Super-Charge Your Mitochondria With Dr. Thomas Seager

Supercharge your mitochondria and unlock your body’s potential! Adiel Gorel is joined by Dr. Thomas Seager, as they do a deep dive into ice baths, and their impact on energy, testosterone, stress reduction, resilience, and overall mitochondria health. Dive into the invigorating world of cold therapy as Dr. Seager shares his personal journey and the science behind the incredible benefits of ice baths. Forget what you think you know about cold plunges; we’re talking real, tangible results backed by research and real-world experience. You will also learn about the Morozko Ice Bath technology, a game-changer for anyone serious about their health and performance.

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Super-Charge Your Mitochondria With Dr. Thomas Seager

I’m very excited to be with you again. I’m especially excited for this episode because we have Tom Seager with us. I’ve learned you know about Tom. I’m very eager to learn more.

Tom, welcome to the show.

It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

I have so many questions. I want to learn so much, and I want my audience to learn so much. Let’s begin with the rote and necessary question. Tell us about your story. How did you get here?

Tom’s Health Journey: Diabetes, Divorce, And A PSA Scare

There are a number of things that have happened to me. I’m 58 years old, so I’ve got a little bit of experience. Some of that came from my son’s diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes. That was 2001. He was six years old. I had to learn about insulin, metabolism, carbohydrates, and the Atkins diet. There was a little bit of awakening to the importance of metabolism and ketosis then.

When my son grew up and went to college, and our younger daughter finished high school, my wife decided she wanted a divorce. It was a big transition in our marriage. We separated, and I realized I’d neglected my own health. I had to lose a lot of weight, for one. I had to clean up my diet. I had to start exercising. As part of trying to take care of myself, I got a blood test. It came back showing that my Prostate Specific Antigen, the PSA, was too high.

That was a scary thing because, at the time, I was 51 years old. I was a mostly sedentary college professor. Inflammation of the prostate is a very common thing for a man in his 50s to have, but if you go online like I did and start reading about PSA, it takes you about 10 minutes on WebMD, and then you think you’re going to die of prostate cancer. That’s what happened to me.

The usual sequence is you get a prostate exam, and then they say, “You’re inflamed. We should do a biopsy.” It’s very painful. They take samples. The false positive rate is very high. They say, “To be sure, you should have a prostatectomy,” and then you’re in for a lifetime of erectile dysfunction. In the state of mind that I was in, I couldn’t figure out if any woman was ever going to love me if I couldn’t ever get a hard-on again.

I decided that I was going to do everything I could to avoid allopathic medicine. I already suspected that there was nothing there for me because our experiences with my son’s endocrinologist taught me that there was a lot of mythology in medicine. I had the data on his insulin, his exercise, his carbohydrates, and his food intake. I knew better than his endocrinologist did. The more I talked with other men, the more I was determined that I was not going to go to see a urologist. I was not going to have a prostatectomy. I was going to do whatever I could to avoid that.

I knew ketosis and ice baths were going to be good for inflammation. They might help prevent cancer, and I was determined I was going to try that. I got into my ice bath every day because I was scared for my life. Four months later, my PSA came down. I had to continue to monitor. Two months after that, I got my testosterone results. It turned out that what I was doing for my PSA, which was ice bath and exercise, boosted my testosterone levels up to 1180 nanograms per deciliter, which is unheard of for a fat college professor in his 50s.

It could also be for thin, young men.

Since I’ve published these articles and since Joe Rogan read my Instagram post out to the world, I’ve been getting messages from men in their twenties who are saying, “I have pretty good body composition. I don’t understand why my testosterone is down in the 300s.” The reason is that they suffer from metabolic dysfunction.

You can have a lean body composition and still have damaged mitochondria. Too many seed oils, not enough sleep, poor light hygiene, or too many carbs in your diet without a break, these will all damage the mitochondria. What I didn’t know at the time is that mitochondria originate from testosterone synthesis. You take cholesterol out of the bloodstream, and it transports to the mitochondria. There, it meets an enzyme that cleaves off a hydrocarbon chain and turns it into a steroid that eventually becomes testosterone. It is the mitochondria that hold the key to your testosterone levels, despite what everyone else on the internet says.

I had gotten my mitochondria through ice bath and exercise to this point where they were pumping out the testosterone, taking me to levels that my urologist thought were super normal. When I finally went to the urologist and brought him all my test reports, I thought he was going to congratulate me on taking good care of myself and on what great shape I’m in. I thought he was going to ask what my secret was.

He didn’t care about any of that. He said to himself, “This guy’s probably taking steroids. He’s probably on testosterone. I’m going to get one more test.” I didn’t know what it was. It was a luteinizing hormone. I had to go look that up. He draws more blood, and the luteinizing hormone comes back 8.9. It was off the charts. He knew that I was natural.

I’m convinced because I’ve seen so many reports from dozens of other men and women that what happened to me can happen to them, too. There is no reason that testosterone has to decline with age the way your medical doctor says that it’s supposed to. You can maintain high levels of testosterone with the energy, competitiveness, clarity of thought, and the feeling of youth well into your 50s. I’m an example of that. That’s how I got started, but it wasn’t how I kept going. It was the COVID lockdowns that motivated me.

I’ve been working as a civil engineer since the beginning of my faculty career. I’ve been working in the environment and disaster response. I worked in Hurricane Katrina. I’ve been working in civil engineering infrastructure, the levees, concrete, and steel. I’m not interested in that anymore. I’m interested in mental health. I’m interested in public health. What happened during the lockdowns was that life expectancy fell off a cliff. We have an epidemic of chronic illness, and it originates in metabolic dysfunction.

Although Kennedy says he wants to make America healthy again and Bhattacharya is at the NIH and says, “I want to take on chronic illness,” this is wonderful, but for me, the only way we make America healthy again is when Americans decide to make themselves healthy again. Kennedy is not going to save you. We can’t sit around and wait for the NIH to fund the research that might come out 5 or 6 years later. It is the responsibility of people like me who are willing to take charge of their own health and fix their metabolism. As an engineer, I make tools that help people do that.

Ice Bath Psychology: From Cold Showers To Chest Freezers & The Power Of Ice Chunks

I want to ask you one thing right off the bat. When you said you got your test results, you said it in a very continuous sentence. You said the next sentence as if it were an obvious thing. You were like, “I started spending a lot of time in my ice bath.” Tell us about that. Why did you have an ice bath? Why was there an ice bath there? What kind of bath was it?

I was at a pretty low point in my life. My kids were grown up. I got to see them on campus because they were coming to ASU, but I was living by myself, separated from my wife. I was reading every self-help men’s book that I could get my hands on. One of them said, “You should take cold showers to toughen you up.” I’m like, “I want to be tough,” so I got in there. I hated every minute of every cold shower I’ve ever taken. I live in Phoenix, Arizona. The water isn’t even that cold.

