Cold Plunge Science - Thomas P Seager Explains Cold Exposure Benefits & How Ice Baths increase Testosterone, Fertility, Vitamin D production, Brown Fat & even Thyroid Function!

Episode 53 of the Fitness Wisdom Podcast, Professor Thomas P. Seager, founder of Morozko Forge, shares his insights on the health benefits of cold exposure, particularly through ice baths. Professor Seager discusses his personal journey with cold therapy, the science behind its effects on mitochondrial health, insulin sensitivity, and even vitamin D production!

He emphasizes the biological necessity of cold exposure in modern living and its potential benefits for both men and women, including improved testosterone levels and fertility. We also discuss the critical role of mitochondrial health in fertility and how cold exposure can enhance cardiovascular and brain health.

Professor Seager also explores the therapeutic potential of green light for migraine relief and emphasizes the importance of relationships in overall health. The discussion concludes with insights into the quality and innovation behind Morozko Forge ice baths, advocating for a return to nature in health practices.

Key Takeaways 🧠

• Cold exposure is often misunderstood as just a temperature change.

• Thomas Seager's journey began with cold showers and led to ice baths.

• Ice baths activate the sympathetic nervous system and promote calmness.

• Cold exposure can improve metabolism and testosterone levels.

• Brown fat is crucial for metabolic health and is stimulated by cold.

• Insulin resistance is linked to mitochondrial dysfunction.

• Cold therapy can enhance metabolic flexibility and support weight loss.

• Vitamin D can be produced through cold exposure, aiding immune function.

• Regular cold exposure is essential for maintaining mitochondrial health.

• Cold therapy can improve fertility in women. Mitochondrial health is crucial for fertility in women.

• Cold exposure can rejuvenate mitochondria and improve fertility.

• Erectile dysfunction in men can indicate metabolic dysfunction.

• Cold therapy is beneficial for brain health and neuroprotection.

• Green light therapy has shown promise in relieving migraines.

• Nature and light exposure are essential for optimal health.

• Relationships play a significant role in emotional and physical health.

• Morozko Forge ice baths are designed for quality and effectiveness.

• Cold plunge therapy can enhance hormonal balance and attachment in relationships.

• Biohacking should focus on returning to natural health practices.

Chapters 📖

00:00 The Journey to Cold Therapy

09:10 The Science Behind Ice Baths

15:00 Mitochondrial Health and Cold Exposure

23:20 Insulin Sensitivity and Mitochondrial Function

28:46 The Role of Mitochondria in Aging and Metabolism

34:20 Cold Exposure and Its Impact on Insulin Sensitivity

40:16 Biophotons and Vitamin D Production

48:41 Cold Therapy and Women's Fertility

53:37 Cold Therapy and Men's Fertility

55:33 Cold Exposure and Cardiovascular Health

01:02:50 Cold Therapy and Mental Health Benefits

01:03:38 The Neuroprotective Effects of Cold Therapy

01:07:12 The Healing Power of Green Light

01:15:07 Nature, Technology, and Biohacking

01:16:33 The Importance of Relationships in Health

01:22:43 Innovations in Ice Bath Technology

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If you want to explore Professor Thomas P. Seager's premium ice baths, check them out HERE

Make sure to use promo code: MOBILITYFITNESS at checkout for a massive $500 discount on your ice bath. 

⬇️ Full Podcast Transcript

Andreas (02:34.468)

Hello and welcome back to another exciting episode of the Fitness Wisdom Podcast. Today we have a very special guest, Professor Thomas Seeger. He's the founder of Morosco Forge, probably some of the best ice baths in the world. They're grounded and also self-cleaning. He's also the author of Uncommon Cold and also Uncommon Testosterone. Welcome to the show, Dr. Thomas. Thank you for being here.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (03:04.309)

It's a pleasure to be here, Andreas. Thank you for having me on.

Andreas (03:08.73)

feel like why it's so important for us to have this discussion is because cold is such an underrated tool when it comes to overall health and wellbeing, because it's simply just seen as this just temperature, right? Temperature change. And a lot of people, the way they view it is just that, I just do it mainly for the mental health benefits or just for being tough, right? And there is a lot of misunderstanding and misconception as well on the internet and also, you know, floating around on social media about ice baths.

and how they actually can be counterproductive for our health. So we are going to dispel all of these myths today, I hope. But before we dive into all of that, I would love to hear your own personal journey, how you actually go into inventing an ice bath company yourself. What was your interest? What was the trigger?

Thomas P Seager, PhD (04:00.749)

I started with cold showers because I'd read a book that said cold showers is going to toughen you up. I said, okay, I want to be tougher, but I hated every single minute of every cold shower that I'd ever taken. in Phoenix, Arizona, where I live, the water doesn't even get that cold. In the summertime, it could be coming out of my shower at 80 degrees.

