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Jan. 25, 2023

#67 Thomas Seager - Morozko Forge Cold Plunge, Trauma, Testosterone for Women

Thomas P. Seager is an associate professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering & the Built Environment at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. Seager leads research teams working at the boundaries of engineering and social science to understand innovation for resilient infrastructure systems and the life-cycle environmental consequences of emerging energy technologies. He also serves as co-founder and CEO of two startup companies:  Morozko Forge, a leading manufacturer of ice baths for biohacking, and Upgrade Engineering, a technology company for the Circular Economy.

00:02:10 Introducing Thomas Seager

00:05:50 You get to choose what things mean for you

00:09:10 This Is Water: Thoughts on living a compassionate life

00:11:38 Complacency and living in the "Happy Middle"

00:13:17 Scientists are hopeless at communicating 

00:15:55 The only advice worth listening to

00:19:28 Parenting as a survivor of childhood trauma

00:23:37 What is epigenetically transferred trauma?

00:27:21 The meaning is more important than the experience

00:32:38 How ice baths help build psychological resilience

00:41:25 How trauma is held in the body

00:44:28 It's time you started working on your trauma

00:49:24 Understanding thyroid function and cold intolerance

00:55:09 The Morozko method and deliberate cold exposure

00:59:04 How cold exposure improves heart rate variability

01:01:57 Most searched questions on cold plunging

01:04:32 Cold plunging - How long is too long?

01:11:47 How to rewarm yourself after a cold plunge

01:17:05 Cold plunges for inflammation

01:19:58 Is cold exposure good for pregnant and breastfeeding women?

01:25:54 Testosterone in women

01:30:40 Collecting testosterone data in women

01:33:30 Parting thoughts 

 

Releasing Trauma Through Ice Baths

Trauma is a shock to the body's normal operating system. So when you're faced with a traumatic event, and that shock is stored instead of released, it can cause mental and physical health issues down the road. Interestingly, when trauma occurs, the brain temporarily shuts down your memory processing system. This act is an effort to protect itself, and so the experience is instead stored as fragments in the body.

So how do we get rid of trauma that's stored in the body? According to Dr. Steager, cold exposure is one of the easiest to release trauma from the body. Whether done in a modern cold plunge tub or the middle of a freezing river, dipping your body in icy waters has some serious physical and mental benefits. Inflammation is a big one because most of us live with chronic inflammation without even realizing it. When you immerse yourself in cold water, it instantly numbs the nerves surrounding your joints and muscles. This causes the release of hormones and endorphins that acts as an analgesic, which is responsible for relieving inflammation and alleviating muscle strain and joint pain.

 

Links and Resources:

Dr. Seager's LinkedIn

Dr. Seager on Substack

Dr. Seager's Instagram

Meta-Description

Dr. Thomas P. Seager shares exactly how we can use cold plunging to release trauma, fight chronic inflammation, and live a natural life in an unnatural world. He also answers whether cold exposure is good for pregnant and breastfeeding women and how both men and women can use ice baths to increase their testosterone. 

 

 

 

 

