Episode 325: The Uncommon Science of Cold: Brown Fat, Resilience & Recovery with Dr. Thomas Seager

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The Uncommon Science of Cold: Brown Fat, Resilience & Recovery with Dr. Thomas Seeger

Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. On this podcast, we talk about all things to increase muscle, increase performance, improve body composition, do all of it within a flexible framework without destroying your health. Today on the podcast we’ve got Dr. Thomas p Seger. He is a PhD and associate professor at the School of Sustainable Engineering and Built Environments at Arizona State University.

He’s also the co-founder and CEO of Morasco Forge. So if you like cold water immersion and all things related to that, you’re gonna love this episode. He also has a book called Uncommon Cold, the Science Exposure of Cold Plunge Therapy, and a new book he just put out on testosterone. We’re gonna talk all about that and a ton of stuff related [00:01:00] to cold water immersion, such as brown fat, metabolic health, physiological resilience related to cold exposure, a little bit about heart rate variability.

Some other things related to testosterone and cold exposure. His book, the Uncommon Testosterone Book. Mitochondria, brown adipose tissue alternatives to TRT, how he got morasco going, and a whole bunch of other stuff. So I think you’ll find this podcast super interesting. As I’ve been doing cold water immersion most days that I’ve been home since.

Oh man, this is, over five years now, which is wild. I ended up getting one set up right before Covid happened, and since everyone was in lockdown, I got to do cold water immersion almost every day for quite a while. Well over a year. I still do it right now. I do think it [00:02:00] is useful. But we get in all the intricacies of it here.

The sponsors of the show today, we’ve got some electrolytes from Element, which are very tasty, high sodium electrolytes. You can go to the link below for that. We’ve got my friends over at Teton. So if you’re looking for ketone esters, this is a great way you can put your body in a state of ketosis without having to do a ketogenic diet.

Each can currently has about 10 grams of a ketone ester. The nice part about ketone esters is they much more reliably raise your ketone levels in your blood compared to ketone salts. Usually in my experience and based on literature, ketone salts will probably only get you around one, maybe 1.5 millimolar levels of ketones ketone esters can go quite a bit beyond that.

So they have some really cool stuff coming out. Very soon, as soon as I get the green light to let [00:03:00] you all know, I’ll let you know about that. A full disclosure, I am a scientific advisor and ambassador to them. Also wanna let you know that the Flex Diet cert opens coming up June 16th for one week, 2025.

If you’re looking for ways to. Improve your knowledge of nutrition for performance and body comp. We also talk about recovery via sleep, neat exercise, and eight total interventions. Everything from protein, fats, carbohydrates. How do you set all these up to increase metabolic flexibility? And do it in a sustainable habit based way.

So it’s not just, hey, have this X amount of carbohydrates and you’re good to go. We look at, as I mentioned, exercise movement, and then primarily focus on the nutrition. We’ve got a ton of great expert interviews there. Everyone from Dr. Stu Phillips to Jose [00:04:00] Antonio, and Dr. Mike. Sby, Dr. Dan party Dr.

Eric Helms and many others. So if you want more information on that, hop onto the newsletter. Go to mike t nelson.com, get on the newsletter, and then you’ll get all of the information delivered directly to your inbox. Side note, if you’re really into cold water immersion this fall, coming up in October, 2025.

Physiologic flexibility cert will open again. That is the four areas to improve your body’s resilience, become easier to recover faster recovery and more anti-fragile. The intervention number one there, that pillar is temperature exposures we talk about in this podcast. So both cold water immersion and also sauna.

So if you’re really interested in that look for that one. That will open again this coming fall. So enjoy this podcast, Dr. Thomas [00:05:00] Seeger all about all things cold water immersion related.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Tom. How are you doing today? It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m doing really well. Yeah. Thank you so much for doing this. I see you’ve got your cold plunge out on your apartment in Arizona. There. You’re all good to go Right

Dr Thomas P Seager: over my shoulder. This is my Morozko ice bath.

It’s up on the 32nd floor with me here in my high-rise apartment in downtown Phoenix.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Nice. I had a buddy years ago was gonna convert a freezer and he was gonna stick it on the second floor of his apartment, and I looked at where he was staying and I’m like, I don’t know what one, what the structure outside your apartment is rated to.

It looks pretty hokey. And then two, I don’t think you understand how much water one of those things actually holds if you had an issue. So. Yes.

Dr Thomas P Seager: Having it [00:06:00] outside means that the water, it drips down below me. Yeah. And that’s a lot better than, to the apartment on the 31st floor. So it’s a consideration and I’m doing this podcast.

But Mike, would you please not tell my landlord?

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yes. Yeah. No. Yeah. How did you, because you were the first person I ever heard of talking about cold Plunges. You’re the first one I ever even tried was a Orozco Forge many years ago actually. And I had heard about it and I started doing some research on it, looking into it.

And we so happened to meet up with a friend who had access to one, and it was way colder than I thought it was gonna be. Like, I grew up in, I live in Minnesota, like we’ve done the old polar plunge and that type of thing. And yeah, that was a long time ago, but there’s something different about. Willingly doing it and getting in.

And then when we did the jumps in the lakes, like many years ago, it was just get in, get out. But it’s different to get [00:07:00] in and to catch your breath and to stay with it and not just instantly get out because everything in your body says, this is stupid. I should get out of this thing.

What am I doing? That sounds right.

Dr Thomas P Seager: Yeah. That’s the sympathetic nervous system response. That’s the fight or flight response. You first get into the ice bath and your body is wired to say, don’t do this. Yeah. You should leave. Right. This is dangerous. Every cell in your body is telling your brain, we are gonna die.

That’s the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system, and it is there to keep you alive. But your ancestors like mine, they had to do things in the cold water, whether that was forage or fish gather mussels or whatever it is that they relied on the water. For their sustenance, and sometimes that water was really cold.[00:08:00]

So after about 30 seconds, when the dopamine hits your brain and the norepinephrine begins to hit your brain and you’re over that gasp reflex that is associated with the activation of the sympathetic nervous system, the dive reflex sets in. The dive reflex is the parasympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system.

Your heart rate will drop down, your brainwaves will begin to lengthen. Your body is automatically without your instructions preparing you to dive into the water. To do whatever it is that your brain is telling all the rest of the cells in your body, this is what you need to do right now. After two or three minutes, if you’re not cold trained, you might feel the urge to shiver, which is fine.

It means you’ve activated your metabolism. The cold thermogenesis is keeping, is defending your core body temperature. And let’s say you come out, you will feel fantastic.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. That’s the craziest [00:09:00] thing. I converted an old freezer back in 2020. Yeah, 2020 at the beginning of the year, right before Covid and everything happened.

So when we were doing all the lockdown stuff, I, my garage is a training area and so I got to do that almost every day. And the thing that I noticed about it, and I’ve still done it most days when I’m home, about five years later, I always thought that once I’m more adapted, that the process of getting in would get easier.

The weirdest part, and you’re laughing ’cause you know what’s next is that it got easier, but it never got easy. Yeah. Like even five years later, there’s right before you get in and it doesn’t, if it’s 45, 37, 50, you always have that hesitation of like, what am I doing? This is stupid. Why am I trying to do this again?

Like, I, my assumption when I started is that part would go away or be very minimal. But it seems like there’s always that hardwired [00:10:00] portion that just never completely goes away.

Dr Thomas P Seager: Viktor Frankl wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning. Yes. Yeah. It was half memoir and half scientific sort of investigation into his experiences in the Nazi concentration camps, the death camps, and being shuttled around and how to survive.

One of the things that he said was he coined a phrase called anticipatory anxiety. Nothing bad has happened yet, but anxiety, it lives only in the future. Fear can live in the present moment, but anxiety exists in your imagination when you’re imagining things that are going to happen. They haven’t necessarily happened yet.

So Franco has this phrase, anticipatory anxiety. There is another phrase, and this one was coined by Dr. Tim Nos in South Africa. Yeah. Called. Anticipatory thermogenesis. Oh, I didn’t know he came up

Dr Mike T Nelson: with that. That’s cool.

Dr Thomas P Seager: He’s the one who invented it because he was [00:11:00] monitoring Louis Pugh. Louis Pugh is this extreme cold water swimmer from the United Kingdom, and he’s gonna swam at the North Pole, and he does this to draw attention to the plight of the environment.

And he wants to protect the ocean. So he is gonna go swim in Antarctica. And where are you gonna train South Africa? He contacts Tim Nokes to monitor his training, and Tim Noakes noticed that Louis Pews core body temperature would go up by more than a degree Celsius before he even got into the water.

What no realized is that his brain was signaling his brown fat through his nervous system to begin the process of thermogenesis in anticipation of getting cold. So to tie this back to Frankl. When you’re experiencing anticipatory anxiety, your brain is imagining something that hasn’t happened, but your cells respond to the clues, to the signals that your [00:12:00] brain is sending out.

They have no choice. Dr. Bruce Lipton is really good on this. He wrote a book called the Biology of Belief. Yeah. Yeah. Your people must do what the brain is signaling them to do. So for me, I really, I need the ice in the ice bath to have this experience. If I’m looking down at the water and I don’t see ice, there’s no signal that this is so cold, it’s gonna frighten me.

It just looks like regular water. But when the ice is in there, it gets the anticipatory anxiety. It get, maybe I get some of that anticipatory thermogenesis and I, the fear that exists in the future, the anxiety grips me and I start thinking, I. I could skip a day.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. I don’t have to do this today.

Right. Just

Dr Thomas P Seager: tomorrow, on Instagram today. Right, right. Who would know? That’s where discipline comes into play. That’s where Joe Rogan says, you gotta kill your inner bitch and you no negotiation. Just get in there and do [00:13:00] it. The first five seconds are always hard, and that’s because I’m at 33 degrees. If it’s about 40, 41, it’s boring for me.

I can stay there. What feels like indefinitely, because I’ve done a lot of cold training, but for me, 33, 34 degrees, still hard. I sometimes have to tell myself I’m just gonna do 15 seconds. But then 15 seconds go by and I’m like, what was I even worried about? I can hang in here. No problem. I’m gonna do two minutes.

I’m gonna do three minutes today. And it turns out to be no big deal.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. That’s fascinating. It’s like a feedforward mechanism. So as the liver kicks out glucose or glycogen in a feedforward mechanism in anticipatory of high intensity exercise, where a lot of other loops in the body are mostly what they call negative feedback like testosterone.

Right. Which we’ll talk about later is you’re looking at this thing to see if it’s there and if there’s enough there. Well, we’ll just start shutting down production, kinda like your thermostat in your house and if it’s warm enough, like don’t turn the [00:14:00] furnace on. We don’t need the furnace at this point.