Andreas (04:21.381)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (04:24.469)

So a former student of mine, I'm a professor at Arizona State University, and a former student of mine said, well, have you ever tried an ice bath? No, I'd never heard of it. He said, have you ever heard of Wim Hof? I didn't know who Wim Hof was. So he invited me to one of these things where you buy 200 pounds of ice and you throw it in the horse trough and you do the breath work. I thought it was great. Completely different experience than a cold shower for me.

It wasn't until later I found this paper, it was done by these researchers in Finland. They compared partial body cold immersion to whole body cold immersion. And they found two different effects on the nervous system. When you do partial body, you get...

Andreas (05:06.53)

Hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (05:08.659)

activation of the sympathetic nervous system, you get the activation of the brown fat, it can be very good for your metabolism. But what you don't get is the dive reflex. You don't get that sense of calm that the whole body ice bath will give you. So your heart rate never comes down. Your parasympathetic division never takes over. The ice bath has this paradoxical calming experience. And then after, say, the first

Andreas (05:20.739)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (05:38.318)

30 seconds you wonder, what the heck was I even worried about? Why was I anxious? After that dive reflex kicks in, your brain enters an involuntary meditative state. When you get out, and the dopamine and the noradrenaline is now coursing through all the neurotransmitters that were produced in response to the activation from the cold. When you get out, now you feel euphoric. So the ice

Andreas (05:58.977)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (06:06.337)

bath experience was entirely different than the cold shower experience for me. We got tired of buying ice. You know, in Phoenix, Arizona, it's 45 degrees C, say, in the backyard. And you buy all this ice, but it melts in 15 minutes. We said, well, we should really be able to build a machine. We're engineers. We ought to be able to construct something that makes its own ice. So we did.

But I didn't get serious about it until I got a lab report back. And the lab report measured my PSA, which is prostate-specific antigen. I was 52 years old at the time, and it's something that, you know, they say you should do. You know, men should get their PSA checked as they get older. My PSA came back seven, which is too high.

Andreas (06:44.448)

Hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (06:55.883)

I went straight onto the internet to figure out why they were flagging that on my lab report in red and telling me it was a danger sign. And it took maybe 20 minutes of Googling around to convince myself I was going to die of prostate cancer. Now, the PSA is not a prostate cancer test. It just says you have an inflamed prostate. However, the thing you're supposed to do is go to your urologist, have a prostate exam, get a biopsy.

I started talking to other guys who had done this. The biopsy was incredibly painful. It was inconclusive in many cases. And so as a precautionary measure, they had the surgery to have their prostate removed. And one of the things that that does is leave you with a lifetime of erectile dysfunction. So I had all these catastrophic thoughts going through my head. I thought I was either going to die of prostate cancer,

Andreas (07:29.396)

Mm-hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (07:52.158)

or I was gonna have a prostatectomy and have a lifetime of erectile dysfunction and neither one of those sounded good to me, Andreas. So, instead of going to the urologist, instead of doing what WebMD told me I was supposed to do, I got straight into the ice bath. I started doing it every single day. I thought the ice bath is good for inflammation, the ice bath is good for metabolism, I'm gonna use a keto diet, which I went in and out of, and the ice bath...

Andreas (08:06.896)

Thomas P Seager, PhD (08:20.053)

to see if I can get this PSA down and it worked. Four months later, I had dropped my PSA from seven down to 1.8. It went a little lower later on. a funny thing happened in my labs. When you go in to the lab, at least in Arizona, and you check, yep, I want the male health panel, they don't just check your PSA, they also check your total testosterone. And my testosterone jumped.

I was in the mid 700s and I went up to 1180 nanograms per deciliter, which came back flagged red too high on the lab report. For an overweight, sedentary 52 year old guy to have 1180 nanograms per deciliter testosterone cries out for an explanation. So I went, you know, I'm a scientist. I went back into the library and I started looking for any evidence of

cold exposure and testosterone. I found some in 1991. These Japanese researchers, they looked at young men and they did cold after exercise, which was what everybody was doing. Use cold for recovery. Testosterone and luteinizing hormone both went down. But then for some reason they reversed it. They did the cold and then they did the exercise. Testosterone and luteinizing hormone went up. Well, Andreas,

Andreas (09:32.956)

Mm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (09:45.708)

I wasn't doing the ice baths to recover from kind of some strenuous workout. I wasn't running three miles a day, you know. I was doing the ice bath because I was afraid I was going to die of prostate cancer. So when I got out, of course I would exercise. I would do some push-ups or pull-ups or I'd go for a walk. Not a lot of exercise, but just enough to get my blood flowing back into my limbs. It was exactly the protocol that the Japanese study said would boost my testosterone, and it did.

