there for the mental benefits. And that is a consistent theme among our regular customers who are setting that temperature down in the 30s. They say, "This is how I challenge myself. This is where I get my wins."

[00:14:46] Luke: It's funny. I think I'm lucky with the difficulty threshold because I live in Texas. When it's hot here, it is hot here, son. Anyone that comes over, the guy that does the pool or landscaping, they see me getting in that thing and they're like, "Oh, you're crazy." I go, "You're crazy to not be doing this."

[00:15:09] In fact, I got a new guy that's been helping me plant some stuff in the yard, and he was over here when it was really hot in the summer, and I'm running them out, big jars of water with electrolytes and stuff, and those Update drinks that I gave you. I was trying to take care of them. And then at one point I just felt so bad. I brought them back and showed him the Morozko, how to take the lid off.

[00:15:29] And I was like, you don't have to get all the way in, but it'd probably feel really good just to dunk your head in. And I'll be damned, every time he came over after that he was doing that. He's like, "You're crazy. But it does feel good." "I told you." But when I have a difficult time with the part like Joe Rogan was saying, how you have this apprehension going into it, I only really get that if it's cold out.

[00:15:53] I noticed today the temperature dropped. It was probably 70 instead of 100 or whatever. And I went out there, and I was like, it's less enticing. And when it's wintertime here, say February, and it's 26 or 35 degrees or something, man, it's lot more challenging. But it's like a mental thing. Even if it's a warm day, but it's a cloudy day, it's a lot harder mentally, I find. It's just a psychological thing.

[00:16:18] But to your point, I think what I was saying in that post was how it's helped me so much psychologically, not so much in overcoming the resistance of getting in. It's gamifying the experience for myself to see how quickly I can relax. People always ask me, how long do you go in for? And back in the early days, I used to time it.

[00:16:41] I remember one time when I made my own chest freezer, Sears chest freezer, ice bath, which was probably dangerous because it has electricity. And I was like, I don't advise that these days. But if that's all you can afford, you can always unplug it. It works. Just the water got swampy really quickly and stuff.

[00:16:58] But I had one of those behind my brother's gym in LA. It was really cold that day, and I set my timer for 20 minutes to see what happened. I stayed in there and made it 20 minutes, and I thought I'm actually okay. And that was the only time I got out and was shivering so bad I couldn't drive a car.

[00:17:17] And so I used to try to be macho with it and play these games, but to me it's not about impressing people or even impressing myself with the duration. It's how quickly can I slow my breathing and surrender to the discomfort. And so it's had a really interesting effect on the mastery over my nervous system so that when other similar stressful and sudden experiences happen in my day-to-day life, I remember that response that's like, wow, I can actually choose to just take a couple of deep breaths and have some equanimity.

[00:17:58] I'm not so much as I used to be at the mercy of that fight or flight response. Because man, you get in a cold ice bath, it's flight, 100%. You see anyone that's new-- I'm sure you've seen hundreds of people get in. And I have people that are new sometimes and they want to try it, and it never fails.

[00:18:15] The response is this [Fast breathes]. And I'm like, dude, you're making it so much harder on yourself. If you shut your mouth, breathe through your nose, as counterintuitive it is, it only takes a few deep breaths through the nose and telling your subconscious mind, telling your nervous system that you are safe, even though every nerve in your body is telling you otherwise. That it can't hurt you. It's not hurting you. It's actually helping you. That's where the secret sauce is.

[00:18:41] And funnily enough, today, because I was running behind, it's the first day in eons that I haven't taken an ice bath right before I recorded. I thought that was funny. I'm like, I got the guy who made my ice bath, the Morozko, and today's the day I was like, "Ah, it's a little chilly out. I'm in a good mood already. I've had a good day and so on." So it's just hilarious. Yeah. But every other time, usually the guest shows up and I'm like, "I'll be right back." And I go get an ice bath. And that's the last thing I do before I sit down because I want to be, a, alert and also just have that rush of feel-good chemicals running through my veins.

[00:19:19] Thomas. I almost jumped in your ice bath in your backyard right before we started. It was so tempting because I stayed at a hotel last night, and I'll do cold showers as best I can. Water wasn't very cold.

[00:19:30] Luke: Austin doesn't really have cold showers. Yeah.

[00:19:32] Thomas: No. And I find I miss it. If I'm away from my Morozko for a day or two, there's some part of me that longs for it again. But I don't do 4, 5, 6 minutes a day. I don't have a timer. There's been a lot of stuff. You've been telling me about microdosing. And so people have been discovering that microdosing psychoactive drugs can give them a lot of benefits. It's really just in the last 10 years that it's become part of the mainstream conversation.

[00:20:02] There's an analogy with cold. The first 15 seconds are the worst of any ice bath, and then you structure your breath. You take control of that panic response. And that feeling of, what was I even worried about, comes over you. Well, you probably got 80% of whatever you needed to do that morning, right there.

[00:20:27] I'm no longer working on my metabolism. I'm no longer working on my testosterone. I'm no longer working on inflammation. I'm working between my ears now. I have this stressful, I suppose I could say, existent. I'm a bundle full of anxieties. I'm trying to be a professor. I'm trying to run a startup company.

[00:20:48] I'm trying to publish a book. I'm trying to put out on social media everything that needs to change in healthcare. Because I have this sense that we are at a critical junction in reforming the institutions of healthcare, in reforming health policy, in changing people's minds about how you take care of yourself.

[00:21:07] I'm watching mental health metrics go through the roof. You can't get a decent therapist because they're all on waiting lists. Meantime, the drug overdoses and the suicides are all on these hockey stick graphs. I'm watching life expectancy in the United States drop off a cliff, and I keep thinking, what more could I be doing now to turn those graphs around?

[00:21:31] So sometimes 4 o'clock in the morning, 5 o'clock in the morning, when it feels hopeless for me, I'm like, "Well, this is it. We're out of resources. We're out of ideas. We don't know what to do next, and we are up against things that will probably never change." I go into the ice bath. 30 seconds later, there's three more things I haven't tried.

[00:21:55] All right. We're going to get back up. I'm going to get back on the computer, get back on the podcast, or I'm going to meet with the team. I'm going to say, "Okay, here's something we haven't done yet. Let's see how this works." For me, it is the resolve to keep going despite all the challenges, despite the fears and the anxieties of failure, criticism, or humiliation that come when anybody is working on something that is really important to them.

[00:22:22] Or maybe it could be that my director has called me into his office again to complain about something I did at Arizona State. That also is a source of anxieties. But the ice bath is how I melt those things away. The irony is that the water, it's like it takes it out of my body, and when I get up, I feel like Superman again. I feel like I can do anything I put my mind to, and I rely on that feeling these days.

[00:22:48] Luke: Let's talk about the neurochemistry. Give me some of the geeky stuff on why it is so good for stress and anxiety, depression. One easy thing to see about rumination, if the mind chatters really loud, you alluded to this, or maybe you're a bit sad, or you're experiencing some grief, the degree of presence required to relax in really cold ice bath has a way of just psychologically eclipsing all of that because you're left with no choice but to be present. But beyond that, what's actually happening in terms of our neurotransmitters, hormones, and all of that, that causes us to feel so good and not just immediately after, the rest of the day?

[00:23:39] Thomas: It's amazing. It lasts for hours both neurochemically and psychologically. And if I remember this right, there's four different levels. You've touched on the first one. An ice bath is the best way to bring you to your present moment. Because when you're in there, there's no past. There's no anxieties about the future. There is only what is going on now.

[00:24:02] And so a lot of the rumination that human beings get stuck in, and sometimes it can be productive, I don't want to say that it's always bad, but it disappears when the ice bath snaps you into that present moment. What is happening to you right now? And that reset is really useful for me.

[00:24:21] The second level is there's a very popular study. Huberman popularized it. It was done in Poland, and it was measuring the blood serum response to whole body cold water emersion. And the water wasn't even that cold. But they found there's 250% increase in dopamine on average. And you got to think about that. That's three and a half times the level of dopamine now coursing through your bloodstream because you spent a few minutes in the ice bath.

[00:24:49] And it's not just that; it's noradrenaline. Those are the ones that give people that sense of euphoria, of accomplishment. And those are wonderful neurochemicals to have. When you go a layer deeper, it turns out those aren't the only neuroactive factors that are produced in your body. There's also a boost in oxytocin. There's also a boost in vasopressin.

[00:25:16] In women, there's an immediate boost in testosterone. And this is because only about a quarter of the testosterone in a woman's body is produced by the ovaries. Now, the ovaries are inside her body, and they're not really stimulated in a brief ice bath. But the rest of the testosterone comes from the adrenal glands, the fat cells, and the skin.

[00:25:35] And those three get stimulated by the ice bath immediately So she gets the testosterone. Men typically have to exercise after the ice bath to get the testosterone because they have so much more, and it's produced in the testes. Although they can also produce it in the adrenal glands. It's just a small fraction of what's really coursing through our veins.

[00:25:56] Now let's break this down, this third level. You take the testosterone, the dopamine, the noradrenaline, the oxytocin, and the vasopressin. All of these neurochemicals are associated with different understandings of love. Helen Fisher is the psychologist who's consulted with Match.com and the dating sites about how people find people and what creates attraction.

[00:26:23] She says there are three brain systems of love. Now, I don't know what a brain system is or what she means by that necessarily, but I understand that in English this word love is poetic. I love ketchup. What does that even mean? Love. There are three ways to think about it. One is pure lust. This is the testosterone reaction, so the libido.

[00:26:46] Another is what Helen Fisher calls romantic love. This is the jealous, possessive kind of love that we have for the people that we might have a crush on or that we're in a new relationship for. And third kind of love, she calls familial love, the love that you would have for your pet or for your sibling. You can have all of these for a single person. Isn't that a wonderful feeling?

[00:27:11] But you can also experience them separately. Familial love for someone that you have no lust for. Or lust for someone that you have no romantic attachment to. When you get in the ice bath, all of these brain systems, as Fisher calls them, are activated by the neurochemicals that are stimulated inside your body. I didn't know the research behind this, but I had an experience with AJ when we were on a photo shoot, and it's up in Sedona.

[00:27:45] AJ's beautiful, and she's smart, and there's so many things to be attracted to, but man, was I angry at her that day? We were in the middle of a big argument for things that I thought she was so wrong about and unfair. And you can see it. My daughter was the photographer, and we'd procrastinated on shoot until the very end of the day. And I told myself, "Well, that's to get the right light and thing."

[00:28:12] Sedona is a beautiful backdrop. We waited too long, and at the beginning of this ice bath, we can't even look one another in the eye. My daughter says, "Hey, it's time to go. We got to roll." We get in, and we hold hands because we're supposed to, and we make eye contact, and we're breathing because we're supposed to. And it takes about a minute for her to start smiling and then giggling and then laughing. And then she leans in, and we're making out in the ice bath because the chemistry-- this is involuntary.

[00:28:44] Luke: You got me on that one. That's something I have not tried.

[00:28:47] Thomas: My daughter is like, "You two get a room. Cut. We're done." We fell right back in love. Every resentment was gone from my mind. We had a wonderful weekend. Now, you said you've never tried this, and it's worth experimenting, but I haven't met a lot of people who have talked their significant other into doing this. And we never would've done it together if it weren't for the circumstances of this photo shoot.

[00:29:13] But my experience is entirely consistent now with the mechanisms that I've read about in the literature. An ice bath, when you do it with someone like that, is like a love potion, and it lasts for hours. You cannot be depressed and be in love at the same time.

[00:29:31] Now, I understand that love can come with a lot of complex feelings, and you can be depressed because you're not getting something out of the relationship that you really want. But in that moment with the testosterone, the dopamine, the noradrenaline, the oxytocin, and the vasopressin, which are those bonding hormones of familial love, you don't feel any of that.

[00:29:51] So there's now a scientific explanation for the n equals 2 experience that AJ and I had, which is a wonderful way of piecing this all together. There is a fourth level. So we talked about the present moment. We talked about the dopamine that people know about. We talked about some of these deeper neurochemicals.

[00:30:14] The fourth level is the metabolism. And this is something that Chris Palmer has been really good at popularizing. He wrote a book called Brain Energy. He's a Harvard psychiatrist. So he goes to medical school, he specializes in psychiatry, and now he's a practitioner, a clinician, but he's also a faculty member at Harvard.

[00:30:33] His Brain Energy book, he dedicated to his mother. What he doesn't say in the book is that Chris Palmer's mother suffered from schizophrenia, and it impacted him severely because there were moments in his childhood, as I understand from other sources that are in the book, where he was homeless because of his mother's mental illness.

[00:30:52] Now, if you had that experience as a child and you had the aptitude for medical school, would you choose psychiatry as your specialty? Would you go deeper into this practice to try and understand schizophrenia and these mental health disorders? Because you can totally understand why Chris has done this.

[00:30:07] But his book is a terrific critique of the diagnostic statistical manual and everything that is failing in the treatment of mental health patients. He says, "The mental health disorders respond to metabolic therapies much better than they respond to talk therapy, other drugs, SSRIs, or what we call the antidepressants.

[00:31:30] He's now got case studies of schizophrenic women who he's put on a ketogenic diet and their schizophrenia resolves. Their lifespan is extended. And they're not the only ones. We've known about epilepsy and the ketogenic diet for a long time. So we know that there's a relationship between metabolism and the brain.

[00:31:51] And what Chris is telling us is that when the brain can't get the energy that it needs because the mitochondria have been damaged, because the body has become insulin resistant, of course, the brain can't do the difficult work of managing anxieties, or reframing experiences, or finding the good in what feels like the bad thing that has happened.

[00:32:10] All of the things that the cognitive behavioral therapists or anybody else would tell you are good for you for your mental health require your brain to be functioning well. Even if you don't have a diagnosable condition like schizophrenia or epilepsy, your brain prefers ketones. There is nothing that stimulates endogenous ketone production better than an ice bath.

[00:32:33] Luke: Really?

[00:32:34] Thomas: You're getting there, and you're to clear glucose from your bloodstream right away. Your brown fat is sucking the glucose out of your bloodstream, saying, "We're using this right now for thermogenesis." This is an emergency situation. The hypothalamus has activated the brown fat through your nervous system and said, "You better get going."