A former student of mine, Jason Stauffer, said, “Have you ever done an ice bath?” I said, “I’ve never heard of an ice bath.” He said, “Have you ever heard of this Wim Hof guy?” I said, “I’ve never heard of Wim Hof.” We went to one of these Wim Hof-style workshops. It was different. When I get up to my neck in the ice water, instead of making me angry, it calms me down. There are physiological reasons for it. The dive reflex takes over. It slows the heart rate. It brings the brainwaves down to a more meditative state. I thought, “This is great.”

Jason and I started doing ice baths for fun because I like the feeling of it. When I got my PSA, I bought one of those oversized Kenmore chest freezers and filled that up with water. It was filthy and disgusting, but I was pretty determined. Jason and I started thinking, “We ought to be able to build a better machine than this.” There was nothing on the market at the time that would make ice. We’re engineers. We started putting things together. Sure enough, we built a unit with its own refrigeration that would make its own ice. By the time my testosterone went up and my PSA went down, we had our unit to the point where people wanted to buy it. That became Morozko Forge. That’s the company that I’m the CEO of.

I’m going to become a devil’s advocate for a second. You said nobody was making a cold plunge that was making its own ice. Why is that important?

When you look down at the water and you see the ice chunks floating in there, it activates something in your psychology. Before you even get in, Tim Noakes coined the phrase called anticipatory thermogenesis. It begins to activate your brown fat through your nervous system. When you see that the water is cold, your body starts to rev up. There’s a little voice in my head that wants to talk myself out of it, like, “You don’t have to do it today, Tom. You’re not on Instagram right now. Nobody would know if you skipped today.”

You don’t need 33 degrees or 1 to 2 degrees Celsius because you’re going for metabolic benefits, but the psychological benefits are found at those temperatures that still frighten you. After your body becomes acclimated to the cold, 39 degrees Fahrenheit is boring. I’m not sure exactly what the conversion is, but you get around 5 or 6 degrees Celsius.

If you’re used to it, you can stay in there all day. You need that temperature that initiates your gasp reflex, which makes you feel like you’re going to die. You know you’re not, but the cells in your body, the sympathetic division of your autonomic nervous system, are activated as if you were in a life-threatening situation. That’s what gets your heart rate variability up. That’s what improves your psychological resilience. That’s why I do it every day.

The way that I would say it in my own words is, at the beginning, you try it and you hate the cold because it’s uncomfortable, but it’s like going to the gym. You haven’t gone to the gym in years. I would advise you, even though you look like a strong man, “Start with very low weights. Take your time. Don’t rush. Don’t be macho.” It’ll very quickly ramp up, and you’ll do the same with water.

You are throwing numbers like 2 degrees Celsius, 1 degree Celsius, or 5 degrees Celsius. For the average person, you put them in water at 60, and they’re going to scream and yell. I’m going to assume that there’s going to be a break-in period, like you going to the gym and practicing. From that standpoint, a machine that makes its own ice is important because once you start lifting the heavier weights, you need the lower temperatures, and you need ice.

That is a wonderful analogy. A lot of people ask me, “What’s the optimum temperature? What’s the optimum amount of time?” My answer is, “It depends upon the extent to which you are cold-trained.” Like weight training, you don’t know what the optimum weight or the optimum number of reps is until you discover what’s right for your body. The more exercise you do, the stronger you get and the more weight or the more reps you’re going to put into your routine. It is the exact same thing with cold.

A good rule of thumb, if you’re starting out, is to go cold enough to gasp and long enough to shiver. After about a couple of weeks, your body will recruit new brown fat. Your vasoconstriction will get stronger. Your cold adaptation mechanisms are stronger and more effective. You’ve got to take the temperature down. Don’t worry so much about shivering because no-shivering thermogenesis in the brown fat will keep you warm for several minutes. Morozko making its own ice is for the dedicated cold plungers. It’s not for the casual weekend. It’s when you know you want it on demand.

By chance, I turn on the TV and I see Shark Tank. Here are two young guys selling the sharks on investing in their plunge company. One of the sharks, Robert something or other, is wearing a robe, and he has a bathing suit on, and he’s going to step in. He steps into their tub and he’s yelling, screaming, and going crazy. And they say, breathe. Breathe. And then he says, I feel wonderful.

The devil’s advocate’s question is, their machine is out there. There are many others. The morasco, well, you know, I heard your podcast with Alexis. I know, but still I’ll float the question for my viewers and listeners. I don’t want it to sound like we are marketing something here. This is a question out of curiosity because many of us will want to get a device like that. What distinguishes the Morozko from the tub or the plunge that the Shark went into?

Morozko Vs. The Competition: What Makes It Unique?

There are several things, but first, I want to confess. I was so jealous when those guys were on Shark Tank. Some part of me was like, “That should be me on that show.” They came a little later than us. As a matter of fact, they visited our backyard where we were making our Morozko. They posed as customers and they wanted to know. They went their own way. Different technology, easier to build, and it doesn’t get as cold. It’s fine. There’s room for a lot of different companies. You can’t type ice into Google without getting 24 ads for different cold plunge companies.

Why do I need Morozko? I’m not saying everybody does. Let me tell you what I built into Morozko because this is what I wanted in my machine. First of all, it gets colder than anybody else, and that gives me the ice that I want to see. The second thing is that it is electrically grounded. It’s not just the electrical circuits, but the tub and the water are grounded. When you step in, you are in an electrical connection with the earth. There is a whole myriad set of benefits, including improved blood viscosity, which is better blood flow from lower viscosity, reduced risk of stroke, accelerated wound healing, and better mood that comes from the grounding that you get in the Morozko.

The third is that it’s warranted for Epsom salts. You can put as much magnesium sulfate as you want in there, and we will still warranty your tub. You can put zinc sulfate. You can put copper sulfate. I’ve published a recipe for this online. You can get some of the mineral benefits. Those are the technology differences.

The most important thing, more important than any of those features, is that you’re 100% comfortable with the people from whom you are buying this equipment. One of the ways to do that is to go on the Facebook marketplace. If you want to save some money, buy a used one. You will see a long list of my competitors for sale on Facebook Marketplace from people who purchased and then came to regret that purchase. Some of them are broken. Some of them are barely used.

Morozko has the best warranty, and I’ve compared it. We’ve published a report on our website saying, “What are Morozko’s return policies and warranties? How does that compare to other companies? Do they stand behind their product?” We decided a long time ago that we wanted a 30-day no-questions-asked return policy. If anybody regrets their purchase, it’s fine. We’ll take it back and refund their money. We decided we were going to have a multi-year warranty that goes end-to-end with no exceptions. You don’t have to hire your own repairman to put in the parts because I want you to call me and talk to my people if you have any sort of problem before someone goes and posts about it on Reddit.