Yeah. So. Go ahead, keep, well,

Dr Thomas P Seager: keep you are correct that in anticipation of the fight or flight response, your liver will release glycogen, increase the glucose levels in your bloodstream so your muscles can make use of that glucose so your brain can make use of that glucose in what your body thinks is a crisis.

When you get into the cold Bath, it begins to clear that glucose out almost right away. So we have good continuous glucose monitoring data on this. You might spike up to 140 for a few seconds and then start coming down, while that glucose gets cleared out of the bloodstream to produce heat.

So another thing that happens when you first get in is the white fat cells in your body will release fatty acids into the bloodstream. The, your body understands that the glucose will be gone fast, and it needs to start burning fat in order to keep the [00:15:00] thermogenesis going. It doesn’t know how long you’re gonna be in this ice bath.

An intermediary metabolic product of that fat burning are ketones. So the fastest way to produce endogenous ketones inside your body is get yourself right into that ice bath. You don’t have to be on a zero carb diet for three days to get into ketosis. If you’re willing to get into the ice bath for four or five minutes, you can kickstart the whole process.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah that’s fascinating because that’s one thing I’ve been trying to figure out for a while is. So I got in and did, I’ve done this three, four times now. I haven’t done it with a CGM, that’s actually what I’m doing next. But I’ve had some clients do it with a CGM and I did it with the old school, poke your finger type thing.

So get out, had everything set up and you’re like, like trying to hit your finger. And the first time I did it before I went in, I was like fasted, I think it was around 87, 85, somewhere in there. And I only did like three minutes, got out and I think the first time I took a measurement it was like 59 or 60.[00:16:00]

Wow. And I was like, wait a minute, this is wrong. I goofed up the thing I got, fluid in it or something like that. So did it again. It was like in the seventies, it was always like super low, which would be technically hypoglycemic. Right. But like what you were saying, I felt fine. Like if you would’ve asked me, I’m like, there’s, I had no, no symptoms at all.

And so that’s interesting that I, do you think there’s something more. Metabolically, I guess profound going on than what most people realize in terms of a very, because you think about even exercise and you think about, okay, I was in the cold for three or four minutes, so this is a extremely short duration to see something like that.

Like a very profound effect.

Dr Thomas P Seager: Cold exposure is an exercise mimetic, so it will metabolically do a lot of the same things for you. That exercise will do, but it’s not [00:17:00] exactly the same. That is cold Exposure is the best way to induce MIT phasia, which is removal of damaged mitochondria and MIT biogenesis replacement of those damaged mitochondria with new higher quality mitochondria.

Exercise will do this too, but cold exposure is better at it. What exercise will not do is brown fat cold exposure will beige existing white fat cells by making new mitochondria inside them. And cold exposure will br will recruit new brown fat into your body the way that exercise never will. And what can exercise do that cold can’t?

Well, you can’t build cardio by getting into the Yeah. Face bath and so there’s some things that only exercise will do. There’s some things that only cold exposure will do, even though there’s a lot of overlap between them.

Dr Mike T Nelson: How much do you think we can modify adaptations to brown fat [00:18:00] with cold exposure?

And then the follow-up question to that is, how long do you think they stay? Because one thing I’ve noticed, and maybe you’ve noticed this too, is it appears like, I’ve done it enough now where I can push my adaptation to it pretty fast. But when I first started, it took quite a while. Like I would start at 50 degrees and I would go slow.

And I’ve done this with several people since then, and it took like a long time to get down into temperature. Where the temperature felt. Okay. Like I could, do what I call the David Goggins, Joe Rogan distrust method. Right. Where, force yourself to do it and you just live through it.

But to get to the point where it felt relatively easy took, many months to get down in temperature. Wow. But I would away wasn’t anticipating you were

Dr Thomas P Seager: gonna say

Dr Mike T Nelson: many months. Yeah, but go ahead. So we’ll come back to that. Maybe there’s a better way to do it. But when I would leave, I go to Texas, let’s say for two or three or four weeks, and I would come back at least it felt like I started over again.

And maybe that’s not true, but maybe there’s a one, a nervous system [00:19:00] component to it. And then two, do we know how long it takes to build up brown adipose tissue? And does that, is it an asymmetric thing where it takes a long time to build up, it goes away pretty fast? Or is it like cardiovascular aerobic adaptations where it takes a while to get up here, but it’s a slow erosion on the other side too.

Dr Thomas P Seager: These are great questions. We do Now, how know how long it takes? Two straight weeks where you go every day into the cold plunge and you will notice a change in your brown fat if you have the PET scanner that indicates whether there’s brown fat in your body, you can measure it. It used to be that medical doctors thought there was no such thing as brown fat in adult human beings.

They thought, well, infants have plenty of it, because the muscles aren’t mature enough to shiver. So infants use brown fat to defend their core body temperature. That’s how infants stay warm. But the doctors said, everybody grows out of it. And it was around 2007, 2008, where a team in Sweden said, we don’t think that’s right.

We’ve got these [00:20:00] PET scans and they’re from cancer patients. And the PET machine, it uses a lot of power and you gotta keep the instrument room reasonably cool so the machine doesn’t overheat. And some of the people who would go into that instrument room would activate their brown fat and show up on the PET scan.

Well, the Sloan Kettering Institute said, no way. You know those Swedes don’t know what they’re talking about. We’re gonna go over 10,000 of our cancer patient PET scans, and we’re gonna find out Sure enough. 5% of them had detectable brown fat on the PET scans. But Mike, that also means 95% of the adult population that went through the Sloan Kettering PET scanner had zero detectable brown fat.

Fat. That’s terrible because brown fat is not just for cold thermogenesis. It is an essential secretory organ. So it’s associated with lean body mass and it’s associated with metabolic health, but it’s also associated with [00:21:00] higher levels of brain derived neuroprotective factor and FGF 21, which helps clear out the amyloid plaques that are, commonplace in Alzheimer’s dementia.

One of the jobs of the brown fat is to protect the brain against damage, whether that’s mitochondrial injury, metabolic dysfunction, or traumatic brain injury. Another job of brown fat is to communicate with the thyroid to regulate the metabolism. When there’s no brown fat for to convert thyroid hormone from the inactive to the active form to stay in constant communication with the thyroid, then the thyroid can become dysregulated.

Whether that’s Hashimoto’s or whether that’s Graves disease, restoring the brown fat will modulate the thyroid function so that there are now cases of people who had Hashimoto’s and the medical doctors tell them, well, this is a lifetime chronic degenerative disease. You’re gonna have to take these meds for the rest of your life.[00:22:00]

No, they don’t because after they start a program of ketosis and cold exposure, there is no indication of Hashimoto’s abnormalities in their blood markers at all. And as long as they maintain a healthy metabolism, there’s no reason to think that their thyroid dysfunction is ever gonna return. So how long does it take?

Two weeks. You will notice changes. These are physiological changes. And then how long does it take to lose? Well, we’ve never done that experiment, but there’s an informal experiment that happens in Phoenix, Arizona, and it’s called the Phoenix wimp. You are in Minnesota. I went to school at Clarkson University in Northern New York.

So this is why I say, hockey country, because they just did the NCAAs and Clarkson had to play Wisconsin in the Final Four, and unfortunately lost, oh. Right. It’s March, late March. This is the time at Clarkson when the [00:23:00] students come out with in the shorts and shirtless and they’re playing Frisbee in the snow.

And they’re like, spring is here. The days are longer than the nights finally. But the fact is graduation will be the first week of May and we’ll all be taking bets on whether it’s gonna snow at graduation. The point is, in Phoenix, you lose that tolerance for cold if it gets down to 55 degrees. I’ll see my neighbors, they got their ski caps.

Oh yeah. And they got their big Winter Co. They’re going to spring training baseball games, and that’s why these teams come here. The snowbirds come down from Canada and they say, huh, we’re gonna get some sunshine. But the people who’ve lived in Phoenix for a year or two are all bundled up in scarves and mittens.

It’s ’cause they have no brown fat. It takes two weeks to build it probably takes more than a year. To lose it. There are other thermal defense mechanisms. Vasoconstriction is one, and they fade out slowly. They will come back fast if you [00:24:00] are willing to challenge your body with the cold.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Oh that’s super interesting.

And on the brown adipose issue, is that doing something to convert the T four to T three? Is it like acting as a converting type organ, I guess in air quotes, or how does that work exactly what it does?

Dr Thomas P Seager: Yep. So you get this the thyroid manufactures thyroid hormone. It responds to thyroid stimulating hormone to.

Rev up its activity. So if you have very high levels, for example, of thyroid stimulating hormone, it’s like your body is really trying to reach your thyroid. It’s like we want more thyroid hormone, so it revs up the stimulating hormone, but the thyroid isn’t necessarily responding. And part of the problem is the thyroid doesn’t have the brown fat to stay in communication with and to cooperate with in the production of active thyroid hormone.

Without brown fat performing this essential conversion of inactive to active forms of thyroid hormone, it’s no wonder your thyroid becomes dysregulated.

Dr Mike T Nelson: That’s [00:25:00] fascinating. I’ve explained it to clients like, imagine the TSH is like you stepping on the gas pedal, but your engine is very poorly tuned.

Correct. Like you’re trying to get the car to go faster. You’re jamming on the gasp. It’s like just not, it’s not doing anything. It’s right. Got it. So tell us like what would be the protocol you would use? You mentioned two weeks and then you kinda looked at me funny when I said a couple months.

So if there’s a better protocol, like I’m all about testing it out, like what would you recommend I.

Dr Thomas P Seager: There are two things going on. One is the physiological and we can measure the physiological. And the other is the psychological, which is typically only reported sort of your own personal subjective experience.

So the physiological I am surprised two months, and I don’t know if you were going every day, but for me it’s every day in the morning you can see the sun shines on my balcony and I get out there, I get a, like, I call it my huberman dawn, ’cause he’s such a big deal about [00:26:00] waking up to the sunshine.

And I get in my ice bath. However, I spent a week in Cartena Columbia. The Army Corps called me up where I have some friends and they said, Hey, we really want you to come down and be part of this NATO science workshop. It’s in Cartena. Will you talk about artificial intelligence and synthetic biology? I don’t know anything about these things, Mike, but they respect that I’m a thoughtful guy, so weak down there.

And I’m like, I’m gonna jump in the ocean. The problem with Cartena is it’s on the Caribbean side of the country of Columbia, not the Pacific, which would’ve been probably cool, but the Caribbean, it’s like swimming in pea soup. It’s always warm. There is no cold anywhere. The shower isn’t cold, the ocean isn’t cold.