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Transcript

0 (0s): And then I ask, does it make a difference to you how you interpret his advice? When you now know, I'm gonna tell you that David Foster Wallace took his own life and many of the students become kind of defensive. They're like, well, we can't take this man's advice. It doesn't mean anything anymore. Like his advice must be bad because he suffered from depression that culminated in suicide. But then we look at it again and we say, when he's making these appeals to empathy, it sounds like he's talking about an appeal for a third party. The woman with her child at the grocery store whose child is screaming and having a tantrum. 0 (42s): There is a way to empathize with her so it doesn't wreck your own life. Or the person who cuts you off at the highway, is there a way to empathize with them? It's very third person, but once you know what his own struggle with and the way that he resolved it, you see that it's really an appeal for people to understand him. It's like, is there anyone out there who will empathize with me? 2 (1m 9s): Hello everybody. You're listening to Chatting with Candace. I'm your host Candice Horbacz. Before we get into this week's episode, just a reminder, I am back from maternity leave. My brain is still kind of mushy, so I do apologize if I am more funky than usual. Our guest was amazing. I could have done better, but I do appreciate you bearing with me as I get my sea legs back. So this week we have Thomas Seager joining the podcast. He is one of the co-founders of the Morozko Forge Ice Baths, which I'm a huge fan of. We actually just got ours last month. I unfortunately can't use it yet. And we will get into those reasons later on in the podcast. But we do get into some biohacking for men and women, including women that are going through their pregnancy and postpartum journey. 2 (1m 55s): I feel like there's not a lot of content out there for women specifically in the biohacking realm cuz a lot of men seem to be dominating that field. So I'm really excited to offer some kind of insight for women. Please help me welcome my guest, Thomas Seager. Welcome back Thomas. So the listeners don't know, but we had technical issues, I should say. I had technical issues the first time we tried to schedule this. So I'm super excited that you made time to reschedule. And what was so interesting, it was as soon as we got off of the call, I find like you get a lot of people that are like those gurus on stage or like they're giving advice that they're not taking. And it's like how do you sift through people that are actually living through those, that their own advice and who's not. 2 (2m 40s): And the very first thing that you said to me when I was like apologizing and feeling like I wasted your time was you no, it's, it's fine. You just gave me back an hour that I didn't have. Like you immediately. The way that you, your perspective was to that situation was so positive. And I thought that that was awesome because I had just got done reading one of yours where you mentioned that what is water commencement speech and how you have a choice in your perspective and how you interface with the world. And I was just like, man, this guy is like the real deal. Like he's actually embodying what he, what he preaches. So I wanted to say I appreciate that. 0 (3m 16s): I learned a a while ago after disappointing so many people cuz I'm so bad at calendars and schedules. I learned a while ago that there's no such thing as late with me. I, I just have to accommodate whatever the rest of the world is doing. I've already done it to someone else at some time. So I have a mantra, there's no such thing as late with me. And it came in really handy on a first date five years ago, I'm still dating this woman, but she almost backed out of our first date. It was like a 45 minute drive for her. I'd invited her to go to this improv theater black box thing and she said, ah, it's raining. 0 (3m 56s): The highways are slow. I'm behind schedule. Maybe I should just cancel. And I said, there's no such thing as late with me. I'll leave tickets for you at the door. It's an improv show. You know, you're allowed to come in whenever you want. That's part of the actor's job. So sure enough, 20 minutes late, she walks in, she's six foot one, she's got heels, she's in this beautiful dress and the whole show comes to a halt cause she's gotta walk all the way down the side and then cut in front. I'm like in the second row and there's no way to do this without, you know, being conspicuous. 0 (4m 35s): So she sits down, I've never seen her before like live, but I lean over and I whisper in her ear, you know, you look lovely or something like that. And now what are the actors gonna do? They've gotta make something out of this. So they like point to us and they say something like, well thanks for interrupting our show. You too look like a lovely couple. How long have you been married? And I say, well first day, you know, and now they incorporate, in other words, it turned out better and funnier because we just rolled with it and I think she enjoyed herself more. 2 (5m 13s): And you guys are still dating five years later. 0 (5m 15s): I'm not saying it's been all one continuous honeymoon. There've been a lot, lot of things to adapt to and roll with. But yeah, we're still dating now. And so the implication here is Candace, this is gonna come out better just because of the way that we're adapting and, and since we last talked and we had to interrupt, you've done some reading, I've done some reading. You gave me a book recommendation, I finished it, I did another article. I think this is all gonna come out better and we're gonna have more fun as a result. 2 (5m 49s): I agree. I agree. And it's like you again, you can ha I highly recommend that speech to anyone. And then your SubstackDr I think is awesome as well. And and it's just the importance of of your choice and realizing how much power that you do have in in creating your own reality. And it can feel like everything is going wrong. And I think oftentimes we get in that loop and it's kind of like the, it's might sound a little bit woowoo or mystical, but you, it's almost like this energetic space that you can't get out of. And that's why like they say, every bad news comes in threes and everything. It rains, it pours and it's cuz you can't get out of that vibration. So it's like you can choose to look at this as it's happening for me instead of to me. 2 (6m 29s): And then just like watch how your look changes. 0 (6m 31s): We should tell the listeners that the speech you're talking about is David Foster Wallace. He gave a commencement speech and is now known on YouTube as This Is Water because there is a beautiful artistic, it's set to music and they have actors. So Foster Wallace is narrating the speech, but he's not standing up there like you're at graduation. They have a backdrop and it's condensed. And in the speech he's making a point for the students or the graduates, which is the only thing they really get to choose as a result of their education is what meaning. So what meaning is to them, that is they get to choose what things mean. 0 (7m 14s): They don't get to choose what happens they, and you say sometimes, you know, some people say, well you get to choose your reaction. There's some truth in that. And yet we are also wired by evolutionary biology, by our trauma, by whatever our experiences are to have certain feelings, to have certain thoughts. They're involuntary, but we get to choose what it means. So one thing that it could mean is that we're irreparably broken. We are unlovable as human beings and we should be ashamed of ourselves. And we all carry around that. That meaning is accessible to us. But another way of making meaning is to say because of things that have happened to me that were out of my control. 0 (7m 57s): Maybe I was young or maybe I was overwhelmed or whatever it is. But because of things that have happened to me, I experienced certain thoughts and feelings and I struggle with those totally different meaning. So David Foster Wallace is trying to say, you know, you, congratulations graduates, you're all educated now and it doesn't mean anything except you are now aware of your own thinking and you're capable of choosing your own meaning. And I used to show that in class from my engineering business practices students. And lots of people see lots of different things in the, in the speech. I think it depends upon at what developmental stage they are, what problems are they working with now because there's so many offerings that people can seek. 0 (8m 41s): So we talked through a lot of those and then I ask, does it make a difference to you how you interpret his advice when you now know, I'm gonna tell you that David Foster Wallace took his own life and many of the students become kind of defensive. They're like, well we can't take this man as advice. It doesn't mean anything anymore. Like his advice must be bad because he suffered from depression that culminated in suicide. But then we look at it again and we say, when he's making these appeals to empathy, it sounds like he's talking about an appeal for a third party. The woman with her child at the grocery store whose child is screaming and having a tantrum. 0 (9m 24s): Is there a way to empathize with her so it doesn't wreck your own life? Or the person who cuts you off at the highway, is there a way to empathize with them? It's very third person. But once you know what his own struggle with and the way that he resolved it, you see that it's really an appeal for people to understand him. It's like, is there anyone out there who will empathize with me? And he becomes, I'm not saying an admirable character, I'm, I'm, you know, people who judge him for checking out or entitled to their own opinion but more sympathetic. He was going through some tough stuff. And so This, Is, Water, you don't know what it's like to be outside the fish bowl until you've jumped out all the little goldfish, the young ones. 0 (10m 16s): Then they're swimming around and they're swimming around. They don't know what water is because they never jumped out of the fishbowl and flapped around on the floor and then said, Ugh, this is air. Just waiting for some little kid to scoop 'em up before they suffocate and put 'em back in the fishbowl and go, whoa, This, Is Water. Sometimes you can only perceive because you have the benefit of contrast. Not all of our experiences, even the traumatic ones like flopping around, you know, on the floor suffocating, they give us contrast benefit of experience. Yeah, 2 (10m 51s): No it's, I love, I, I think there is kind of like a, almost like a dark beauty to how things turned out for him. Obviously I wish that he had found love and resources and like that wasn't the end. But I do think that when you are experiencing like that amount of pain and depression, like you have to be in a very dark place to take your own life. So I think from that place it does make that stark difference. You can kind of see like the empathy and the beauty because it's something that you are craving and or that you don't have. Because that is one of the top comments I saw in all the videos. Cause there's a whole bunch of different iterations of that and they're like, well don't listen to that because he killed himself. I was like, no, maybe do, because he did, right? Because he was hurting so much that he could actually see the more, more of the, the beauty and the light in the world that maybe someone else doesn't. 2 (11m 36s): Because I, I forget what I was reading, but it was almost saying like the worst place that you could be is like right in the middle. Like you're not elated, you're not depressed, you're kind of just drifting and coasting because you co become complacent. So it's not forcing you to really wake up or change anything or strive for better cuz everything's fine. So like that Happy Middle is actually like the worst place to be as far as development goes. I'm 0 (12m 2s): Not sure that's true. I can think of worst places, but I also think of it like this. I'm a teacher and my job is to accumulate experience, knowledge and wisdom that I can pass on to my students so they don't have to make the mistakes that I made. I once read it is the job of the artist to create experiences that other people can live vicariously through so they can sort of have a safe experience through the vicarious like work of art without taking the risks that the artist has taken. So for you as an artist, I can see your argument, oh worst place to be is in the middle because nobody wants to watch an artist walking a tightrope that's sitting on the gym floor. 0 (12m 50s): You gotta put that thing up over Niagara Falls. If there's no danger then there's no level of interest. And it's the tightrope walker's job to create that experience that people can identify with vicariously from a position of safety for themselves. 2 (13m 7s): That's really interesting. Now that makes sense to me. So it just kind of depends on what role you're, this 0 (13m 13s): Is something I learned in improv as well. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. I'm glad. 2 (13m 17s): Oh you did improv 0 (13m 18s): Classes. I taught improv along with engineering business practices. So I taught improv at the graduate level and I did it with a friend of mine, a theater director, Boyd branch. So he's in theater and I'm in engineering and we hit upon the same problem but from different directions. The problem is Scientists can't communicate. You know, they can put up a graph and they can say, and this is what it is, but the audience often finds it very dry and unable to relate to whatever the scientist is trying to say. So this is a problem for my graduate students and for Boyd, he got sick of dealing with all of the, the drama in the drama department. 0 (14m 2s): Like maybe somebody should have told them you work in the drama department. But the mission that his students would bring to their craft was, look at me, pay attention to me. It's a very self-selecting kind of self-centered student that majors in theater. He said, I would love to work with students that have another mission and engineers are ideal for this because all they really want is to stay in the background and work on important problems. So we created this graduate class in improvisational theater for science communication. And it happened to be at the same time that Alan Alda was touring the country talking about improv for science communication. I mean it was wonderful because we were following in his footsteps. 0 (14m 45s): He came to asu, we get to meet him and talk about these things, which was inspirational. But I learned from Boyd, it is not about public speaking, public speaking class. You know, you stand up straight and you minimize your disfluencies and you look out over the tops of the heads of the audience and everything is about your composure and how you appear and kind of protecting your ego from embarrassment. He goes, improv theater is about connecting with your audience. And that's got to be an emotional connection. Cuz if they don't identify with you, they don't care what you're saying. 0 (15m 25s): So at the beginning you were saying there's a lot of people out there, gurus or speakers or whatever, and they, they strive to appear perfect. You didn't say that. But it's, what I remember that is they might not talk about themselves. They might say, oh you should do this and you should do that. And David Foster Wallace's talk, he's talking about the students and this is what's gonna happen to you when you get into the grownup world. I would, it's not the path that I've taken because The only advice worth listening to is from someone you admire who says, this is what worked for me or this is what didn't work for me. 0 (16m 5s): The only advice is not you, you, you. It's like when I was in a similar situation when I was a parent and I had a three month old, you know, these are the things that I did and these are the things that I regret. And now you can say by analogy, is that an experiment that I wanna run for me So, when you go on my SubstackDr, you're gonna see, I'm gonna break some rules. You're gonna see a lot of things that are about me, experiences I've had that I am not, they weren't all positive and I'm not proud of them all, but they're out there. And why? Because I don't want my kids to think that, oh well dad's perfect and I gotta be perfect too. 0 (16m 47s): Or some, I want whatever mistakes I've made, I want my kids and my students, my audience, whomever, to say, well thank God he did it instead of me. And they might sit in judgment about what an idiot I am because of the things that I've screwed up. That's okay. That's part of me sort of accepting that I've made those mistakes. 2 (17m 11s): Yeah, I think there's a certain level of vulnerability that you have to offer if you want to have that connection with somebody. And I think connection is what makes you listen because then you're like, oh well they're a real person. They're not, you know, this pious creature that's on this stage that's untouchable. And I think so much of us are learn like looking and and wanting something more real. Something that's like on our level. Cause we're, we're so used to being talked to, right? Like we used to have three news channels and they would talk to you and I feel like, I mean I just had a baby, so a lot of my stuff is like in that realm and dealing with doctors and they talk to you. So it's like, like finding people that will talk with you and well this is what I did with my kid. 2 (17m 53s): Like our pediatrician, like he's very non-traditional. Like he's a, he is an md like he is, we're not like that far crunchy granola. But he talks to you and you get to make your own decision. I'm like, well this is more, I like it. I'm like, I don't want someone in a coat just like telling me this is my only option. So I think we're all looking for a little bit more humanity in everything that we're experiencing. 0 (18m 15s): It happened when my daughter got older. Your kids are very young, but you know, I gotta fast forward maybe 12, 15 years and my daughter came to me and she said, dad, why do the girls in school dress? You know, I think the way she put it was like sluts, they, their shorts are too short. They're going in spaghetti straps and this is a public school. She said, and why do they start drinking and why do they do? And I said, many of your friends have a problem. Their parents are lying to them about what they did when they were teenagers about what it was like to grow up. Their parents have tried to project to the children, your friends, that the parents are flawless somehow. 0 (18m 59s): But the kids are now old enough to see through that facade. The parents aren't talking about the mistakes and the things that they're ashamed of and whatever their regrets are. And your friends have the same problem you do, which is how do I grow up? What does it mean if I'm 15? I'm like, how do I become an adult? What is it? And so they're trying different things. They're trying things that they see other adults do because they can't talk to their parents anymore. You don't have that problem. You can talk to me, you can, you can ask your mom what was it like when you were 15? And it is so powerful to be able, I mean you can't do this with a three month old, but as your children mature to say when I was five or whatever it was when I went to kindergarten for the first day, these were the things that I was afraid of. 0 (19m 44s): These were the surprises that I experienced and these were the people that I met. You know, and just tell that story. And it could take the nerves. I don't know what your kids are gonna feel like when it's time to go to kindergarten, but it's kind of a moment for a parent and you're saying, well this is what it was like for me. It requires you to be vulnerable. It requires you to tell stories to your kids that probably you don't wanna relive because you were embarrassed by whatever it was that happened in the school cafeteria when you were, you know, in second grade or something. And if you don't deal with those, it comes right back to, you know, it didn't start with you and Mark Wallen. 0 (20m 25s): If you don't deal with those things, then you're just, it's like Ari Dickey says, you might as well tie 'em up with a bow, put 'em in a box and hand 'em down to your kids to deal with. 2 (20m 35s): I wrote that quote down from one of your stuff's. That's a stack articles. No, I think it's, it's incredible. That's, and I think it's something new that a lot of parents are doing, which is really digging deep into our shadows and our traumas and maybe stuff that was handed down to us through epigenetics and you and trying to undo that mess so that we can be a better parent. And like, and they've done the several studies time and time again and it's basically any kid that's growing up in an environment that they don't feel safe or supported or nurtured, like they're not gonna thrive and you're gonna get a much more dumbed down version of who they could have been. 2 (21m 17s): So there's some times where if you come from a traumatic childhood or you didn't have the best parents and you're trying to undo all of that with your own children, it's almost reparenting yourself. So it can be very emotional because you're like, man, I wonder where I would be or who I would be if, you know, when my, if I spilled something, my parent reacted this way or if when I was potty training, my parents took this approach instead of just like reflexive anger, which I think is like a lot of Gen X and boomer parents, at least from people that I've talked to. It's just like ruling through fear and no explanation. So we try to have a very, very, very different approach and it's like without all of that trauma, who could you have been? 2 (22m 5s): So you can always try to undo it even as an adult, like it's never too late to start doing that work. But if you are going to have kids, the sooner the better. That way you're not Parenting in a way and showing up in a way that you're not even aware of. 0 (22m 18s): My mother was very crafty and she made Christmas stockings, she knitted them, you know, out of yarn. So my older sister has one, I have one, my younger sister has one mine says Tommy, I don't remember anybody ever calling me Tommy. I don't know what possessed her to put Tommy on the Christmas stocking because she didn't really call me Tommy. I'm named for my grandfather, her father, he's Thomas and I was Thomas or Tom. But on the Christmas stocking it says Tommy and I still have this stocking. So it's now like 53 years old or something and Santa knows where it is. So now I say that I have all of these memories and emotions attached to them and I carry them around with me in my 56 year old brain and they're little Tommy. 0 (23m 3s): So I've created a character and I put a school picture of mine from elementary school. I went to school in the seventies Candace, and you're gonna have to forgive, like there was some serious fashion mistakes made during school. Picture time in the 19th said, look up George Clooney, you'll see it. I look horrible in some respects, you know with my tie-dyed t-shirt, my bowl haircut. But I put it up there where I can see it. So I say, I got you, I will never leave you. He will never leave me and I will never abandon him. But it wasn't until you and I talked earlier, you recommended this book that I spent a weekend on ancestry.com trying to learn about what types of epigenetically transferred trauma am I carrying around either from my mother or from my grandparents, what happened to them that could be passed down to me. 0 (23m 59s): Turns out that my grandfather for whom I'm named Thomas Payson, he was seven years old when his father Richard Conan Payson died. Now if you're a seven year old boy, you've got three older siblings and your father dies, how do you feel? Do you feel abandoned? And I'm like so much of my relationships as adult romantic relationship, the woman I told you about, so much of them has been formed by this fear of being abandoned that it has caused me to have what Daniel Amon calls automatic negative thoughts. 0 (24m 40s): The fear takes over my brain and it constructs the reality. It isn't really there as if I'm being abandoned in real time when really somebody is trying to reassure me of how important I am to them. And I thought about, yeah, I don't know this is the case, but I thought about my grandfather Thomas, my mother and me and I found a picture of my grandfather as a little boy. He's probably five or six back then they dressed little boys in dresses or or short pants. I mean it's a really bizarre kind of fashion statement. And I would rather be wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt, you know, for my school picture than get dressed up the way they dressed up boys when my grandfather was young. 0 (25m 20s): But it's him in his little boys dress. And I'm like, I got you too. Because if I am carrying around the epigenetic trauma of the loss of the father figure at such a young age, I need that mantra to say not just because of things that happened to me, I experienced thoughts and feelings in this way, but because of things that happened to my grandfather, I will experience thoughts and feelings in this way. What will I do when those come to me? One way of making meaning is to say I'm insecure. I have an insecure attachment, you know, pattern or I've read all those books too. 0 (26m 5s): I'm fundamentally flawed, I'm unlovable. No, no, no. It's all her fault. There's, she's unreliable. You know, I can tell myself a million stories because stories are how we make meaning. And one of the stories that I can tell is because of something that happened to my grandfather that is out of his control and because the way epigenetic modification of DNA works, I have inherited experience, not experiences, but automatic thoughts and feelings that are intended to protect me from things that happened to him. Okay with that meaning I am sort of, I'm armed, I'm empowered to go through my life and say he's okay. 0 (26m 50s): Got it. I'm never leaving him. I'm never leaving little Tommy. And it is all right, you know, if other people make their choices, they might leave me, but I'm gonna carry these two around with me everywhere I go. And someday, you know, maybe I'll meet them in the afterlife or some other dimension of consciousness and they might come up to me like in my imagination they might say, Hey thanks I felt that. Or they might say, what were you doing all that time? And I'll say, well I was taking care of myself. The meaning is more important than the experience. And this is something that we say you can see, you know, I got my ice bath, there's my Morozko Forge out on the balcony and I meet a lot of people who are like, oh I hate the cold. 0 (27m 35s): I would never get in the cold. But the meaning that you make is moreor important than this story. I mean, sorry, than the experience you had. So when I get in, I tell myself a story. I'm here for a reason. I'm here for metabolic health, I'm here for psychological resilience. I'm purposely making myself uncomfortable so that whatever happens in the rest of the day is like nothing compared to the three minutes I spent in 34 degree water. The way you construct a story that gives your life meaning is more important than whether it was happy or positive or negative or traumatic or anything like that. And that is something that you can get more of from Victor Frankl in his book, man's Search For Meaning I write a lot about Maslow, you know, the most famous successful American psychologist, I'm coming at you with Abraham Maslow. 