Andreas (09:57.97)

Mm-hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (10:14.785)

So I wrote an article about it. I put it up on the internet where everybody could read these brilliant findings of mine. And nobody cared. Google ignored it. Nobody was looking at morozcoforge.com for advice on testosterone until Joe Rogan found it. And he put it up on his podcast. And he explained to David Goggins, this is December 2022,

Andreas (10:37.455)

Hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (10:43.831)

that he'd started this protocol of doing his ice bath in the morning and then doing some exercise. And David Goggins was like, well, that's crazy. You how's that working for you? And Joe said, it's working. Then people all over the world found the article. They started reading it. They started doing it because they wanted to see what happened. They started sending me their labs. And that's really what happened with my book, Uncommon Testosterone. It explains

Andreas (11:01.519)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (11:13.281)

What happened to me? What happened to my prostate? What happened to my testosterone? It's got the case studies of men and women, by the way, from all over the world. It says this is why your testosterone goes up. It turns out that every sex hormone in the body originates as pregnenolone synthesized in the mitochondria. It is the mitochondria that are responsible for producing your sex hormones.

Andreas (11:25.946)

Hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (11:40.214)

So when you do things that support your mitochondria, exercise is good, magnesium is good, zinc is good, sleep is good, get all the seed oils out of your diet, it's good for your mitochondria. And one of the best things you can do is cold plunge therapy because it stimulates mito-biogenesis. Now you have more mitochondria. They are of a higher quality because of what you've been doing in the cold. It's no wonder.

your testosterone levels go up. So that's the genesis of Morosco Forge. Some people come after me and they say, you know, this guy, he's fabricating the science so he can sell more ice baths. And they get the order wrong. After I figured out how incredible the science was, backed up by my own experience, I had to start fabricating ice baths so that the world could have access.

to what they needed to keep their metabolism healthy, their testosterone levels up, their energy level up, et cetera.

Andreas (12:37.381)

Yes.

Andreas (12:40.92)

Mmm.

Andreas (12:45.042)

yeah, that was such a fantastic breakdown. Thank you so much for sharing your personal journey and it's super inspiring because it makes you understand that, okay, that it's working on a foundational level. It's not just something that you feel on the outside. It's working all the way on a cellular level, on the mitochondrial level, because we know that the mitochondria are the foundation of health and when mitochondrial health is suffering, that's when everything else begins to decline because obviously the mitochondria they produce

the energy for the cells and obviously if the cells have the energy that they need, then they can carry out all of the necessary processes that they need to be able to thrive and to survive really. And when things are, you know, our modern living really, which is making us so comfortable, you know, the temperature, for example, the lack of sunlight, staying indoors and being under artificial blue light, this is so damaging to our mitochondria. And I feel like too,

cold can be such an incredible tool for people who can't get much time in nature, for example, who can get such an incredible hack into their lives because it's actually going to change their body from the inside out, right? So maybe now you can take us down the journey of what actually happens step by step by the timeframe from the moment that we enter the ice path by time and what's actually happening under the hood on a biological level.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (14:12.631)

You get it, Andreas.

So ironic, our industrialized modern world that makes us so comfortable is also killing us. So everything that my grandfather used to consider a hardship, we now consider therapy. My grandfather used to chop wood so he could run the wood stove in Maine the whole winter. And so he's getting his exercise and he'd be so sore at the end of the day. Now we go to the gym. Because what he used to think was a hardship, we consider a therapy.

Andreas (14:40.137)

I know.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (14:45.199)

Well, cold is part of that. It takes about two weeks for your body to recruit brown fat in response to daily cold stimulation. My people come from the North Sea. I come from seasonal latitudes. I'm supposed to have summer and I'm supposed to have winter. The problem is I live in a high-rise apartment building in the hottest city in North America in the middle of the desert in Phoenix, Arizona. I don't get any winter. I need an ice bath.

to maintain healthy levels of brown fat. Now some people might say, what's the point of brown fat? You know, 20 years ago medical doctors thought there was no such thing as brown fat in human adults. They thought it was only something that babies had and then everybody grew out of it. But it was in Sweden when they were doing PET scans with cancer patients and they said, we think we found brown fat in grown-ups. And they published a couple of papers. I think this was 2007. And so other cancer researchers started looking

Andreas (15:19.45)

Mm-hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (15:45.052)

at their scans looking for brown fat. And sure enough, about 5 % of the cancer patients scanned showed visible brown fat on the scans. What that meant was 95 % of these patients had zero detectable brown fat.