A week goes by, I come back to Phoenix and I’m looking at my Morozko. I had lost my psychological resilience. Oh yeah. I got in and it was like the first cold plunge I’d ever taken all over again. Some part of me was like, this is nuts. [00:27:00] Now. It’s not that I lost my brown fat, I lost my nerve because I was out of practice.

That’s the psychological component. And so it might be that part of the acclimation that you experienced wasn’t the physiological changes. Maybe there you were fine, but psychologically it took a long time to habituate yourself to what’s gonna happen and to learn how to cope.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve definitely noticed that in other forms too, where if I haven’t done like a max 2K on the rower, I know with my sub max numbers like where we’re about what I would be.

But if I haven’t done a lot of interval stuff and specifically, or I haven’t done short intervals, and I’ve done this before where I’ve tested my 2K, my time was okay, but my RPE, so radiant perceived exertion was just off the charts. It was just so horrible because you’re almost like, you’re, like you mentioned, I’m psychologically not accustomed to sucking.

Again. [00:28:00] I know what that felt like in the past, and this one felt even worse than that, even though my numbers were not that far off. But then I do a training block where I do some high intensity intervals. I do some other stuff to prepare myself, and then you do it, and it still sucks. It always sucks when you do a high RPE for a test, but it wasn’t quite as bad.

It was almost like I lost that mental capacity to just get used to the suckiness again.

Dr Thomas P Seager: I I can relate to that feeling. When you’re mentally out of practice, it impacts your physical performance because Oh, sure. The pacing, the attitude, the like you mentioned, just David Goggins through that stuff.

But discipline will atrophy over time. If it is not, discipline is like a muscle. When you exercise it, it gets stronger. Huberman had Goggins on his podcast and he said he was saving this little piece of neuroscience to explain to David. Berman said, there’s a [00:29:00] portion of the brain called the anterior mid cingulate cortex, and it will only grow when you do things that you hate doing.

If you, I’m quoting him now, he goes, if you love the ice bath, the anterior mid singulate cortex doesn’t grow at all, but if you hate it and you do it anyway, that is the portion of your brain in which discipline resides. Hebrew went even a little further and he said, some scientists believe that is the seat of the will to live, and it is larger in athletes who push themselves to the edge of that motivation.

It is probably, although I’ve never seen the data larger in somebody who’s doing ice baths at temperatures that frighten them.

Dr Mike T Nelson: What is the line between? So, so my little hypothesis, and this is based, this model’s been established for a while, is the eustress versus distress. So the EU stress of do something, it may be a [00:30:00] little bit harder, but in general you can recover.

And I could come back and do that thing again in a shorter time period. A distress event would be more like an athlete’s competition where it’s probably a lot harder, but the only thing we care about is performance. But the cost to that thing is much longer. If post event, it may take you five, six days, even a week or two to get back to normal training again.

My bias is cold is this weird area because it could go either way. And so even though it always sucks, I try to do. I’d say more of a eustress model where get in, get your breath, hang out for 30 seconds. And then I, other people probably described this too, but it’s like waves. Like my goal if I’m gonna do it daily, is to just get past the first wave where you get in.

It’s hard, it sucks. You get control of your breath. Okay. It feels a little bit easier. Okay. Now you’ll, at some point there’ll be like that second wave where it starts to get harder. Maybe just get through that a little bit and then get out. My hypothesis is that I’ll [00:31:00] be able to make up for the intensity by doing more frequent exposures versus the distress where, all right I’m plucking all the ice outta here and come hell or high water, I’m gonna stay in for five minutes.

I think both of ’em have value, but what are your thoughts on that model and how do you think about it? I guess

Dr Thomas P Seager: there was no modern concept of stress until scientists working in Canada named Hans C cellier invented it. And I wish I could pronounce his last name correctly, but he noticed that there were these generalized responses no matter what the infection or the experience, the body had these generalized responses.

And he’s like, well, how can this infection or this experience result in the same generalized response in the body? And so he created this concept called stress. Now we understand that there’s eustress EU being a a [00:32:00] Greek prefix, meaning beneficial or good for you, rather than diss, which was another prefix.

So we understand, and the classic relationship between stress and response is an upside down U curve. We see this with micronutrients. You don’t get enough selenium, for example, and the response is poor. Your health is poor. You get just enough selenium and you’re in that, healthy response where your body has the micronutrient that it needs too much selenium and it becomes a poison.

The same thing is true for iron and lots of other things that happen into our life. The same is also true for exercise. You don’t get enough exercise and of course your body is suffers. That is your low on that response. In an unhealthy state, you get just enough and you have an optimum health, but too much exercise results in injury.

The classic line between dis, sorry, eustress, where everything’s going great and you’re helping your body and distress is that [00:33:00] injury. When a pro athlete pops an ACL or rips an Achilles tendon, they have crossed the line from eustress to distress and it can take weeks if not months. Take a look at Aaron Rogers.

He’s a Morozko customer and he wrote us right into his Netflix special. It took him almost a year to come back from his, I believe it was ACL injury. But cold is different than exercise cold. You can cross that threshold where you are now getting too much dose. You’re no longer optimum, but there is no catastrophic failure like a ripped tendon or a torn muscle, or a traumatic brain injury.

It’s more of a gradual failure. Hypothermia takes a long time to set in. Yeah. Give you an example. The world record holders for, immersion up to your neck in ice cubes used to be like an hour and a half, and Vim Hoff held that record for a little while and it just got broken and [00:34:00] it got broken by another.

These guys are over four hours. They go into a hypothermic state. You’re like, well, this is ridiculous. They’re clearly in the distress zone, and they are, but then they rewarm and they’re fine because there is no period of injury that is so drastic or acute that it requires a long, months long recovery period.

Even those people who have drowned in cold water. And they appear at the emergency room. No vital signs. There’s no pulse, there’s no brainwaves. They’re not dead. Like Billy Crystal’s character in, princess Pride, they’re only mostly dead. Yeah. I talk to an emergency room physician and she says, until we have attempted resuscitation, we may not declare a cold water drowning victim dead because she has brought people back to life 24 hours after they lost all signs of like vital signs of life.[00:35:00]

And that’s because the think the old thing was they had

Dr Mike T Nelson: to be warm and dead, correct? Right. They had to rewarm ’em and make sure they were there to warm temperature, do resuscitation, and then they could, pronounce that they were dead.

Dr Thomas P Seager: There are some dramatic cases in the medical literature of how cold creates a temporary state of like suspended animation.

Now, he not, it sounds like a hibernation or torper, right? Yep. And you could wait for minutes. Still no heartbeat. But there’s also no brain damage from the lack of oxygen because the body is cold. Heat is totally different. The eustress to distress line in heat, for example, if you’re thinking about the sauna is much more acute, much more dangerous, much more long lasting. When people die in a sauna, and this is rare, but it has happened from over exposure, they cannot be resuscitated because the brain is much more vulnerable to heat than it is to cold. So there is no magic line between distress and [00:36:00] eustress in the cold.

The rule of thumb, if you’re just starting out, is go cold enough to gasp, go long enough to shiver. Then after a couple of weeks when you’re cold acclimated, you don’t even have to stay in there long enough to shiver. Your body is already producing the heat via non shivering thermogenesis in your round fat.

If you do find yourself shivering, it’s probably for a different, either you stayed in too long or maybe it’s something that’s happening in your nervous system rather than happening metabolically. Maybe there’s some trauma, some unreleased anxiety or some stress that will be resolved through the shivering because shivering is a nervous system function movement, not just a metabolic function.

Yep.

Dr Mike T Nelson: No, I like that. And the way I think about it is obviously this is well established for drugs, but like the therapeutic window, right? So what dose do you need to see a beneficial effect versus the dose, the LD 50, the dose that could potentially kill you? You obviously want a large therapeutic window so you can get a [00:37:00] dose, but I.

If somebody, Ethel screws up and takes three pills instead of one pill, like she’s not gonna, you don’t want it

Dr Thomas P Seager: to be

Dr Mike T Nelson: fatal, right? You don’t want it to be fatal. Right? Yep. Where with heat, that is much more narrow. And then if you look at people who’ve gotten like Frank heats stroke and have survived, the body seems to put like take the gain and just crank it to 11.

Right? Like they become extremely heat intolerant very fast. It’s almost like you went past the part that was really bad, so we’re gonna take the gain to make you so sensitive to heat now, at least acutely that you’re never gonna hit that point again because you’ve basically almost died. Or with cold, it seems like that range is much, much larger.

And even when you do go past that, at least from what I’ve seen, I’d be curious in your opinion, there doesn’t seem to be as much of that air quote negative effect, even when you step out and go too far.

Dr Thomas P Seager: Agreed. I am convinced that these experiences of heat and cold [00:38:00] modify your epigenetics. So there’s Dr.

Bruce’s gene, right? We’re we’re not modifying our DNA, we are modifying the expression of our DNA. And one of the ways that this happens is to coat the DNA with these methyl groups. It’s called DNA methylation in a way that can turn a gene off or to change this epigenetic structure to turn a gene on.

So someone who has this near death experience in the heat and result as a result becomes extremely heat sensitive, has likely. Modified the expression of their genome through this epigenetic structure that creates an automatic response. They don’t have to think about it. Their body is now rewired to respond to heat in a certain way.

I believe you can also use experiences to un modify or to remodify. Your epigenome. Cold is likely one of those experiences [00:39:00] and the story that you tell yourself, that is the reason you’re getting in cold. The meaning that you make of the experience is part of that epigenetic modification. These stories exist in our brain, in our imagination, and as Lipton points out.

The other cells in the body are, can’t tell the difference between what has existed in our imagination and what has existed in, whatever. We’re gonna call this real world. And one of the reasons I’m convinced of this is because of Kelly McGonigal’s book, the Upside of Stress. Yeah, she wonderful book.

Exactly right. She makes an error in there. She talks about the cold pressure test and she’s trying to get the reader to appreciate how difficult the cold pressure test is. And she says, I forget what page, but if you were to immerse your whole body in ice water this cold, you’d be dead in two minutes.

She’s wrong. You can tell Kelly Mcgon has never done an ice bath, but she’s dramatizing how cold creates this stressful experience. And the whole [00:40:00] book is about pointing out the meaning you make of that stressful experience. Is the consequence, or it is what dictates the consequence of the stress? The people who tell themselves a positive story about their stress.

Ah, it’s really hard. I’m looking forward to when we get through this we’re gonna be a lot stronger on the other side of this. We’re gonna make it because we are adaptive and we survive. Those people live longer. The people who say I can’t believe it. This job is killing me. It is those, the story that they tell themselves is more important than the experience that they’ve had.