0 (28m 29s): Don't get me any of this BF Skinner crap, just cuz he taught pigeons to play ping pong doesn't mean that he helped anybody, you know? So here's Maslow and what most people don't realize. Maslow went to graduate school at University of Wisconsin. He studied under Harry Harlow Harlow, I don't know how else to put it. He tortured reesey's monkeys, you know, for science. He was the one who took a baby reesey's monkey separated from its mother and raised it in a cage because Skinner and operating conditioning at the time, the idea was that the child only bonds with the mother because the mother provides milk. So Harlow was like, okay, we're gonna make this chicken wire mother and we'll put like, I don't know, some buttons on it for eyes and we'll put milk in it. 0 (29m 15s): And so it'll bond with, you know, the little baby rishi's monkey will bond with the chicken wire doll. Didn't happen at all. Cuz then, and this is very cruel, but then they would scare the rishi's monkey in the cage and never went to the chicken wire covered bottle. There was always like a doll or a rag or something soft and they would always find comfort in the thing that they weren't getting the milk from. And this caused Harlow to kind of rethink attachment bonding. So Maslow, he does his doctorate with Harlow and he comes out and he's got questions you know about human motivation and about what are, what do people really need? And instead of answering those, he spends two or three years working as a sex researcher. 0 (29m 57s): He did a lot of sex surveys and things like that. World War II happens and he publishes Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Motivation. It's sometimes called Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. And it often, you know, it looks like a pyramid down at the bottom will be safety and security. A little further up self-esteem, sense of belonging. And about the top he put this thing called self-actualization, which I don't know if anybody knows what it is, it turned into, you know, an army recruiting slogan a couple of decades ago, be all that you can be or something like that. Then Frankel comes along and he says, forget about all that. 0 (30m 39s): It's about living a meaningful life. Man can suffer any deprivation he wrote has a reason why. So why get in the ice bath cuz it hurts and it's painful. I mean that's not hypnotic happiness, but it allows us to fix our metabolism, to build psychological resilience, to strengthen us throughout our day. We make ourselves intentionally uncomfortable so we can deal with those discomforts that we didn't choose. And life is really about that. It's what David Foster Wallace was exhorting in his, you know, audience to find meaning and to choose the meaning that they're gonna make for themselves. So these are the the four great ones, Freud, Adler, Frankel and Maslow. 0 (31m 25s): And they all kind of integrate along this Maslow's hierarchy of needs. As long as you realize the bottom doesn't have to get satisfied first, that it's more a complexity and that meaning is the most worthwhile pursuit or use of our lives. What meaning do we give it then all the hardships they become easier to endure. 2 (31m 49s): That's so interesting. I've never, I've had a couple psychologists on and one of them actually has a book where they kind of redid the hierarchy of meaning. It's Scott Berry Kaufman, his is more of like a sailboat, but it's about transcendence. And it's interesting because if you do take into account Victor Frankl's story, none of that really does matter. You like you're, you kind of nailed that on the head and I, that's one of my favorite books that I recommend to everyone cuz I think it, it will shift the way that you see everything in such a beautiful way. And he was obviously in one of, if not the worst circumstances, you can find yourself sick in a a holocaust camp and he's still finding meaning. 2 (32m 31s): So if he can do it there, no one else has an excuse anywhere else and it just shows how mu how powerful your mind is. I was curious, so one of the reasons I reached out to you is I feel like the way that you look at I guess like the human body and I think it kind of probably ties into yourself actual engineering it, there's like a very holistic approach. So a lot of people in this biohacking space or self-improvement space, like it's a very one track mind. But then I'm getting these emails that I signed up for with the newsletter that are about trauma and epigenetics and I'm like, whoa. 2 (33m 11s): Like he is really hitting it from all of these angles. And it was, there was a section on one of the articles that was like the importance of power control and movement when it comes to P T S D and I was like whoa, I, I've never heard someone else talk about that, but the importance of shivering or convulsions to release trauma and there actually is like a physiological effect of doing that, which is why you see wild animals don't experience trauma. It's only something domesticated ones do because they're not allowed to just run and have that release. So I'm curious when it comes to incorporating the ice bath with trauma, obviously you have that inherent need to shiver when you're getting into water that's that cold. 2 (33m 56s): Do have you found like a protocol or maybe an exercise that you've done on yourself when you're doing like trauma work? 0 (34m 3s): I wish I had, but there's a couple of things to talk about because I have a PhD but it's in civil engineering. I'm not a medical doctor, I'm not a psychiatrist or a psychologist. You know, I did my dissertation on thermodynamics. So some people might come at me and say, well you're not qualified to talk about any of this, you know, I'm gonna go back to a Jordan Peterson podcast or something because why should I listen to you? And it's totally valid. All I can do is say these are the experiences that I've had, this is how I'm making sense of my life. These are some of the things that have worked for me. And then I want people to judge for themselves. Don't, I'm not trying to tell people what to do, but I got into psychological resilience for very practical reasons. 0 (34m 50s): I went from the civil and environmental engineering to studying disasters. Katrina 2005, it was a big cultural event and it came, you know, after nine 11. And so here I am sort of reorienting my career around how do we recover from disasters, infrastructure disasters in particular. And we all thought at the time it was gonna be about rebuilding as fast as we can and adapting and moving water and glass and steel around. I think that's wrong. Well let me, I think that's insufficient because every single resilient adaptive response requires at its core a human being. 0 (35m 32s): We are not gonna build our way out of disasters. We must have resilient human beings to have resilient infrastructure. So I started studying psychological resilience, human resilience because I found the concrete and the steel and the dams, it wasn't satisfying, it's all down at the bottom of the pyramid. That's where civil engineers work in, you know, the safety and the shelter. But once I've gotten into Maslow, I'm like, what would engineering be like if we move up into interpersonal relationships? Sense of self-esteem, meaning-making. So that's where the self actual engineering comes from. What if I am the object of my own engineering design my life? 0 (36m 17s): Who would I become if I could design my own life the way an engineer would design a highway? So now you understand the transition that I'm making and how I've tried to equip myself by reading a lot, talking with a lot of people and studying my own experiences, writing, sharing them with people and getting feedback. One of the things that I read was Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine. He's got two books and I'm not gonna remember, he's got so many books, you can look him up, he's prolific. But Waking the Tiger was one and the other one escapes me at the moment. 0 (36m 57s): But in one of these he talks about when he was hit by a car, he was crossing the street car, ran him over, he's on the sidewalk and he is conscious like in some sort of a third party way. He's a little dissociated but he knows who he is, he knows he's here. And there happens to be, there's an off-duty paramedic. The off-duty paramedic wants to immobilize him because from the paramedic's perspective, there could be a hairline fracture in the spine and if that gets displaced, spinal cord could be severed. The paramedic is taught, is trained, immobilize the victim to minimize any further physical damage. 0 (37m 37s): And Levine practically begged the paramedic to leave him alone because he knew that he would have to tremor, that he would have to shiver that this is part, sometimes it's called tremble, that this is part of his natural nervous system reaction to the trauma. And I, I don't have a lot of experience with hunting. I used to fish when I was a kid, but some hunters have reported the same thing that the animal either right before it dies or right before it gets away, it will have this para pathetic burst of energy and we can kind of see why that would be good for flight or good for fight. But Levine's thesis is that immobilization is how to turn trauma into PTs D they finally got him in the ambulance and there was again a medical doctor. 0 (38m 28s): She was on the scene and she rode with him or maybe it was the ambulance nurse, I can't remember. There was somebody in there and it was a woman and she took his policy, asked about his vital signs, he lied a little bit, you know he's not a medical doctor but he said, I'm a doctor, you know, tell me you know what's going on. And so she reported back whatever the data was and he said, oh thank goodness because now I won't have P T S D. He knew that the trembling that he did had released the trauma to an extent where it could be resolved. He will always have the memory of the stressful experience, but he will not have the automatic feelings and the flashbacks that are attached to the memory. 0 (39m 9s): And he's concluded from this that it was because he was mobile. Now this is not the only case. Immobilization is a reliable way to turn a stressful experience into a traumatic one. P T S D then has to be resolved or it will constantly come back. This is another section of of Peter Levine. He talked about these cheetah cubs. So you know, you gotta imagine the African Savannah and there's three cheetah cubs and what do they do? They play all the time, right? But the lions shows up and the lions is gonna attack the cheetah cubs and eat them. But they run up a tree and they escape until the lions gets bored. 0 (39m 51s): And you know, I don't know where mama cheetah was, but this is the experience that they had. And it kind of reminds me of growing up as a kid in the seventies. You know, who knows where the parents are? The children are sort of free range. So what do the Cheetah Cubs do for the rest of the day? They take turns playing lying attack like you know, you two be the Cubs and I'll be the lion and I'll pounce. And they go through the experience reliving it in play from a position of control. It's very improvisational theater. And we see kids do this all the time. Leonard Cohen wrote a book called Playful Parenting, which I want you to read because you're a new mom and it's a wonderful book. And he talks about, you know, maybe you have to take your daughter to the dentist and you know it's stressful and it's new and she cries a little bit and the dentist has to get in there and maybe she's got a cavity and the dentist say, oh this will only hurt a first second. 0 (40m 46s): And she comes home, what does she want to do? She wants to play dentist, she'll get the dolly out, but she's not the patient anymore. She says to the dolly, this is only gonna hurt a little bit, you know, and then, then she'll play the, no, no, that's not true. It's terrible. You know, she will relive in play the trauma from a position of control that resolves the trauma. You have the memory of the dentist but it's not attached to the negative emotions. Well all of this is fascinating cuz you can see how I'm picking up puzzle pieces and it's not like I have the box top. I don't really know what it's supposed to look like when I have all the pieces, but I'm trying to fit them together because in Bessel VanDerKolk's book, the body Keeps the Score. 