[00:32:50] But the glucose reserves in your body are so small. Your liver stores glucose and will release it into your bloodstream right away. We've got continuous glucose monitoring of type 2 diabetics and people who have normal insulin responses, and this is great stuff. After the 30, 45 seconds that initial spike of glucose reserve that your liver releases comes right back down, and your brown fat will switch to lipid metabolism.[00:33:19] When your brown fat is burning the lipids, because there's two kinds of fat, brown fat and white fat, there are different functions. The brown fat called thermogenesis, production of neuroprotective factors, it's a secretory organ that helps modulate thyroid function. White fat, mostly energy storage.

[00:33:38] So the brown fat will burn lipids released into the bloodstream from the white fat. And part of that is the production of ketones. So you can use an ice bath to get yourself in ketosis almost immediately. Some people have to go for three days of almost zero carb to get themselves into ketosis.

[00:33:56] But I've tested this on my own body. I have good metabolic flexibility so people naive to cold exposure probably aren't going to get the same results. But for me, it was Thanksgiving last year. Because I'm a sucker for pumpkin pie, I ate half the dang pumpkin pie. And pumpkin pie regret came in a little later, and I said, "What am I going to do about this?" I peed on a stick, a keto stick, just to see where I was. No ketones.

[00:34:24] Got into my ice bath, and I said, "This is how I'm going to get rid of this. This is what I'm going to do." Because I had such a good high-carbohydrate time, my metabolic penance, I got out of there, peed on the stick again an hour later, and I have small ketones.

[00:34:39] Because the ice bath will stimulate the release of those lipids from the white blood cells and get your brown fat burning them up in fat metabolism, it stimulates andogenous ketone production almost immediately, which your brain adores. So we have these four different levels, and this final one is the metabolic benefits.

[00:35:02] When you activate your brown fat, it is associated with higher levels of brain-derived neuroprotective factor. It will produce FGF21. And these are the two neuroprotective factors that are most effective against Alzheimer's. We've just seen something like 100 papers, and don't quote me on the number, but on the scale is about right, that are related to Alzheimer's just based upon made up falsified data.

[00:35:31] All the Alzheimer's drugs that have been proceeding through trials, they're all phony, and they all get shut down before they get approved by the FDA because they don't work worth a damn. You know what works? Metabolic therapies-- magnesium, vitamin D, brown fat, the things that heal the brain's metabolism.

[00:35:50] When you take care of your mitochondria, your mitochondria take care of your brain. So that's the fourth level. And this is so complex that I wish I could reduce this down to a 90-second reel on Instagram. It would go viral, and everybody would say, "Hey, ice baths are good for the brain. And yet I had to write a book.

[00:36:09] Luke: I feel you. Jarrod over here knows how frustrated I get trying to make reels. I'm like, "How does anyone say anything in 90 seconds? There's too much to say." especially when you get into the science like this. So that ketone piece is really interesting. I did not know that whatsoever. But I find it interesting in terms of the blood sugar regulation. So you had your pumpkin pie experiment, which went well.

[00:36:34] Thomas: I'm going to do it again. Thanksgiving's coming up.

[00:36:38] Luke: That's where I'm going with this. I get down with some ice cream. That's my weak spot there. Alyson can take a couple of bites of ice cream and put it back in the freezer, so she buys it. So I can't outlaw it from the house because I have self-control problems. But once I get a taste of sugar, it's over. I'm going to finish yours and mine.

[00:37:06] So it would make sense. It's probably better to not OD on sugar, but if one can't help themselves like me, in some cases, it sounds like after a high-carb or high-sugar meal that an ice bath would be a good way to regulate that, much like taking a long walk would be. Is that valid?

[00:37:21] Thomas: Yeah. They both have similar effects of stimulating your metabolism so that instead of getting that high insulin spike which will drive the glucose into your fat cells, you're consuming it either in your muscles, or you're consuming it in your brown fat. The best thing you can do is get in the ice bath and then go for a walk. You don't have to choose one or the other.

[00:37:45] Luke: Right.

[00:37:45] Thomas: And then the walking will restore circulation into your limbs. It will help boost your testosterone, and you will be managing your hormone levels like insulin. Ghrelin and leptin are also associated-- Ghrelin with appetite; leptin with the storage of fat. And so there's some things that you can do that will lessen the blow. But ice cream, depending upon what you're getting, it's not the worst.

[00:38:13] Luke: Good. Tell me more.

[00:38:16] Thomas: Fat, egg yolks, what sweetened with. Is it sweetened with sugar, which-- there's probably worse things that you could pick, but I'm not a fan of sugar. Or is it sweetened with honey, maple syrup, and things that have a lower glycemic [Inaudible]? I learned this from Ben Bickman. Allulose seems to be his favorite non-glycemic, non-insulin spiking sweetener. There are things that you can do with ice cream that aren't the worst for you. I'm on a heavy cream diet. I've discovered that coffee just enables my heavy cream addiction.

[00:38:52] Luke: Totally. I know. Totally.

[00:38:55] Thomas: And it's not bad for me.

[00:38:56] Luke: Can you guys get raw dairy out in Arizona?

[00:38:58] Thomas: Arizona, it's okay. You got to go to the specialty grocery store.

[00:39:02] Luke: Oh, okay.

[00:39:02] Thomas: You can get the raw dairy. You can even visit the farm where they make it, and you can see that-- and the wonderful bacteria that comes from a healthy lactating animal, of course, that's good for us. On the other hand, I understand pasteurization. Because once dairy farms went industrialized, they became dangerous. So pasteurization is a solution to a problem that a good farm doesn't have.

[00:39:27] Luke: Yeah.

[00:39:27] Thomas: And when you go and you see the good farm, you see the hygiene and the sanitary conditions and you visit the cows, which I've done, of course, you want to get your hands on that raw dairy. Ice cream, just like pumpkin pie has some good redeeming quality-- eggs and vitamin A. This is what I tell myself.

[00:39:44] Luke: I'm going to tell myself that too, granted, generally speaking, I'm eating the cleanest possible ice cream.

[00:39:51] Thomas: I'm still getting in the ice bath after.

[00:39:53] Luke: Back to the ketones. Is there any extra benefit to, say, chugging down some exogenous ketones? I'm obsessed with this stuff, Ketone-IQ. I drink two or three bottles a day. It's incredible for brain function. That's what I really notice. I've not really tested it on physical strength and endurance as many people do, but to me it's an amazing nootropic. So oftentimes before the podcast, I'll chug one of those Ketone-IQs. Would there be any bonus benefit to taking some ketones and then getting in the ice bath?

[00:40:26] Thomas: I'm going to yes because there are studies of exogenous ketones in animal models that have measured benefits. I'm going to talk about those in a second. However, there is no dietary source of ketones, at least not that I'm aware of. When we're talking about ice cream, that's because it's like breast milk.

[00:40:59] Where else do you find fat and carbohydrates in the same combination? No wonder we eat our feelings out of the freezer. Because when we're getting anxious when we go dip into that French vanilla, it's like going back to mom as a baby. This is the only place I know that fat and carbohydrates coexist in that combination.

[00:41:12] As far as I know, there's no natural dietary source of ketones. They have to be produced industrially. Thomas Seyfried who's probably the world's most well-known scientist of cancer at a metabolic disease, I think he's at Boston University. He has published the most convincing work on ketones, cancer, and the metabolism.

[00:41:40] He's implanted tumors into these mice, rats, or animal models, and he's administered to them exogenous ketones, not putting their own metabolism into ketosis but just saying, "What happens when I elevate the ketone levels in their bloodstream?" It inhibits tumor growth. I'm going to use an analogy here. It's like chemotherapy but without poison, with nutrition.

[00:42:09] Because the cancer cells operate on fermentation. Their mitochondria are already shut down. There's two things that they ferment. One is glucose, which they love. 80% of tumor cells have genes that are upregulated for glucose metabolism. But they can also, many of them, not all cancer cells, but many strains, can ferment glutamine which is an amino acid.

[00:42:33] So you have the glucose and the glutamine, but they cannot process ketones. And so when you administer exogenous ketones in these animal models, they promote all the healthy cells metabolism and starve the cancer cells. This is the mechanism by which the tumor growth is inhibited in the animal models.

[00:42:56] Now, the question is, if that works so well in cancer in animal models, what about the cold? Cold stimulates ketone production. Couldn't the cold have some of the same effect? Nobody had really studied this until a group of Swedish researchers. So this is 2023 Seki et al. I've got the citation all over at morozkoforge.com.

[00:43:19] Luke: What does et al mean?

[00:43:20] Thomas: Et al is Latin for--

[00:43:21] Luke: I've always wondered, and I keep meaning to look it up, and I always forget.

[00:43:24] Thomas: And others. When I was in graduate school I had to do the same thing. I had to--

[00:43:28] Luke: You always see that on studies.

[00:43:30] Thomas: Exactly. Et cetera and a whole bunch of other stuff. So the et al means and others.

[00:43:37] Luke: Thank you for clarifying that. Now I'm going to start using it and sound really smart.

[00:43:43] Thomas: If it's Latin, it's got to be learned. But Seki is the first author. And they get a group of people and say, "We're going to do the animal model thing." They take rats, and they expose them to cold air but is acute, intermittent cold exposure. Same thing. The rats are bred to die of cancer. They implant tumors in the rats, and they find the same effect that CFRI did with the ketone administration. It inhibits tumor growth, and it extends the life of rats who are bred to die of cancer.

[00:44:17] So they're like, "Okay, this is pretty amazing. But what about human beings? We can't just trust animal models." They took a Hodgkin's patient, and this Hodgkin's patient had already been through several rounds of chemotherapy, but there were more rounds to go. So they're in the middle of traditional treatment, and they said, "We want to know if the cold is going to activate brown fat, clear glucose from the bloodstream, starve the tumor cells in the same way that it does in the animals.

[00:44:44] PET scanning, positron emission tomography, it's how you detect brown fat in human beings. You have to administer a radioactive tracer of glucose. So they drink this in, gets into their bloodstream, and then you can follow the glucose using PET scan. Where does it go? It accumulates in the tumors. So when you administer this radioactive tracer and then you put a patient in a PET scan, you say, "There's the tumor. There's the tumor."

[00:45:12] For a long time, medical doctors thought there was no such thing as brown fat in adult human beings. And then PET scanning was invented. These PET rooms, very intense, very power consuming. So they have to keep them cool just for the equipment. Then you put on this gown, which is crappy, and I hate them.

[00:45:31] And of course, you get into the cool room and some people get their brown fat activated. Most people don't have any brown fat. 95% of people tested over the age of 45, no detectable brown fat. But again, in Sweden, and this goes back like 15 years, they're seeing symmetrical deposits show up, and they know it's not a tumor because cancer's not symmetrical.

[00:45:53] And they say, "I think this is brown fat." And they changed all the medical science opinions. Yes, adult human beings who get cold can have brown fat. So this Seki adult team says, "We're going to use PET, the positron emission tomography, to track what is happening in the brown fat and the human being to whom we've administered this radioactive trace. And we're going to put them in the cold." Where does the glucose go? Into the brown fat and not into the tumor. So they verified in a human being that the same mechanism that is active in the rat also exists in humans.

[00:46:26] Now there's this whole new wave of trolls and haters on Twitter that are telling me I don't have a medical degree. I'm full of crap. That when I cite these studies from Thomas Siegfried and from Sweden that say, look at what's happening to brown fat metabolism, and look at the idea that we could starve tumor cells out, the idea that the ketogenic diet has already been shown to reduce the side effects of chemotherapy and accelerate the beneficial aspects of chemotherapy to help the chemotherapy patients recover faster-- what could happen with cold and brown fat?

[00:47:06] And then I cite case studies of people who have declined the centralized, the allopathic medical. They say, "I don't want the surgery. I don't want the chemotherapy. I'm going to try the cold instead." And in some cases, they have resolved their cancer and removed all blood markers of cancer in their bloodstream.

[00:47:25] Well, people say, "That can't be true." But so much is changing in the science that I'm not going to listen to these people who say, "We've always done it this way, so that must be the way to always do it." What do we have to lose by getting into an ice bath for a couple of minutes, by restoring that brown fat in our body that we had as children, that we lost as adults?

[00:47:53] It could be uncomfortable. And I'm not saying that it's going to cure your cancer. I can point to people who swear it has cured their cancer. Dean Hall is one of them. He's in the book and he's written his own book called The Wild Cure. He used to have leukemia. He swam the entire length of the Willamette River in Oregon. It took him three weeks to do it, and he experienced hypothermia at several stages. And when he got out of that river, he didn't have leukemia anymore.

[00:48:18] Luke: No way. Wow. Wow. That's crazy.

[00:48:22] Thomas: So if see that, we say, "Here's a source of hypotheses." I am waiting for the next medical researcher, the next clinician to say, "I want to combine Seyfried and what Seyfried knows about ketones, and what Seyfried knows about the mitochondria, and his studies on transplanting healthy mitochondria into--" actually he did it the other way. He took a cancerous nucleus, and he put it into a cell with healthy mitochondria. And the healthy mitochondria repaired the defects in the DNA that are characteristic of cancer.

[00:48:54] And combine that with Seki who says, look, cold will also stimulate endogenous ketone production. It will stimulate the cold shock proteins that we know can activate repair mechanisms inside the nucleus and repair the defects in the DNA. When we are ready to combine these different lines of evidence into a definitive clinical trial, then we might unlock a brand new way of treating cancer that doesn't involve chemotherapy.

[00:49:23] Because I'm with Zach Bush. He's on Instagram saying, "Cancer is not a chemotherapy deficit." That might kill the cancer cells, but the rates of recovery are so bad. We need to look at what are the originating causes. Yes, it's toxins that cause damage, but this metabolic approach to cancer seems to be much more promising. I'm an engineer. I build machines. The people who can do those studies are never going to get funded by the NIH.

[00:49:55] And I've talked to people who have long track records of funding at the NIH. One of them is at the University of Utah. Another used to be at University of Washington. Other people at ASU who do a lot of work with the NIH. And they tell me, "That's not the way the NIH works." Is there some private philanthropist who's going to fund this clinical trial and then we're going to wait the three years, or we're going to say, "God dammit, I'm getting myself in?"

[00:50:28] AJ had a tumor on her liver. I was in Texas. I was in Dallas, and I got a call. She said, "I am in acute pain. I think maybe I popped a cyst in my ovaries or something. I've felt this before, but this feels worse. I just wanted to let you know." And I said, "What? Are you kidding?" This is before COVID, before masks, before the social distancing and all the rules in the hospital. I said, "Get yourself to the hospital and find out what this is."