About the salts, it goes without saying that it’s self-cleaning.

Correct. We use ozone exclusively. We will never sell you another chemical. No stabilizers, no oxides, and no chlorine. Ozone is the most powerful, most effective of all the water disinfection technologies. We don’t want chlorine anywhere near our customers because it’s dangerous, whereas ozone is beneficial. You’re not supposed to breathe ozone, but on the skin, it has a lot of benefits. When it decays, it goes to oxygen.

With the grounding, doesn’t it need a ground nearby? It could be the electrical ground. If you install it in a yard or on a porch where you can reach the yard from the porch, how do you guys ground it?

We ground it through the grounding plug in your wall. In the United States, it’s a three-pronged plug, and one of those is ground. We take that wire and connect it to the tub so that the stainless steel tub is grounded. The tub is in contact with the water. As soon as you get into the water, you get the electrons from the earth.

Starting Cold Plunging: A Gradual Approach For Beginners

I’m sitting and talking to you, and my feet are bare on a grounding mat. It’s the same exact principle.

Well done.

That sounds very exciting. Let’s talk about that timeframe. At this moment, I can see the thought bubbles of the readers. They’re in their car reading and saying, “That sounds so good. I’m a man. I want my testosterone to be higher. I want my PSA to be lower. I want that, but I have to step into that? I can’t do it.”

Let’s talk about the analogy of the gym. You start with five-pound weights and very quickly, you ramp out to whatever pounds you need because you’re strong. You are in Arizona. I assume if you put out the Morozko and do not connect it, it’ll get pretty warm because of the sun most of the year. Let’s pretend for a second. I’m in California. Let’s take it to my yard.

Sitting there, it’s at 60 degrees, let’s say. Would you consider a person to be a sissy if the first day out, they go into 60 degrees, sit there for a few minutes, and leave? They still say it was cold because it’s the first day. The second day, the Morozko, I assume, has a dial where you can put it at 59, if it can go that high. I don’t know if it can go that high. I’m pretending. The third day, 58, etc. Maybe after a month, they will go to 40 and feel fine. Does that make sense?

It does. We can’t all be David Goggins. We’ve got to start where we are. The protocol that you’ve described, a number of our customers use. They typically start a little cooler, let’s say around 50. They go down one degree Fahrenheit a day. After three weeks, 50 minus 20, you’re already at freezing. The way you work yourself down gradually is psychological. If you did 50, you can do 49. If you do 49, you can do 48.

My colleagues and I at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, are writing a proposal to request funding from the NIH. We’re saying, “We want to reverse Type 2 diabetes,” which is prevalent especially in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The rates of Type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance are way too high.  It’s shortening lives. Both the quality of life and the quantity of use are being cut short by insulin resistance.

How are we going to take these people who aren’t Joe Rogan? They’re not looking to kill their inner witch or whatever it is. How are we going to convince them to get into the cold? The first three days of the program that we’re proposing are habituation. We don’t even care whether it’s cold enough to activate shivering or activate the gas reflex. We want them to get used to coming to the center, getting into the tub, staying there for 3 or 4 minutes, and then drying off. Once we normalize that process, then we can begin to take the temperature down and give them a little cold dose.

About 2 or 3 years before COVID, I started cryotherapy. There used to be many little shops that popped up. You go into the cylinder, and it’s dry air. The temperature looks mind-boggling. It’s negative 220 Fahrenheit. They said, “The maximum you can do is three minutes.” I said, “How about I begin with one and a half minutes at the warmest one?” It was negative 160 or something. After one week, I was doing three minutes at negative 220.

This is an interesting story. I was doing it for two years, every day. I loved it. I slept better and felt amazing when I went out. I went to the Wim Hof workshop in San Francisco and loved every second. When he put us in those little baby tubs, I thought, “I’m going to ace this. I’ve been doing this for two years.” I did not ace it at all. The difference between air and the conductivity of water, I was shocked at how hard it was.

Correct.

It’s amazing.

Water will suck the heat right out of you, to the point where if you’re used to doing ice baths, cryotherapy becomes boring. The first time I tried cryo, they said, “Under no circumstances should you be in this chamber for more than four minutes.” They have a timer. It gets to four minutes, and I’m like, “My eyebrows have frozen, but I’m not feeling it.” Five minutes passed. Six minutes passed. At eight minutes, I give up. I was like, “I’m not going to stay in here anymore.”

Your thermoregulatory mechanisms are like anything else in your body. The more you exercise them, the stronger they get. The vasoconstriction that will cut off the blood to your limbs and the outer layers of your skin helps you conserve heat. The brown fat, the non-shivering thermogenesis, helps you produce more heat. The body is complex, but very clever. When it becomes acclimated to the cold, it no longer responds with that same shock response, like in the dry cold of the cryo.

That was a very vivid example of somebody who is a cryo master being put in a baby tub with ice. I was not happy. The water is special. Let me ask you a question on the other side. You’ve been doing it for a while. At some point, do you feel, “I’m doing it at 31, 32, or 0 degrees Celsius, and I’m getting bored.” Do you feel that?

Pushing The Limits: How Cold Is Too Cold For Ice Baths?

No, not at those temperatures. When we’re down one Celsius, like 33 to 34, I still hate it. I’m in there, and after fifteen seconds, I’m like, “What was I even worried about? Why was I even anxious about this?” There is a temperature that is so cold you never psychologically acclimate. A lot of people will see me on Instagram. Instagram is great. We want big chunks of ice because it’s dramatic, and people know that it’s cold. I’ll do these science lectures. Sometimes, it’s 2 or 3 minutes in the ice.

You are in the tub and lecturing? If I were lecturing, I would scream.

I try to look cool. I want to look like I’m not bothered.

You are cool. You are cold

If you could see the crew, I’m pacing back and forth and trying to psych myself up, and the crew has to be very patient. They say, “Professor Seager, we’re rolling. Whenever you are ready.” I have to get myself in the right frame of mind to talk about mitochondria or something when I’m up to my clavicles in chunks of ice.

That does make sense because, as much as you get acclimated, your body is still a human body. Those temperatures are very extreme for a human body. There are many people who say that if you are in a temperature like this, you’re going to die within one minute.

Those people are wrong. Yeah,

It’s not true, but you have your limits, too. Wim Hof is probably made of brown fat, but even for him, there’s a limit to how much it can take.

I agree. It’s funny. It doesn’t take a lot of brown fat. People are so afraid of fat, but brown fat is very different than white fat. The purpose of brown fat is to burn calories, not to store them. It doesn’t take a lot of brown fat. It doesn’t appear in the same areas of the body that white fat does. It appears around the base of the neck, a little bit around the heart. When it’s generating heat, it will impart that heat to the blood vessels that feed the brain.