0 (41m 27s): He talks about How trauma is held in the body. He never really gets into the the epigenetic, you know, modification of gene expression. But he would talk about different parts of the body and where you're holding the trauma. Louise Hay is great on this too. You know, all these expressions. He's got a chip on his shoulder. Oh he's a pain in the neck. Oh that guy's a pain in the ass. You know, all of these expressions that relate to the body help us decode how the body holds those feelings. So Mander Kolk writes this wonderful book and then last chapter, he puts it on, it's kind of like an addendum and he talks about his son was trying out for a, I don't know, theater camp or something. 0 (42m 10s): He talks about using improvisational settings to recreate the experience of trauma. And it's one of these caveats, you know, don't do this at home and the potential of improvisational therapy to allow a patient to relive their trauma from a position of control in their imagination. You don't actually have to have the experience again, you can have the imagined experience, the play experience and it can give you because the cells of your body don't know. They don't know if this is pretend or virtual or if this is really happening to you. It's your the brain. Bruce Lipton talks about this in the biology belief. 0 (42m 52s): He says they take orders from the brain. Yep. So if you are able to reimagine the experience from a position of control and resolve it, there's a chance you will no longer be carrying it as P T S D within your body. There's one more book and I'm trying to remember the author. It's called Goodbye Darkness. This man was a soldier, 18 year old Marine, he went to the Pacific, he's gotta fight the Japanese. And then he became an author very well accomplished. Maybe it's William Burrows but I wish I could remember Goodbye. Darkness is the name of the book. As an older man, he's almost retired but not yet cuz he's a writer. 0 (43m 35s): He goes and he visits the battle scenes, he visits the villages and he has a dialogue with his younger self who I guess was promoted to sergeant or something. And he goes back to the foxhole where he spent a night like up to his armpits in cold water. He relives these experiences as an old man from a position of control. He re experiences the flashbacks. He's in dialogue with his younger self and at the end of the book he takes his old pistol, his service pistol, he throws it into the Pacific Ocean. He's like, I don't need this. He's resolved. And then he writes a book about it, which is a great book. So if you're curious, there are far better authors than me. 0 (44m 17s): I'm just like a portal to this whole rich body of literature from more qualified people that have been very helpful to me. 2 (44m 25s): There are so many really cool exercises and NLP that you can do for a ton of trauma work. One of my favorite ones that I've done is, so you imagine yourself going and, and you probably know this one, but you go into like an empty theater and you sit in the front row like the, you know the front row and the center and then you pull out like a tablet. So it's like you have to imagine like a screen and a screen and you find a traumatic moment of your younger self and you're watching it from like a third party point of view. And there's a couple ways that you can do this. One is that you now as the adult go back and give that child what they need. 2 (45m 6s): And again, you're watching this all happen like on a screen, on a screen and then feeling what that little girl would've felt like what that little boy would've felt like that comfort that they needed that parent that they needed, that friend that they needed. And then that's like one way to do like inner child work. Another one is if you're watching a traumatic moment happen on a screen, on a screen is right before the terrible thing happens, you have to think of something ridiculous, like something really comical to kind of like snap you out of that loop. And it's supposed to help get rid of like any lingering trauma or negative feelings or because they've done a lot of studies and now especially with like the epigenetics and gene expression is trauma is turning into like disease or disease. 2 (45m 52s): And Bruce Lipin does a ton on this and Joe Dispenza does a ton on this. Joe Dispenza and Bruce Lipton show that gene expression is more important than hereditary. Like her, what you inherit from your genetics. So you might have this gene that will turn into breast cancer for exam example, but your environment and your interstate is what turns it on or off. So that's why I think it's like really important to go through your own traumas and in something like a divorce is traumatic, like it doesn't have to be something that's worthy of a lifetime movie. Like all of these things do kind of stack up. And they've also done studies where like all of those traumas stacked actually contribute to weight gain. 2 (46m 36s): So when people go to like these very, I guess spiritual retreat centers where they meditate for a week or and they do a lot of forgiveness work or if they're doing psychedelic work with the shaman or if they're maybe doing work, whether it's heat therapy and cold therapy that all of a sudden like 20 pounds comes off and they didn't change lifestyle, wow. It was just all of this baggage that they were holding onto. But I think it, so I have Graves disease, I'm like kind of like a scroll right now. I have Graves disease, which is an autoimmune issue. And then when I was trying to figure out like how do I fix myself because I don't wanna be on medication for the rest of my life, all of the doctors were like, there's nothing you can do about it. 2 (47m 18s): I'm like, well that's not the answer that I want. That's kind of when I found Joe Dispenza and Bruce Lipton and it's like no, your interstate is so indicative of your outer state and how you feel and doing things that do cause pain. I think it makes you less stressed in your regular environment. You're like, if I can handle this, I can handle anything else. So whether it's like a really intense workout protocol or if it's three minutes in a nice bath or if it's 25 minutes at 150 in the infrared sauna, right? Like you have to create healthy stressors that you're in control of so that you learn how to control your interstate when you're out in the world and you're not in control, right? Someone cuts you off if someone's rude to you, if someone's picking on your kid, whatever it might be. 2 (48m 2s): Otherwise you end up being like this very reactive person and then that's not healthy. And for me what's really interesting is I was someone who like, I feel like you have emotional neutrals, if that makes sense. So like some people, their neutral is very easygoing and happy-go-lucky. Some people it might be aloof, some people it might be very aggressive. Like we all kind of have these neutrals that we find ourselves in and my neutral was super aggressive. Like I was just really always ready to be angry and then all of a sudden I spend one week with one individual that kind of really brought out my worst side a lot. 2 (48m 42s): And then I, that's when my Graves disease kicked on. It was like that gene had always been there, but I had just given myself just the right amount of stress to turn it on and I kind of knew that this person wasn't someone I should be spending a long amount of time with. And the interesting thing is, is that's Grave's disease is hyper and it's a lot of heat and to me like that kind of resonates with that anger emotion. So you're trying to say that I can't fix it, but everything else with new science is saying no. Like if you can kind of control your mind and calm it and cool it, then this can kind of calm and cool as well. And in my experience that's helped out tremendously. 2 (49m 23s): And then I saw that you had written an article with cold exposure and thyroid. So I was hoping to kind of get, I guess like your knowledge based off of that. Cuz I know like a lot of people talk about Hashimotos, which is the opposite. So I'm curious about both of those when it comes to cold therapy. 0 (49m 40s): Okay, so there's a lot of things that come up Before you were asking me about protocols for stress, I said I didn't really have one. That's true, but it, but I do have habits, we'll call them. I had an experience this morning and this morning was, there's a lot of transitions happening that are stressful for me right now. And some of those bubbled into a text exchange I had with the woman who was most important in my life. And I could feel that we were on the verge of one of the misunderstandings that has been very damaging to our relationship in the past. And, and we know this and we both, and we're gonna like back off, we're gonna take a minute. 0 (50m 21s): So I said I gotta get in the Forge. A lot of people ask me should I shiver or not shiver? And I don't really know what the advice out there is. If you're working on weight loss, you're working on other things. But I can tell you what works for me. I guess Huberman has advice on this and I've forgotten what Huberman says. When I'm in the Forge and I'm stressed and I'm anxious, I bring on the shiver and it can happen, you know, 20 seconds and I will feel it and I'll say, good, I'm gonna go with it. Because just like Peter Levine, I wanna release this stress, I wanna release this anxiety. So I did that this morning. 0 (51m 1s): I came out of the Forge after only like two and a half minutes of shivering and I got a lot of brown fat. I don't ordinarily shiver unless it's for one of these psychological reasons. And I had a realization and it was, oh, when I used that word, it doesn't mean the same thing to me as it means to her. And if I think about it, didn't she just tell me two days ago about this conversation she had with her daughter about this and the other thing? And I'm like, she thinks I'm saying something that is very different than what I'm really saying. What could spiral into an argument or a disagreement could also be a misunderstanding. 0 (51m 41s): So when I came out of the Forge, I was like, aha, because of experiences that she had in her marriage. And I've already mentioned, you know, we're both divorced, she's gonna interpret when I say these things in this way as if, I mean there's some things that I have in common with her ex-husband. There are ways that we are alike and there are ways that we are different. And I, so I called her up, I said, maybe I've had her revelation, I just wanna share it with you and see what happens. And I said, I think it's like this. And she said, it could be, I'll think about it. And that was all we needed to say to repair the relationship instead of, you know, it turning into an argument that takes a couple of days to work its way out. 0 (52m 25s): What was helpful to me is I will say to myself, well because of things that have happened to me, I have these thoughts and these feelings and these automatic, but it also is true for others because of things that have happened to you or because of things that have happened to her. She will have automatic negative thoughts and fi and I, I've gotta be okay with, maybe that's not what she wants to experience, but it's what's happening to her because like me, her body is programmed by evolutionary biology, you know, to have these automatic thoughts that are supposed to keep her safe. So that's the shivering. I say shiver metabolically people are in different places and typically if you're shivering because of the cold, that's shivering thermogenesis and you know that you're getting enough cold dose to activate or to stimulate your brown fat, recruit new brown fat shivering spine. 0 (53m 18s): But I shiver for other reasons because I do so much cold exposure and I've got so much brown fat. And that brings us to the thyroid. Ben Bickman is really good on this. He wrote a book called Why We Get Sick. And it's all about insulin resistance. According to Ben, and I'm gonna paraphrase 'em, but something like eight out of the 10 leading causes of death in the United States are from insulin resistance. They're all just different manifestations of insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is when the cells in your body will resist the introduction of more carbohydrates. My son was diagnosed with type one diabetes when he was six years old. 0 (53m 57s): So I had to learn a lot about insulin. I had to learn a lot about diet and nutrition. Insulin resistance is when the membrane in that coats your cells will resist insulin's attempt to put more carbohydrates in the cell because they're trying to protect the mitochondria. The mitochondria is where chemical energy in food gets oxidized to electrical energy that runs our body and they're subject to damage. In particular, radical oxygen species can damage mitochondrial dna. They have their own DNA N separate from nucleic dna. And insulin resistance is an attempt to slow things down to the mitochondria. Cause you're eating too many carbs, you're not getting enough exercise to protect the mitochondria from damage in aging. 