If you do not get cold on a regular basis, you lose your brown fat. And maybe some people are saying, I'm OK with no brown fat. I'm just going to keep the thermostat up and I'll stay warm. But brown fat is not just about thermogenesis. Brown fat is an essential secretory organ. So it makes, for example, neuroprotective factors, FGF21 and brain derived neuroprotective factor three are associated

Andreas (16:04.497)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Andreas (16:20.305)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (16:34.079)

higher levels of brown fat. Your brown fat takes care of your brain. Your brown fat also communicates with your thyroid to regulate your metabolism. When you have no brown fat, there is nothing to modulate your thyroid function. And so many people who are separated from the cold will wind up with a thyroid disorder, either hypo or hyper, that can be corrected by two weeks of regular ice

Andreas (16:44.95)

Mm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (17:03.999)

bath therapy. Now their body recruits new brown fat that communicates with the thyroid, modulates its function and brings it back into the normal range. It's brown fat that will convert inactive thyroid hormone into the active form of thyroid hormone. So the brown fat supports the thyroid and the thyroid signals the brown fat. When you don't get cold, you lose your brown fat, you lose an essential metabolic

and neuroprotective organ, it is no wonder you get sick.

Andreas (17:39.745)

Wow, that's so powerful. Yeah. It just makes you realize that it's a biological necessity to get cold. It's not just something that's nice to do. You know how uncle Dr. Jack Cruz, he talks about the three legs stool of life, right? He talks about light water magnetism and how those three things are essential for supporting life on this planet. Well, I would actually want to add into that stool if it would be possible. Melanin.

DHA and cold because I feel like those if you add all of those things together my god you would have such a such a thriving organism because as you're mentioning it's not just something nice to do it's a biological necessity especially if you're designed your biology is designed to actually be exposed to the cold because a lot of people don't understand that if they are from a northern latitude and they are living closer to the equator they think that it's okay to not do the cold

But I personally, because my mother is from the UK, but my father is from Cyprus, so I'm half and half. But I really, really crave the cold. Like the entire summertime, I really, really crave the cold. So that's just telling me that, you know, my body really needs it. Whereas there are some individuals who don't really crave the cold at all. And I can imagine that people who are born on the equator, do they actually need to do the cold as well? Do they also benefit from the cold, for example?

Thomas P Seager, PhD (19:07.435)

Yes. So here's two things to keep in mind, Andreas. First, your mitochondria have their own DNA.

Mitochondria do not participate in sexual reproduction like the DNA in the nucleus does. You've inherited your mitochondria from your mother. So as far as your mitochondria are concerned, they don't care that your father is from Cyprus because all of your mitochondria are inherited from the mother. Because the mitochondria do not participate in sexual reproduction, although the mutation rate will modify mitochondria and result in different

Andreas (19:36.237)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (19:45.728)

The inheritance of mitochondria that goes along this maternal line means that there's less variation in each generation. That is, when you inherit one set of chromosomes from your mother and one from a father, there's all kinds of recombinations. When you inherit them only from your mother, they change more slowly. So, as a first approximation, we have the same mitochondria as our ancient grandmothers who survived the ice age of 70,000.

years ago. Where did they live? The oldest human fossils have been found in East Africa. During this ice age,

The anthropologists estimate what was called a population bottleneck, estimate that there were only 5,000 human beings living between the edge of the glacier and the ocean. We lived at the water's edge. We fished and we foraged in the water so we could stay alive. And that water was cold.

Andreas (20:27.243)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (20:51.573)

So where does Wim Hof take his trainees? know, after they finish their breath work training and they finish their ice bath and they finish their sauna, what do they do? They climb up Mount Kilimanjaro.

Andreas (20:51.787)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (21:02.657)

Well, Mount Kilimanjaro is on the equator. There are four modern glaciers in East Africa, and they were all iced over 70,000 years ago during this ice age. So we have this sort of modern misconception that the world today was the world that it always was. And that's not true. Our ancient ancestors were stressed by the cold, and in particular, the cold water in a way that favored

Andreas (21:16.446)

Hmm.

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (21:32.564)

those who had the mitochondrial and the metabolic fortitude to thrive in the cold rather than suffer from it. So there's something ancestral about this expectation of cold. Now, the challenge to that is

Andreas (21:42.737)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (21:49.228)

Well, you what about these hunter gatherer societies that live in the Kalahari desert? Human beings are very adaptable. And I don't know this for a fact. So I'm going to give you a hypothesis. When your light exposure is on point, so you don't have fluorescent bulbs, you don't have LED devices at night, you have good circadian rhythm, lots of natural sunlight. When your diet is on point, we're not talking seed oils, you're getting a lot of

fats and during the right season you're getting good fruits maybe some tubers so your light is on point your diet is on point and your exercise is on point lots of steps

Probably you do okay metabolically, even if your brown fat is minuscule because you don't have regular cold water exposure. I think there's nothing about the health of the hunter-gatherer societies that contradicts this idea that the human body is designed to expect cold exposure. However,

Andreas (22:41.575)

Hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (22:54.273)

when your light is not on point. Because maybe you're a college professor who stares at computer screens all day and all night. When your sleep is not on point because you happen to live in an industrialized society where light is practically free and people stay up all hours of the night. When your diet is not on point because people are subsidizing ultra processed foods to put canola oil in there, to put soybean oil and corn oil in there and wreck the function

of your mitochondrial membranes. You're darn right you need cold. Brown fat and cold plunge therapy will help you overcome many of the other insults to which your mitochondria are subjected. And that can be poor light hygiene, too many seed oils, constant snacking of carbohydrates. In other words, the standard American diet and the typical Western modern lifestyle.