So one of my rules is there can be no coercion, there can be no bullying there. You only get into the ice bath of your own volition because when you come out and you feel like a conquering hero, you feel like you have cheated death. You feel like you have, exercised the will of your mind over the weakness of your body.[00:41:00]

There’s such a tremendous feeling of accomplishment. That’s part of the experience, and we can’t take that away from somebody by saying, breathe motherfucker or whatever, I’m not gonna get a megaphone out and yell at people to get in there. You must release your, you must relax your way into the cold.

It’s very difficult to tough your way through it.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Do you think that’s one of the main benefits is that. You have to, for lack of a better word, just let go to get through the experience because I’ve only done this with a handful of people here, but it seems like the people who had a very hard time, you could almost literally watch it on their face.

Like, and over time I’ve actually queued people a lot less. The only thing I really look for now is, explain to what’s going on. You’re gonna have the gas reflex, all right, make sure they’re safe, all that kinda stuff. And then after that, the only thing I’ve really queued them on is anything to get them to relax and let go.

And you can almost watch like people who are fighting it and then [00:42:00] all of a sudden you get them to like go, it looks like they just like, their whole composure and everything just changes and then it gets easier and they stay in much longer. Versus, and I’ve had this happen with myself too days where I have to remind myself of this.

It’s like, oh, I’m just gonna fight through for 60 seconds. It’s like, no, I just need to. Let go, relax. I do a lot more open-ended stuff now. Okay. Whatever time I get to is the time I get to. If it feels really bad, I’m gonna get out. I’m gonna at least make it to 30 seconds, get control of my breath, be in a relaxed state.

At that point, I can decide how long I want to go, where I’m feeling. It just seems like that’s, at least in my limited experience, a theme I’ve seen over and over again.

Dr Thomas P Seager: I caught this on video. There’s a former civil engineering student of mine at Arizona State. She graduated, she stayed friends with my daughter and she got into this bodybuilding, where the women get really ripped and they wear a bikini and, okay.

So she became very conscious of body composition and muscle tone and [00:43:00] she won. Her first competition is wonderful. And then she said, well, a lot of the ladies are doing ice baths. I should probably look into that. And my daughter’s like, my, my dad invented like the ice bath. Come on over. She gets in and she’s using the same mentality that works in the weight room.

One more rep, we’re gonna flex. It was terrible. She lasted like 30 seconds and then she saw my daughter go in. Now my daughter trains in Kav, Maga. My daughter’s very tough, but she has a different mentality about it. When she gets in, it’s. Relax, breathe. Nothing bad is happening to me. This is what cold feels like.

Well, my former student watches my daughter go through and she says, I want to try again. The next time she gets in, she does two and a half minutes because she’s not fighting it anymore. You can find the video if you search online for set your ice bath to a temperature that frightens you. And you can see this person who’s naive and thinks they’re gonna [00:44:00] toughen that up and they’re gonna get through it that way.

And then this person who’s like, I’m just gonna relax my way through it. I’m gonna surrender to the cold. I’m gonna let all the problems that I bring dissolve into the water, and it’s a much better experience. So from her, I learned what the problem was when I was selling to the NFL. So, these football players, they use the ice bath for recovery.

And I got a call from Tennessee and it was this football player’s wife, and she was upset. He hates it. He wants to send it back. It’s too cold, you know it’s our ice bag, right? Like what are you thinking? He didn’t send it back in with that football player, like combat mentality. So the next call, I get it I can tell this story ’cause he’s not anonymous about it.

My phone rings and he goes, ah, yeah, I just tried one of your ice bats. I gotta get one right away. I [00:45:00] go, oh that, that sounds great. I, I’d love to sell you an ice bath. What brought you to us? He goes, well, I coach football and we use ice baths a lot and I’ve never really been anything like yours and I want to get it right away.

At what level do you coach? And the whole conversation changes and this guy goes well. I coach in the NFLI go, I’ve heard of the NFL. Maybe I heard of your team. He goes, yeah, I coach the New Orleans Saints. It’s Sean Peyton. Yeah. Calling me up and saying he wants an ice bath right now. And I say, Sean, coach, I’d love to sell you an ice bath, but I won’t unless you make me one promise.

What’s that? I gotta be there to coach you through the first time, because I’ve gotten calls from guys in the NFL and they don’t have the right attitude about it. They go in, they think they’re gonna tough it out, and then they’re not happy about it. I want to be there and I want to coach you through. He said, that’s great, come on up.

We had a great time. I asked him the [00:46:00] things about early times in his career, ’cause early time in Morales Co. And times when he was struggling, he told me a story that has nothing to do with ice basketball. I’m gonna repeat it here. Yeah. He says he was an offensive coordinator with the Cincinnati Bengals.

Beginning of his career, if I’m remembering this correctly, he had a crappy week. Like it had been a tough season, and it was a particularly tough Sunday. And when you have a tough Sunday, you wanna get right back to work. Monday morning, he gets into his office in Cincinnati and there’s a voicemail, and he’s got an answering machine back, and then he’s gotta hit the button, right?

Bill Walsh on his answering machine and Bill says, Hey Sean, I see what you’re doing there in Cincinnati. It’s really innovative and I think I, I get what you’re going for and you should keep it up. I think it’s great. This is Bill Walsh. Hang up. Sean goes, I called the guy back right away.

He didn’t answer. I’ve never talked to Bill Walsh, but can you imagine the type of individual who’s [00:47:00] coaching another team notices what an assistant coach on some rival team is doing, realizes that it all blew up in his face and said That guy probably needs an encouraging word. This is the way I want you to talk to yourself when you’re in the ice bath.

Mike, I want you to talk like Bill Walsh talks to Sean Peyton, when your toes are hurting, I want you to say, Hey, toes. I know what you’re going through. I see what’s happening here. We’re working on something, right? It’s going to take a minute. You are still on the team. You hang in there. I know you’re hurting.

The rest of the body is getting a lot out of this. When we get out, I’m gonna warm you right up. Talk to your body. Not like you’re angry at it for letting you down, but like you love that part of your body that whatever it is screaming at you in your ice bath and you’re gonna reassure it that it is on the right path.

You are gonna have a better experience.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah I love that. When I started doing ice bath stuff and reading [00:48:00] the research, I very much was like, oh, the physiologic response and you’re training your hormetic response or active homeostasis and like, like we talked about, all those things I think are beneficial.

But four years later, after doing it, even now, I’m convinced that while there isn’t as ton of data on it, I think the psychological aspect of doing. Something that’s difficult that’s how I got into it is something, I wanna do something difficult that wasn’t time intensive that I could do every day.

Right? To like train that muscle, to train that discipline. Like you can do that with exercise, but you gotta be careful. It takes a little bit more time, more, five years later there’s still that decision to get in the ice bath. There’s still that decision just how long you’re gonna hang out and there’s still that relief of when you’re done.

And I think those psychological wins, which is maybe are similar. I like doing that in the morning. Do a little aerobic training, do it after that you feel better. You did the hard thing first thing in the morning. I just, I think that’s an underestimated [00:49:00] component of just psychological training that you can do day in and day out that does have some other additional benefits to it.

Dr Thomas P Seager: I agree. There is now some data that we’re gathering. One of the best physiological measures of psychological resilience is heart rate variability. Yeah, you probably know a low resting pulse is indicative of good cardiovascular health. So if you’re resting, pulse is, below 60 or something, oh, you’re in great shape.

But heart rate variability is not the same as pulse. It is the difference between the beats and it’s measured in microseconds. So you might have this pulse and then a microsecond different pulse rate with your next beat. That is your heart responding to the different demands of the body. And what are those demands?

Breathe in. Breathe out. Can change the space around the heart cavity can change your pulse in this microsecond scale. Your thoughts change your heart, [00:50:00] and when you gather enough data and it takes, more than just a few beats, because this is a statistical measure, you can see heart rate variability.

The more your heart is able to change, to meet the demands that the body is placing upon it or the environment is placing upon it, the more adaptive you are psychologically and the more resilient to stress. Now we’re seeing people with very low heart rate variability ratings on their whoop strap or their bio strapp or whatever it is, move up by two, three times.

By that measure, there’s a lot of different measures of heart rate variability, but they’re moving qualitatively in the right direction after they start a program of ice baths. Because this is the stress that they’re placing psychologically on their nervous system. This is creating that adaptive psychological capacity in them every time they start that morning with a win.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, I’ve seen the same thing too. My part of my PhD was actually in heart rate variability and [00:51:00] metabolic flexibility. No kidding. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s what I was looking at years ago. Before you had, devices, like on your phone, you could measure it. We had 20 grand worth of used equipment. I had to write a fricking MATLAB code to, to do the thing that had come into the lab and do all this monkey motion.

And now you can do it on your phone. And I say the same thing in my own clients and other people that initially if they push too hard, you will see a little bit of a drop. But then almost always it goes up. And I think that’s the combination of the physiologic. And I think a lot of it is the psychological too, like we just talked about that it’s very empowering to go.

Okay, I did. The hard things. So being stuck in traffic or this next thing, it’s not as sucky as that ice bath I did this morning, right? So you’re talking about anticipation and worry. I just think that has a large transfer to other aspects of your life, and so not only are you probably raising your baseline of HRV, you’re also kinda dropping that sort of erosion of it during the day by, calming [00:52:00] down more other unnecessary stressors throughout your day.

Dr Thomas P Seager: Agreed. There are so many people who report that experience to me that, they’re reporting something real, but being able to capture it in a physiological measure, like heart rate variability, put it on a graph show, a time series to them, builds their confidence that they’re not just fooling themselves into thinking this, and it’s more than a placebo effect.

I love the placebo effect, despite the fact that people disparage it. I’m like, gimme these, positive benefits at low cost with no side effects, but it is not a placebo, it is a physiological change in the way the body works.

Dr Mike T Nelson: What would you recommend for people, oh, before I forget. So if you had, like, someone who’s brand new to cold water immersion, they come to you and they say, Hey, I just bought a Morasco Forge.

It’s awesome. I love it. I’m gonna do this. I’ll do whatever you tell me. Like, give me what you would consider like the best protocol to start out. Where would you have people start?

Dr Thomas P Seager: There’s almost no one that [00:53:00] comes to Morozko who is entirely naive to cold exposure. Right. Most of ‘

Dr Mike T Nelson: em are, try to experience that.

I’m sure that’s

Dr Thomas P Seager: Morozko’s a huge investment. I think our cheapest ice bath is like 10 grand and most people aren’t dropping 10 grand ’cause they saw a Joe Rogan video. Oh yeah. Or something like that. Where they typically start is with cold showers. And the difficulty here is you can get metabolic benefits off of a cold shower, but the body does not respond to partial cold water immersion.

The same way that it responds to whole body cold water. Whole body is gonna initiate the dive reflex, and that’s not guaranteed when in the cold shower or when you’re doing just submersion of a single limb or something like that into ice water. So by the time they get to us, they’re usually experienced, but every once in a while there is somebody multiple sclerosis.