0 (54m 41s): Great. If you don't get enough cold, you will lose brown fat and brown fat modulates the thyroid. There's more thyroid hormone coming outta your brown fat than any other organ of your body. The brown fat and your thyroid are in constant communication with one another because thyroid is essential for a regulating metabolism, but it is brown fat that is stimulating and modulating the thyroid. So Adrian, Adrian J, she's now a cold coach she's in, created something called the Mira Co Method and it's much more feminine in its approach. You're never gonna hear Adrian say Breathe motherfucker you know, she's never gonna yell at you with a bullhorn because her thing is, there's no bullying, there's no coercion. 0 (55m 28s): It's you must enter and exit the Forge as if you were royalty. And so you always have, you know, your composure, and no one bullies the queen. So I really like Adrian's approach. And she did it because the, the more masculine, like aggressive reproaches, they weren't working for her. She grew up in Florida, she moved to Arizona. She hates the cold. She's one of those people who say, I can't stand to be cold. She will argue with you about the thermostat. And she had no brown fat. Because as kids, you're born with a lot of brown fat, but you lose it over time. And if you don't, I don't know, go skiing or play hockey or do something cold, then you never get the cold exposure necessary to cause you to shiver, recruit new brown fat. 0 (56m 15s): And your thyroid gets outta whack. When the brown fat is restored, the thyroid condition is better managed. So it's no longer hyper or hypo. It will come into alignment with where it needs to be because it's got the brown fat on the other end to continue to communicate with. So we've covered a lot of ground. I don't have a protocol, but Adrian has a method. It's called the Miraco method. There are meditations on our, you know, YouTube channel. And one of the most critical aspects of this is the breath. The breath is the gateway to those autonomic aspects of, of your body that ordinarily you can't control. 0 (56m 60s): You know, your heart just, it beats the way it wants to beat your, your stomach does what your stomach does. You don't have to think to digest, you know? And so that's the autonomic nervous system. And these sympathetic functions do what they need to do. Your breath will speed up, slow down, but you can control it. So it's that gateway into somatic awareness and structuring your breath. It's okay if it's fast, it's okay if it's slow, but making it conscious and structured, that is the key to being in the ice bath. Hmm. You cannot tough it out. Sometimes you'll sell ice baths to, you know, football players and UFC fighters and bodybuilders, and when they go in there with an attitude like I, I can take it, you know, 45 seconds is about as long as I've seen anyone last at 34 degrees. 0 (57m 52s): When you surrender, you breathe. Adrian's mantra is, this is what cold feels like. And it's a dialogue that you're having with your body. Every cell in your body is screaming at your brain, we're gonna die. Get us outta here. What are you thinking? You know, you have to talk back to the cells in your body and you can't tell them a negative because if you say, don't forget your homework, your kid is gonna say, what? Forget my homework. You know, you have to translate negatives in your cells. Can't do it. So instead of saying it's not that bad, you are not gonna die. 0 (58m 32s): All the negatives your cells aren't gonna get. Instead you tell them what is happening? This is what cold feels like and your toes, you know, in this imaginary dialogue, they'll say, what? No, this is what death feels like. No, no, no, you're feeling cold right now. And the toes are like, really? That's it? And your brain's like, that's all just be cold and everything comes down. Now you're strengthening your vagal nerve. You're strengthening your parasympathetic nervous system. This is how you're building resilience. And there's a good measure of it called heart rate variability. Your heart is not a metronome. I'm getting that from J Wildes at Hanu Health. 0 (59m 12s): He does some really good podcasts. He goes, your heart is not a metronome. It's not supposed to keep the beat like it's the bass player in a jazz band or something. It is supposed to lengthen slow. You breathe in, that requires a certain heart rate. You breathe out that requires a different, you know, pulse. All the things that are happening to you, your heart is expected to adapt. So heart rate variability is a measure of how adaptive your heart is. There are a few things that you can do to improve your heart rate variability that will improve your psychological resilience. And Jay talks about them. You know, exercise, loving relationships, get a good night's sleep, all these things we already know these things. 0 (59m 56s): Old exposure will improve your heart rate variability. And it's only in the last, say five to eight years that studies have come out as wearable technologies have improved and people get more data, they start fooling around with cryotherapy and other biohacking things to see, oh, what does this do to my heart rate variability? So it's no accident that the cold exposure that challenges our sympathetic nervous system that creates in us the flight, fight, or flight response, gives us this safe environment in which to practice psychological resistance, strengthen our vagal nerve, strengthen our parasympathetic response shows up in this physiological marker called heart rate variability as improved adaptability, improved nervous system adaptability, improved psychological resilience. 0 (1h 0m 49s): It has the additional benefit of recruiting brown fat, fixing your metabolism and you know, modulating your thyroid to the point where you can resolve hypo or hyperthyroid conditions. And Adrian has experienced this, but you don't need to get to 34 degrees to do the metabolic stuff. 60 degrees is fine. You don't really need to get uncomfortable. Oh wow. I, no, it's like, just turn the thermostat down to 60. I forget where you are. But you know, when I was going to school in northern New York, you just go outside for a walk. In the wintertime you get plenty of cold exposure and the metabolic benefits are terrific, even at mild cold. 0 (1h 1m 30s): But if you want to go for the psychological that I'm doing, it's gotta frighten you. So like when I look down and I don't see ice in the water, I'm like, all right, I guess I, but I can do 50 degrees indefinitely. I want it to be 34 with ice. I want the slush around my neck because that's what scares the crap out of me. And I only get that now at those super cold temperatures. 2 (1h 1m 58s): Yeah. So I have a bunch of just like the top, top searched questions when it comes to Cold plunging. So is there a difference? Let's do some rapid fire between, yeah, like is there, is there a difference between the temperature? So like you said, you can do 60 or 50 degrees from metabolic and then it gets more mental after that. That is there. Like where's the gradient for that? 0 (1h 2m 23s): It's subjective. There's something called what I call the thermal co thermal comfort level. Most of the studies are done on people who are naive to cold exposure. Not all of them, but they'll take, you know, 12 undergraduate healthy men who are not acclimated to the cold and then they'll stick 'em in the cryo chamber or, and so most of the people that we're studying in the scientific literature don't have a lot of experience with cold. Their thermal comfort level might be mid sixties. As soon as you get below the thermal comfort level, you start getting metabolic benefits and shivering is a sure sign that you're getting metabolic benefits. You gotta go after you become acclimated. You gotta go lower and lower and lower to the point where you get the scared shitless benefit. 0 (1h 3m 7s): For me, that's down 35, 34 degrees with ice in the water. Do not go colder than 32. It's possible to do, even though it sounds thermodynamically like how could, but I had a couple of my former students, they're engineers at Morozko Forge now, and they put 18 pounds of Epsom salt in the Forge, which I thought was a great idea. You know, I encourage 'em to do that. We're gonna get some magnesium sulfate benefit. But then they took the temperature setting down to 30, they plunged in 20 inches of slush. They came out, they did seven minutes each. I got a call two days later and he says, I don't know Tom, what's going on? 0 (1h 3m 46s): It feels like I got this bad sunburn all over me and I'm itching and I'm not comfortable at all and I feel bloated and swollen. I'm like, I don't know. I've never, I've never did that happen to the, you know, Marvin and Mike, I gotta put 'em in. Did that happen to Mike too? Yes. Wait a second. Turns out they gave themselves frost nip, which is not as bad as frost bite, but it feels like a bad sunburn. You must keep your Forge above 32 degrees please. But 33, you can scare the crap outta yourself. So temperature matters and it is a subjective experience of where your comfort level is, depending upon how much brown fat you've 2 (1h 4m 30s): Built. I find this with a lot of men, especially young men. And that story is kind of proof of, of all of this is that they get very competitive and then there's kind of like this machismo that goes into it. And especially when it comes to something like an ice bath or like a sauna and how much can I endure? So How long is too long and how many days a week is too many? Or if there is, because I've seen these challenges on TikTok. So Russell Brand jumped in and he had his timer and he was calling out Joe Rogan and he's like, your record is in the past and I'm just skating by it. I was like, okay, but How long is too long. Has he been Russell Russell? You know, I think it was 10 or 20 minutes. 2 (1h 5m 11s): And I was like, Hmm. So when, when can you, when should you have to get out? 0 (1h 5m 16s): First of all, Russell Brand and Joe Rogan are not young men, old men, middle-aged men can be competitive too. And there are good evolutionary biological reasons for it. I don't want to discourage men from being competitive because we're born into this life and if we do not compete, we're gonna fail on an evolutionary scale. The other thing is that cold exposure, ice baths, at least for men, I don't have any data on women, but for men is a hell of a Testosterone boost. I discovered this accidentally. I was doing my ice bath and I would come out, I'm cold and I was doing it because I had a prostate scare. 0 (1h 5m 59s): I got an elevated prostate specific antigen, which is a marker. That means I'm at high risk for cancer. I started talking to a lot of guys and I'm like, I don't even wanna biopsy. I'm gonna try keto. I'm gonna try cold exposure to see if I can bring this PSA level down. And I did from seven down to less than one. So now I'm no longer at elevated risk, but I'm getting my Testosterone levels checked because when you go for these blood tests, you just like men's health, you know, give it all to me. And my Testosterone went up from mid 700 s to like 1140. So men are wired, especially the men do an ice baths and then exercise afterwards for competition. And some of that is Testosterone fueled Joe Rogan, he's got a Miras co Forge Russell brand. 0 (1h 6m 43s): He's got a friend of ours in the uk, a brass monkey. And as far as I'm concerned, Joe Rogan always wins because he's got a better ice bath. But the only reason Joe did 20 minutes is cuz Jocko Wilnick called him up and kind of shamed him into it and said, Joe, what was that? I mean, he was posting from his forage. This was a couple of summers ago. And Joe's like, oh, there's ice in this. You know, I'm gonna quote Joe. He says, I'm such a little bitch or something. Jocko calls him up and says, get in there. You know, my son will do 20 minutes or so. So now Joe, there's the 20 most boring minutes of video of Joe Rogan's entire career are him in his sport. 