Andreas (23:29.594)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (23:53.868)

Now I'm not about to go live in a cabin in the woods or go become a hunter gatherer in the Kalahari Desert. I like my job. I like being a professor. I like living in a modern city in the United States.

But because I'm so disconnected from nature, I need to do things that are going to bring the nature back to me. I need the Morosco ice bath because I need cold, because I need the grounding. I need the electrons from the earth that come up through the wires that we've built into the Morosco so I get instant electrical balancing with the earth when I get in there. I need the Epsom salt and the magnesium and some of the other sulfate salts that we put in there so I can get transdermal magnesium

Andreas (24:18.404)

Mm. Mm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (24:40.794)

absorption to keep my metabolism healthy. If you don't get the good sunshine, for example, well then you need the red light panel. If you can't get out into the forest, then you need, you know, the green light device because your eyes are relying upon what your ancestors used to get for free. This is why we say Morosco is the next best thing to nature. I'd rather that you went and jumped in the Mediterranean.

Andreas (24:56.804)

Mmm.

Andreas (25:03.062)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (25:10.744)

That's wonderful. And here's the salt water and the cold temperatures. When you can't do that, that's when you need Morosco.

Andreas (25:20.273)

yeah, it's so important to have these biohacks and tools in our modern living and in lifestyle because as you mentioned that there are so many people who can't get in connection with nature on a daily basis and you need to do these practices on a daily basis honestly to stay healthy because our biology has been designed that way that we're supposed to be in connection with nature on a daily basis, right? So if you don't have some

biohack or something to replace that in order to even keep your biology at a baseline health level, then obviously it's going to deteriorate and decline. I always like to look at the body like a battery. The mitochondria are what are fueling that battery and when those are not working well, then obviously our battery is going to start to become depleted. There are many lifestyle factors, especially modern living, the blue lights, the EMFs, the C-dolls like you mentioned.

are all depleting our cellular battery. They are just constantly draining it. So it's so important to be aware of those things and to not have them in our life in the first place or minimize those. But then at the same time, do the things that are boosting the mitochondrial function, which is basically the ice bath, right? So maybe you can talk a little bit about how the ice bath is beneficial for insulin sensitivity. How does it actually do that? And

Yeah, like what's actually happening when we are exposed to the cold? Where is the glucose going?

Thomas P Seager, PhD (26:47.84)

Insulin resistance is at the origin of

every single leading cause of death from chronic illness in the United States. So you could say, well, what about cancer? Strongly associated with insulin resistance. Cancer is a metabolic disorder that originates in dysfunction of the mitochondria. You could say, well, what about heart disease? The association between insulin resistance and death from heart disease is very strong. Alzheimer's, Alzheimer's is now called type three diabetes. It is a mitochondrial

in the metabolism of the brain. Every single leading cause of death from chronic illness in the United States originates in mitochondrial dysfunction that can be characterized or expressed as insulin resistance. So people think insulin resistance is the problem. We got to get your insulin levels down without raising your hypoglycemic, without raising your blood sugar until you become hypoglycemic.

Andreas (27:27.522)

Mm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (27:52.214)

That's sort of an okay thought, but it is misguided. One of the things that a type 2 diabetic in the United States is likely to experience is a recommendation or prescription for metformin.

You take the metformin and laboratory studies, especially in animal models like rats and mice, will show that metformin decreases blood glucose levels and say, we should give this to the type two diabetics. The problem is that metformin is a mitochondrial toxin. You can temporarily stimulate mitochondrial function by giving a body metformin and that increased mitochondrial function will reduce blood sugar levels. But you do it at the

Andreas (28:25.311)

Hey.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (28:37.588)

expense of the mitochondria and not in support of the mitochondria which is why people find themselves taking larger doses and larger doses over time. They say you know it's not working anymore perhaps I should take more but they wind up

Andreas (28:40.391)

Hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (28:53.536)

Ruining their mitochondria insulin resistance is not the problem insulin resistance is your body searching for a solution to mitochondrial dysfunction when the mitochondria are overwhelmed with carbohydrates the cell becomes resistant to the action of insulin it says I'm gonna keep that glucose in the bloodstream for a little while I'm gonna slow down the rate at which you're processing it because

Andreas (29:18.969)

Mm. Mm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (29:23.5)

the processing of glucose into ATP will produce reactive oxygen species inside the cell right at the mitochondria. And those ROS can be a good thing. can stimulate new mitochondria. They can stimulate mitobiogenesis, but only when the mitochondria get a break. That is stress and recovery. That's what the mitochondria needs like anything else. When they are subjected to a constant stream of carbohydrates and a constant production of

Andreas (29:45.154)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (29:53.472)

ROS. They never get the recovery. They become dysfunctional and the cell responds by resisting the action of insulin. The way to fix insulin resistance is not to overwhelm the mitochondria but to support the mitochondria. Magnesium, red light, cold therapy, sleep.