There’s something like 17 FDA approved drugs for multiple sclerosis, and none of them are as good as an ice bath for managing. Really? Huh? Yeah. [00:54:00] Parkinson’s is another one. You know that Parkinson’s is a disorder of dopamine receptors in the brain. Yeah.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Well, substation agro,

Dr Thomas P Seager: yeah. If you get into the ice bath and you have doubled or tripled or quadrupled the dopamine levels without exogenous dopamine, it feels great.

Parkinson’s patients have told me that they respond, they have a fewer tremors, a better gait, better posture, that they feel like they have better control over their body after they start a practice of ice bath. So sometimes these people will come and they’ll say, look, I really need this to manage my disease state.

How should I start? And typically what I’ll say is, cold enough to gasp long enough to shiver. But they don’t wanna fool around. They wanna set a thermometer, they want to set a timer. I say, okay, start at 55 degrees. Just do three minutes next day, go down one degree Fahrenheit next day, go down one degree.

You can do one degree Fahrenheit a day. Well, I got a call, it was [00:55:00] maybe two and a half weeks after they took delivery of their Morozko, and this guy’s like, I’m sticking with it. I’m one degree a day, but God, this is hard like. What temperature are you at? I asked. He goes, I’m down at 39 now.

One degree a day. I go, well, hang on a second. Did you think you could keep making it more challenging every single day and yet it was somehow gonna get easier? He goes, I never thought about that. I’m like, of course it’s hard. Why don’t you just stay at 39 for a couple weeks? Call me back, see how it goes.

This is what he still plunges at 39 to this day, and this is a good temperature for him. He feels that gas reflex. He’s got no desire to get down to the ice chunk zone. He feels like he’s got better. He’s managing Parkinson’s, like he’s got better symptomatology, slower progression of the disease. Stay right where you are.

So this one degree a day rule of thumb is partly a psychological trick that says [00:56:00] you, it’s kinda like Tony Robinson’s 1% better every day. Now. Tony doesn’t do exponential mathematics. I don’t think he really understands what that means, but rhetorically it is a way of making a commitment to increasing challenge and constant improvement.

When you find that sweet spot that is working for you, it’s totally okay to say, this is where I’m gonna stay. I don’t need to go longer. I don’t need to go colder. I’m getting what I need out of my protocol. And everybody is different.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, that’s the one thing I found too, is that I tend to have people start warmer and then slowly go down.

And again, I don’t know if there’s any right or wrong. I like your approach too, which is great. And usually what I find is the people I’m trying to air quotes, sell it to have no experience whatsoever. Agree. Like never done anything. They’re typically live in warm climates. For them to swim in a 70 degree pool is like, wow, this is horrible.

Right. So whenever you put out a general recommendation, [00:57:00] you’re trying to, encapsulate, large area that you think is most of the responders, but even like myself, like I’ve played around lately more, 32 to 40 and for whatever reason it seems like once I get 39 and below it all feels just as cold.

Like I start getting above 40. I can notice a little bit of a difference, but I dunno. That’s just maybe the way I’m wired too. Who knows?

Dr Thomas P Seager: I can tell the difference between 34 and 39. Like, I’m not the only one. A lot of other experienced cold plungers will know when it’s really not ice cold.

And that’s what I mean by boring. Yeah, I never get used to 34, but 39, 40 degrees, eh, nowadays it feels like no big deal. I get this question a lot. What’s the optimal time? What’s the optimal temperature? And it’s a nonsense question. I don’t mean to make fun of the people who are asking it because the pharmaceutical industry has convinced us that there is one pill for [00:58:00] one symptom that you take at one dose, along one timing, and that this is the way everybody must do it.

And that’s a bunch of garbage. Cold training is more like weight training. If you ask me what’s the optimal bench press and the optimal number of reps, I should do I would have to say, well, what’s the extent of your current training? You aren’t looking for the optimal weight or the optimal rep.

You’re looking for the right level of challenge. So you know the dose and you know where you are on that hormetic distress, eustress curve, cold enough to gasp. Long enough to shiver is good for everyone who is starting out because it’s gonna put them on the right part of that hormetic stress curve. But the weird thing is they change, they train.

There’s a fallacy that is associated with medicine. Suppose you have type two diabetes and your doctor puts you on metformin. Metformin is a mitochondrial toxin, and in a way it can stimulate MIT biogenesis through its [00:59:00] toxic effect, right? It can be a hormetic stressor at the right dose, and probably if you’re gonna use metformin, ’cause you can’t exercise, you can’t do an ice bath or something like this, then probably you should cycle in and out of it.

But that’s not the way the doctors prescribe it. They put you on it. You’re supposed to take this dose every day, which is the same dose that they dose the other people on. After maybe six months, you’re not getting any benefit from it. So what do they do? They up your dose. No appreciation of where you might be on your curve.

This fallacy is if a little bit is good, more must be better. What a bunch of nonsense that is. If a little bit is good, less might be even better because we don’t know where we are on the curve. You’ve got to place yourself on the curve first, and when you do that and your body’s naive to cold. Exposure and dose, they’re pretty much the same thing, but as you get cold trained dose is not the same as exposure.

This is very well understood in [01:00:00] toxicology that you can be exposed to something without it entering your body. Your body has certain defense mechanisms without creating a response in your body can be neutralized within your body. But the armies of the world who have been studying cold exposure and the performance of soldiers in cold climates have never figured out how to go from exposure.

Oh, the wind was this, and the level of clothing was this, and the temperature was this. To dose your body’s defense mechanisms are vasoconstriction, shivering thermogenesis, non shivering thermogenesis. Those are the things that will maintain core body temperature even in the event of exposure. So. You start out cold enough to gasp long enough to shiver and then you modify based upon how quickly does, do you get bored or how quickly do you respond to where you started your initial dose?

If the gasp reflex isn’t coming strong for you anymore, take your temperature down. [01:01:00] If you feel like you should be shivering after five minutes and you’re not, you might take your temperature down. You can’t go cold, please don’t go colder than freezing. Like I have yet to meet anybody that really acclimate themselves to, zero degrees c.

Although some people write to me and say they put a lot of salt in there and they’re really trying to test their, I had a couple of engineers do that, and they gave themselves what’s called frost nip, which is not all the way frost bite, but it’s like a bad sunburn that you got without ever going into the sun.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah I used to joke and put in my slides at the end, I put a little slide and before anyone would ask questions, I put, here’s what I think of optimal. And I would put like, rainbows and unicorns and pots of gold because it’s this, I understand it doesn’t exist. Ask the question. I understand what they’re asking, but it doesn’t exist, right?

So, like if I ran a lab and you came in and said, Hey, I wanna know the optimal cold [01:02:00] exposure for MS, and we’ll get IRB approval, I’ll give you $2 million. You’ll study this. I couldn’t tell you the answer, but I could tell you, you give me protocol A and protocol B and some sort of outcome that we’re gonna measure.

I could tell you all day if protocol A is better, or protocol B is better. So you can measure better one thing compared to the next. And if you iterate over time, you’ll get closer to the mythical optimal. But you can’t ever figure out what is optimal, even though I get what, why people are asking.

Dr Thomas P Seager: I agree, Mike.

Dr Mike T Nelson: A couple more things we finish up here, what, you’ve talked about some pretty big increases in testosterone, I think you said with cold, and I believe you’ve got a new book coming out on, is it testosterone and how it’s related to a bunch of other things? Correct?

Dr Thomas P Seager: Amazon just put it up yesterday. It’s

Dr Mike T Nelson: called, oh, it did go up yesterday.

I should have looked today. I knew it was coming out very soon.

Dr Thomas P Seager: I wrote this book called Uncommon Cold, and I took all the articles that I posted at Morozko and a lot of [01:03:00] messages that I got from readers and, 450 scientific citations and I put ’em together in this self-published book. You can’t even get it on Amazon.

It’s only available@Morozko.com. But what people kept wanting to talk about was testosterone. What happened to your testosterone, Joe Rogan’s talking about your testosterone again. So I’m like, okay. Rather than like put out a new edition of Uncommon Cold, I extracted the things that were just testosterone related.

I added more case studies. I described the mechanisms by which testosterone or synthesized in the mitochondria because all the testosterone research. Is flawed in this fundamental way. None of it has an appreciation for the mechanisms of testosterone, synthesis and metabolism. The typical medical trial goes like this.

We got some young guys, we brought ’em in the lab, we fed ’em some ashwagandha, and then we went see if their [01:04:00] testosterone goes up it and it’s nonsense because they don’t know by what mechanism might Tonga Ali or ashwagandha or despotic acid, by what mechanism might these work and they work through the mitochondria when once you understand the mechanism, now you must un also understand where are you on the dose response curve.

So despotic acid is a great example. There was a sort of clinical trial. They administered despotic acid to a bunch of young men. They got a response in testosterone. They had no idea why. So a bunch of other people came along and said, well, we should reproduce these results only. We’re gonna do it with more.

We’re gonna double the dose and we’re gonna extend the duration by two more weeks. ’cause then we’ll get a stronger signal out of our sub. No. Testosterone went down. Well, if you’re gonna mess the mitochondria up that bad, of course, testosterone goes down because it is on the inner membrane of the mitochondria where cholesterol meets an enzyme called P four [01:05:00] 50 cc or some acronym like this.

The cholesterol is cleaved by this enzyme into a steroid called pregnenolone. All the other sex hormones are derived from pregnenolone, and I might not even be saying it right. If your mitochondrial membranes are not functioning well, then maybe they’re not bringing the cholesterol into the inner membrane, or maybe the enzyme, the P four 50 hasn’t detached correctly.

It is no wonder that you have low testosterone. Exercise is insufficient to ensure healthy testosterone levels because exercise is good for the mitochondria, but it’s nowhere near as good as cold exposure. And if you do exercise, but you have all these other things seed oils poor light hygiene poor sleep patterns, if you do all these other things that will damage your mitochondria, you can have good body composition.

You can feel like you’re in good cardiovascular strength. You can have good muscle strength and still have poor testosterone levels. So [01:06:00] I extracted out of the Uncommon Cold Book all the things related to testosterone and the protocols that involve my prostate and sex health and erectile dysfunction.

And I’ve added these case studies and this additional research, and I put it in a book that’s about 225 pages called Uncommon Testosterone. We’ll see if it sells Mike, like I hope you go by. I bet it will. I hope you post a review. Right. Joe Rogan was just talking to Andrew Schultz about what happened to my testosterone and it was all an accident.

I. I had an elevated prostate specific antigen test come back. And that’s not unusual for a guy. I was a fat college professor in my early fifties. Of course I had an inflamed prostate, like what other guy doesn’t. But I was not gonna go through a biopsy and a ectomy. I was scared I was gonna die of cancer.