0 (1h 7m 24s): You know, just doing this the whole time. My experience has been if you're doing more than three, four minutes, you're just showing off. And I like showing off. So that's a reason to do it, you know? But then Susanna Solberg from Denmark, she published a study in cell Huberman, talks about it a lot. And she was one of the people who studied experienced cold acclimated winter swimmer, she called them Now in Denmark, you know, it gets cold. You hop in the field, it's like four degrees C, you swim around, there's a tradition of this. 0 (1h 8m 4s): She says that of the winter swimmers that she studied that had more brown fat, it was activated when they were exposed to cold. And it's exactly what we would expect. She said, how much winter swimming do you do? And the average in that group was 11 minutes a week. So she concluded that we don't know what the minimum really is, but if you're doing 11 minutes a week on average, you can expect you're gonna have brown fat, healthy metabolism, good insulin sensitivity, and all the benefits that she measured when she p e t scanned the winter swimmers. She also said, it doesn't seem to matter whether you're doing, you know, two minutes, six days a week, that'll get you to 11, it'll get you to 12, you know, or if you're doing 4, 4, 3 or it doesn't seem to matter how you break it up. 0 (1h 8m 50s): If you wanna do your 11 minutes all at once, you know, be my guest. Having said that, Russell brand is full of crap and Joe Rogan is full of crap. The world record is something like, you know, an hour and 40 minutes. And I'm not going for a world record the most that I've ever seen, like right in front of my eyes. This is my girlfriend's 12 year old daughter. I get a lot of questions as it's safe for kids. It's wonderful for kids. Kids have a lot of brown fat. You do not bully them in. You let 'em get out whenever you want and they're gonna be fine. But her 12 year old daughter has cerebral palsy and it means that she doesn't experience the same sensations that you and I do from the waist down. 0 (1h 9m 37s): So she saw me doing it and kids, you know, they're I, they're like, well, you know, I want to try. So she asked her mom and she's waiting around. She says, this feels really good in my feet. Can I go down to my waist? And mom's like, well, sure, you know, it seems all right Tom, is that all? Yeah, sure, that's fine. She goes down to the waist, can I go down to my armpits? Yes, you may 12 minutes go by. And mom says, is this okay? I'm like, it's fine. You know, I've done 22 minutes myself. And if she were in any danger, then she would get out like, we're not fine. 20 minutes go by, mom says, is this okay? As far as I know, it's fine. 25 minutes go by and she says, I want to get her out. 0 (1h 10m 19s): I think I, I feel like I should have to get her out. I said, I tell you what, if she doesn't come out by her own volition at 30 minutes, I mean we have an adult responsibility, we will make her come out. You know, she did 30 minutes. She, she wasn't, because for the first time she's feeling things in a different way than she's felt them before and she wasn't ready to give up that sensation. She comes out and to be honest, she wasn't walking real well. Like it, it kinda like when your leg falls asleep and you know, you, you stumble about until the circulation returns. It was kind of like that. And her mom understandably protective and worried. 0 (1h 11m 1s): But you know, I've been through some cold adventures. I'm like, here's what we're gonna do. We live in Phoenix, Arizona, put her in the car drive, crank the heat up all the way, drive her out in the sun like the a car in Phoenix parked in the sun in the park, gets up to like 160 degrees. It's called a car sauna. So just drive around for 20 minutes and help her rewarm in the car as hot as you can take it, which she did. And the daughter has asked, can I do this again? Can I do this again? Neither one of us is really comfortable with her going all the way to 30 minutes. But until Russell brand gets past what a 12 year old girl with cerebral palsy can do, he's got no business giving Joe Rogan any crap. 0 (1h 11m 43s): Which is the whole point of the story. I do two to four minutes a day 2 (1h 11m 48s): When it comes to the reheating. So that was also like a really commonly asked question. Is there a method like is it hot, cold, hot or just hot cold or cold? Hot? You hear like you wonder how much is wives tales when you'd ask the internet. So some people were saying that in Russia a lot of them would just do cold therapy and if it was in the winter, there's not really any rewarming. So then they were seeing liver damage and they didn't know if that was correlated or not. So do you have any advice when it comes to reheating and and the protocol, whether it's hot, cold or cold? Hot? 0 (1h 12m 26s): So Berg will say, and I think Huberman backs her up on this, always end on cold. Adrian prefers to end on cold. But when Solberg and Huberman are saying, if I remember correctly, it's because they're really talking about body composition, weight loss, metabolism and they want your brown fat and your mitochondria to do the work of rewarming. If you don't challenge your brown fat and your mitochondria, it's kinda like you're cutting your session short. You're not working them as hard and that's fine. But I'm not doing it for weight loss. I'm kind of, I am not a light individual, you know, and I used to be obese, I lost a lot of weight, but it wasn't from cold exposure, it was from controlling my diet. My preference now is to rewarm with exercise. 0 (1h 13m 7s): And there's reasons for it. One is when you get in the ice bath, you experience what's called vasoconstriction. All of the blood vessels that carry the blood to your limb, they shut down because your body is gonna protect your internal organs, keep the blood in your torso so it stays warmer longer. Vasoconstriction is carried out by smooth muscle tissues and there's no way you can't go to the smooth muscle gym, you know, and work out your smooth. You have to do it with vasoconstriction. There's also vasodilation and vasodilation opens everything up, pours the blood out to the surface of the skin. And this is, you do it when you're too hot. So if you go in the ice bath vasoconstriction, then you go on the sauna vasodilation and you are pulsing your smooth muscle tissue in the best way possible to exercise it. 0 (1h 13m 58s): And this is good hypothetically for things like varicose veins or deep vein thrombosis that you're improving your circulatory capacity, at least hypothetically. I haven't finished the article on it. Okay, so all that's good to know. But here's something else that's good to know. When you get in the bathtub and you draw a warm bath, you probably recognize when your kid, that your fingers get wrinkly, you know you're in there for 20 minutes and why are you crinkled up like a prune? That is baso constriction. Even though you're warm, you can't sweat when you're in the tub or in the hot tub in vasodilation in the sauna, you know that the blood goes to the surface of the skin. 0 (1h 14m 41s): So you can release heat. That's one way of your, your body trying to defend itself against too much heat. But without sweat, that wouldn't work because it is the heat of evaporation. The sweat comes to the surface of your skin, the blood is there, the water evaporates and that's what carries the heat away. If it's 140 degrees in the Sona and you are not sweating, you're dehydrated. That's a big freaking problem. Get the heck out. The blood goes to the surface so it can lose the heat via the sweat. When you're in the tub, you can't sweat away the heat. And so instead your body will do vasoconstriction to try and protect the surface of the skin from taking too much heat in from the hot tub. 0 (1h 15m 23s): So this is my only advice on the sort of back and forth thermal contrast therapy. Resist the temptation to rewarm in your hot tub or your hot shower. You know, if you're really, you know, if you did 20 minutes and you're out in the Joe Rogan territory and you're like, I gotta drive to work. Do not operate heavy machinery when you're rewarming. You know, because cognitively your brain's offline doesn't know what's going on. You got so much nor epinephrine and so much dopamine going in there, you should not be driving. So if you're in a pinch, you know, take a hot shower, get in the hot tub, rewarm yourself. However, I like dry heat, wet cold. It sounds miserable. 0 (1h 16m 5s): But then again, I'm in from Phoenix so you know, when I wanna rewarm, I go out in the sunshine, I will, I got my steel mace and I do my 360 s and I got my little kettle bells. And you don't have to do a lot to get the blood going back to the surface of the skin. Get the vasodilation and the Testosterone boost. It's the other reason that I like doing exercise for rewarming. If you do your exercise first and then your ice bath, like everybody in high school tells you you should do suppresses your Testosterone, do your ice bath. Oh, and then your exercise boosts your Testosterone. I'm getting that from a 1991 study. We've known this for a long time in Japan and they tested it both ways. 0 (1h 16m 49s): Use exercise to recover from the cold, not the other way around. And I'm, I'm really hap I only have data in men. The Japanese study was only in men. But if I could get women to do this and send me some numbers, that would also be wonderful. 2 (1h 17m 4s): No, that's so interesting because that's what you've always been told is after a hard workout or if you're an an athlete and you're playing a game is then you get into get into the ice. So if you're doing it to raise your Testosterone, then you really should reverse it. My husband actually, he slipped the other day and like really hurt his hip. So he's been trying to like do a lot of movements to try to get that feeling right. And he's been doing the ice bath and he says he notices a huge difference in that just and he's not going in super long cause we've only had it for maybe like a month now. So he's only doing like, you know, a couple minutes at a time. But he says even just those couple minutes is really helping with inflammation in his hip. 0 (1h 17m 43s): That's doesn't surprise me. The vasoconstriction is part of how the Forge will help with inflammation, but it's not the only way. There's a really neat book called Survival of the Sickest and it's separated into chapters, talks about diabetes, it talks about sickle cell anemia, it talks about how these illnesses might have evolutionary adaptive origins. And one of the things that it tries to explain is when you go out in the cold, you know, you get your snowsuit on, you're making your snowman and everything and you're having a great time and then you gotta pee and you're like, what? 0 (1h 18m 23s): Now I gotta unzip. And cuz little kids are coming in and outta the house and the parents are going, didn't I just send you but mom, I had to pee. When you get cold, it has a diuretic effect. And the survival of the sickest book is saying it's hypothesizing that shedding water from your body will up the ionic strength in the sort of the electrolyte concentration in the cells because you are less dilute. Like the water that you're peeing out leaves, it takes some salt with it, but it leaves a higher concentration of salts in the remaining cells in your body. And that is to defend you against frostbite. 0 (1h 19m 3s): Now this is his hypothesis, if I'm paraphrasing it, Hmm. Correctly, but the phenomena of I got cold and then I had to pee. People experience this all the time. Now it might sound a little weird for you to go up to your husband and say, Hey you've been peeing a lot lately. But people who suffer from like chronic inflammation not, may not just localized like hip, but they feel bloated and then they begin practicing cold exposure, they'll get the vasoconstriction and they'll get some of that diuretic effect. And sometimes they'll send me a note and they'll say, you know, Dr. Seager, this is kind of embarrassing but you know, I did four minutes in the Forge and I can't stop peeing. 0 (1h 19m 44s): And I'm like, are you working on inflammation stuff? They're like, yeah, I mean it's really been helpful. Well where do you that water's going? You know, right now you're U Aretha. Very positive. 2 (1h 19m 55s): Oh wow. Yeah, I didn't know that. So I'm, I'm still breastfeeding and I think the consent, it's the data's like still out. Like I've seen one woman that you recommended in one of your articles that was Cold plunging during pregnancy. So I tried to find her Instagram and reach out, but I don't think she saw my message regarding breastfeeding and cold exposure. And it, I was just seeing some of the comments and it seemed to be kind of 50 50. So there is some kind of biological component and variability whether you are gonna dry up or not. So for me, I was like, I don't wanna take that risk so I'll just wait till I'm done breastfeeding. But you know, I'll def I wanna get my, all of my hormones taken before and after. 2 (1h 20m 38s): So I mean I'll definitely let you know about the Testosterone in women because there's not a lot of information when it comes to the women's variability, when it comes to anything biohacking. And I thought it was really interesting too that she was doing the cold exposure while she was pregnant. So I, I would've thought that was like a big no-no. Especially once you get into the colder temperatures. But her doctor signed off on it. So I was like, that was really surprising to me. It's a 0 (1h 21m 1s): Big yes. 2 (1h 21m 1s): Yes. 0 (1h 21m 2s): I wish. 2 (1h 21m 3s): Yeah. Cause inflammation's a huge issue when you're pregnant, especially later on. Yep. 0 (1h 21m 9s): Especially if the pregnant woman does not getting enough protein. The protein requirements during the last trimester are legendary. Like you can hardly eat enough, you know, triple cheeseburgers or something, but, and the fetus needs it. But the way that our diet is organized and our cultural expectations, most American women are not getting enough protein. It can lead to toxemia to, actually, I always pronounce this wrong preeclampsia, but in any case you'll know it if you see swelling, some people are gonna call it edema, but I'm not a medical doctor so I call it swelling, especially around the ankles below the knee. And that's a good indication that you should get some cold exposure because you are metabolically getting outta whack. 