All of these things will give the mitochondria the support they need rather than reducing blood glucose levels at their expense. When the mitochondria have that necessary support, they're better prepared to process the carbohydrates. Ketosis is another one. Intermittent fasting is another one. Giving your body a break from those carbs will help your body restore the mitochondrial function. Going back to the animal models.

Andreas (30:25.476)

Hmm.

Andreas (30:38.689)

Mm. Mm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (30:44.278)

Researchers took mice and they said, okay, let's see what happens when we give them periodic, that is intermittent acute cold exposure, not chronic cold exposure. Many of the studies on mice have been mice housed at a cold temperature without any break. But just for a few hours a day, let's give these mice some cold and then allow them to recover. What they discover is that it stimulates mitophagy, which is removal of

broken mitochondria and mitobiogenesis, their replacement by new mitochondria. Exercise will support mitochondrial function, but the best way to improve the function of your mitochondria is to give it cold. This is like a workout for the mitochondria, in particular in your brown fat. Brown fat are packed with mitochondria, so when you recruit new

Andreas (31:21.049)

Hmm.

Andreas (31:43.417)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (31:44.114)

brown fat. You do it by Beijing white fat cells. That is adding mitochondria to the white fat cells. Where are those mitochondria coming from? Reproduction, proliferation. Your body knows how to select the highest quality mitochondria and make new ones from them. And so in this way, cold therapy is like reversing your biological clock. Many of the phenomena that are associated ordinarily with aging, testosterone is

of them. Your doctor might say, a man's testosterone inevitably declines with age. Well, that's a bunch of crap.

To the extent that a man accumulates mitochondrial injury or the man's mitochondria deteriorate over time because he's not taking care of them, yes, testosterone will come down. But that kind of aging is optional. When you take good care of your mitochondria, they take good care of you. Your body responds ordinarily to the cold with muscle shivering. We're all familiar with this, but that's only because you don't have the brown fat. When your body recruits the brown fat,

Andreas (32:49.163)

Hmm. Hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (32:51.032)

will no longer shiver to the same extent in the cold. So we tell people who are just starting a cold process, go cold enough to gasp so you feel that gasp reflex and then go long enough to shiver.

Andreas (33:02.851)

Mm-hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (33:05.186)

But after about two weeks, you don't need to shiver anymore. Your body has recruited the brown fat. Just getting into the cold and feeling the gas reflex will activate your brown fat. It will stimulate mitobiogenesis. Don't stay in too long. Go very cold, as cold as you can stand it, and still get that gas reflex. And just stay in for a couple or four minutes. That's all I do. That's how to keep your metabolism healthy.

Andreas (33:31.586)

Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, I've actually noticed that myself as well that because here I always get in the sea, I live by the sea like super close, like 50 meters and I get in every single day, right? And I do this all year round on purpose because I want to keep that brown fat active. And I know that cold is so beneficial for me. And, and, is there any like benefits to doing longer times, especially when the temperature

of the water is not that cold because the lowest it gets here in Cyprus in the winter time is like 55 degrees Fahrenheit, which is honestly not that cold. You know, it's not freezing, right? So yeah, exactly. So it's, basically just enough to stimulate something.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (34:06.178)

not cold at all. Yeah. That's funny because anything warmer than about 40 degrees, I get bored. And so I'm trying to think of what that is in Celsius. I don't know, maybe seven or eight degrees Celsius is boring for me. You must go cold enough to get that gasp reflex or you're not activating the parasympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system.

Andreas (34:34.835)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (34:34.85)

brown fat unlike white fat.

It's highly innervated. Well, what are all those nerve endings doing in your brown fat? They're not there to feel pain or something. They are there to communicate with the brown fat. The body can't wait for the brown fat to sense that you're in the cold environment. Those thermal receptors are in the skin, whereas the brown fat is inside the body where it's going to keep your vital organs warm. The body can't wait. As soon as your skin senses the cold, it will send

Andreas (35:02.709)

Mm-hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (35:07.082)

signal through the nervous system to turn the brown fat on and that's going to keep your vital organs especially your brain and your heart warm even when you're in the cold. But if you don't feel that gasp reflex, if you're wading into the Mediterranean and you're like you know this is great then you are not signaling your nervous system. Your brown fat is sitting around going hey Andreas when are you gonna find some real cold and it's not getting that stimulation.