[00:50:59] Flew back to Phoenix, and she was in the ER, but she hadn't been admitted. And they weren't telling her. Finally, the doctor came in and said, "We had to send your case all the way up to the tumor board." The tumor board convenes. She has a growth. It's four centimeters wide, and it's on her liver. And her liver was bleeding out. This was the source of her abdominal pain.

[00:51:22] And of course she says, "What can you do?" And the doctor says, "The tumor board says it will not respond to chemotherapy. It is not amenable to surgery because you have a history of a bleeding disorder. If we cut your liver, you could just die right on the table." "What about radiation?" "It won't respond to radiation. We can't reach it in the right way. And we don't know if we would do more damage than we could--" "Well, what can you do?"

[00:51:48] And they said, "Watch and wait." "The hell?" She said, "Tom, watch and wait? Sounds like a death sentence. When a tumor comes out of nowhere and it's impinging upon my-- what am I going to do? I've got four daughters, and they're counting on me." I said, "You're going to do the same thing Dean Hall did. You're going to do the same thing I did. You're going to cut all the alcohol and the sugar out of your diet, and you're going to get into the ice bath."

[00:52:16] She did. Now watchful waiting requires you to get a scan every several months. She went back for a scan all before COVID. That damn tumor shrunk from four centimeters down to two and a half centimeters. Then COVID shut down all the hospitals. She wrote an article. She wrote a couple of them. One was called The Curve is Already Flat. She was saying, "Look, it's already community spread, and these lockdowns are useless."

[00:52:38] She wrote another one several weeks later that said the lockdowns are killing more people than COVID. People like me cannot get a scan because they stopped all the elective procedures in the hospitals. And what they didn't tell the public, is elective, is anything that can be scheduled, not whether it's life threatening or not. But if it can be scheduled, it's prohibited.

[00:52:59] She said, "I have this tumor. I can't get it scanned. Even if I could, I'm not going to mask up and keep my daughters out of the hospital. If the scanner was open to me, the conditions that they're imposing upon me, I will never go back to a hospital like this." She wrote that article. I sent it to the governor of Arizona. He lifted the ban two and a half hours later because it was so impactful.

[00:53:26] What we were doing to people who needed treatment and we were denying them that treatment was so dangerous at that time that the governor of Arizona was convinced to lift the ban. Other things like isolation and masks stayed in place, but at least people could get elective treatment again.

[00:53:42] And when the ban was lifted, I asked her, "So are you going to scan?" And she said, "No. Promise me that you will never put me back in that hospital again if they will not allow my daughters to come with me. Because they might find something, and they might not let me out, and I'm not going to die without my daughters by my side."

[00:54:01] So now, Luke, I've got to promise. But what are you going to do? She's going to do ice bath. She's going to do the keto. She's going to do all the metabolic things that people tell me don't work and would never work. Because she has a lot less to lose by trying it.

[00:54:19] What's the worst thing that is going to happen? She feels a little cold for a little while? Nothing matters. No clinical trial matters. No health policy matters. No CDC report matters more than your n equals 1 experience. You experiment on yourself, and you say, "This is working for me." Then you keep doing it. If you experiment on yourself and you say, this isn't working for me, then all the library studies in the world are irrelevant for you. So you can now read that.

[00:54:52] She wrote the forward to the book, and she helped me with the introduction. And it has changed my view as a scientist because I used to be one of those guys who said, "We've got to have double-blind placebo-controlled randomized p factors." I used to be one of those idiots. And now I say, "No." What matters for for you? All those studies are just sources of hypotheses for you to try.

[00:55:20] Luke: Beautiful.

[00:55:21] Thomas: I don't remember what you asked me or even if I answered it.

[00:55:23] Luke: It doesn't matter. I'm not even needed here. The guest just needs someone to talk to. Most of y'all don't really need many prompts. I forgot to mention, you can find the show notes for this, and we're going to link to your articles, her article. If you want, send me a link to that and your book. We'll put everything at lukestorey.com/icebath.

[00:55:43] Let's carry on with the metabolic health thing though because you sparked a memory of mine. Years ago, I interviewed a PhD immunologist named Dr. Que Collins on the topic of deuterium. And he had done a series of studies with dogs with terminal cancer. All he did to my memory was put them on a strictly ketogenic diet and feed them deuterium depleted water for a period of time.

[00:56:16] And I forget, so we will put that in the show notes. You can go back and listen to it. But basically, 90, 100%, or something of these dogs got rid of their cancer just from doing that. And I was like, "Oh, this is so interesting." That's the first time I heard about the relationship between metabolic health and cancer.

[00:56:33] So that begs the question, has anyone, to your knowledge, looked into the impact of cold therapy in terms of your mitochondria being able to produce more deuterium depleted water? Because the way he explained it and also his partner at that time, Laszlo Boros, as they said, the reason that ketogenic diets are so impactful for cancer is because your mitochondria produced this deuterium depleted water.

[00:57:02] They're like, that's the whole point, is to get the DDW working, which helps to improve the function of the nano motors in the mitochondria, which then are able to produce ATP more effectively. And you could do the same thing. I drink deuterium depleted water all the time just based on those two conversations. Because it was so impressive. But have you seen any connection between deuterium and cold?

[00:57:29] Thomas: There are three things. Jarrod's got to remind me because I'll go off on some tangent, and I'll forget them. I'm going to go backwards through time. We're going to talk about deuterium depleted water. We're going to talk about mitochondrial therapy, and then we're going to get back to ketones and why ketones have a bad reputation.

[00:57:46] So deuterium depleted water. This is one of those things-- I was doing a podcast with Dr. Max Guhan. He's from Australia, and we're talking about lots of different things. He's great. And he said, "But Professor Seager, I don't really understand the deuterium depleted water. Can you explain it?" And at the time I said, "Max, I don't understand more than 30% of the things Jack Kruse talks about. but I had to believe. I start from the premise that he's right and I'm just too stupid to know what's going on." And that has served me pretty well.

[00:58:18] I'm not saying Jack Kruse is always right. I'm saying that that is my default, because he's so far out ahead of me and then it takes me time to catch up to things that he says.

[00:58:27] Luke: I know the feeling.

[00:58:29] Thomas: Okay. I'm not defending him either because he has a certain way. Max is such a good host, and he's so generous that when I'm ignorant, I can admit it to Max and not feel like he's going to jump down my throat. I said, "But here's a little bit of biochemistry." We understand that electrons travel through wires. They travel on the surface of the copper, the silver, or whatever. They jump along. That is not the way they travel through cells.

[00:58:58] They're not free electrons moving around through our mitochondria and through our cells. They're always attached to something, just like they would be attached to the metal in a wire. And so we talk about how people are electric and the flow of electricity. And it's important. But for every electron there is a proton, and protons do not move freely, not even through our nerves.

[00:59:23] Protons move through the cell as H3O. You know that H2O is a water molecule. When you add a proton, you get H3O with a positive charge. And that's what balance out wherever the electron is. When you have to move a proton, it's much larger than an electron.

[00:59:46] An electron essentially has no atomic mass. But these protons, they do. And moving that proton is a physically different mechanism than an electron would travel along. Wherever the electrons go, there has to be a compensating charge balancing proton move, but it's a different mechanism. Now add a neutron to that proton, and you have doubled the atomic mass of the additional proton.

[01:00:10] So how are you going to move that around? And this is just basic biochemistry. I'm not speaking to exactly what's happening or to the level of expertise that Jack has, but this is what I explained to Matt. When you add a neutron to that proton and now the thing is bigger and it is heavier, it's more difficult to move.

[01:00:28] The proton pumps. The proton transport mechanisms that are essential to this energy conversion role that the mitochondria play, producing the ATP from the metabolic substrates like glucose, like lipids, they depend upon proton transport. If you slow that proton transport down by adding a neutron to make the water deuterium rather than just ordinary water, then why wouldn't it interfere with mitochondrial function?

[01:00:57] It makes sense to me that the neutrons, we can tolerate a certain amount of them, but that the neutron enriched water, the deuterium water, does not move as readily as, we're going to call it H3O, without the neutron. I have not verified that that essential atomic weight change is the mechanism that interferes with mitochondrial function. And yet the hypothesis makes sense to me.

[01:01:28] So since then I've been listening to more Jack. And I think my intuitions here are pretty good. The deuterium depleted water aids the mitochondria in their essential charge transport function by giving it less work to do. Now, if you have healthy mitochondria-- now we're moving to the second level-- most people in the United States don't. The healthy mitochondria can probably handle some of the extra work that is associated with the deuterium.

[01:01:56] Why don't we have healthy mitochondria in the United States? There are three routes to mitochondrial injury. One of them is you get your light messed up. Poor light hygiene. This is because mitochondria produce their own melatonin. And I had no idea about this until I had a conversation with Joe Mercola.

[01:02:16] He's walking on the beach, and he's like, "I'm not really into cold exposure. I don't think you can ever talk me into one of these ice baths." And of course inside I'm crushed because he's legendary in the biohacking world, and he's just not into it. He says, "I want to talk about melatonin and mitochondria instead." If Joe Mercola wants to talk about it, I'm going to write it down. He says, "Did you know they make their own melatonin?" I had no idea.

[01:02:41] Melatonin are what scavenge up those extra reactive oxygen species in the mitochondria. When the mitochondria are really working hard, they will produce ROS. The melatonin donate an electron to the ROS, and they deactivate the ROS. When you run out of melatonin in your mitochondria, those ROS are going to go somewhere else, and it is the mitochondrial DNA. They attack the DNA, grab an electron over there, damage the mitochondrial DNA.

[01:03:07] Most people don't know this, but mitochondria have their own DNA. I didn't learn that in ninth grade biology. I learned about sexual reproduction and the nucleus, and you get this from your dad and this from your mom, and blah blah blah.

[01:03:18] Mitochondrial DNA are inherited exclusively under ordinary circumstances along the maternal line only from your mother. And it means they're not subject to the same rate of mutation and evolution as the DNA in the nucleus. You and I have essentially the same mitochondrial DNA as Eve, and that's just a first approximation. But they don't move as quickly through time change as much. And you can injure them if you don't give them the right light hygiene to produce the melatonin that protects them. That's one. The second one is seed oils.

[01:03:53] Luke: That's why I'm always wearing these glasses. Usually not in the daytime, but I started wearing them recently under these lights.

[01:04:00] Thomas: It's the bright lights. Yeah.

[01:04:01] Luke: And I find I'm much more relaxed during the interviews. I'm probably not producing cortisol, and I start making a little melatonin. I get pretty chill.

[01:04:12] Thomas: I'm not too worried about--

[01:04:13] Luke: Plus you're not blurry because these are my RX glasses. I can't catch the micro expressions.

[01:04:19] Thomas: The blue light during the day doesn't bother me.

[01:04:22] Luke: Yeah. You're supposed to have it during the day. Yeah.

[01:04:25] Thomas: But shut it down at night so that you can get your melatonin right. But the second one is seed oils. You can metabolize seed oils, and when you're burning them for energy, it makes sense. But most people don't know that the membranes in your body, they're made out of lipids. And so you eat fats, and they become not just part of your fat tissue for energy, but they become part of the cell membrane, including the membrane on the mitochondria organelle.

[01:04:54] The mitochondria are called organelles because they're an organ within the cells of your body. A brown fat cell might have thousands of mitochondria each with their own DNA. Bone cells have mitochondria. Red blood cells, not so much. But all of the cells that rely upon mitochondria for this energy conversion role, those mitochondria have their own membranes, and those membranes, just like every other, is made of phospholipids.

[01:05:18]You give your body the wrong kind of lipid, and it makes the wrong kind of membrane. This upsets the transport of charge and the metabolic substrates in and out of the mitochondria because the phospholipids aren't structured the way they're supposed to be. Seed oils are a second route to mitochondrial damage.

[01:05:40] And the third one is carbohydrates without a break. You can have the ice cream. It's a hormetic stressor, that sugar. Your mitochondria's like, "What are you doing to us, Luke?" And you can say to your mitochondria, "Hey, toughen up for a night." Because the reactive oxygen species will also stimulate mitophagy and mitobiogenesis. When the mitochondria work too hard, they say "Hey we got to get rid of some of these damaged mitochondria. We got to make new mitochondria."

[01:06:11] So the mitophagy is getting rid of the damaged one, and the mitobiogenesis is the creating new ones. And they will choose those with the best DNA to replicate. You want to have a sugary snack once? Indulge, and then give you mitochondria a break. And that means intermittent fasting or it means ketogenic diet. Move yourself into fat metabolism.

[01:06:33] This is like recovering from a tough workout. So the ice cream could be a tough workout for your mitochondria. And then you do some fasting, you go ketogenic, and you do the mitophagy, the mitobiogenesis. They come back stronger, which is what hormesis is supposed to do. But we don't do that in the United States.

[01:06:52] The dieticians are telling us, "Eat lots of small meals," which is the stupidest thing that you can do. But I'm getting this from the American Diabetic Association. That's the third thing I want to talk about. Carbohydrates without a break will cause defects in your mitochondria from which they will not recover until you adopt a ketogenic diet or intermittent fasting.

[01:07:16] And why does ketosis such a bad reputation. It is because of what people like the American Diabetic Association, the dietician and the nutritionists have taught us. My son was six years old when he was diagnosed with diabetes, and I didn't know what was going on. I thought he had the flu. I was giving him orange juice because that's what my mother gave me. And of course he got worse instead of better.

[01:07:40] This was December, and it was after Christmas. We have sweets at Christmas. The kids are young, and what did I even know about metabolism at the time? And he's sick. So my wife finally calls our pediatrician, and he was our next-door neighbor. He knew my kids really well. And she says, "He's got a low-grade fever, and he has no energy." And John says, "He is probably sick. Give him a few days." My wife says, "And he's peeing the bed all the time."

[01:08:13] John says, "Meet me in the hospital right away." "What?" "Well, your son has diabetes, and your life is going to change." I had no idea. And I felt such ashamed of myself because I'm supposed to be the parent who protects and cares for the child. And I was doing it all wrong, giving him orange juice. We live practically across the street from the hospital. I carried my son there. We're not going to do car seats, belts, and things like that. They admitted him right away.