And I wasn’t like, it was just inflammation, but the mind has a way of, catastrophizing. And so I got into that ice bath every single [01:07:00] day, not because I wanted to be a tough guy or I was trying to recover from a difficult workout, it was ’cause I was scared I was gonna die of prostate cancer and I didn’t want to have a prostate ectomy and a lifetime of erectile dysfunction.

I said, I’m gonna deal with inflammation with cold. So I did that. Ketogenic do, got my PSA way down and my testosterone went way up. Every medical doctor will tell you that testosterone is anabolic, and if you are worried about the risk of cancer, you should not be promoting high testosterone levels because the anabolic effects of the testosterone could promote the growth of cancer cells and every doctor that says that is wrong.

Dr. Abraham Morgentaler is an exception because he’s done the research that shows high testosterone levels protect against prostate cancer. So if I’d known what I was doing, Mike, I never would’ve discovered all this, right? But I stayed away from the urologist long enough to watch my [01:08:00] testosterone go up to 1180 nanograms per deciliter.

I had no idea why. That’s it’s what I call supernatural. It’s what I call uncommon. And if you saw that in a 19-year-old, you wouldn’t. Yeah, you wouldn’t. You know what? Still pubescent or whatever. Yeah. That in a 53-year-old obese college professor, and you wouldn’t believe it either. So my urologist said, Nope, we’re gonna do one more test.

I didn’t know what Luteinizing hormone was until he sent me back to the lab to get tested for it, right? Luteinizing hormone came back 8.9 off the charts, uncommonly high. This is how my urologist knew that I was all natural rather than taking some like right replacement. You see the inverse? Exactly right.

Well, I had to go to the library. I had to figure out what was going on. I had to figure out what is this mechanism. I had to overturn the misconception that you should, if you’re worried about [01:09:00] prostate cancer, you should be on some kind of testosterone suppressing agent. No, you should get your testosterone up.

You should take care of your mitochondria. There is no reason for men to suffer a gradual decline in testosterone levels that every medical doctor tells you is an inevitable consequence of aging. No, it’s not. It’s an inevitable consequence of mitochondrial injury when you rejuvenate your mitochondria and an ice bath is the best way to do that.

You need not suffer from what people generally accept to be the accumulated consequences of aging, whether that’s joint pain or low T or low energy, or any number one of these other things.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Oh, that’s fascinating and good. You can read

Dr Thomas P Seager: about it in the uncommon testosterone.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. We’ll definitely link to, to all of that.

All right. Is there, has anyone looked at this in terms of like an actual, like randomized controlled trial or anything like that yet? Because even this is how everything starts, as you know in science, right? You hear a bunch of anecdotal stuff, you’re like, Hey, that sounds [01:10:00] cool, and then it becomes more formalized over time.

Dr Thomas P Seager: There are a bunch of randomized clinical trials regarding testosterone and fenugreek or testosterone and vitamin D or testosterone, and I’m trying to think of what else is out there. There are any number of supplements and charlatan’s people, we’ll sell you boner pills or whatever, and some of them create a clinical signal.

Most of them don’t. So I’ve sorted through a lot of that stuff, like what works, what doesn’t? Vitamin D is a really interesting one. It will not boost your testosterone. Vitamin D is associated with higher testosterone levels, but not because vitamin D participates in any causal chain that produces testosterone.

But because vitamin D is synthesized in a similar way to testosterone, if your mitochondria aren’t right, your vitamin D isn’t right. And so these two, they move together but not in a causal relationship. So you could [01:11:00] say, well, I’m taking a lot of vitamin D supplements ’cause I wanna get my testosterone up and congratulations if you’re suffering from an acute vitamin D deficiency, or what is the term calciferol like?

It’s only one aspect of vitamin D that we really measure in the bloodstream. And there’s something like 22 other configurations of vitamin D. Yeah,

Dr Mike T Nelson: we only usually just 25 hydroxy is usually, there you go. DD three marker in the layer quotes.

Dr Thomas P Seager: That’s a really good indicator of whether you’re getting enough sunshine or whether you’re taking vitamin D supplements.

It is not an indicator of whether your Vitamin D metabolism is super healthy or not, and it is not gonna lead to more testosterone, but the association confuses people, so there’s a lot of clinical data and most of it isn’t any good because it doesn’t appreciate testosterone synthesis and metabolism and understand the point in that chain at which whatever your dosing will intervene.

There are also risks to TRT people, men on TRT in particular, but women as well, they feel great [01:12:00] because if anything is the fountain of youth, it is testosterone. Nobody wants to lose that feeling. But when you go to your doctor and he says, okay, we’re gonna put you on the TRT and we’re gonna add HCG, which is a placental hormone because we don’t want your testes to shrink and shut down and stop producing sperm and that kind of thing.

Shouldn’t something go off in your brain and be like, wait a second. Yeah. Why do I need this placental hormone to like, maybe something’s not quite right here. I would much rather men do it naturally by promoting mitochondrial health. Zinc is a good one. For example I say there’s this that doesn’t work and that doesn’t work.

Zinc is wonderful. Zinc can be more toxic at high doses than magnesium. Magnesium is also a wonderful thing. Take as much as you like magnesium. Will we let you know when you’ve got diarrhea, you’ve taken too much magnesium? Yeah. Yeah,

Dr Mike T Nelson: back

Dr Thomas P Seager: off, right? But zinc is a little bit different. Zinc in that hormetic stress response curve, it’s you can take too much.

If you do not have enough, your [01:13:00] testosterone levels won’t be right because zinc is essential, again, to the synthesis and metabolism of testosterone. And you can point to places in the chain where zinc plays a critical role in the manufacturer or the function of these enzymes, which are essential to converting cholesterol into testosterone.

If you’re on statins, Lord help you because your body needs cholesterol. Your mitochondria are working with cholesterol to synthesize all of these essential sex hormones. If when you take a statin to disrupt your cholesterol metabolism, you get. The best statistical evidence is you get some tiny, perhaps marginal benefit and you introduce all these adverse, unintended consequences into your cholesterol metabolism in a way that is very profitable for pharmaceutical companies and very bad for you.

So go to the Uncommon Testosterone book. You’re gonna see like 200 scientific citations, and when I say none of them are [01:14:00] any good, I’m a little bit oversimplifying. What those citations do is point us towards the research that we really should be doing. Everyone is trying to, gene edit. So you got, there’s some good people out there. Mark Hyman, he’s pretty good and now he’s marketing this like individualized medicine gene. Yeah. Everybody’s got one of these and as a first approximation, they’re all nonsense. They’re looking in the wrong place. The secrets to your health do not lie in the nucleus.

They lie in the mitochondria. Mitochondria have their own DNA, and that is where the secrets of longevity are going to be found. It’s just not where anybody’s looking. That’s where testosterone research needs to go.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah I would agree with that. I usually, on the random one-off consults I do for especially guys coming in and asking about TRT, it’s usually my role is like, okay, here’s the questions you want to go back and ask your doc.

[01:15:00] And most of the time I try to politely point out, your nutrition is a floating Trashman fire. You’re sleeping six hours a night. Your exercises may be okay. You don’t do any cardio. You have no other environmental exposures like heat and cold and pH and all these things. Your breathing is horrible.

Your respiration rate at night’s 17, like you got a lot of low hanging fruit that you should fix because all those things will directly or indirectly decreased testosterone. Yep. And if you go in, yeah, I’m sure your numbers are probably low. If you go to a good physician, they’ll take time to try to figure out what’s going on.

They’ll talk to you about stuff. They’ll show you the pros, they’ll show you the cons. If you don’t go to a good physician, you go to these TRT, Whack-A-Mole clinics that pop up everywhere else. They’ll just give you testosterone. And again, will you, like you said, will you feel better? Yes. Will you see some benefits?

Yes, but in my head, I just. It seems like you’re gonna have other consequences later ’cause you’re just sticking a huge bandaid over like all your [01:16:00] underlying issues.

Dr Thomas P Seager: The thing about TRT is it works, of course it works. Yeah. Huberman didn’t get jacked in his lab. Rogan, you see his ice bath video and Rogan is ripped.

Oh yeah. And both of these guys are like, yeah, I’m on TRT because I feel so much better. I wrote to Mark Bell I was on his podcast, we were talking testosterone. And Mark Bell is famous for taking, quantities of testosterone that you wouldn’t even give a thorough bird race horse, yeah. Because he’s out on that experimental edge and he was making fun of me. He’s like, you think you have testosterone? When are you gonna serious? And all these men. Right. TRT works, but I’m not a bodybuilder. I’m not an Instagram model. I’m not an MMA fighter. I’m not trying to compete in these ways.

I’m just trying to live a long, healthy life, write my little books and teach my classes and run an ice bath [01:17:00] company. And so if I needed washboard abs and a totally jacked liver king sort of physique in order to maintain my audience and make my living, I would do it too. Sure. But don’t. Tell me that you’re natural.

Don’t tell me that. You got so ripped by taking liver supplements or something like that. It makes no sense. Once you experience, this is what men have told me. Once you experience the trajectory from low energy, no motivation, being depressed, can’t just get shelf off the couch to levels of testosterone that are like super normal, 12 50, 1400.

You don’t ever want to take the chance of going back. You don’t ever want to be like, I don’t ever wanna feel that way again. And so they stay on the TRT and maybe they’re done having kids, like maybe long term it’s all gonna work out fine for them. I think in an acute case, TRT can rescue somebody, whether it’s a man or a woman from a [01:18:00] really miserable quality of life, but not doing all the other things.

It’s supposed to give you the motivation to do the other things. Yeah. It’s supposed to give you the self-esteem and the confidence to take care of your diet and your sleep and your light hygiene and all the other things so you can get off the TRT. Jack Cruz has this great line. If your body can make it, you don’t need to take it.

And I think it’s very compelling.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And I do agree that if some people are using it as a bridge to do these other things because they have no motivation or everything else as they’re trying to fix those, cool. That’s fine. And again, everyone makes their own individual choice. I think TRT isn’t really necessarily horribly dangerous or anything like that.

But I think there should be, like you mentioned, more long-term. I. Thought put into the cost because as there are a percentage of people who go on TRT who can never go off. Correct. Not even fertility reasons aside, they just have natural shutdown. You can give ’em all the HCG in the world, it just doesn’t seem to restart [01:19:00] again.

Is that everyone? No. Is that a small percentage? Yeah, it’s pretty small percentages from neurologists I’ve talked to, but rarely do I hear physicians mention that also. So it’s like all things, like I think people should have the personal freedom to do what they want, but they have to be educated on here’s the pros, here’s the cons.