It’s not like you look any different when you’ve recruited the brown fat to your body, but you feel different. You feel different in the cold. Brown fat is not just for non-shivering thermogenesis. It is also an essential secretory organ. It’s associated with higher levels of neuroprotective factors. Things like brain-derived neurotrophic factor, RBM3, or FGF21, these things that are associated with brain health come from brown fat.

Brown fat is in constant communication with the thyroid. These two work together to regulate metabolism. If you are an adult and you don’t get enough cold, and you’ve lost all the brown fat from your body, it’s no wonder that your metabolism becomes dysregulated. Your thyroid has nothing to work with. There is no opposing organ to modulate its function. Restoring brown fat through a program of regular cold exposure can resolve Hashimoto’s. It can resolve Graves’ disease. It can normalize thyroid function. We have several documented cases where women have done exactly that.

It makes a lot of sense that when you start building brown fat, it’ll appear in those regions. From my very limited experience of doing the cold shower, this is where you feel the cold. This is where the cold will hurt you most. It is exactly in those places that you described. I’m going to wait with the women in the Hashimoto’s because that’s a big subject. I’m going to put it on the shelf for a second. Let’s start with men. One way you described PSA is an inflammation of the prostate. The PSA is a very inexact measure anyway. Many doctors will even say, “Don’t do it,” because it’ll get you into the rabbit hole that you described.

Correct. It will initiate this whole sequela of iatrogenic injury of unnecessary intervention in the worst over-diagnosis, where men are having unnecessary prostatectomies because their biopsies have come up either as ambiguous or false positive. When I had my elevated PSA, I did not tell my daughter, my son, and my wife because I was afraid that they would beg me to go to the doctor to undergo these procedures that I was pretty sure were useless.

I can’t look my daughter in the eye and say, “I’m not going to do that.” I didn’t want to be confronted with the feelings of guilt that the people I’m counting on to love me might say, “Dad, we want you to go have that biopsy in case.” Far too many men have been overdiagnosed, overtreated, and injured as a result. I was determined that that wasn’t going to happen to me.

It makes a lot of sense. The cliche is they say you die with prostate cancer, not because of prostate cancer. Going back to this, you called it inflammation, but in many cases, the prostate grows. It’s BPH, Benign Prostate Hypertrophy. You have BPH. That will generate a high PSA, whether it’s inflamed or not. To the males reading this, is there any chance or hope, or have you seen anything or learned anything that this cold water will shrink the prostate?

I don’t have a case study at the ready of someone with Benign Prostate Hyperplasia, I think it’s called, who was able to reverse that through cold plunge therapy.

It’s hyperplasia. I’m so sorry.

The question brings up an important point. Most medical doctors believe that because testosterone is anabolic, it promotes the growth of cells in the body. Most medical doctors still believe that high testosterone levels could promote the growth of the prostate or prostate cancer. This is not true. The data going back to the 1930s says the opposite.

High testosterone levels protect against prostate cancer, but that hasn’t stopped a number of urologists from prescribing testosterone-suppressing agents to the patients that they’re treating. This is harmful to the patients, according to the epidemiological data. Dr. Abraham Morgentaler has been the most vocal advocate of this. He’s published several papers saying, “Stop doing this because, as a population, it is harmful to men who are pursuing prostate health to suppress their testosterone.”

Practices in medicine change a lot more slowly than knowledge does. Most doctors do whatever they were taught in med school. The only continuing education credits they get have been funded by the pharmaceutical industry, which wants to encourage them to prescribe more drugs. I wish I could talk to men and say, “Try 3 or 4 weeks of cold plunge therapy before you take any other more drastic approach. See if you get a difference in your PSA. See if you get a difference in your testosterone.” The men who have the guts to try it, who are reporting back to me, are getting magnificent results from it.

Going back to the brown fat, it’s brown because it has a lot of mitochondria.

Correct. Thousands of mitochondria.

I was trained as an engineer as well. I’m an electrical engineer and a computer engineer.

I’m civil and environmental. It’s nice to meet you.

Talking not as an engineer, but as a total simpleton, to the point of high testosterone is not good for your prostate, I will ask the simpleton question. We have a 21-year-old man. His testosterone is 1400. He’s a young man. How come he doesn’t get prostate cancer?

The irony is that the rates of prostate cancer increase with age, and typically, testosterone declines. For some reason, the medical community hasn’t put this together. One is going down and the other is going up. They’re like, “Here’s a hypothesis. If your testosterone doesn’t decline, your risk of prostate cancer does not go up.” That is exactly what the data shows.

It might be that they are both originating from a common root cause. It might not be that high testosterone itself is protective. What is more likely is that the metabolic health required to maintain high testosterone levels is also protective against cancer because cancer is a metabolic disorder. It originates in dysfunctional mitochondria, not in defects in the nucleus. When the mitochondria are already damaged, your testosterone will come down. When the testosterone is high, it’s an indication that the mitochondria are functioning well. That’s what protects you against cancer.

Many of the doctors, when they talk about that, think about drugs or TRT. Your body says, “What is that?” I’m going to stop doing it myself. Everything goes crazy. You’re talking about something else. You are simply inducing a stimulus, and the stimulus creates completely natural reactions. Let’s go to a little more procedural stuff, and then I’ll go to the women, Hashimoto’s, and all.

You said you started going into the plunge daily, and then you would exercise. From my understanding, you didn’t exercise heavily. You did jumping jacks, pushups, and maybe squats. You dry yourself first. You get out of the tub, you are cold, and you dry yourself. Maybe you go to the room when it’s not so cold, and you exercise. Is that your protocol?

Cold Plunge Protocol: Exercise And Recovery For Testosterone Boost

Correct. Since I’m in Phoenix, I would always have my cold plunge outside on my patio. I was renting an apartment. I would get out and dry off. My favorite is the steel mace. I like doing my steel mace swings. I got a pull-up bar. Pushups are good. Sometimes, all I have time for is to walk to class. At that time, I was maybe a mile from campus. Some days, it’s a pretty hot walk in Phoenix. It could be 45 degrees Celsius outside in the desert or 115 degrees Fahrenheit. All it takes is to get the circulation back in the limbs and reopen the blood vessels. It does not have to be a hard resistance training workout.

One of my favorites was to get out of the ice bath, drive to hot yoga, and then do an hour of hot yoga. A funny thing happened in one of those sessions. Everyone else surrounding me is sweating. I didn’t start sweating until about 45 minutes. The instructor finally came up to me and said, “You don’t feel hot.” I said, “It’s very hot.” I had to explain that I’d come out of the ice bath. I was using hot yoga to rewarm. She was reassured, but I have yet to know anybody in that hot yoga class who came up to and asked me, “What is this ice bath thing? How do I get some of that?”

What about a very compact thing that you could do, like a rebounder?