0 (1h 21m 53s): The metabolic demands of pregnancy are extraordinary and cold. There's really good epidemiological data on this. Cold is good for pregnant women because it maintains the insulin sensitivity that they need. We're not even talking full on gestational diabetes. A pregnant woman's metabolic demands are so acute that they can sometimes develop a condition called gestational diabetes. But even before then there can be gestational insulin resistance. We wanna avoid that at all costs. The cold is terrific for pregnancy, but after you give birth, go back to heat. Don't use heat when you're pregnant. 0 (1h 22m 35s): It can be dangerous, but it's good for breastfeeding. And I'm getting this, this is kind of, I don't know how else to put it, like a, a ancient southeast Asian, you know, like Cambodian midwives tale or something. The, as you said, the science is not settled on this, but if you talk to people with a lot of experience, they'll say, well you know, I had this friend who is a Thai midwife and she said blah blah blah blah blah. And so this is folk wisdom that results in scientific hypotheses. And how many fricking times have we discovered through science that the folk wisdom had a practical basis. 0 (1h 23m 18s): We aren't looking for what is theoretically proper, we're looking for what works. And it's so the woman that you saw that you reached out into on Instagram, she called me up and she said, should I be doing cold while I'm breastfeeding? I said, can tell you what I've been reading? And this folk wisdom is use heat. She said, okay, she got on the sauna, she's like, Thomas is great, it's working well for her. So remember what we said about advice all, all we can do is say, well this is what worked for me. I think you've got it right Candace, don't go too heavy on the cold exposure. If you wanna fool around with it, it's no big deal. But the heat is gonna keep all the, the fluids moving through your body. 0 (1h 23m 57s): You're right now you are a miracle. I don't know how you could take like, you know, spaghetti and meatballs and turn it into breast milk, but that's what you're doing and you have an obligation to maintain this miracle heat is good for you 2 (1h 24m 14s): Right now. Oh it's, it's incredible. That was actually like my, my push gift for, for this baby from my husband. So he got the infrared sauna and it's also partially for him cuz he's all the time as well. But I noticed like, cause your healing process is so intense during like your bones are shifting, your organs are shifting now having to create milk, you're exhausted beyond belief and just like sitting in the sauna even for, you know, 15, 20 minutes at a lower temperature of like 1 30, 1 20, you're a different person when you come out. You have like this, this new vigor that you wouldn't have had. So I find that playing around with some kind of temperature, whatever is available to you is extremely beneficial, whether it's cold or hot. 2 (1h 24m 56s): And eventually, hopefully it will be both for me soon as I'm done with my breastfeeding and I don't have to worry about potentially drying up because I just see that ice bath and I wanna get in so bad because I'm, I know all the benefits, especially with the brown fat. So I used to live in upstate New York and got plenty of cold exposure there, but now we're in North Carolina and it's, we're cold for like maybe two months out of the entire year. So not a lot of cold exposure at all, but I just wanna see how long in there as well. 0 (1h 25m 24s): County. 2 (1h 25m 27s): Okay. I was in Binghamton. 0 (1h 25m 28s): Where were you in New York? 2 (1h 25m 29s): Binghamton, New York. So kind of near Syracuse. 0 (1h 25m 33s): Oh alright. Yeah, 2 (1h 25m 35s): Yeah, 0 (1h 25m 36s): Yeah. I was in Potsdam. I also lived in Rochester. Okay. I've been through Binghamton many times. Yeah. And 2 (1h 25m 43s): I agree not a lot going on there. 0 (1h 25m 45s): You never really know until you've experienced negative 40, you know, which we got a couple of times when I was an undergraduate. But also you brought up Testosterone and women and I would love to get your labs because there's a common misconception, the most important sex hormone in men is Testosterone and the most important sex hormone in women is Testosterone. And the people don't realize that women carry much more Testosterone than they carry estrogen. And it's because when you get your labs back, you know, if you're measuring these things, Testosterone is typically reported in one type of unit and estrogen is reported for, I don't know what reason, but in the different units. 0 (1h 26m 27s): So if it, I forget what it is, but let's say it's nanomoles per deciliter for one and then it'd be like milligrams per lit or something like this. When you report them this way, the estrogen number is bigger than the Testosterone number. And so a lot of women are like, oh of course you know, I'm a woman, I have more estrogen. No you don't. When you convert them to the same units, women can have like three times the Testosterone as they have estrogen and it means that women can suffer from Testosterone deficiencies just like men can. But there is no FDA approved Testosterone therapy for women. And that means that any clinician 2 (1h 27m 7s): Which is crazy 0 (1h 27m 8s): Wants to, to get a woman on Testosterone the, isn't that crazy? Yep. She's just gotta make up a male protocol and try and fit that into the woman's cycle, do a lot of test. It's like hit or miss. And what this means is that there is a hidden population of women who would benefit from higher Testosterone levels and they have no idea. And even if they did have an idea, they really wouldn't know what to do about it. I think I wanna tell the woman's story more so that doctors have better idea of what to do and that women have a better idea of what questions to ask. 0 (1h 27m 51s): You could help me with that. 2 (1h 27m 52s): Yeah, when it, yeah, so w I was getting some of my labs done by one of our friends who is like a hormone specialist locally and he actually right before I got pregnant actually had me on Testosterone cuz mine was so low and then I had to come off of it while I was pregnant. But there's like, there's no studies on it so he's very ahead of, of the science at this point. But he was saying that especially women that are about to be menopausal, which I'm obviously not there yet, that Testosterone therapy can be hugely beneficial for them. So if there's also another way to boost it naturally through cold exposure, it's like well why not exhaust all those options, see if that affects your labs before you go into like a bioidentical Testosterone or whatever they're giving you, whether it's like a cream or a pellet. 2 (1h 28m 44s): So one of my, my friends, she is in that age range and they gave her a pate and it's like way, way, way too intense. So now she's having to readjust but there's nothing to go off of. There's no science for women. So a lot of it is like being our own Guinea pig, which can be a little bit scary and frustrating. So you have have to be with someone that you trust that's constantly checking your labs and modulating as you go along. Like how do you feel? But they were saying that women, especially with like your skin and cuz we're all vain creatures, but as you get older you start to lose that vibrance and that radiance and it gets dry and scaly and that's due to low T. So often if you just adjust your Testosterone levels, you'll start to get more vitamin. 0 (1h 29m 24s): I had no 2 (1h 29m 24s): Idea, more appearance in your skin. 0 (1h 29m 26s): Everything you're saying sounds right. It's a big challenge and I hope that women are gonna talk about it more with one another. 2 (1h 29m 32s): I hope so too. And I think that, I mean even like that one I, what's the, what's her name? The whim H instructor that's in Germany I believe, or you mentioned her in one of your 0 (1h 29m 44s): Articles. Yeah, Josephine Wark PhD in microbiology, I believe you can find her on Instagram. And she is very welcoming of women with medical questions. She's not a medical doctor but she practices science in microbiology and she talks about her experiences with cold during pregnancy. Her Instagram is full of anecdotes and people write in and they ask her questions, she'll say she doesn't know when she doesn't know and she'll say, well I've read these studies when that's the case, I think she's wonderful. 2 (1h 30m 17s): Yeah. And then you, if you leave your comments publicly, then her followers will, will also share their anecdotal experience. So obviously it's not hard science, but where else do you start? So I think with more women getting involved in just like the benefit of social networking and social media is that you can just personal like story share and then kind of make your own decisions based off of that. And then eventually we'll have enough cumulative data to say, okay, well this is the protocol for X, Y, and Z. But so far, I guess to sum it up, I would say cold Plunge is good while pregnant obviously check with your doctor postpartum, you want heat cold can affect your, your milk supply. 2 (1h 30m 57s): So just know that if it's something that you wanna play around with. And then I think a lot of women too are getting more aware of like where they are in their menstrual cycle. A lot of people are waking up to the side effects of birth control and they're trying to just control like their, their cycle just by keeping an app or taking their hormones daily, like on those like little p sticks. So I'm curious too maybe how different therapies would benefit you where you are in your cycle? Because they're saying workouts for women, you should kind of adjust based off of what phase you're in. So certain times you should be more doing more calm exercises like yoga and other times you should be doing like hits and something a lot more intense. 2 (1h 31m 39s): So to kind of maybe cycle through the heat and cold exposure where you are in your cycle. But again, it's gonna be just like trial and error and just experience sharing like how did I feel after this? You know what I mean? 0 (1h 31m 50s): This is one of the best things about the internet is it connects people who can share experiences in, you know, when I was a kid and when I was in school learning science, there was this cultural idea that if it wasn't proven by science, it couldn't be true. Which is all a bunch of crap like experiences or where hypotheses come from. You can't contradict someone's experience, but you also have to recognize that it doesn't necessarily apply to you. What works for them may or may not. You have to experiment with yourself. And the whole biohacking community has benefited from forums, from the kinds of questions that you're talking about and from social media cuz people get to share experiences. 0 (1h 32m 33s): But the, what often gets lost is the flip side. We'll do a scientific paper and we'll have human subjects and we'll gather data and then someone will say, look, with a 95% level of confidence and as if that proves it. And then if it didn't work for you, it's somehow your fault. But what about the other 5%? Right? Like just because there is a scientific study and somebody who slapped the bell curve on doesn't mean you know where you belong on that bell curve. You still have to experiment for yourself. Everything that I do now, I treat as a hypothesis. It's an experiment. 0 (1h 33m 13s): And regardless of how, you know, scientifically proven it is. That's just a way of prioritizing the different experiments I wanna run. 2 (1h 33m 24s): No, I, I love it. So can you, before we go, I definitely want you to plug your SubstackDr because I love reading your articles. So where can people find your SubstackDr? How can they support you? Where can they get a Forge? All of that good stuff. It's like your shameless plug time. 0 (1h 33m 40s): I am Seager tp, so it's S E A G E R tp and that's me on SubstackDr. S E A G E, RTP dot SubstackDr dot com. That's me on Twitter, that's me on Instagram. It's not very creative. If you Google Seager, you're gonna get a lot of baseball players. I used to be on page one, but then Corey Seager hit a bunch of home runs and now I'm hard to find. So Seager TP is a more reliable way to find me. Awesome. And thanks for that. 2 (1h 34m 12s): Yeah, I I found you right away when I googled you. Yeah, you popped right up for me on page one. I think when you put your full name with the PhD, it comes right up. 0 (1h 34m 24s): That's why 2 (1h 34m 25s): I put it down. I definitely check out his SubstackDr everybody. It's, it's excellent. 0 (1h 34m 30s): Thank you. This has been a pleasure, Candace. You're 2 (1h 34m 33s): Welcome. Yes, for me as well. And I would love to have you back on in the future cuz I have more notes to go through. Let's do that. And that's it for this week's episode of Chatting with Candace. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope to start producing some more episodes, but hopefully two a week is gonna be the goal. We'll slowly work our way there. If you liked this episode or any past episodes, please share it with a friend or on social media and if it's been a while, you could always leave another five star review. That helps us a ton with the algorithm. Then I usually repost it onto Twitter or do some shout outs. So yeah, I'll see you guys next week. Thanks for listening.