Whether it’s TRT, psychedelics, whatever things that are still, quasi illegal within the government. There’s some definite real benefits to it and there’s, definitely some cost. And in general in physiology, the higher you go on benefit, there potentially is a higher cost associated with it.

There’s just no, there’s no physiologic free lunch.

Dr Thomas P Seager: My son was six years old when he was diagnosed with type one diabetes. My. Doctor who’s a friend and a neighbor, he handed me an orange and a syringe so I could practice drawing up the insulin and injecting it into the orange. This is before insulin pumps.

He said, your son has diabetes and your life is gonna change. Nobody leaves this [01:20:00] hospital until you figure this out. And I felt grief partly as a parent, as a dad. Like, how did this happen? How did I not know? How did I not protect my son from this? I had no idea. And I would not wish. I’m very grateful for human, genetically magnified insulin.

The e coli bacteria that kick out insulin for my son, thank God. Oh yeah. That I get to inject. Oh, huge. Inject him every day. Right? But I would not wish that on anyone where it, it’s a lifetime where you are now dependent upon injecting a synthetic hormone into your body to sustain your life.

That’s where my son is, and I can’t imagine. Somebody signing up. Yeah, let’s do that. I’m gonna be better off just like me wanting to avoid the biopsy and the surgery. I will do anything to stay out of the pharmacy if I can, if there’s any sort of alternative that I think might be promising to try instead.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. So last [01:21:00] question will ask you all about the cold for or the Morasco Forge if someone were to do their own little testosterone experiment. Because this is done on one of my lists of experiments, I’m gonna try again this summer, is get my blood taken before, see where it’s at. I’m due for blood work, any again anyway.

What type of cold exposure would you recommend? What sort of length of time and then when would you recommend people get retested? So for listeners, they can go run their own experiment and be like, hey, absolutely. Lemme test this out myself.

Dr Thomas P Seager: I didn’t keep careful notes. I wasn’t getting into the ice bath because I thought I was gonna boost my testosterone.

Yeah. I was getting in there ’cause I thought I was gonna save my life from prostate cancer and then I would get out and of course I’d be cold. And so I would do my exercise after the ice bath, which for men is critical. For women, no big deal. They get an instantaneous testosterone boost as soon as they get in.

But men need some exercise afterwards. So the, I wrote about the protocol in the uncommon testosterone book. Two, three minutes at a temperature, cold enough to initiate the gas reflux. You don’t need a lot more [01:22:00] than that. And then sometimes people ask me about how much of a gap between the cold and the exercise, as long as you’re still feeling cold when you begin your exercise seems okay.

One of my favorites, before lockdowns was do the cold with my girlfriend and then we would go do hot yoga and it’d be maybe 20 minute drive and I would get in there and of course I’d still be cold. Well, the yoga studio is cranked up, in phoenix, people are sweating all over the place, but it would take me 45 minutes to really start to get cold again.

And finally one of the yoga instructors was like, is it just not hot enough? And I explained what we were doing. As long as you initiate the exercise, when you’re still feeling the chill, what my readers are telling me is that seems to work. And I probably should have written a little bit more about that in the uncommon testosterone book.

But I, it’s just easy stuff. Lunges, I have a barbell out on my balcony. I’ll do squats with some weight. I’ve got a couple of [01:23:00] kettlebells. And so I just do body weight type stuff like squats or lunges or pushups, unless I want a little extra. And I’ll add a kettlebell or I’ll add the dumbbell for my squats.

It’s very brief, so sometimes it’s just a brisk walk. We’ll do it. You’re gonna rewarm the limbs, you’re gonna get some blood back into your testes if they need it, I think that the order of things is important not for any circulatory or really physiological reason, but I think it is the nervous system.

When you exercise, you are activating the sympathetic division. That is a fight or flight activity. Cortisol might go up a little bit, as you pointed out, glycogen release could increase your glucose levels for a little bit at first, and then you get cold. That will initiate parasympathetic when you first get in.

It’s sympathetic, but you end on the dive reflex with the parasympathetic. And so to [01:24:00] exercise is sympathetic, cold, sympathetic, and then parasympathetic. There’s a certain order of things, and for women it’s fine, but for men to go sympathetic, parasympathetic, sympathetic. Again, with the exercise, it’s a different order, and I think it is that toggling back between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic divisions of the autonomic nervous system that might be responsible for the.

Testosterone boost you get when you exercise after the cold, compared to the testosterone suppression you get if you exercise before the cold. Now, that’s just a hypothesis. I would love to see my friend Marius Braus at the Lithuanian Sports University. He’s one of the leading researchers on cold exposure.

I sent him a Morozko, he had to hire a crane to get it into his lab, but he’s drawing blood and he’s like, oh, cool, okay, let’s really get into the granularity of this and see if we can understand it better. So hopefully he’ll write back to me in a year and he’ll say, thanks for the Morozko. Here’s [01:25:00] data and that’ll be the best payment I could ever get.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, that, that’s awesome. That matches something I call HDR or Human Dynamic range. Like how fast can you get sympathetic? How fast can you get parasympathetic? How fast can you toggle back and forth between those? Yeah. And then chronically how hard can you push those ends? Right? So if you look at heart rate, how low can you get your resting heart rate over time?

How high can you still hit a max? Yep. And if you’re doing intervals, how high of an interval can you hit? How fast can you recover? Can you go again? Do heavy set of squats? How fast can you recover? Do the same thing again. You get in the cold plunge. How fast can you get parasympathetic from that sympathetic response you’re gonna get?

I think that transition period is what you’re actually training. You’re training the range and the transition period to compress those stressors. And when you think you can compress them, you are more resilient to that particular thing.

Dr Thomas P Seager: Agreed. Mark? I think that’s genius because you are creating indicators of human resilience and [01:26:00] it’s psychological and physiological.

This is a wonderful service to, science and to mankind.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Awesome. So tell us about the Morozko Forge. Like I know you were like one of the first guys ever saw that got into it. How’d you get into it and what makes it different?

Dr Thomas P Seager: I started with a chest freezer like a lot of other guys and it was problematic.

I think the biggest thing was though, I felt like a side of venison. When I got into the chess freezer, I didn’t feel, it does feel weird, feel like Superman, right? And so a former student of mine, Jason Stalfer and I, we started Morozko together and it was. Like this, we’re engineers, we gotta be able to figure this out, so, because

Dr Mike T Nelson: your background technically civil engineering, is that correct? Correct. Yeah. Environmental. Yeah. I did a masters in mechanical engineering, so before my PhD. Yeah. Alright. So, some

Dr Thomas P Seager: thermodynamics.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. I just suffer through all that shit.

Dr Thomas P Seager: Yep. It’s amazing how many people don’t turns out, oh, I know.

And am is hard. Very hard. And I don’t want to even try and explain entropy. I grad luck school, my dissertation [01:27:00] was deep into entropy and I spent some long, sleepless nights, pondering the philosophical underpinnings of the concept. Turns out to be really helpful to my understanding of health.

I just wrote an essay, put it up on my substack. I sent it to Jay Bot Chara, and I’m like, look. Oh, cool, Jay, you. Yeah. He and I became friends during the lockdowns. And this was before, of course, he was going to the Senate for his confirmation. He got confirmed yesterday by the entire Senate.

And I’m like, Jay, oh, he

Dr Mike T Nelson: did get confirmed. Oh wow. Very cool. Yep.

Dr Thomas P Seager: Along party lines. It was really disappointing. Not a single Democrat voted for him, which tells you there’s something wrong in that party. He seems

Dr Mike T Nelson: pretty legit background too.

Dr Thomas P Seager: No kidding. Completely legit. He talks about chronic illness. He talks about longevity and life expectancy, talking about all the right things.

And I said, but you look, you’re gonna be the director of the National Institute for Health, so what’s health? Like health is not the absence of disease.

Health is your ability to [01:28:00] move between the two states. Exactly. As you were describing it, Mike Health is not a single point on a graph, which is the way most people think of it.

Yep. Health is like the derivative between two points. Yep. And this is why it is so difficult to understand. If you can understand entropy, then you know, entropy, we can think of it as the A system property of a thermodynamic system or a state property, and it’s not. Entropy can only be measured relative to a reference state between two states.

The first definition of entropy was heat flow over temperature. Entropy is more like a verb than it is like a noun. Health is not what you have. Health is what you do. Health. If you think of health as the transition between a stress state and a recovery state and your capacity to navigate that transition, now you know what health is.

So, Jay wrote me back and he is like, yeah, I remember the first [01:29:00] time I encountered entropy and that was it, because I don’t study that stuff in medical school.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Oh no. Right. This is not part of the curriculum.

Dr Thomas P Seager: No, it, why should it be? It’s, you don’t need to know anything about entropy or anything about health to, to prescribe a pill.

Health is the absence of disease is a great way for a pharmaceutical company to define health because now it motivates you to look for that disease. Where can I find a disease? Let’s get you a full body MRI scan so we can over diagnose you to justify some kind of profitable medical intervention.

What a crock of nonsense. So how did we do Rosco? Well we thought, we’re engineers. We ought be able to do this ourselves. We want to take charge of our own experience. There was nothing commercially available in the ice bath space. There were a couple of companies that did cold tubs, but there was nothing in the [01:30:00] ice bath space.

So we had to create it. Now you can’t go to Google. As soon as you start typing cold, you get like 36 ads for all these Chinese made, tons of them Now manufacturer, tons of Right. You can get ’em at Costco. You can get one off a sharper image. You, and they’re all crap. And a little bit, I’m talking my own self-interest.

Yeah, totally. I’ve spent six years developing Morozko, we are still laboring over improving the product, getting it right, making it more reliable. It does what no other machine in the world will do. Because I’m an engineer, I don’t work on health from the inside like a medical doctor would. I work on health from the outside.

You can’t always get to, Coronado Island to train with the Navy Seals. You can’t always get up into the forest or the mountain stream. You can’t always cut a hole in the ice and in the state of 10,000 lakes or something like that, when you can’t get into nature to give your body the stimulus and environment that it needs.

[01:31:00] Morozko is the next best thing to nature. I’m on the 32nd floor. You think I’m grounded? You think I’m electrically connected to the earth? I am. When I get into my Morozko, I’m so far away from the ocean. That’s okay. I’ve got electrolytes in the water in my Morozko. I live in the hottest city in North America, but that’s all right.

I’ve got cold. On my balcony. So my job as an environmental engineer is to make the machines that empower people to maintain their own health. Now they don’t have to care who’s in the White House or who’s directing the HHS, who’s, or who’s been appointed to the NIH or the FDA or the CDC, and they all look like great appointments to me.