There is a man, Jeff Daubney, in Mexico who swears by rebounding as the ideal exercise for rewarming men after an ice bath. He’s got good data to prove it. He took one of his clients. I forget where they started. They were low in the three hundreds or low 400s. He took him all the way up to 900 nanograms per deciliter total testosterone in 30 days. It was the fastest testosterone ramp I’ve ever seen.

What’s his name?

Jeff Daubney. He’s on Instagram. We did a great interview. He does some diet interventions as well. Jeff believes that the cornerstone of his testosterone program is the ice bath followed by the rebounding. A good rule of thumb is, however long you’re in the ice bath, maybe you did 3 minutes or 4 minutes, do 2 minutes on the rebounder. You can always do more.

Sometimes, I come out of my ice bath and I feel like I’ve got the energy of a Persian warrior. I want to do more pull-ups, push-ups, and lunges. I want to get those kettlebells and toss them around because all that energy needs a place to go. A good rule of thumb is to do 2 minutes of light exercise for every 1 minute that you’re in the ice bath. It doesn’t take very long at all.

Let me again be a devil’s advocate. When you do a pull-up, a pull-up, no matter how you slice it, is a heavy motion. You lift your entire body weight. I’m 200 pounds. I have long arms, too. You lift 200 pounds. That’s a strong motion, whatever you call it. People will say, “Before you do that kind of stuff, you need to warm up.” You didn’t exactly warm up here. What do you say to that?

I’ve never bothered with warming up. The benefits of warming up are probably exaggerated, but I’m not a physiologist. All I can tell you is what works for me. I get out, dry off, and do my pull-ups. I’ve never pulled a muscle. I’ve never torn a tendon or injured a joint or something. I weighed 210, and I could only do 4 pull-ups. Talk about not being David Goggins. Some part of me feels pathetic doing those four.

I also remember what it was like when I was 250 pounds and I couldn’t even do 1 pull-up. I remember when my daughter sat me down. She was in high school, and we had a trainer for her. She was into sports. I asked her for a series of exercises that would help me get in shape, and she was so enthusiastic. She was like, “I know all these things that I’ve learned from my trainer.”

She got out a sheet of paper and she wrote along the top of it The Fat Daddy Workout. It was crushing, but she was right. When I started working out, I remembered I didn’t want my daughter to think of me as fat anymore. I’m still something like 25% body fat. I’m no Instagram model. I don’t have those washboard abs that Paul Saladino can show off, but I’m metabolically healthy. That correlates well with a long life.

I read it. You explain keto as carbs. You said, “The combination of intermittent keto plus the cold plunge got my testosterone and my PSA.” Someone could challenge you and say, “Maybe it was only the keto.”

It could have been. Keto is a pretty good thing for your body, for your metabolism, and for your mitochondria. I didn’t run a controlled study. This was an accidental discovery. However, one of the fastest ways to stimulate endogenous ketone production is an ice bath. As soon as you get in and activate that sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system, your liver will release its glycogen stores into the bloodstream. This is to fuel your muscles in case you have to fight or flight. That doesn’t last very long. You get a temporary blood sugar spike.

The brown fat or your shivering muscles will clear that glucose from your bloodstream. At the same time, your white fat cells will begin to release into the bloodstream the free fatty acids that take over the metabolism, which will fuel the thermogenesis when the glucose is gone. As an intermediary product of that fat metabolism, you will produce ketones. Your brain loves ketones. Tumor cells hate ketones, but your body loves ketones. If it is the ketones that do it, then the ice bath is still the right mechanism by which to stimulate endogenous ketone production.

It sounds right. I was only posing this logical challenge. The ice bath was the dominant factor.

There’s a good reason for that. Exercise will not recruit brown fat. It is good for your mitochondria. It will benefit your mitochondria. It’s a hormetic stressor. You might feel sore after exercise. You might feel tired or fatigued, but your body comes back stronger. Nothing will recruit new brown fat to your body. The thousands of mitochondria that are in each brown fat cell, any better than cold exposure will. It is the only thing that will recruit new brown fat. I’m not knocking keto or exercise. These are wonderful things to do. There is no perfect substitute for cold exposure.

Going back, Jeff Daubney probably likes the rebounder because you can do a lot. If you want to walk, you can walk. You can run. You can do jumping jacks. It’s very flexible. The protocol, you go in for a few minutes, depending on the cold. Alexis and Jack Cruz talk about something completely different. She shared with you 50 to 55, which was a lukewarm summer. They lie there for 15 to 45 minutes, and that’s for metabolic effects. When you go down to 40 or 39, how many minutes? Three, four, or two?

I don’t have the patience that Alexis Cowan has. I don’t know how she can sit in that thing for twenty minutes. It’s the time and temperature. If you’re doing a warmer bath and you want the same amount of heat extraction, you have to stay in there longer. For me, I feel like three minutes in and I’m already checking my watch. I got six more emails I have to respond to.

I’m not recommending that people live their lives this way. Probably her slower pace is healthier for her. I  haven’t found a way to make it work in my life. I do 2 to 4 minutes every day. That’s where I believe the psychological benefits reside. After I’ve calmed my breath, after the dive reflex has kicked in, after I’ve got to that point where I’m like, “What was I even worrying about?” and it snapped me to my present moment, the most important work that I’ve done in my ice bath is complete.

Talk about being in the present moment. That kind of stress puts you, whether you choose to or not, in the present moment. There are many other benefits as well.

You don’t have a choice. When you get into the ice bath and it’s cold, you don’t have any room in your brain for those regrets in your past. You don’t have any room in your brain for those anxieties that might exist in your imagination about the future. It snaps you to that present moment. The only thing happening to you is the cold that you’re feeling. That is a wonderful psychological hack.

Is there a better time of day to do it?

Best Time Of Day For Cold Plunging & Temperature Control

I do it in the morning. I have friends who swear by doing it in the evening. The most important thing is that yours equals one experience. I can’t tell anybody that they’re doing it wrong. My setup is that I like getting up before dawn, and I might have a phone call or an email. I’ll certainly have a cup of coffee. Although some people say that’s not what you’re supposed to do, it’s what I do. When the sun comes up, my Morozko is on my east porch, so I go out and get that Huberman light into my eyes. I get into my cold plunge, come out, and then exercise at dawn. That seems to be working well for me. If something else is working for someone else, then far be it for me to judge them.

The Morozko itself, you can choose the temperature, right?

Correct.

What’s the highest that it has on the dial?

We don’t have a warming element in there. You can go up to whatever your ambient would be.

Once you start cooling, surely, you have something like 50.

You can also freeze it solid. We shipped one up to Ben Greenfield. He found us, reached out, and said, “I’d love to have one of these things.” He put it outside in Spokane, Washington, where he was living at the time. The first thing that happened was he froze it solid. I’m going, “Why hasn’t Ben Greenfield posted from his Morozko?” We had to wait until March for the temperatures in Spokane to get warm enough for him to even get in the dang thing.