[01:08:42] He was in ketoacidosis because a type 1 diabetic cannot metabolize blood sugar. They pee it all out. The GLP-1 inhibitors in some ways mimic what's happening in a type 1 diabetic. Instead of using the blood sugar, spiking your insulin, and producing fat, you pee it out. My son, the pH of his blood has changed because his ketone levels were so high. That's why it's called ketoacidosis.

[01:09:12] They put him right in the pediatric ICU. And then John explained it to me. Even though he's a friend and a neighbor, his bedside manner pretty abrupt, Luke. He handed me an orange. He handed me a syringe. He said, "Nobody's leaving this hospital until you figure these things out."

[01:09:33] Meanwhile, they put my son on an insulin drip, and I was watching him come back to life. The color came back, the tone. You could see that he was no longer dehydrated because the insulin is taking glucose from his bloodstream and transporting it into his cell where it can reach his mitochondria. And now he doesn't need to make that many ketones.

[01:09:56] Ketones have a bad reputation because in type 1 diabetics, ketoacidosis can be fatal. He was hours away from a coma, and he has to very carefully manage his blood sugars and his insulin levels so it doesn't slip back into ketoacidosis ever. But that doesn't happen to you and I because we have working pancreas, because we make our own insulin. We don't go into ketoacidosis.

[01:10:20] The dangers that my son faces give ketosis a bad reputation. But it's not deserved, except for those extreme cases of type 1 diabetics that no longer make insulin. Just like we wouldn't inject insulin into ourselves, we are not going to get worried about the ketoacidosis in which we will never slip.

[01:10:43] Ketosis is a healthy normal metabolic state for people who make insulin like you and I do and it's something for my son to be very careful with, which is why he checks his blood. He's now got a continuous glucose monitor. You can even get a continuous ketone monitor. But something very similar happened with my son. He never wanted to go back to that hospital again. And he didn't make me promise.

[01:11:09] He'd been back but not for diabetes. He'd been back for baseball injuries and things like that. He just said, "I think we can do it at home, dad." The American Diabetes Association says, "No, you can't." The dietician whom he met with and the endocrinologist said, "No, you can't." Luke, they were all wrong. They were so wrong they were full of crap. They gave us such bad advice that this was my first introduction into don't trust a word that institutional medicine is telling you.

[01:11:39] When he got a fever, he would pop positive for ketones again. Because the body knows what to do when it's fighting an affection. The immune system is very stimulated, and of course, he lost his appetite. And he said, "I don't want to go to the hospital. Even though they tell us that's what you're supposed to do, can't you figure this out, dad?" "Yeah. We can drip feed you insulin. We don't have to put you into an insulin reaction. You don't have to eat. We can monitor these things if we're really careful about it."

[01:12:11] And he had never gone back to the ER for diabetes since because I had to learn everything about the Atkins diet, about ketones, about insulin, about metabolism. It was the beginning of my journey. It prepared me to learn about ice baths, cancer, and ketones. But it didn't send me all the way to what you might call the dark side. But when the reports of COVID first came out, I thought it was the big one. It was AJ who said, "No, it's not it. I've looked at the data, and it is all one trumped up propaganda scheme meant to scare you." And now I don't believe a word of it.

[01:12:51] I don't believe the American Diabetics Association. I don't believe the FDA. I don't believe Tony Fauci. I don't believe anyone whose job it is to tell me what to do with my body. Now I got to find out for myself like I did with my son, like I did with AJ, like I'm trying to help people do by sharing these experiences, these case studies, and the research.

[01:13:16] Luke: Epic.

[01:13:17] Thomas: I'm glad.

[01:13:18] Luke: Epic.

[01:13:19] Thomas: I'm glad you've got me going on these rants.

[01:13:23] Luke: There's always a light side to the dark times we go through. It's like, think of the number of people, I'm sure you've contemplated this, that you've been able to help and continue to be able to help, and will continue to help as a result of going through that. I love people like you that have the skill of transmutation and can turn something super shitty into something amazing.

[01:13:48] Thomas: Thanks, Luke. That's what we are going for.

[01:13:49] Luke: Yeah. Because it's like you're either victimized by these systems, these inept or corrupt institutions, which I'm sure are full of well-meaning people in most cases. Or else you take responsibility to educate yourself. And that's the path that I've chosen. Alyson and I just went the other day and got this thing called the Prenuvo scan, this full-body diagnostic MRI, which I heard about a couple of years ago, and I didn't want to do it because I was afraid of the radiation and the contrast, which is full of deuterium by the way. Jack Kruse told me, "Never get contrast." And I was like, "Okay."

[01:14:24] Thomas: I don't think he's wrong. Yeah, maybe there's some emergency circumstance or something, but I'm with him on that.

[01:14:31] Luke: Yeah. If you suspect you have a brain tumor or something, there's maybe no way to avoid it. But anyway, we went and did this, and it was so empowering. I didn't need a prescription. I didn't need to go see a general practitioner. I just went on a website, booked it, five days later, I have a perfect blueprint of my entire body.

[01:14:51] And what was interesting about it was-- of course, I was hoping it didn't find anything that I didn't know about, and it didn't. Every single thing that it picked up were things that I already know and I'm already working on through my own journey of keeping myself healthy.

[01:15:07] So I'm looking forward to emerging practitioners and modalities like that that make it easier for people like you to do what you did, where we don't have to be dependent on that centralized system, and we can each become our own sovereign doctors of ourselves and our family, and be willing to accept the consequences of that too.

[01:15:30] That's the thing. When you interface with the medical system, you sign all these waivers that say, "Hey, if this goes terribly, you have no liability." Versus working on something yourself. You go, "Okay, I understand. I'm going off the reservation here, but I'm willing to accept the consequences of my experimentation. And at least then there's only myself to blame and not someone else who has no accountability legally speaking at all."

[01:15:57] Thomas: They have so much responsibility. Yeah. Their potential for regret is--

[01:15:59] Luke: It's empowering though.

[01:16:00] Thomas: That's the other side. Yeah. When I was ready to start a family and my wife was pregnant, I called my aunt. My aunt is Penny Simkin. She's my mother's sister, and she started an organization called Doulas of North America. Now, she's a physical therapist, but she'd been working with pregnant women, and this is really all she wanted to do, this concept of the doula.

[01:16:24] When a woman is in the throes of childbirth, it is not a good time to ask her if she wants to use a fetal monitor, or, "Are you ready for an epidural?" Her decision-making capacities are compromised to say the least. And so aunt Penny, she says, "Have a birth plan." And a birth plan is not a premonition. It is, under what circumstances would you do this? Under what circumstances would you do this? It's an exploration of all the alternatives and saying, "What are your values?"

[01:16:57] Now you're making informed trade-off decisions. What would cause you to change your mind about whatever birth you're fantasizing about? So informative. And then she said, "Have a doula." A doula's not a midwife and not a doctor, but a doula is an advocate for the patient. And I said, "I'm the dad. Why can't I be a doula." "Well, you can. Read the books. Here's the workshop. You can get certified if you want. I'll train you, of course."

[01:17:24] It's a very natural role for a dad. But because doulas or childbirth we often associate them with a very female kind of thing, and you maybe you want an experienced woman who's been through childbirth, no, I was my wife's doula. And then I said, "Shoot, my diabetic son needs a doula." Everybody who goes to a hospital needs a doula, not for childbirth.

[01:17:48] You mentioned the brain tumor. A friend of mine has a brain tumor, and the irony is he's a neuroscientist. But when he's talking with his doctors, his judgment is compromised. He needs an advocate that understands his values. He needs a plan that he's worked out in a calmer moment. When would you do this? When would you do this?

[01:18:09] That doula is there because you've thought about things ahead of time. And the doula has the clarity of thinking and judgment to make the decisions that you've agreed upon for you. Everything in our healthcare system is meant to disempower and intimidate the patient. The patient might say, "Oh, is there a test we can do?" "Well, you need a referral for the test and then we have to have it approved by your HMO and see if your insurance company-- and this is your deductible."

[01:18:37] The whole apparatus is meant to communicate to the patient, that's not your decision. There are four other people who have to approve that before you get that information. And by the time they let you put your own clothes back on, you're like, "I guess I'm not in charge. I guess all these other people are in charge." And part of this is generational.

[01:19:00] I remember my father, before he could no longer fly, he came out to Thanksgiving. He said, "I've got three different kinds of cancers, and I guess it's just a matter of time before one of them gets me." My father was a diagnosed narcissist, and something about Thanksgiving had to be all about him and his cancer, which is okay. But I said, "Geez, dad. What are you going to do?" He goes, "That's not my problem."

[01:19:25] I said, "This is your cancer." He goes, "No, that's my doctors to figure out." My dad's old. Maybe that's just the way it was. That's not the way it's for me. My health is not my physician's problem. It's not my insurance company's problem. It's not my employer's problem. It's certainly not my politician's problem. It is my problem.

[01:19:50] Sometimes there really are victims out there. But the difficulty of playing in the victim Olympics that seems so popular right now is it doesn't do you any good. What choice do you have but to say, "I'm going to try everything that makes sense to me until I figured this out."

[01:20:12] And this is why I don't want to go back on COVID. I don't want to reminisce about the lockdowns because there were so many injustices. And I do want to learn the lessons from that that will help us promulgate the policies that ensure it never happens again, but it is not going to help the people who are vaccine injured. It is not going to help the people who are starting to have that moment of, "Hey, wait a second. What did I do to my children or to myself? What were the misconceptions that now the regrets that I have will prompt me to change my mind?"

[01:20:47] I want to empower people to take charge of their own health, to decide for themselves what the right experiments are to run. What health condition do they want to be in? And so in that respect, I'm very forward looking, and I think my background as an engineer is terrific. What are the technologies? What are the machines that we can build that empower you rather than how am I going to go inside your body and change you up in ways that you don't understand?

[01:21:15] Luke: Beautiful, man. Well said. I had no idea we were going to go in that direction. I love it. You reminded me of a funny experience I had about a month ago. Alyson came down with a cold or something. It persisted for quite a few days, maybe over a week. And if you get a week, two weeks in, it's like, all right, I might take one for the team and go get some antibiotics or something.

[01:21:38] And so it's always last resort, I think, for both of us. But at one point we're just like, all right, this isn't going away through all of the things we're throwing at it. So we went down to the local urgent care place just to get some tests. First thing, of course, is they're really pushing for the PCR test.

[01:21:57] I'm sitting in there. I've been so out of that world for so long. I'm looking at the doctor. I'm like, "You guys are still doing that?" I'm like, "What?" So anyway, she refuses that as we're trying to determine is a bacterial infection, yada, yada. So he basically just threw his hands up because she wouldn't take any of the things he was suggesting or the tests he was suggesting.

[01:22:18] And then Alyson and her innocence, it was so cute to me because I already knew what the answer was going to be, she went, "Should I take some vitamin C or maybe go out and get some more sun?" And he looked her straight in the face. He's a nice guy. He's just indoctrinated into that model. And he looks straight in her face. He goes, "There's no scientific data to support that either of those would be helpful at all, but if it makes you feel better, go ahead."

[01:22:47] Thomas: I'm glad he said the last part because she's feeling bad.

[01:22:49] Luke: I might be giving him a little grace there.

[01:22:51] Thomas: You might even be adding that.

[01:22:52] Luke: I probably am just to be a bit diplomatic. But we walked out of there. And Alyson isn't into all this biohacking stuff. She's on a different channel. She's got her own way of working through life that works for her beautifully. But even she noticed. She was like, "What the fuck was that?" There's no evidence to support the idea that more sunshine, vitamin D, and vitamin C could be helpful if you have some infection or cold. It's just crazy. And I was like, "Give me my 60 bucks back."

[01:23:25] Guys are idiots. And it's so often the case that that's the kind of experience that I have, which is why I am so hesitant to even interface with that world. I like to say, "If I fall off the roof and break my neck, don't give me ashwagandha. Take me to the emergency room." Duh. We all know that acute care is best served by professionals that are trained to do so.

[01:23:51] Thomas: And they do it really well.

[01:23:52] Luke: Yeah. And it's great. I'm very grateful for that, but it's just the system itself. But anyway, I could go on and on.

[01:23:58] Thomas: This phrase, "There is no evidence," has become the catch phrase. In a scientific--

[01:24:05] Luke: I got a YouTube video deleted today for talking about colloidal silver. It's the third one they've taken down, and they're like, "This is dangerous medical misinformation". So I appeal it with 10 PubMed studies supporting the antimicrobial effects of silver, yada, yada. Every time I do it, I know they're going to decline my appeal, and I just do it anyway just because I'm like, "God, you idiots."

[01:24:27] Thomas: You can't stand but to poke the bear.

[01:24:29] Luke: I got to do it. But yeah, there's no research to support that. Where's the evidence? Show me the studies.

[01:24:35] Thomas: That's all crap. Those are all excuses for minds that are all made up.

[01:24:39] Luke: Common sense, man.

[01:24:41] Thomas: But it goes deeper than that. The phrase, "There is no evidence," was used by Fauci to suppress studies that he could have funded. In a scientifically curious mind, the phrase, "There is no evidence," should be motivation to run a study, to say, "Oh, that's great. Let's get some evidence. We're scientists here. Let's formulate some hypotheses."

[01:25:04] But it was used by Fauci to suppress the things that people wanted to try first during AIDS and then during COVID. To say, "There's no evidence," was twisted around to mean that we shouldn't do it, and he's not going to fund it. He was the one suppressing the studies that would've created the evidence that strip away this excuse, "There's no evidence."

[01:25:26] So this phrase, which should be an expression on scientific curiosity, has now become weaponized against the truth. And now every time I hear it out of a guy who's-- he is an urgent care doctor, and he's probably trying to help people in exactly the way that medical school trained him to help people. But it also trained him to say, "There is no evidence," in this weaponized way that suppresses people from doing things that would otherwise be harmless. Get some sunshine. Take a little zinc.

[01:25:55] Luke: That's the one that got me. I was like, "There's no evidence that the sunshine is good for you?" It's like, how do you think we're alive? You know what I mean? It's like, how do you think every living thing on the planet is here? Oh my God, it is mind boggling.

[01:26:11] Thomas: Anyone who says that there's no evidence is in willful denial of whatever conversation you're trying to have. And so I move on, but not without that little sense of tragedy that there's no evidence has been fabricated to suppress.