I’m so pleased with the change in stewardship of these institutions of public health, but they’re just institutions. No one is responsible for your health in Washington DC unless you happen to live in Washington DC ’cause you are the only one that is in charge of your health. All the language and all the [01:32:00] processes of reimbursement and health maintenance and all these institutions are designed to disempower you, to disenfranchise you to take away your own agency when you should really be making your own decisions.

You should really be, buying books like this, listening to podcasts like yours, talking to people who have been where you have been before and saying, I wonder if that would work for me.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Awesome. And are there different models you have now and what’s the difference between the models kind of recommendations?

If a personal use, professional use,

Dr Thomas P Seager: We have all of those. There must be six different Morozko models or something now. ’cause someone will call us up and say, well, can you make one like this? And we do a lot of custom work and when we see a good idea from one of our customers, we’re like, okay, we’ll do that more.

So we recently thought about how to present our catalog. I. I asked my media team to do it like this. The most important thing about the model is the metaphor. What do you think about when you’re getting into the Morozko? So this is a classic [01:33:00] bath. I’ve had this experience. I drive up into the mountains around pacing Arizona, and I get into the stream and I let the stream, go over my shoulders and cover me in cold water.

That’s the bath experience. But for you in Minnesota, you cut a hole in the ice and you, which is actually really hard to do

Dr Mike T Nelson: actually, when the ice is thick. It’s a lot more work than you realize or are using a chainsaw. We did an experience up north and we ended up using a chainsaw, but because the ice was so deep, you have to cut layers out to get down to the next layer.

To get to the next layer because it was so thick. But yeah, that’s an

Dr Thomas P Seager: excavation. Yeah. Yeah. But then when you go in, you have this more upright experience. And so we have models with different posture. And they’re meant to evoke a metaphor. Are you in the ocean? Are you in the lake? Are you in the stream?

And the degree to which you are upright. We have a model so big you can tread water in it, oh wow. That’s the right, it’s the ocean experience. [01:34:00] So not everybody relates to that. Most people are like, whoa, what’s the footprint and the space and the pricing and things. But even though I’m an engineer, I think in terms of metaphors, I want people to evoke a natural experience in their imagination when they’re getting into their ice bath.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Awesome. And where can people find more info about it?

Dr Thomas P Seager: Let’s give out the uur l mor.com. It’s not easy to pronounce. It’s a Russian folk fairytale character, a winter warlock type character. But we are now the number one Google search result for like four different misspellings of morasco. Yeah, I tried misspelling it, it

Dr Mike T Nelson: still showed up, so Yeah, exactly right.

Dr Thomas P Seager: Yep. Google has finally found out who we are and that sometimes people want to visit our site.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Awesome. And last question as we wrap up, like rapid fire, what would be your top four things as someone who’s like, Hey I’ve heard about this cold water immersion, like I’m looking into it.

What would you say are like the top four reasons they should consider [01:35:00] it?

Dr Thomas P Seager: There are things that make Morozko different than any other tub. One of them is grounding. You get into a Rubbermaid plastic thing, you’re not in connection with the earth, and so you’re not getting that additional grounding benefit.

Morozko is grounded. The other is salt. Morozko is warrantied for use of any salt, ba salt. So magnesium sulfate, zinc sulfate, potassium sulfate, copper sulfate. You can put the electrolytes right into the water. I’ve got a recipe for that. We don’t use any chlorine. It’s all ozone disinfection. And so that’s part of why it’s all the other pieces that we use are salt tolerant.

So grounding salt. The third thing is Morozko gets colder than or as cold as any ice bath in the world. There are now two other companies that make true ice baths. Brass Monkey is one. Odin is another brass monkeys in the United Kingdom. Odin is in Australia, and there’s one besides us in the United States.

Sun Home. They make a sauna. Now they make an ice bath. But for a long time, Morozko was the only one [01:36:00] that got that cold, that actually made the ice. So those are the biggest differences. Aside from that, sometimes people like the wood look, they want it to match their sauna or something. But Morozko is expensive, so it’s not for everybody.

What really gets me is when someone will. Go and get one of these inflatable, plastic ones and they’re cheap. Just from smelling the tub, when you take it out of the box, you know you are bathing yourself in bisphenol a or brominated flame retardants or phthalates or none of that stuff belongs anywhere near your body.

So we will not do chlorine. We will not do the plasticizers and the microplastics and things that come with these cheap materials. Part of why we’re so expensive is because we’re made in Phoenix, Arizona, and we’re not just a little bit, we’re not just like assembled in Phoenix, Arizona. The wood comes in, the finish comes in, the metal is rolled in a mill, I don’t know where it is, and it goes to a fabrication shop [01:37:00] in Phoenix where they make the tubs.

We are manufactured by craftspeople in Phoenix, and that’s more expensive too. So I. For those people who are price sensitive, I get it. They might be better off. In a desert Plunge. Matt Kuper, he runs Desert Plunge. He’s a friend of mine. He’s here in Tempe and he’s got a really good value product.

It’s not quite the same as Rosco, but it’s a great place to get started. There are sh I was gonna say charlatan’s, but I’m gonna be more direct. There are criminals in this business, Mike, you can’t just Google around and find what you think is a good deal. If you’re looking for a good deal, go on Alibaba, because most of my competitors are also sold on Alibaba for like a fifth of the price.

And there are some reservations that people have off of ordering from Alibaba. That’s where a lot of my competitors are getting their stuff. And then they mark it up three, four times, buy some Google ads, and they try and sell it to people who, because this is such a young [01:38:00] industry, don’t have the experience to really know what they’re buying.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And that’s one thing I’ve learned over my lifetime is. If you want anything that’s of high quality and high value, amortized over a lifetime, it’s just gonna be more expensive. That’s just how, that’s just how the world works. Like people want something that’s of high value, high quality, it’s not gonna be cheap.

The flip side is if you invest in it and it’s something you use and you enjoy, you’re gonna have it for a long period of time. So,

Dr Thomas P Seager: which is exactly the way you should be thinking about your body, right? It’s an investment in

Dr Mike T Nelson: yourself. Yep. So it’s, yeah.

Dr Thomas P Seager: Awesome. So what we do is we offer the best, longest, most comprehensive warranty in the business.

And there’s a report on our website that compares our warranty in terms to everybody else in the business. The reason we do that is because we haven’t got it all the way figured out yet, like we’re still trying to make the product better. And the last thing I want you to do is if you have an idea or a problem or something about [01:39:00] your Morozko, last thing I want you to do is go on Reddit.

Just call us up. You have a comprehensive, no questions asked warranty. Just let us know what the issue is. We will fix it and then we’re gonna fix it for everybody else. We make it for too.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah, that’s great because there’s nothing worse than if you buy something that is in that moderate price range and then it breaks and then the company just gives you the run around, doesn’t wanna stand behind it.

And then, so I think of a, like E Foils, a buddy of mine, he bought a cheaper electronic foil. And I asked him, I said, oh, how is it? He is like, well, it’s not too bad. But I bought another one just like it so I can fix this one when it breaks. And I’m like, bro, you could have bought like a high-end one for the price you paid for two cheap ones.

Like, well,

Dr Thomas P Seager: some people like to DIY that which is okay. Yeah. But here’s the thing, if you wanna save money, go onto Facebook Marketplace and look for a cold plunge or look for ice bath. And take a look at all the brands [01:40:00] that are advertised there. Oh, it’s broken. Oh, it just needs a new pump or I hardly ever used it, and then I just wanna sell it, see what I can get for it.

And if you wanna save money, don’t buy any of those brands. Yeah. They’re on Facebook Marketplace for a reason. So take a look at it so you know what to avoid.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Awesome. Well thank you so much for all your time. I really great. Appreciate it. All the stuff you’ve been doing, highly encourage people to check out your product there and make sure to.

Pick up the, it’s just the new book is on Amazon, right? The old one is not there. Correct. Just on your website. Correct.

Dr Thomas P Seager: You go to Amazon and you start typing Uncommon and a whole bunch of stuff is gonna, except my book is gonna show up. You gotta get it the way, all the way through Uncommon testosterone.

And then Amazon might say, you really want that book Seeger wrote? You might have to dig a little bit to find it.

Dr Mike T Nelson: Oh, great. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. That was great. This has been my pleasure. Thank you, Mike. Thank you. Talk to you soon.

Speaker 2: [01:41:00] Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. Huge thanks Dr. Tom Seger for coming on the podcast and sharing all his wonderful information with us. Make sure to check out his book all the great stuff that he has published. He’s got wonderful stuff on Instagram. Also, check out his fancy cold plunges over at Morasco Forge.

His Morasco Forge was one of the first actual official. Cold water immersions that I ever used several years ago. It was really nice. So check that out. I do not have any disclosures or affiliations with it at the time of this podcast. I also check out electrolytes from our friends over at Element below.

And if you’re looking for exogenous ketones, put your body in a state of ketosis. Check out our friends over at Teton. I’ve got a code down below. Dr. Mike, you can save some d nro on that. I look for a big [01:42:00] announcement from them coming very soon. I’ve another meeting with them this week to get all the updates.

And soon as everything is public knowledge, we’ll let all of you know what’s going on. Full disclosure, I am a scientific advisor and an ambassador to them. Make sure to check out, like I said, all of Dr. Tom’s great stuff. Thank you for listening to the podcast. If you’re interested in increasing your body’s ability to recover via primarily nutrition and improve muscle mass and body composition at the same time, check out the Flex Diet Cert Opens again, June 16th, 2025.

It’ll be open for one week. If you want more information on that, hop onto the newsletter. Mike T. Nelson. Dot com. Last thing, if you guys are going to the International Side of Sports Nutrition meeting, which is later in the month in June I’ll be there the whole time. So please come up and say hi.

Not doing any presentations this [01:43:00] year, but I will be judging posters and hanging out the whole time. So hope to see some of you there. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. Really appreciate it. Again, huge thanks to Dr. Tom for coming on here. If you enjoy the podcast, please. Do the old downloads subscribe, hit the like button, forward it to a friend to share it on social media.

All that stuff really helps us get our information into more ear holes and spread the podcast. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Talk to all of you next week.

Speaker 3: Did you see that? Yes. The frog is certainly taking a beating on this show. Yeah. It’s hard to feel sorry for him. We take a beating every show.

Speaker 5: This podcast is for informational purposes only. The podcast is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. You should not use the information on the podcast for diagnosing or treating a health problem or [01:44:00] disease, or prescribing any medication or other treatment.

Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider before taking any medication. Or nutritional supplement, and with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition, never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it. Because of something you have heard on this or any other podcast, reliance on the podcast is solely at your own risk.

Information provided on the podcast does not create a doctor patient relationship between you and any of the health professionals affiliated with our podcast. Information and statements regarding dietary supplements are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests.

This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to therein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.