He could have put it inside. He could have put it in the house.

He could have. Maybe he didn’t have room. He’s become a good friend since then.

He has a lot of gadgets. Another question. You said you started this when you were around 51. Now, you’re 58. I live in Marin County, North of San Francisco. There are lots of healthy and active people here. Sometimes, you see a person in the street walking around and think it’s an athlete, and then you look at their face. It’s an 80-year-old person.

He is an athlete.

Let’s talk about that 80-year-old. We are still with men. We’ll go to the women in a second. An 80-year-old man is reading this. They’re generally healthy, but very likely to have BPH and stuff like that. He’s reading this and saying, “I’m excited. I want to get a cold plunge. I want to start cold plunging.” Would there be, from you having experienced your customers slash friends, any advice you’d give the 80-year-old as opposed to the 51-year-old or the 58-year-old?

They say the human body loses plasticity, whether it’s neuroplasticity or its ability to respond to exercise. The medical doctors will tell you, “That erodes over time. NAD+ deteriorates.” There’s one thing that can be problematic. You might be accumulating too much iron, and you might have to donate blood in order to shed iron.

The body isn’t very good, especially in men and older women, at dispensing excess iron, so that’s important. Wherever you start, you can make progress. The 80-year-old can make progress like the 51-year-old or the 31-year-old can. It’s very discouraging to say, “As you get older, there are some things that you can’t do.” I would encourage them all to start. What happens?

Patrick Porter is the BrainTap guy. He had me in his neural check a few years ago. They put electrodes on your wrist and measure what kind of energy you’re putting out. He flipped through these things and said, “Tom, I can’t help you with BrainTap.” I asked, “Why not?” He goes, “Because you’re already operating at such a high level. You’re at this 97% or 98% of potential. What am I going to do? Get you up to 100%?” I thought he was flattering me. He said, “Let me show you one more screen. This is your biological age as measured by your energy output. Congratulations. You’re 32 years old.”

There are a lot of material markers of biological age, whether it’s telomere length or DNA methylation. I don’t think they’re worth a damn because I have seen the data. I don’t think any of them improve upon chronological age as a predictor of mortality. Mortality studies of that type are very difficult to do as human beings. It is the mitochondria that are the escapement of the biological clock. Mitochondria pace your aging.

The fortunate thing is that you can rejuvenate your mitochondria. You can reverse the damage associated with your mitochondria at any age. Biological age is a measure of mortality. You can reduce the risk of mortality, whether you’re 81 or 51, by doing this mitochondrial therapy. Cold is good. Magnesium is good. A little zinc is good. Fix your light hygiene.

Get sunshine during the day. Get dark at night. Fix your sleep, for goodness’ sake, if you’re not sleeping well. Get the seed oils out of your diet because the seed oils are incorporated in the phospholipids that make up your cell membranes. They interfere with the cell transport processes across those membranes. When you do all of these things, you don’t feel old anymore.

The answer is also a 51-year-old and an 81-year-old going to a gym. Maybe they will start at a different place. Maybe 1 of them will start with 25 pounds. Maybe 1 of them will start with 12 pounds. Who cares? They start. Nike’s got it right on this front. Just do it.

Agreed. I’m very happy with my strength. What exercise can do that cold cannot do is improve your cardiovascular. I went through this whole battery of tests at Optispan in Seattle. They said, “We’re going to look at all these different measures of health.” On the strength measures, I did very well. I did the standing broad jump and came out 6’2”. I was so pleased with myself. I didn’t think I could do standing broad jumps at 6’2” when I was in high school. If you can do more than your height, and I’m only 5’11” and 3 quarters, then they say that’s pretty good.

For my VO2 max, I stayed on that treadmill until I was afraid I was going to throw up in the mask. When I got out, I was exhausted. My supervisor there looked a little disappointed. He wrote my number down. It was 28. I texted it back home to Phoenix. I said, “28. What do you think?” My media manager at the time said, “You’re going to die within seven years. Your cardiovascular health is poor.” I don’t need more strength. The testosterone is doing that for me. The cold plunge is doing that for me. I do need more cardiovascular. I’m not going to die in seven years, but I don’t have the cardiovascular health that I probably would rather have.

That makes a lot of sense. I’m going to switch to the women. We talked about men. It was very fascinating. I’m a man. I’m fascinated. Chad, our producer, is a man. He’s fascinated. We know about testosterone. We know the levels. We go to women. It’s a whole other story. Let’s begin by you, maybe for a few minutes, laying the foundation. What happens when Alexis goes in the tub, or when another woman goes in the tub? What’s the story there?

Cold Plunging For Women: Testosterone & Romantic Bonds

Most of the testosterone in a man’s body is made in the testes. Men have about ten times the total testosterone that women do, and that’s because of what the testes contribute. What most people don’t realize is that testosterone is also the dominant sex hormone in women. A healthy woman will have 3 to 4 times the testosterone as she will have estradiol. Where does it come from? About 25% comes from the ovaries. The rest comes from skin cells, fat cells, and adrenal glands.

A woman’s response to the cold in the skin cells, fat cells, and adrenal glands is to rev up the activity in those three areas, not so much the ovaries, which are inside the body. Since they all produce testosterone, she gets an immediate testosterone boost. By immediate, I mean give it a couple of minutes. As soon as she’s in the ice bath, her testosterone begins to rise. This has a number of beneficial effects for women. The most well-known is increased libido. The number one reason that women are treated for low testosterone is a loss of sexual desire.

I had an incredible experience with a woman I was dating. We were in a big argument, but we’d agreed to do a photo shoot. This is on YouTube. We’re so full of resentment towards one another that we can barely even look at each other as we get in. We’d procrastinated all day. It’s such a crappy photo shoot. We never would’ve posted it except for the fact that after about a minute, she smiled at me.

After a minute and a half, she gave my hands a little squeeze, and I squeezed them back. At two and a half minutes, we were making out in the ice bath because this whole flood of neurotransmitters and hormones was giving us an involuntary response towards one another. We spent the weekend together. We had a wonderful time. All those bitter resentments melted away when we had that experience together. I didn’t know what was happening.

I have to exercise to get a testosterone boost, but she’s experiencing more testosterone, more vasopressin, and more oxytocin. Those are the bonding hormones that can heal a relationship not necessarily for the long-term, but in that moment rekindle the romantic attraction, the lust for one another, and the feelings of attachment for one another. We got some video from CryoCON in Dallas. There was a couple there that agreed to plunge together. It was delightful watching them get in, stare into one another’s eyes, and hold one another’s hands. The way they related to one another the next day, because they did it on day two, was wonderful to see.