[01:26:29] Luke: Yes, indeed. Back to cold therapy.

[01:26:34] Thomas: I remember that.

[01:26:34] Luke: Yeah. First, I want to say, and I've told you this before, kudos for making the most beautiful and bulletproof ice baths ever. There's a lot of brands emerging in this space now, and I'm glad. I think you probably share the same view that there's no such thing as competition other than with yourself.

[01:26:54] Other people come out with a plastic ice bath that's a third of the price or whatever. You're going, "Great, let's make ours better." But I got to say, I'm on my second one now, and the first one I had, which was when I graduated from my Sears chest freezer, sat here in the backyard for about two years in grueling Texas heat and cold because we had a couple real cold winters, and that mothereffer took a licking and keep on ticking.

[01:27:24] You could not kill that freaking ice bath, reliably cold. And with the ozone sanitation system that you so wisely put in there, always perfectly clean. I don't even know if I ever changed the water. The only thing that happened to the old one, because when I got it, it was used is the exterior aesthetically took a hit from the weather.

[01:27:45] Thomas: It was pretty rough.

[01:27:46] Luke: Yeah. So I'm going to admit I would go in the backyard and be like, "I wish that thing was a little nicer looking." Because it's the showpiece in the backyard here. But I didn't really care because it still worked, and that was the point. So whatever you did with your engineering background, good job. Because that thing is totally indestructible. Now, the new one I have is also indestructible on the outside, so I'm just in love with it. And the stainless steel-- it's just like a pristine machine.

[01:28:14] Thomas: I'm so glad.

[01:28:14] Luke: Now, one of the cool things that I discovered when I had the last model, was when I did some EMF testing over here when we were doing the Faraday paint and all the stuff on the house, I was making some videos showing people how to test for EMF and how mitigate--

[01:28:30] Thomas: Brian Hoyer.

[01:28:30] Luke: Yeah. So Brian Hoyer, we're just testing all my technologies in the house to see what might be good for you but also have really high EMF. And sometimes you just can't avoid EMF with technology, so it's like a cost-to-benefit ratio. And that's the metric by which I decide to use something on a regular basis or not. You can lay on a PEMF mat-- it's got a lot of EMF, but is the benefit worth it? So I said, "Let's go test the ice bath. I'm really curious."

[01:28:55] And for starters, it was producing no detectable EMF. But the interesting thing that was super cool is when he tested the grounding potential or the DC current of the water because of the way you guys grounded it. You're getting ultra, ultra grounded in there, which is super cool. You're getting those, what is it, the negative electrons, or is it positive? I forget.

[01:29:20] Thomas: The Earth is slightly negatively charged.

[01:29:22] Luke: You're getting a DC current, right?

[01:29:23] Thomas: Exactly right.

[01:29:24] Luke: So it's like when you go out barefoot, you're grounding. Many people know this is really good for you. When you're in that thing, you're ultra grounded. So that's one thing I was like, "Cool. No wonder it feels so freaking good."

[01:29:35] Thomas: It's on purpose.

[01:29:36] Luke: Is it?

[01:29:36] Thomas: Yeah.

[01:29:37] Luke: Oh, it's amazing. Because I had no idea. I was like, "Oh, I hope this doesn't test poorly." You never know. Then other thing is, and this is one question I've had for you recently, sometimes I'll run the ozone in there. I don't keep it on all the time, but if it starts to get a little murky, I crank the ozone up. And so sometimes I might forget for a few hours or even overnight, and I get in, and it's all bubbly. It's like milky water. It's so full of ozone. Is there any evidence to support any benefits of being in ozonated water, like if you went in an ozone sauna or something?

[01:30:10] Thomas: Yeah. But our ozone concentrations are way lower than what the clinical studies use. So ozonated oil will help heal wounds faster. And there's ozone baths that you can use too, but you don't stay in a Morozko long enough to really get the ozone benefit from the bath.

[01:30:30] Now, ozone is wonderful. Good for your skin. It's a natural disinfectant. There's no chlorine. There's no halogen. So we are always going to use ozone because we don't want to subject you or other people to unhealthy disinfectants. And is there benefit to having all that ozone? At these low doses and exposure times, probably not.

[01:30:54] The big benefit is that there's no harm. In your pool you've got to add chlorine because the board of health requires you to do it. Oh, the pool is so big, and the ozone won't create enough residual.

[01:31:07] Luke: I've been at war with our pool guy for two and half years.

[01:31:10] Thomas: I don't blame you. You could call Micah Lowe at Simply O3. He now has this giant ozone generator, but it's still not going to do your whole pool because the half-life-- let me put it differently. Ozone is unstable, and it will decompose just all on its own in water. And that relates to temperature. The warmer the water, the more quickly the ozone decomposes.

[01:31:34] So you could get good disinfection right at the point of ozone injection, and then you have nothing, no residual ozone in the pool. Chlorine has a residual. Chlorine will protect the pool as well as the point of injection. Now, the Morozko is small enough, and we're throwing enough ozone in there, and it is cold enough that it slows down the decomposition of ozone.

[01:31:58] You can protect the entire bath because of the size and the temperature with just the ozone injection that we have. This is wonderful, but you're not going to stay in there for 40-- please don't stay in for 45 minutes to really get the ozone benefit.

[01:32:12] Luke: Okay. Got it. Got it. Okay. Then have any of your customers, other than me, experimented with the coherence of the water? One thing I did a couple of years ago when I got this Aǹalemma wand-- it's a water structuring wand that's got made of crystalline glass, and it's got this mother water in it. And so you stir your drinking water with it and so on.

[01:32:38] And I thought, "I wonder what would happen if I were to structure the water in the ice bath." So I went out there and stirred it up for quite a few minutes. If it's a glass of water, you only need it 30 seconds. But I went out there for probably five minutes and trolled it all around, put the lid on, came back the next day, and the ice that formed on the bottom, that's the way your baths work. For those that don't know, it actually makes ice, which is another thing that makes it super dope. Because I like being cocooned in the ice. It's an added, I don't know, tactile experience.

[01:33:12] Thomas: It's not just there for Instagram.

[01:33:13] Luke: Yeah. So the ice floats up, and it made these beautiful snowflake, crystal designs in the ice after I structured it. I was like, "I'm convinced now." I believe the Aǹalemma guys. I interviewed them, and I was like, "They seem very smart and high integrity." So I'm like, "I'm just going to take their claims at face value."

[01:33:33] But when I did that, I was like, "Okay, this is undisputable evidence that the nature of the water changed," because the ice looked very different than it had. So then I took it to the next level, and I got the whole house Aǹalemma structuring unit, which goes in the garage where the plumbing is.

[01:33:50] And so when I fill up the Morozko now, I do it with this highly filtered water from our drinking water. So I had my guy make a spigot in the garage so I have that water if I want water special plants or fill up the tub, the pool, or whatever. And so now the only water that goes in there is super filtered and structured.

[01:34:13] And there's something different about the experience of getting in that water. Even when people get in our pool, they go, "God, this feels really good." And I'm like, "I could never explain it to them because it just sounds too crazy." But have you or anyone you know played around with structuring the water or making coherent water just to add another level of benefit?

[01:34:32] Thomas: You're the first person.

[01:34:33] Luke: Am I?

[01:34:34] Thomas: Yeah, to tell me that they have structured the water inside their Morozko. I've read about structured water, and I get it. And I always thought that it's most important in the very small volumes that exist in our body. There's the red blood cells, the white blood cells, and then there's the plasma that moves through.

[01:34:53] And I'm like, "The plasma is mostly water within our blood vessels. It could be structured." And I've always poo-pooed structured water at this chemical engineering scale except ice. Ice is so damn structured. It's a solid crystal. And so if you appreciate the beauty of an ice crystal, you've got to appreciate the way that water can be structured in the liquid phase too. But this experiment that you're telling me about would have been incredulous to-- I never would've hypothesized anything like that.

[01:35:27] Luke: To be fair, you'd have to fill the ice bath, freeze it, make the ice, observe it, empty it out, put the structured water in, but then you also have the placebo effect of the intentionality behind it. When you get to the quantum realm, it's like, "Well, if I believe the crystals are going to look different, hard enough, they probably will." So it gets crazy. But anyway, that was another thing. The next thing I want to ask you is--

[01:35:55] Thomas: On the other hand, what does it harm? I love the placebo effect. The placebo effect is the best thing ever. Costs you nothing. Look at this [Inaudible].

[01:36:05] Luke: I know. Yeah. I think part of my experimentation with that is I just have such an intimate relationship with water, and I see water as a living being. And that might sound crazy to some people or people that are more mechanistic in their worldview, but I think that I'm made of water.

[01:36:29] And so my water's communicated with the water that I get in. I had Paul Chek over here the other day. He has this whole routine with his cold plunge where he prays into the water. He talks to the water. He has a very deep relationship with. I would say mine is pedestrian comparatively.

[01:36:47] But when he shared some of his practices, I thought, oh, man. Wow. I thought I was already in that, and I was like, "Wow, I could actually step it up." So part of it is more just in acknowledging the gift that water provides and wanting to treat it with reverence and respect.

[01:37:05] And then I feel like it offers that back to me when I take my ice baths. It's not just H2O, some inert clear liquid. It's like we're doing stuff together. We're working together. There's a synergy in that relationship. So that's one of the reasons. Next thing I want to ask you is let's talk duration and temperature.

[01:37:27] Now, years ago, I think it was Jack Kruse, it was probably the first guy I ever heard talking about deeper science of cold exposure. And if I'm not mistaken, and he could have changed his tune by now-- this is many years ago-- he was not that hung up on the temperature and said that if the water was under 55 degrees, that you were going to derive the CT benefit, or the cold thermogenesis benefit.

[01:37:52] And that if it was under 55, say it's 50, it might just take a little longer to get the benefits. Whereas if you have the water extremely cold as you're talking about, 33 to 40 degrees, then 2, 3 minutes gets the job done rather than trying to stay for 5, 8, or whatever. So give us the scoop on temperature and duration in terms of--

[01:38:12] Thomas: Thermodynamically, that's the case. That is the lower the temperature, the shorter the duration. You can achieve the same heat extraction from the body. And when you're talking about cold thermogenesis, when you're talking about metabolism, it's complex because a cold-trained body will defend itself against the cold. And that's vasoconstriction. That's activation of the brown fat.

[01:38:36] And so it might not surprise you that the armies of the world have spent a lot of money studying how soldiers respond to cold exposure, and they haven't got it all figured out. So if you only look at it from heat extraction, you can say there's the body's capacity to produce heat, defend itself against cold, and then there's the temperature and the duration. For me that's boring.

[01:39:04] It's all good stuff, and it's complex thermodynamically. We should be curious about it. But it's very frustrating because people will say, "Oh, Professor Seager, what's the optimal temperature? What's the optimal duration?" Nobody asks the bodybuilders or the trainers, what's the optimal number of reps and the optimal weight and expects one single answer.

[01:39:31] Cold training, in this way, is analogous to weight training. You can't just walk into the gym never having lifted a dumbbell in your life and say, "What's the optimum?" Because the optimum for you is different from the optimum for somebody else. Everybody starts in a different place. So I want to get rid of this idea of optimum.

[01:39:52] And if Jack Kruse isn't too hung up on it, then kudos to him because I don't want anybody to be too hung up on it. When you're starting out, you go cold enough to gasp, you go long enough to shiver, and you know you've done it right. You're monitoring your body. And if you get in and you feel that, you know it's cold enough. Because that's a nervous system reaction.

[01:40:13] The thermal receptors on your skin have sent a signal to your hypothalamus, and your hypothalamus deep in your brain is saying, "What the hell?" And that's what you're going for. Then you go long enough to shiver. And the reason for that is because most people don't have any brown fat. They can only do shivering cold thermogenesis, not the non-shivering. So they've got to get their muscles going.

[01:40:35] Their muscles will shiver. This is an indication that the body is responding to the cold, by doing thermogenesis. You've probably already got the vasoconstriction going. That's really good for the blood vessels. You're doing fine. And it takes about 10 to 14 days, if you're doing it every day, to recruit brown fat and to become acclimated to the cold. In the grand scheme of things, that's not a long time.

[01:41:00] And then you're going to stop shivering. It would take 6 minutes, 10 minutes, as you become cold acclimated and even colder temperatures for you to feel that shiver. And so I say once you're cold acclimated, don't worry about the shiver. You know you're getting your brown fat acclimated.

[01:41:16] Luke: That's good because I never shiver.

[01:41:19] Thomas: You're in there all the time. Do you feel that gasp reflex? Well, I think you were at 39° this morning.

[01:41:26] Luke: I got to turn it down.

[01:41:27] Thomas: I'm going to out there when we're done. I going to take you down to 35.

[01:41:31] Luke: Was it at 39?

[01:41:32] Thomas: It was at 39 when I was there. Yeah. It might be that because--

[01:41:38] Luke: Let me be honest. I don't get in and like, ah, this is like a nice hot tub. There's a moment of resistance. But yeah, I can breathe deeply and slowly pretty much immediately.

[01:41:52] Thomas: After you are cold acclimated, you got to get the temperature lower to continue to get that nervous system activated, gasping.

[01:42:03] Luke: I thought I was a stud.

[01:42:04] Thomas: Yeah. Well, you are, and I'm just telling you what's true of me.

[01:42:08] Luke: Okay.

[01:42:09] Thomas: I want that. I want that fear. I want that activation. So I'm running at 33, 34. If there isn't ice in there, it's not scaring me. When it gets up to 40, I don't even need somebody to tell me the temperature because if it's not lower than 39, it's just boring. I could be in there 10 minutes, 12 minutes, and it's fine.

[01:42:33] I've probably done 2,000 ice baths by now, and I've reached a level of cold training where the vasoconstriction is on point. The brown fat is on point. The dive reflex is on point. My own mental the story I'm telling myself is on point. And so I got to get down into the low 30s, not metabolically.

[01:42:57] Metabolically, I agree with everyone who says, "There's no big metabolic benefits of going colder than 40." Yeah. It's psychological for me. It's the nervous system that I'm trying to really push on when I go that cold. And so you could say, shoot. If you and I had met this year, you'd probably never even find Morozko because this is such a crowded space now. Everybody's trying to rebrand some Chinese thing that's $300 on Alibaba and call it the latest ultimate revolution and Wi-Fi-enabled, Bluetooth-controlled.