Andreas (35:34.687)

Yeah.

Yeah, so what I was actually going to say was that

Thomas P Seager, PhD (35:38.982)

Now if you stay in there for long enough

Andreas (35:43.167)

Sorry, continue.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (35:43.606)

If you stay in there for long enough and you do find yourself shivering, then you know you have activated your brown fat, even if you didn't get the gas reflex, and it might take a long time.

Andreas (35:56.53)

Yeah, I did find actually at the beginning when I started doing that because I was living in Costa Rica at some point and then we came back to Cyprus in the winter time and then I started doing the cold and then I noticed that okay I was really shivering at the beginning when I was doing it even though I was you know I just wasn't conditioned to doing it and then afterwards after a while because I had been doing it the whole year round when the next winter came around I wasn't shivering at all I had no shivers and I could stay

20, 30 minutes and I was like I don't feel anything but it was cold it did feel kind of uncomfortable but I didn't get the shivering feeling though

Thomas P Seager, PhD (36:36.672)

If you, I don't know if you had this experience when you were a child, but if you watch children, they don't care how cold it is. They just want to go on the beach. They want to play in the water and their teeth might even be shivering, but they don't want to come out of the water because they're having such a great time. And then the parents are like, no, no, it's too cold for you. The parents don't have the brown fat, but the children do. And so they can be much more comfortable in the cold weather than the parents who aren't getting cold anymore ever could be. And I remember.

remember this when I was a kid and it was at the very beginning of the summer, you know, the first day mom would take us to the beach and we would go run into the water and we would play in there for hours. We didn't care how cold it was. Unfortunately, we also got sunburned because my mother was one of those people that thought margarine was healthier for us than, you know, butter fat was. My mother had some really weird ideas that she mostly got from Harvard University propaganda.

Andreas (37:30.448)

Hey.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (37:36.448)

about what to feed her children. I was raised on white toast and lucky charms. No wonder I wound up fat. The nutritional misconceptions that my mother, which was all propaganda, was told were not good for me. But taking me and my sisters to the beach to let me run around in the cold repaired my metabolism, repaired a lot of the damage that had been done by a winter's worth of eating marshmallows for breakfast.

breakfast.

Andreas (38:07.312)

So by being exposed to the cold, then we're actually improving the insulin sensitivity by increasing the amount of mitochondria that we have and increasing the brown fat, which is higher in mitochondria. So basically we have more factories to process more of that floating substrate that is available in the bloodstream. You know, so it's getting processed more efficiently. Is it also going indirectly?

like insulin independent into the muscle as well via the glut4 receptor is anything like that happening as well.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (38:44.418)

There are mechanisms by which glucose can enter the cell without insulin. Those mechanisms are insufficient to maintain normal glucose levels. And so I'm not an expert on the Glut4. We should talk to Ben Bickman about this. know, how does the cell metabolize when insulin levels are very low?

Andreas (38:58.283)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (39:10.272)

One of the mechanisms that I am familiar with is ketosis. Ketones are an intermediary metabolic product of fat metabolism. Ketones do not need insulin to enter the cell. And so the classic mechanism that your body has to metabolize in a low carbohydrate environment is to burn fat. And ketones will fuel the brain. They cross the blood brain barrier and keep your brain

fired up while you're on a fat metabolism and you maintain through gluconeogenesis a minimum level of blood glucose which could just be 50 or 60. We've discovered that people in ketosis do not experience the symptoms of hypoglycemia or low blood sugar at the same levels that people who are not metabolically flexible will begin to experience brain fog.

Andreas (40:03.307)

Yeah.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (40:10.152)

or a loss of proprioception or other characteristics of hypoglycemia. When you're in ketosis, you can tolerate very low insulin levels and very low blood sugar levels and still maintain good brain and muscle function. So rather than think about how could blood glucose enter the cell without insulin, I've thought a lot about what do we do in a low insulin and low carbohydrate environment that's called ketosis.

The fastest way to stimulate production of ketones in your own body is to get into the ice bath.

because you get that parasympathetic activation and your liver will release glycogen into the bloodstream. There will be an immediate blood sugar spike as a result of that fight or flight response to the cold. But it only lasts 20 or 30 seconds. Your brown fat burns through glucose almost immediately. And so the white fat cells will open up and they will release free fatty acids, triglycerides, they'll release lipids into your bloodstream so that they can travel

Andreas (40:47.455)

Hmm.

Andreas (40:59.883)

Mm-hmm.

Andreas (41:16.139)

Mm-hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (41:17.114)

to your mitochondria and your mitochondria will begin burning fat almost right away to fuel the non-shivering thermogenesis that will elevate your ketone levels. So one of the advantages of having a regular ice bath practice is increased metabolic flexibility. Now, you don't need three days of 20 carbohydrates a day to get yourself into ketosis. You can do it in a matter of hours because you've got an ice bath to burn through all the excess glucose.

to burn through the glycogen stores in your liver and move you to ketosis almost immediately.