In this particular case, she makes testosterone from her skin.

Her adrenals and her fat cells.

She did not need to get out of the tub and exercise to get the boost. She got the boost in the tub. Her reaction affected you. It’s not like you got a boost of testosterone. You were reacting to her.

I was a happy man. Remember, in my body, I’m also getting vasopressin. I’m also getting oxytocin. Vasopressin is essential to vasoconstriction. When you get into the cold and you get the vasopressin boost, it increases those feelings of attachment and commitment to the person that you’re doing it with, which is a wonderful thing. I certainly had no objection to her increase in testosterone. When she leaned in to kiss me, I thought I’d hit the romantic jackpot. All the anger that I had towards that relationship was already gone. I was receptive to the idea that we should kiss and make up.

As a secondary benefit, if you have a couple, they’re both on board. Sometimes, one of the couple, and it could be the man or it could be the woman, will say, “Are you kidding? You’ll pay me $1 million, and I’m not going into that thing.” If they’re both on board and they go in, that’s good for the relationship, isn’t it?

Correct.

Let’s go to Hashimoto’s. I know it’s not uniquely female, but you see it a lot in women. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah. There are some good documented case studies, and probably the best is Dr. Courtney Hunt. So she’s a medical doctor. She has a practice in Scottsdale. She reached a point in her life where she was not happy with her condition. She was overweight, she was pretty miserable, and she had Hashimoto’s. This is a woman who has a medical degree, who’s been practicing as an OBGYN for years. She knew that she was headed for a lifetime of thyroid medication if she was going to go by what she was taught in medical school, and she decided she wanted something else.

She started by going into her pool outdoors. The pools in Scottsdale, Arizona, aren’t necessarily cold, but in the winter, they’ll get down into the 50s, and they’ll give you some cold stimulation. She went into keto, and she started being much more careful about her light by getting morning sun in her eyes and doing some sunshine to build a solar callous and make some vitamin D.

It wasn’t that she just did a cold plunge, but a cold plunge is essential to recruit brown fat. It is the brown fat that will convert inactive thyroid hormone to the active form of thyroid hormone. It will produce more active thyroid hormone than the thyroid gland will. It will stay in constant communication to modulate the function of the thyroid.

There are so many women in Phoenix, because Phoenix is not cold, who have no brown fat and dysregulated thyroid, whether it’s hyper or hypo, who would benefit from recruiting brown fat via deliberate cold exposure, and then modulating that dysregulated thyroid function to normalize it. She tells me that there are zero markers of Hashimoto’s in her blood tests. That is a reversal of what medicine believes is a chronic degenerative condition that requires medication for the rest of your life.

She says that she’s in tune enough with her body, that if she lapses on her routine, she will slide backwards. These are dependent upon lifestyle choices. When you make poor choices, the symptoms of those poor choices return. She’s a determined woman. You can follow her on Instagram. You’ll see almost every day, she’s out there hiking Camelback Mountain, getting her sunshine.

She has reversed the rate of cognitive decline, for example, in her parents by getting them in the cold plunge, by getting the seed oils in the processed carbs out of their diet, and by recruiting that brown fat that protects their brain. She’s documenting it all on social media as she goes. She’s not the only case, but she’s probably the one that we should get to know first.

Reversing Hashimoto’s & Metabolic Health With Cold Therapy

Many of these practices, barring the cold plunge, which has an initial outlay, may not get as far as we should have because nobody makes much money. Going in the sun, hiking on the mountain, and cutting off the seed oils, who makes money out of that? That’s not an attractive message for the general population.

It’s not good for Moderna shareholders, I can tell you that. The best way to do your cold plunge is if you’re in California, go get in the Pacific Ocean. The best thing that you can do for your body is nature. I live in Downtown Phoenix. I need the next best thing to nature, which is the machines that I’ve created to simulate the response in my body.

If I can’t get into the Pacific Ocean, I’m going to get into my Morozko. I’ll get that cold water. I’ll get the salt benefit. If I can’t get up to the forest, I’ll get my MyGreen Lamp out. I’ll get the green into my eyes to reduce anxiety and take away the pain of headaches. The next best thing to nature is a technological solution to the problems that technological lives have created for us.

You make perfect sense. In fact, I used to know a lady who lived in Petaluma, which is a little North of where we are. She said she constantly goes to the beach and goes in the water, which is very cold. Logistically, at least for me, it’s a half-hour drive. You park and go. It takes half a day to do this thing. Let’s talk about what our readers can benefit from by being in touch with you and how they can be in touch with you. I understand that you have already written a book called Uncommon Testosterone. That’s great. I’m very glad that you did. Are you writing another book?

I have two books. The newest one is Uncommon Testosterone. It’s available on Amazon. The one that I published in 2024 was Uncommon Cold. Uncommon Cold is quite comprehensive. It has something like 450 scientific citations. It talks about autoimmune disorders. It talks about cancer. It talks about sex, health, and testosterone a little bit. The Uncommon Testosterone book goes deeper into the protocols and the science of sex hormones, sexual performance, sexual function, and fertility.

There’s some overlap between the two books, and you can only get Uncommon Cold at MorozkoForge.com. It’s not on Amazon. We’ve self-published it and self-printed it. It is a magnificent book, but it’s a lot harder to buy because you can only get it from us. I want to update it, create a second edition, and make it easier for people to find by, for example, putting it on Amazon. That’s a bit of a project. The next book might turn out to be Uncommon Cancer, because cancer originates in disorders of the metabolism. The cold can help fix that.

There’s a deeper dive for me to do into the benefits for people who are worried about the risk of cancer or managing an active cancer that comes from cold plunge therapy. You don’t need to buy any of my books. You can go to MorozkoForge.com and read everything I have ever written on the topic of ice bath science for free. If you’re one of the people like me who want to write in the margins and put sticky notes all over the book, then you have to spend the $35 or something to get it on paper.

When we first started, the dumbest thing we could do was to name our brand after a metaphor because Google hated it. If we had called ourselves BestIceBathForYou.com, then Google would’ve pointed you right to us from the outset. We are the number 1 Google search result for 4 different misspellings of Morozko. You will find us.

People who are logical are going to want to get your plunge.

If they can afford it. I’m sorry, but it’s made in America by people who earn a real wage. It’s still expensive, and I wish I could bring the cost down. We have a $10,000 model, but that’s still an enormous investment. It’s because we won’t compromise. We won’t use plastic. We won’t use inflatables. The last thing I want is my customers getting into a pool full of bisphenol A, brominated flame retardants, or anything else that’s going to make them sick.

If you can’t buy one for your home, increasingly, there are more and more businesses where you can show up at a wellness center, and you can combine it with sauna, red light, and all the other modalities that they have there. I’ll keep working on getting that cost down. If you can afford it, the best way to do it is to get a Morozko. Get either our low-end model or one of the larger ones that will match your sauna. The aesthetics are very important.