[01:43:32] Luke: I hate it when they do that.

[01:43:34] Thomas: I know.

[01:43:34] Luke: That's the first thing I look for when brands reach out to me with their gadgets. I'm like, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, I'm out.

[01:43:43] Thomas: We don't want it.

[01:43:44] Luke: You don't need it. Go turn the thing on. You don't have fingers? You know what I'm saying?

[01:43:48] Thomas: I don't want my dishwasher talking to my phone. I'm just going to hit a button.

[01:43:51] Luke: Oh, man.

[01:43:53] Thomas: I'm a bit of a Luddite in that regard. The point is it's such a crowded space that people look at Morozko and say, "I know it's Luke Storey's favorite, but I don't want to spend 14,000." And it makes sense because here's a $3,500 inflatable Chinese chiller thing, and they saw a video about hertz. That's the ultimate solution.

[01:44:14] What they're forgetting is if it's not a metal tub, it's not grounded. And you can feel the difference. Even if you don't understand the difference, your nervous system feels the difference. Your circulatory system feels the difference. I've measured the difference in heart rate variability and systolic/diastolic blood pressure, but I don't have enough data to put an article out.

[01:44:34] I need more people to report this kind of thing to me. It's not grounded if it's plastic. It's not grounded if it's acrylic. And acrylic is a little more expensive but the better choice. When you buy one of those inflatable, flexible plastic jobs that is so cheap, and you say, "This is for my health. I'm going to fill up the water so it can suck the phthalates, the bisphenol A, the brominated flame retardants, right out of that super flexible vinyl part of that."

[01:45:05] Nobody thinks about this. And now I'm the guy who's on the internet trashing the competition but for good reason. I don't want you to break the bank. I would rather that you got a stock tank, or if it's got to be plastic, get something that is hard plastic rather than the soft plastic because neither do I want you getting into a tub full of flame retardants, phalates, PFAs, and all the other things that come with the-- when you open that new thing up and you say, "It's here. It's arrived all the way from China." And it smells like a new car, that's because it's poisoning you.

[01:45:46] And you will never-- Morozko will never come out with one of these super cheapo things because I don't want to be responsible for poisoning my customers. And so those people who have made it to know hour 3 of this podcast and they're like, "What's the coupon code? How do I save the money?" I'm sorry that there's no free lunch. We're expensive, and we're not for everybody. It's because I cannot sell something I'm not going to get into myself.

[01:46:17] Luke: Well, I'm glad you mentioned a discount code because I wasn't looking at my notes. And we actually have a really nice one here. If you guys want to get one of these baths and you're so situated to do so, you can go to morozkoforge.com and use the code LUKE500 to save 500 bucks. Thank you for that. And we'll put that link and the code in the show description, of course, on the podcast apps.

[01:46:38] Thomas: Full disclosure, you get a percentage of everyone who uses that code.

[01:46:43] Luke: Wonderful.

[01:46:44] Thomas: Thank you for introducing us to your audience.

[01:46:46] Luke: Wonderful. I'm all for that. I think that's the rad thing about podcast and affiliate marketing, is that it's a reciprocal model where said brand gets a customer, makes few bucks, person that researches and vets it, AKA me, gets a couple of bucks, and more than anything, the listener, viewer gets a discount and also doesn't have to spend the time vetting and researching themselves if they trust the person talking about it, which I hope at this point people listening to this show do.

[01:47:20] I yank shit off my website all the time because I realize like there's something better or there's something inferior about it that makes the deficit of using it higher than the benefits. You just reminded me about one product I'm thinking of right now. I got to check on, man.

[01:47:41] Because when brands approach me or when I find something on my own, I comb their website and like, man, I have a very strict approval process because, a, the karma that I believe is true, I don't want to ever take a buck to hurt someone. I'm just not playing that game ever.

[01:48:01] And the other thing is, my reputation depends on it. If I promote something and then someone finds out it's super shitty, they're like, "Oh, now we can't trust Luke because he told me about this shitty thing."

[01:48:11] Thomas: I got email from a customer--

[01:48:14] Luke: I really value that trust, and I value the relationships with brands like you.

[01:48:19] Thomas: It is your currency.

[01:48:20] Luke: 100%.

[01:48:22] Thomas: A customer emailed me, and he's a real fan, big word of mouth. He's probably helped us sell three other customers. And he said, "Tom, I saw this article. It's in Forbes." Or something like that, "and it's 10 Best Cold Plunges, and Morozko's not in it. And you really got to get on there. How come you're not in it?" And I sent him the email that I got from the PR company that said, "We're doing an article. We're going to place it in Forbes for 10,000--

[01:48:48] Luke: I knew it was 10 grand. I knew it.

[01:48:50] Thomas: Because this is the going rate. And I sent that, and I'm like, "That's because we didn't have the 10 grand to be named one of the 10 best." And he goes, "What?" People are only starting to wake up to native advertising. Whatever they thought traditional journalism is, it's dead and buried.

[01:49:10] And so everything they read online now is bought and paid for. It is okay that we have affiliate marketing, because either I got to pay Google to stuff interruption ads in front of anyone who's-- the word cold comes up, now I got to pay Google to follow you around the internet and put cookies on your browser so that you're reminded 12 times that my brand or what-- and I hate it. So I canceled all of our Google advertising.

[01:49:41] We do a little bit on Instagram, but we only plug the posts that lead you to science articles. Because I want you to know. And it seems to be like it's finding the right people. Are you curious about multiple sclerosis and cold plunge therapy? Turns out cold plunge therapy is more effective than 17 FDA-approved drugs that won't cure multiple sclerosis. I want you to know I'm willing to pay 20 cents a click.

[01:50:06] But I'd much rather pay people like you who have a reputation, who have vetted it. Does it say it's the ultimate solution to anything? Then you know it's the same Chinese crap that everybody else is selling. You're not going to see that on our website. I would rather people use lukestorey.com as a portal to find the information that-- because they don't know who to trust. They can't trust Forbes. They can't trust the Wall Street Journal or any of the other people who are liquidating their own reputations to try and make a buck.

[01:50:41] Luke: It's a good way to put it. Good way to put it. Yeah. I appreciate that. Thank you. What about exercise and cold? I remember I think it was Rhonda-- what's her name? Dr. Rhonda--

[01:50:55] Thomas: Patrick.

[01:50:56] Luke: Yeah. Years ago I saw her doing a video about the sequence if you're going to do resistance training, for example, and cold therapy. Because I used to do it after I would work out because I would never be sore. It just would nuke the lactic acid. And I was like, "Oh my God, I just found the cure for ever being sore no matter how heavy you lift."

[01:51:18] Obviously I don't do a lot of heavy lifting. You can tell by my scrawny arms, but at that time I was in a workout phase, and I was like, "Okay." And then interestingly I started doing my cold after I'd workout, and it worked the same way. I still was never sore from working out.

[01:51:32] Thomas: It's correct.

[01:51:33] Luke: Yeah.

[01:51:33] Thomas: It's the same effect, the same recovery. You do the ice bath beforehand.

[01:51:38] Luke: When I started doing my ice bath before, is what I meant to say, then I would also not be sore. But here's the wild thing that I've noticed, is that for years now, if I do cold before I do any kind of resistance training, I am infinitely stronger. I can't even get tired. If I go in hot, for example, and try and do the ARX machine or something really difficult, I get that lightheaded, your ears feel full of fluid, and just almost want to puke. It's a really bad feeling. If I do cold right before, I'm just like nothing. It's crazy. What is up with that?

[01:52:18]Thomas: This is your mitochondria again. Remember when I said when they're overworked they create the reactive oxygen?

[01:52:23] Luke: Yeah.

[01:52:24] Thomas: Okay. Fatigue is your body's defense mechanism against mitochondrial damage. And so your muscles start to heat up. They start producing reactive oxygen species. The melatonin in the mitochondria is getting consumed, and your body knows. They're like, "Hey, if you push this too far, you're going to damage your mitochondria."

[01:52:47] Now, if you're David Goggins, somehow you have overcome all those fatigue signals and you're able to do more. That's not me. However, when you extract that heat from the body and you keep the muscles cool, oh my God, you get this huge peak power perform-- your mitochondria are able to do so much more work.

[01:53:11] They don't get fatigued, and they get a boost in peak power output is what I mean to say. Now, how do we know this? Because Craig Heller at Stanford University has measured it. He took people, both amateurs, untrained individuals, and professional athletes, and he brought them into his lab at Stanford, and he said, "Here's what we're going to do." You're going to do a normal set, and then you're going to put your hands in this device that I've invented.

[01:53:35] Ordinarily, if the palms get cold, vasoconstriction will eliminate the blood circulation to conserve the heat inside the body. You won't lose much more heat out of your palms. But Heller created a vacuum that sucks the blood into the hands, overcomes the vasoconstriction, and it's cold, so it removed the heat from the palms.

[01:53:57] Now, I just put you in an ice bath, and I've been to ARX, and it was ARX that people first started reporting to me the phenomena of pre-cooling. Heller's research is per cooling. Heat extraction improves mitochondrial performance and delays fatigue, and not by a little, by a lot. It's like two times as many pull-ups in untrained athletes, six times as many pull-ups in trained athletes.

[01:54:21] The endurance seems to be really dramatic, but also the peak moves up by 20, 30%. ARX has these tricked out computer driven constant displacement machine. They can integrate your whole power curve and stuff like that. So they called me up and said, "Our guys are going in the Morozko and then they're getting in the machine, and we're getting 25, 30% boost. What is going on?" That's pre-cooling rather than between sets.

[01:54:52] And it's the same effect. You're keeping the mitochondria cool. Now, thermodynamically, this is not correct, but it's like you store cold in the muscles. Cold can't exactly be stored that way, but you understand what I mean. Now that the mitochondria are getting revved up in the exercise, they're not getting fatigued because they're not yet getting hot.

[01:55:11] Now, there's a whole body of research on exercise in the heat. And you're right. It's terrible. Olympic athletes, professional football players, everybody who knows that they're going to go someplace hot, tries to acclimate to the heat ahead of time, especially in the endurance sports, so that they can go longer during their competition.

[01:55:33] There's less research on this per cooling and this pre-cooling effect. However, the people who are subject to the worst heat are the Formula 1 drivers. And I didn't realize this until I started talking to a guy who's a customer and is a huge Formula 1 fan. They had the Vegas Grand Prix. Where do they put these Formula 1 races? Well, they put them in hot places, and you're inside this tiny little car for, what, two and a half hours or something like this.

[01:56:05] You got your flame retardant suit on. You know how they air condition those cars? They don't. Because they can't carry air conditioning equipment in the-- so those guys pre-cool, and it buys them a little time before they get overheated. So we have a customer. He's posted about this, BJ Baldwin, and he's one of these offroad 4x4. He does the Dakar.

[01:56:29] And I get all excited because now I know a little something about Formula 1 drivers. And I'm talking to BJ and I'm like, "Hey, do you know about the whole pre-cooling thing? These F1 guys do it." And BJ says, "Call me when they're racing for 24 straight hours through the Sahara Desert and then let's see whether--" BJ loves his ice bath, but the pre-cooling effect only lasts for a little while. Your body will eventually heat up. You and me, we're not working out for two straight hours.

[01:57:01] Luke: Yeah. More like 15 minutes.

[01:57:03] Thomas: Right. And we feel great. We're like, "I'm amazing." I went up to Seattle. Optispan is there. And this is a new outfit, and they will do a comprehensive health assessment. And they said, "Look, we want to have you on the podcast, and we can either pay for your plane ticket, or we can give you a complimentary health--" Heck, I want the health assessment.

[01:57:26] And they're putting me through the wall sit, the grip strength, and then how many pushups can you do? And the DEXA scan. And Luke, I'm 28% body fat, which is obese. I'm 58 years old. And I go through all these things, and actually, it looks really good. There's no like indication of liver fat. There's no indication of plaque buildup in my ab-- all these wonderful markers of metabolic health.

[01:57:55] They tested my lipid panel, my triglyceride to HDL ratio, which is an indication of insulin sensitivity. It's 0.6, which is amazingly healthy. But then I had to do the VO2 max test. 28. I thought I was going to throw up in the mask. And so I had to get off that damn treadmill. It's 28 milliliters per kilogram per minute if I'm remembering the units correctly.

[01:58:27] And I texted that to AJ and said, "I did okay on the grip, and I did really well on the broad jump. 28 on VO2 max. Nick looked disappointed." Nick is the guy who takes me through all this stuff. And he didn't praise me like he did for the hang. She goes, "Because 28 is poor, and you're going to die within seven years." I'm like, what are you talking about?" She goes, "At your age, you should be 35," or whatever.

[01:59:04] She said, "This is a terrible VO2 max rating, and it makes sense since you never do any cardio. I sat down with the doctor at Optisan, and he said, "I can't figure you out." "Why?" He says, "Your lipid panel looks great. All the ultrasounds that we've done look great. You have pretty good strength measures. We look at your teeth, and you're doing really well. If I get somebody with your body composition and a VO2 max like you, I usually see liver fat. I see plaque in the arteries. I see evidence of metabolic dysfunction. And I can't figure out why I don't see all those signs in you."

[01:59:44] I'm like, "Wow, it must be the ice bath." And he says, "The what?" It was practically another podcast conversation about how the ice bath will improve insulin sensitivity. It will improve all the metabolic markers. It will correct metabolic dysfunction. But what it will not do for you is give you the cardio endurance that I don't have. When should you exercise? After your ice bath.

[02:00:17] And so let me go another step. We're going to triple stack this. First do your ice bath, then do your exercise. Then do your sauna. Because sauna is a cardiac mimetic. You get in there, and your heart rate is going to go up. It will be a workout for your cardiovascular system. And it will help your muscles recover.

[02:00:38] Luke: Wait. So did I get the order on my shirt right? I can't read it from up here.

[02:00:42] Thomas: It says breathe, which is always good advice.

[02:00:44] Luke: Oh, breathwork, sauna, ice bath, repeat.

[02:00:46] Thomas: Now we got to get you a new shirt. It's got to be ice bath, exercise, sauna, and then breathe the whole freaking time.

[02:00:56] Luke: That's funny because I made the shirt with the order that I just intuitively typically do, which I get my sauna space on it for 20 minutes. Just sweat my ass off. Then I go cool off in the ice bath and so on.