Let’s talk about the models. You said you are roughly 6’0”. I’m 6’2”. Which model does one get?

The favorite model for the engineers I have who are 6’4” is the 66-inch tub. It’s a little bit counterintuitive. You don’t want a tub as long as your body. I’ve got a little 48-inch tub at home because that’s what fits on my balcony. The only thing I regret about it is that it’s too big for me to partner plunge. The woman that I was telling you about is 6’1”. When we were going out, we wouldn’t fit into the tub together unless it was at least 60 inches long. The shortest tub we make is 60 inches long. If you want something shorter, you have to special order it.

I’m 6’2”. Maybe I’m going to want to partner plunge. Which one?

Get the 66. You’ll be very happy in it, and you’ll be able to fit in there with your partner. We make a 72-inch tub. We do that because a lot of our customers are pro athletes. They are pro football players and pro baseball players. They’re very long. We had a call from a guy who was 6’11”. We had to design a special, more upright tub for him, and he loved it. Then, the 49 ERs called us and said, “We want three of them, but you have to make them big enough to fit our guys.” Some of those guys are 320 pounds. We said, “Here’s a video of a 6’11” guy getting into our upright. We call it the Ice Plunge. They said, “Perfect.”

Does the 66 model have a name?

Yeah. The MIB 66 or the Pro 66. I’m not very good at the catchy marketing.

For me, Chad, and our readers, do you have any discounts that you give?

We do. For our affiliates, for example, it’s a modest discount code that’s $500 off. I’ll get you an affiliate code. You choose the keyword. I’ll program it in as soon as we’re done with this recording. What would you like it to be?

I would like it to be Life201.

You type in that promo code when you’re online, and it will save you $500 off the retail price.

Not that I want to ask a painful question, but we are engineers. We’re practical. How much does it cost, the 66?

Off the top of my head, I wouldn’t be able to remember the retail price. It’s $13,000. The 72 would be a little bit more.

The 60?

$9,900.

I see. That will preclude maybe sharing it with somebody that you like.

It depends on how tall you are. It didn’t stop me. The tub that I was telling you about with the woman who was 6’1”. That was only a 5-foot tub, so 60 inches. The intimacy that we felt getting in there and the fact that we were so close helped with the experience. I don’t want to discourage anybody from getting a 60-inch tub and doing a partner plunge in there.

Let’s put the partner plunge aside for a second. The daily grind is that you go in. For a 6’2” guy, I don’t know. I’m not an expert, but you are. Which one would you get?

Get the 66.

I heard you. I don’t know about Chad, who is listening, I’m sure, with great interest, but I learned a great deal.

I am so glad.

You said you’re not focused on marketing and everything, but sometimes, sexy names sell things. How about your fourth book, it is Uncommon Sex?

That’s the Uncommon Testosterone. It’s full of sex. There will be a series of books because it is very important to me that our brand be built on the foundation of science. I want data. I want case studies for every claim that we make. There’ll be Uncommon Testosterone, Uncommon Cancer, Uncommon Brain, or Uncommon Cognition. I don’t know. We will roll out these specialty books, and then I will update the Uncommon Cold so that it remains more of an encyclopedia of ice bath science.

There is an issue in this country where if you have an MD following your name, people listen to you in a better way. Being trained as an engineer and clearly having the patience to dig deep, I believe, gives you a big edge over an MD who went to medical school twenty years ago and is too busy to follow up.

I agree.

Being an engineer, being logical, and being a researcher, I believe those books and all your information would be incredibly valuable.

The Engineer’s Perspective On Health: Science, Data, And Taking Control

I handed my book to Jay Bhattacharya. The last time he was in Phoenix, he stopped by to say hi. He was working on his own book at the time. He opened mine up, thumbed through it, and said, “Tom, you have way too many scientific footnotes. Nobody’s ever going to buy this book with all these footnotes in here.” I said, “Jay, what do you want me to do?” He says, “Take them out. Make it more popular.” I told him, “No way.” I have labored over every single journal article that I cite to ensure that the information in there is reliable, and then I want other people who might question the way I’m interpreting it to find that information for themselves.

Especially if you have a person who hands the book over to their doctor, the doctor will appreciate those footnotes.

I had a guy come up to me in Dallas. We were talking about prostate health. He said, “Professor Seager, I’m on testosterone suppression. I have been diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer. I’m going through radiation. This testosterone suppression is killing me. I’ve gained twenty pounds. I have no energy. I’m depressed. What do you think I should do?”

It puts me in a very difficult position because I’m not a medical doctor. Even if I were, I’m not his physician. I can’t give medical advice, but I can say, “Take this book to your physician. Point to these citations and say you’ve been doing some reading. You’re curious about what this study says about the dangers of testosterone suppression for men with prostate cancer. If your doctor says, “All those studies are full of crap. All those studies are wrong,” then ask your doctor for the studies that they think are right.” In this case, there are not any.

My job is to equip people with the machines and the knowledge they need that allow their bodies to heal themselves. The NIH isn’t going to do it. Your doctor isn’t going to do it. You are the only one in charge of your own health. It makes sense that you need to learn and that you need access to the protocols that will work, to the experiences of other people, and to reliable sources of hypotheses. You’re like, “What do I want to try for myself?” You need access to technology. That’s the role of the engineer and the scientist in me. Thank goodness I don’t have to unlearn years of medical school that I’ve never been trained to prescribe drugs because I’m not into it.

Before I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all I’ve learned and all the beautiful talk, how does one buy the Morozko?

The best way to do it is to email Scott@MorozkoForge.com. He’s our sales director. You can go right to our website. You can click to buy. Sometimes, we have people with those American Express Centurion cards who’ll drop $25,000 on an ice bath. It’s a wonderful thing for me, but Scott is a terrific human being. He is the least salesy person who has a job in sales. Email him and say, “I saw that episode with Professor Seager. He put your email address on blast and told me I should ask you about buying an ice bath.” He’ll be delighted to hear from you. Alright,

Thank you so much for taking the time.

It’s been my pleasure.

Same here. Take care.

Take care.

Important Links

• Morozko Forge
• Uncommon Testosterone
• Uncommon Cold
• Thomas Seager on Instagram
• Jeff Daubney on Instagram
• Courtney Hunt on Instagram

About Dr. Thomas Seager

Thomas P. Seager, PhD is an Associate Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering & the Built Environment at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ and co-Founder and CEO of Morozko Forge. He recently completed the first limited edition of his new book, Uncommon Cold: The Science & Experience of Cold Plunge Therapy. With more than 500 footnotes and citations, it is the definitive scientific work on cold plunge therapy. Thomas has also co-authored over 150 scientific articles related to human & infrastructure resilience, industrial ecology, and the environment.