[02:01:09] Thomas: That's pretty good.

[02:01:11] Luke: Often times I'll do circuits. I'll get hot, cold, hot, cold. If anyone wants a natural high, there is-- if your mood is jacked up, for me and many people I know, there is nothing that will put you in an improved mental emotional state than just getting hot and cold a few times. It's crazy. That's what I used to do when I was a little kid. I'd go to hot springs and then jump in the cold pool or in a cold body of water in Colorado or whatever, and I always remember that, just how high I would get.

[02:01:40] Thomas: Kids know.

[02:01:41] Luke: Yeah. On the exercise thing, the thing I remember too that Rhonda Patrick was talking about all these years ago was if you, say, lift weights and then you do your ice bath afterward, if you're trying to gain muscle mass, you're shunting the inflammation that's going to instigate the muscle mass. Is that still valid?

[02:02:03] Thomas: Yeah. Huberman is pretty good on this. He says, "Wait four hours." It's good advice. But why would you? In my mind, do the ice bath first. I don't listen to Rhonda Patrick anymore. I was disappointed in her views on COVID and that.

[02:02:22] Luke: I think she lost a lot of people when she went on Rogan. I don't know. They must've paid her a lot of money or something.

[02:02:27] Thomas: I had the same. I don't know her, and I've never talked to her. I don't know this for the fact, but I just [Inaudible]. She sold out. And it's an unfair accusation.

[02:02:35] Luke: Who knows?

[02:02:36] Thomas: But she was way wrong. And when she went on Huberman, she said, "We didn't know things, and the uncertainty." And she backpedaled to her credit. But that's bullshit. We did know. You read the Pfizer report, you would know. And I thought it was the responsibility of somebody like Rhonda who has credentials and a PhD to do this reading and to communicate the data for people.

[02:02:57] Of course, there were things we didn't know, but when they started vaccinating children, they way crossed. There was no data-driven-- and as a matter of fact, the opposite was true. And so there's some people that I just wrote off. That doesn't mean they're wrong about everything.

[02:03:15] Luke: I get it. Yeah. In mid-2020, I got an email from a PR firm inviting me to get paid to promote the Pfizer vaccine.

[02:03:28] Thomas: I did not.

[02:03:30] Luke: Which was hilarious because I'm like, "You had to go on my website to get my email." You could look at my website for five minutes and know I'm not on your team. It's pretty obvious. And I was very vocal early 2020. I was like not about it. But what was interesting about that, obviously, I wasn't going to do that because, I don't know, I'd rather have my toenails pulled out while getting a root canal than hurt people in that way knowingly.

[02:04:01] But what was interesting is I thought, "Wow." Because I saw a lot-- and I'm not saying she took money to do that. She maybe was just misinformed or whatever. But I was also shocked by the number of people in the wellness space and in even in spiritual circles, yoga teachers and things like, the amount of people that were promoting that.

[02:04:22] And it made a lot of sense after I got that invitation. And I don't know how much they were willing to pay me. It could have been a sizable chunk of change. And after I got there, I thought, "Oh, I'm not even that well known, and they came after me. So imagine these people that have really big platforms, much bigger than mine."

[02:04:39] I sense that many people, maybe they didn't realize how bad it was at that time. They were like, "Yeah, I'll take the money." So you never know. I would never accuse anyone of doing that. But the climate was rich to make a few bucks to promote those products. I was shocked, and I wanted to send a really smart-ass response and just eviscerate them.

[02:05:03] Thomas: And then you'd feel smug.

[02:05:04] Luke: Yeah. Self-righteous enjoyment. That's very temporary. So I just deleted the email.

[02:05:10] Thomas: In 2020, Del Bigtree invited me to be on a show because in the throes of the lockdowns, so many people just went quiet. No matter what their reputation was, they're like, "I don't want to comment." And that wasn't me. I was out there mouthing off about a lot of stuff I didn't really know about, but there were few things that were super important and that I was right about.

[02:05:32] So Del, at that time, he didn't have a lot of faculty on his show, and he said, "Come on." And I said, "I'll do it, but under no circumstances can we talk about the vaccines. You people seem like a bunch of nutcases, and I just don't want to get into that. And I don't know." He said, "It's no problem. We'll talk about resilience. We'll talk about lockdowns. We'll talk about whatever you want to talk about."

[02:05:53] And so we did a show, and I'm embarrassed by some of the things because I was naive. I was embarrassed by some of the things I didn't know. But I had a long conversation with this producer, and I said, "So what is it with you in the vaccines?" And he said, "I have two vaccine-injured sons." I said, "What does that mean?" "It means that they got the vaccine, and the medical doctors diagnosed them as vaccine-injured. They didn't have autism before their vaccine injury, and they do have autism now."

[02:06:22] I said, "Oh. AJ has an autistic daughter, and I only know a little bit about that experience through her." And Patrick says, "I can't tell you that vaccines cause autism or that they don't. All I can do is tell you this has been my experience." And a switch went off in my head. You cannot deny someone's experience with some study because they weren't in that study.

[02:06:52] And so I started doing more reading. I met with Aaron Siri who happens to live in Scottsdale. He said, "You should read this. You should take a look at that." And I was reading it as a scientist, and man, Rogan had that great quip. He goes, "Before COVID, I would've told you that vaccines were the greatest invention in history. Now I don't think we even went to the moon."

[02:07:13] Luke: That's how it goes.

[02:07:15] Thomas: Same epiphany. I'm like, "I don't want the religious exemption from the max. I want a science exemption." Only they don't give those out. So it was Del Bigtree, this producer, that taught me to really look instead of to just sort out and maybe piece things together at the margins. It was wonderful. I know I got a lot more out of that appearance than Del Bigtree.

[02:07:38] Luke: He's a great guy. We went boating with him and a couple of friends. Our friend Micah, who's also my chiropractor, I went to see this morning. Shout out to Micah Pittman. If anyone needs a good chiropractor in Lakeway. I don't know if you know the name of his business. I think it's Lakeway Chiropractic. Anyway, he's awesome.

[02:07:54] We were out there listening to AC/DC, just cruising around the lake. It was fun just seeing Del out there with his kids. He's a beast on that, whatever the tubing. I guess you'd call it tubing. It's like, damn, this guy's a couple years older than me, and he's in it to win it. Great guy. Former guest on the show. Which we'll link to in the show notes. Please, Jarrod.

[02:08:14] I interviewed him just about vaccines a couple of years before the plandemic, and he had a lot of good data at that point too. He's a real a real fighter. What about getting your skull and/or face in the cold water. I intuitively do that. I dunk my head in and hold my breath and just keep the top of my dome in the water, and then I take a breath. I hold my face in, and I just meditate in the water, look at my third eye.

[02:08:47] I derive a lot of benefit from getting both my face and my head cold. What I don't enjoy is what many of the real bad asses of cold therapy do. They get in, plug their nose, and lean backwards under the water. I hate that. It feels like I'm being waterboarded, so I don't do it. And I thought, well, there must be something to that. So I found my own adaptation for that. Is there any data to support that getting your face and your head in is good for you?

[02:09:14] Thomas: I'll tell you what do because I do a head dunk every time.

[02:09:18] Luke: You go backwards?

[02:09:19] Thomas: Yeah.

[02:09:20] Luke: Oh, I hate that. Oh my God.

[02:09:21] Thomas: I don't blame you. But I don't go very deep. When I was doing cold showers, I would let the cold water on the top of my head, and we all know about brain freeze, and this was worse. I don't like having the top of my head freezing.

[02:09:34] Luke: I love it.

[02:09:36] Thomas: Okay. People are different. And I never ever hold my breath. I always breathe out slowly. I never plug my nose. I will blow bubbles while I'm underwater, and I'll try and do it slow, and I'll try and last as long as I can. Twelve seconds is my record. Because there is something about waterboarding.

[02:10:00] For me it is an abject state of panic, being under water in the cold. And I love swimming. I love body surfing, and that doesn't cause the panic for me. Even if the water is cold and I'm body surfing, it doesn't. There's something about peeing in the Morozko and doing that face, head dunk that is psychologically very threatening.

[02:10:26]The experience for me was when a friend of mine said, "You should try a snorkel." So put my snorkel on, and I said, "All right." This allows me to breathe, which is important for safety. I don't ever want people to hyperventilate and then try cold. If you pass out in the water, you can drown.

[02:10:43] And so I never hold my breath. Oh, try the snorkel. But I had a powerful flashback of being at Children's Beach with my mother. It's 1973. It must have been before that. I must have been four or five years old, and she's trying to teach me how to swim. And one of the things you do is the dead man's float. And of course your mom holds you up while you're floating on your back, trying to lean back and learn how you-- look, son. You can float. Just like riding a bicycle.

[02:11:09] And then she takes her arms away, and you realize you're floating in the water. Luke, that flashback sent me into some childlike state of panic that I'm willing to go up to the edge on. I want to explore it a little bit, and I will never, by myself, cross into that threshold to feel that again. So I'm not the right person to ask about is this right clinically?

[02:11:43] It's not right for me to hold my breath underwater-- at least not yet. But maybe I'll get there. I recommend you breathe. I don't like the plugging the nose aspect. But I can't tell people what's going to work or not work for them. What I can tell you is you do not get all the benefits of an ice bath by sticking your head in a bowl of ice water on your kitchen counter. The body doesn't work that way.

[02:12:12] You can get some cold shock, and that's about it. There's nothing wrong with having your face cold physiologically, and it will activate your nervous system. And the claims that you're going to read online from people who have big audiences about, "Oh you don't need to do this. All you need to do is put your face in there and you get everything." Those are coming from people who have been bugging me for years about getting a free Morozko and haven't gotten one.

[02:12:40] Luke: That's funny. Years ago I saw this product. I don't know if it's still out. I think it was called the Cryohelmet, and it was for TBIs, brain injuries, and stuff, where you put this ice-cooled helmet on, and it was used therapeutically. And somehow I just had that in my memory, so I thought well, it's probably a good idea when I get out to dunk the top of my head.

[02:13:02] And technically I am breathing while my top of my head's in. But I find, I don't know, I feel like it quiets down any inflammation that I feel in my head. If I have brain fog or it's midday and I need to reboot, getting my head cold and holding it in for quite a while seems to do wonders for that.

[02:13:23] Thomas: Cold is one of the best things you can do for the brain. And don't have to freeze the brain. Whole body is really good because of the neuroprotective factors that are associated with cold. But there is a guy at the University of Southern Florida, his name is Joe Dituri. He goes by Dr. Deep Sea. He was a Navy diver for decades.

[02:13:47] And so pressure and oxygen are really important to these high-performance divers. He gets out of the Navy, and he says," I want to get a doctorate." He does that. He's got a PhD, but he's teaching in the medical school there. And one of his favorite things is his 1943 pickup truck because I guess 1,943 was the deepest he ever dived. He was in some submersible submarine thing, and he gets T-boned in Florida.

[02:14:13] Guess what a 1943 pickup truck doesn't have. Airbags, any of the safety equipment that we would take for granted now. And he wakes up in the hospital. He doesn't recognize the attending physician. And the attending physician is like, "But you taught me--" or whatever it was. And he goes, "Holy crap." He's got this temporary amnesia, and my brain's not functioning.

[02:14:34] He studies the brain. He did his dissertation on hyperbarics and the brain. He goes, "And now my brain is messed up." He's got to heal himself. So he does hyperbaric. He does red light. He does magnesium, and he calls me up and says, "Tom, I want to do cold because it just makes sense to me."

[02:14:51] If I submerge up to my neck, not only am I going to stimulate my vagus nerve, improve my vagal tone, but vasoconstriction is going to force all the blood up into my head. And that increased perfusion is going to help my brain. And he's just going on his intuition. And now he swears by it to the point where he put a functional MRI on his scalp.

[02:15:10] And this is a scientific infringement, not the choose muse, which is a lot of fun. But he's looking for a greater level of sensitivity. And you can only do this with people who are trained in the cold because you need about five minutes, 33 degrees, and they got to stay still. But he measures himself, and he sends me the data. He's like, "My brain is lighting up. This is me when I'm warm and dry. This is me when I'm cold and wet. And I have reduced latency, which is the time it takes for different sections of the brain to talk. I have increased activity."

[02:15:40] He goes, "I'm getting data that shows my brain works much better on cold. So now your intuitions about this are being backed up by his expertise and his data. I think we're really onto something. And again, we should run better trials with people who are curious about how their brains respond.

[02:16:02] Luke: Epic. Last question. What's the difference between getting in cold water versus cryotherapy? I used to do cryotherapy a lot just because I didn't have an ice bath yet. And it's nice, but after I got acclimated to doing ice baths all the time, I get in cryotherapy. I'm just like, "This is boring." Is this doing anything? Can you turn this thing down? It's not the same to me.

[02:16:26] Thomas: You, me, and all the other customers that I've talked with. Cryotherapy is great. LeBron James does cryotherapy because it makes you feel good. You get a sense of accomplishment. I like the cold. Cryotherapy has a lot of benefits. I don't mean to knock it. And the cold water is so much harder than the cold air because the cold water will suck that heat right out of your body.

[02:16:55] So I went to a cryotherapy chamber in San Diego first time, and they said, "Under no circumstances should you be in there for more than four minutes." I put the mittens on, and I put the headband on and everything. I was like, "It's going to be just going back to school." I went to school in Clarkson University, Potsdam, New York, way up north of Lake Placid. Negative 40 degrees. Celsius, Fahrenheit, doesn't matter.

[02:17:19] That's where they cross. And I've enjoyed that. I'm like, "Great." Four minutes goes by. Five minutes goes by. Eight minutes. And I'm like, "When does it really kick in? When am I going to get the mm-hmm." Because it's boring. After you've acclimated to cold water, cryotherapy feels like a breeze.

[02:17:40] And all of my customers who started with cryo and now have Morozko, they say, "Why didn't you tell me about this six years ago?" I was like, "I'm trying." I've only got my little 15,000 followers, and I'm glad you found us. They only do cryo when they're on the road and they can't get cold any other way.

[02:17:59] So what are the differences? One important advantage that cryo has is you don't have to get wet. And sometimes people don't want to get wet. And part of that is if you're going to a cryo chamber, you're not worried about whether the last person in the chamber showered before they got in there. You have your Morozko at home, and it's only you and your guests.

[02:18:24] But some people are going to go to a public spa, and even though it's got ozone and the water looks good, they just don't feel like they want to share a bath with somebody. Cryo is the next best thing. So that's a big advantage to cryo. And then I got a whole list of disadvantages. You can't put Epsom salt in the cryo chamber.

[02:18:46] And to date, nobody's done halotherapy and cryo at the same time. You're probably not in there long enough to really get a good salt dose. So there's a number of things. You can find my whole table at the end of my cryo con talk. I don't want to knock cryo. I want people to try it. And for me cold water is more effective.

[02:19:06] Luke: Got it. Okay. I'm glad you mentioned the magnesium too because that's another addition.

[02:19:11] Thomas: You're doing it now.

[02:19:12] Luke: Yeah. I was putting the wrong form, and it turned the water yellow.

[02:19:17] Thomas: Do not put chlorides in to--

[02:19:20] Luke: Yeah. Magnesium chloride, right.

[02:19:21] Thomas: Yeah. But do magnesium sulfate.

[02:19:24] Luke: That's what I'm doing now, and the water stays clear.

[02:19:26] Thomas: Oh, good.

[02:19:27] Luke: Yeah. Was it an interaction with the ozone or something?

[02:19:29] Thomas: Yeah.

[02:19:30] Luke: Oh, okay.

[02:19:31] Thomas: Chloride and bromide, by the way, they're benign. When they're in their minus one form-- table salt is chloride. There's nothing wrong with it. We knock chlorine for really good reasons. It does not exist in nature, and your body doesn't know how to handle it. But chloride is great, and it's in seawater. However, when the ozone and the chloride interact, it can change the valent state of the chloride into forms that are not benign, that are toxic.

[02:20:00] They're not supposed to go together. And so I discourage people from putting chloride salts because I want them to use the ozone. But put all the sulfate salts in there that you like. Even in yours you can use zinc sulfate, potassium sulfate, a little bit of copper sulfate, and you'll get some antimicrobial effects, especially from the copper, anti algaecide. Copper is an algaecide, so anti algal effects. And you'll get some of the transdermal absorption of the potassium.

[02:20:27]Luke: Epic.

[02:20:28] Thomas: Yeah. I have a recipe now in an article that I haven't shared with you but it's online.

[02:20:34] Luke: Because then you're getting a mineral bath at the same time.

[02:20:36] Thomas: Correct.

[02:20:38] Luke: Yeah. Epic.

[02:20:39] Thomas: So you're getting your grounding. You're getting your cold. You're getting your salt, your mineral bath. Magnesium's great for muscle soreness too. What is not to like with all of the stack that you're now getting in your ice bath, and I suppose what's not to like is you're up to your ears in freezing cold water.

[02:20:58] Luke: It's a matter of personal preference. Would it be better for one to do, say, three to five short ice baths in a day or just do one long three to five minutes?

[02:21:10] Thomas: I don't consider three to five really all that long.

[02:21:14] Luke: I'm asking because I jump in there probably three six times a day depending on busy I am and how hot it is. But sometimes I'm only in there for 30 seconds. Sometimes a minute, two minutes. I just love it, so I do it more often. But I don't always have time to sit in there and have the full experience.

[02:21:31] Thomas: And I say the same thing about yoga or meditation. If you don't have the time, you should do it for twice as long. I could probably make the time. I don't have the patience for a five or a six-minute ice bath. I start thinking about things. I get these ideas. "Oh, here's the three things that I haven't tried yet." I want to get out, and I want to start working on them right away.

[02:21:53] But when I'm shooting a video, then sometimes I'll have a long ice bath. You probably weren't paying any attention, but Carnivore Aurelius, that crazy account, 40% good advice and 60% just click bait crap that drives me up the wall. And she did a beautiful video, or he. Whoever Carnivore is.

[02:22:17] Luke: He. There was rumors for a while that it was a woman, but he went on Rick Rubin's podcast, and he was very much a male.

[02:22:25] Thomas: Okay. The criticisms of ice bath were bogus. And so people were asking me, "Will you do a rebuttal?" It took me three takes. Because sometimes the words just don't come to me right. And AJ is filming, and we're up to 20 minutes, and she says, "Do you want to go over the part again about the sex thing?" And I'm like, "I'm freezing, and I got to get out of here."

[02:22:50] Sometimes I'll do a long ice bath because I'm working on something. But mostly it's just two to four minutes. Phoenix, 115 degrees, I'll go in there two, three times a day sometimes. In the winter, it's usually just one ice bath.

[02:23:06] Luke: You just reminded me of another question, and maybe it's because I heard it from Carnivore Aurelius or someone like that. I have seen antagonist to the idea of cold therapy that shit on it saying that you're flooded with cortisol and adrenaline, and it's really bad for you. And in nature, historically, humans would've never voluntarily gotten that cold. Your body thinks you're going to die. This whole thing. What's your quick rebuttal to that?

[02:23:33] Thomas: Bullshit.

[02:23:35] Luke: That's pretty quick.

[02:23:36] Thomas: Yeah. Have those people posted their labs? No. Have they even posted a photo of them going into the ice bath? No. But I've looked at the data. The best work on cortisol is coming out of the Lithuanian Sports University. There's a friend of mine, because I called him up and I wanted to get to know him, Marius Brazaitis, and I have trouble pronouncing his last name. He's measured cortisol. He's done this with blood samples. There's also salivary studies.

[02:24:01] The ice bath does not increase cortisol unless you're chronically low. If you're chronically high, it will bring it down. It modulates cortisol. Now, cortisol's tricky because it changes throughout the day, and you have to be consistent in the way that you're measuring it. I got though a great story for you by Mitch Wishnowsky.

[02:24:20] This guy is an Australian punter for the 49ers. And it seems like all the punters in the NFL are now these former Australian rules football players, and Mitch is one of them. He was told he had to reduce his stress because he had a bubble of cortisol in his eye that was interfering with his vision.

[02:24:38] His medical doctor says, "You got to take your stress down." And Mitch is like, "You know I punt." He's not going to stop his career. He must be in these stressful situations. So what is he going to do? He says, "Before I quit football, I'm going to try breath work and ice baths." Four months later, he goes back. He says, "Doc, how's my cortisol bubble doing? Because my vision seems pretty good." Doc says, "It's gone." "What have you done?" And he goes, "Breath work, ice baths." Doctor's like, "That doesn't work." Mitch says, "Well, I got to go punt now." It worked great.

[02:25:14] This is a misconception, that you will burn out your adrenals. And I think it's an excuse that people use because they don't want to get uncomfortable. Wouldn't it be great if a mimosa brunch was the healthiest thing you could do and then maybe go to the spa for a vermiculite facial or something, then come out of there and live for seven years longer? Our lives would be wonderful. It doesn't work like that.

[02:25:41] Yeah, you get a stress response. Yes, lots of physiological things happen in your adrenal glands, and burning them out is not one of them. Now, there are risks to the ice bath. Hypertension is probably the most important one because the vasoconstriction in your limbs is going to force blood into your core and up to your brain. It's going to raise your blood pressure. If you already have chronically high blood pressure, you need to be careful that you don't have some kind of a hypertensive medical event.

[02:26:19] Go warmer starting out. Over the long term, ice bath is great for the circulation. It can be really good for high blood pressure. But hypertension is an important contraindication. So I don't mean to say that ice baths are good for everybody all the time. I mean to say that this idea that our ancestors would never have voluntarily gone into the cold water is bullshit

[02:26:43] Because we descend from the homo sapiens that survived the ice age. And when the world was covered with glaciers, it's called a population bottleneck. There were probably only a few thousand human beings total. And of them, maybe half of them, or more than half of them were women. But now we are all descendant from the same 3,000 women that survived that ice age. Where did they live? They lived next to the water.

[02:27:15] You might think, well, no. They lived in Africa near the equator. Those were the oldest human fossil records are found. And you say, okay, the equator, we think of it as warm. But where does Wim Hof take his trainees? Up Mt. Kilimanjaro, which you might have noticed, is right at the equator.

[02:27:32] There are four modern glaciers at the equator in Africa, in East Africa, where the oldest human fossils are found. When those glaciers were enormous and covered by ice, our ancient ancestors lived near the water's edge. Where did they get the omega-3 fatty acids that would support the human brain? Where did they live when there was nothing to eat, when the herbivores were already so scarce?

[02:28:04] They ate the seafood. Jack Kruse is really good on this. When you do your studies of the brain and how the brain is supported by the fatty acids and by the seafood, the mollusks, that is the shellfish, the fish, and the plants that grow in the water, where our people foraged, our ancestors had the choice of starve or get cold. They decided to get cold.

[02:28:31] And to say, "Well, that's not voluntary," it's just a crap hooey. The people who were not cold acclimated never made it through the ice age. Your mitochondria are descendant from the same women who forged for their living inside that cold water, who gave birth to your ancient grandmother in that cold water.

[02:28:54] So it's perfectly natural to be getting yourself in the cold. It's what your ancient ancestors did. And these counter arguments, you don't need to concoct them. The number one reason for not doing an ice bath is because you don't want to do an ice bath. Just say that. I'm not going to coerce anybody, bully anybody, or shame anybody into getting to an ice bath because that would just rob them of the feeling of accomplishment that they get when they finally try it.

[02:29:23] Beautiful. Thank you for that. I'm glad I remembered to ask that. You know how the internet is. It's like for every one person that's for something, 50 people pop up and create a platform by being against it. So you got to wade through a lot of data to arrive at the truth. Last question, my friend. You ready?

[02:29:44] Thomas: Yeah.

[02:29:45] Luke: Who have been three teachers or teachings in general that have influenced your life and who you are today?

[02:29:53] Thomas: Number one, Walter Obermeyer taught me journalism at Peabody High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and he was an asshole. And that really worked for me because that had a series of female honors English teachers. And we're supposed to read Ethan Frome or the Great Gatsby, whatever. We're supposed to interpret it and all this stuff.

[02:30:15] And I was getting C'S and D's in English, and I knew I'm going to be an engineer. I'm good at math and science. And then I signed up for this journalism class, and he sat me down said, "Your writing is terrible, and this is how you're going to fix it." And he was ruthless in his criticism. And he showed me what passive voice was and active voice.

[02:30:36] He showed me this journalistic inverted pyramid style. And he gave me a structure instead of all this nebulous humanities crap, which just didn't work for me. Although I did finally freaking read Moby Dick. I've come to appreciate better what was happening then that I couldn't appreciate at all. Wally Obermeyer taught me how to write, and I haven't stopped. So I'm grateful for that.

[02:31:01] There was another high school teacher that I had at this terrible inner city school. It was the '70s. It was forced busing and desegregation, white flight. It was violent. And there were a lot of challenges that harmed me in the time and helped make me who I am that I only came to understand later.

[02:31:23] This one is Mr. Sadowski, my AP chemistry teacher. And he was not universally liked. He was a chemical engineer who went to Clarkson, by the way, and went off on these incredible tangents. He was a storyteller extraordinaire. I sat in the front row of AP chemistry. I didn't write anything down. I just listened to all of the stories. And some of them still come back to me because I learned chemistry listening to Mr. Sadowski's crazy stories.

[02:31:57] I had another childhood mentor, Gunny Stackpole. This was on Nantucket Island. Gunny Stackpole retired. He was born on the island. He grew up on the island. He traveled the world. And he retired to run the Old Mill. So the Nantucket Historical Association, they owned 15 different exhibits, the Whaling Museum, the Oldest House, and one of them was the Old Mill. My mother took me for a picnic, me and my sisters, at the Old Mill in Nantucket, and I adored it. So I wanted to go back.

[02:32:28] Now, this was the '70s, remember, when kids were allowed to free range and I had a bicycle. So I'd ride my bike up to the Old Mill every freaking day. There was an alcoholic there who smoked a pipe, and I remember the smell of his pipe, Dick Swain. And he told the best stories. So Dick would put me to work. "Hey, you should package up the cornmeal. Take care of the sales. Go do the rope." Because I guess that's the way alcoholic pipe smoke and storytellers work.

[02:32:55] And I love learning how to do things and learning chores. But I came back the next year and Dick was gone. And this Gunny Stackpole guy is here. Gunny said, "What are you doing here?" I said, "I work here." And I'm nine. He says, "No, you don't. And we don't allow kids to hang out." I came up every day, and I told Gunny, "I work here." And he said, "All right." Finally, after a week of this. "Let's see what you can do."

[02:33:21] Oh, I can package the cornmeal. I can take the 50 cents submission. I can put the sales up. And Gunny and I got along great. So you got to imagine this guy is 70, and here's a little kid, nine. And Gunny told a better story than Dick Swain did. Gunny was a salesperson. You pay 50 cents to come into the Old Mill, and you would walk out with a cookbook, five pounds of corn meal, spermaceti candles, and six postcards or something because Gunny could sell that way.

[02:33:51] And I was, when I was nine, terrible at it. But I loved the way that he told the stories. I got to be 14, and the Historical Association said, "We want to hire you, but you're too young. So we're going to put down--" I should probably not say any of this.

[02:34:08] Luke: Those are always the best comments.

[02:34:12] Thomas: My first job was under my older sister's Social Security number, so that they could find a way to pay me for doing that job. By the time I was 18, they said, "Okay, you're the miller." Gunny developed dementia. Turns out cornbread is not good for your brain. I didn't know. But at the time, I like graining corn, making Indian pudding, and all these recipes. He went to the old folks’ home, and then he died. They needed somebody to run the mill.

[02:34:42] And when I was 18, that was me. But then I went into engineering school. And by the way, a windmill that works and grinds corn is a wonderful thing for a kid who's going to be an engineer. I needed like a real job, and I became a surveyor. I had to give up being a docent in a miller. And those three people, I go back to them at some difficult times, when I'm working on a problem. What I learned from them still comes back to me today, whether it's storytelling, chemistry, or just trying to figure out how to write something down.

[02:35:21] So it's a wonderful question, and I hate that I have to narrow it down to three because there's some other older mentors that I've had. Thank you, Dick Parsons, whom I've learned other really important things from. Now I get to be a teacher, and now I get to tell myself a story about how in another 30 years there's going to be somebody on some podcast who's going to get that question and they're going to say, Professor Seager really made a difference to me in my life.

[02:35:57] Luke: Beautiful. Epic, bro.

[02:36:01] Thomas: Thanks, Luke. It brings up some things.