Andreas (41:54.502)

Wow, that's incredible. Yeah, because metabolic flexibility is so important, right? Because your ability to be able to utilize both substrates is absolutely essential. And we know that it's not only governed by diet, as you're explaining environmental factors such as temperature is a huge, huge factor, but also the light environment we're exposed to as well, because we know the artificial blue light can spike our insulin levels and can make us release glucose as well, because it's actually

activating that sympathetic fight and flight state. And so we know that basically our metabolic health is governed by the light environment, the presence or the absence of oxygen. So the type of metabolism we're using aerobic versus anaerobic and also temperature. That's basically what I'm understanding here. There are these three factors at play. And when we are able to manipulate those to our advantage, we're able to stay more

metabolically healthy and more flexible and be able to switch between those different substrates more efficiently. Whereas modern living, because of the comfort that we are experiencing and because we like to be comfortable, we're also becoming metabolically inflexible while at the same time over consuming glycogen rich foods, which are maybe not even grown at our, you know, latitude or even season. And then that's overwhelming the mitochondria causing

mitochondrial damage and therefore not even able to process that energy, you know, even even more. So it's actually becoming even more of a problem because we have damaged mitochondria, we don't have new mitochondria forming. And this is why it's so important to have tools like the ice to be able to restore the balance basically in the system. So you mentioned a little bit about the reactive oxygen species and this is a very interesting topic because

We know that the ROS is like a signaling molecule because it's not only, yes, it can be damaging in excess, but as you said, it can be as a signaling molecule, right? For the mitochondrial biogenesis. So maybe we can talk a bit about the biophotons if you know about that topic, you know, and how that actually contributes to the formation of vitamin D and actually how cold can be a supplement for vitamin D in the winter when we have

Andreas (44:12.901)

an absence of UV light from our environment.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (44:17.004)

You are correct. The mitochondria make light inside the cell. They can't help it. The electron transport chain is a series of what are called redox reactions. So you're moving electrons from one molecule to another molecule, from one state to another state. And the physics of electrons requires the release of light as the electrons are moving between different states.

some of that light made inside the cell where the mitochondria are housed is in the UVB wavelength. And so you might say, well, it's very faint, you know, and our sensors have a very difficult time detecting it. And that's true because we don't have sensors inside the cell. When the light is produced right there inside the body, you can't think of the same intensity expectations because that photon, which might not be the right word,

that light at about the 312 nanometer wavelength made inside the mitochondria will intersect cholesterol. It cannot help it. And when that happens, this is not enzymatically governed. This is a purely physical reaction. The UVB wavelength of light produced by the mitochondria, which is called a bio photon, will convert the cholesterol to pre-vitamin D. It is later metabolized into the myriad, there's something like 25

Andreas (45:37.209)

Mm-hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (45:45.752)

different forms of vitamin D, which isn't really even a vitamin. It is a hormone. It has a profound effect on everything happening in your body, including the regulation of the immune system, the development of the immune system in children. Of course, your bone metabolism, everything in your body relies upon your hormone levels of vitamin D. And to take supplements will help if you are an acute vitamin D insufficiency or deficiency. But here I agree with

Jack Cruz. If your body can make it, you don't need to take it. The big question is, how do people at the extreme latitudes maintain healthy vitamin D levels that their body needs when there's no sunshine, at least there's no UVB in radiation during the winter? This was an enormous mystery and people thought that is because, they're living on seal fat or they're eating, you know, cod liver or something.

Andreas (46:36.843)

Mm.

Andreas (46:45.654)

Yeah.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (46:45.696)

The dietary contribution to vitamin D is inadequate to maintain healthy levels. But the biophotons produced by the mitochondria can make up for it. When you get cold and you activate your brown fat, you initiate this electron transport chain that produces light inside your brown fat cells. That light in the UVB range intersects cholesterol.

Andreas (47:13.346)

Mm-hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (47:15.446)

produces pre-vitamin D and it produces it right where it needs to be. Not in the skin where it has to be transported into the fat cells where it can be stored and further metabolized. It produces it right in the fat cell. And so I wrote this article and I hypothesized.

that the vitamin D produced by cold would never show up as calciferol in a classic vitamin D blood serum test. Because people on Twitter were coming at me and they saying, hey, where's your data, Professor Seeger? If the cold will produce vitamin D, why aren't we measuring it in the bloodstream? And I said, it is not measured in the bloodstream because it does not ever have to be transported through the bloodstream. Andreas.

I was wrong. I found this paper.

This is from Poland. came out in April, 2025, and it is the first study of whole body cryotherapy and blood serum levels of vitamin D. And guess what it finds? Whole body cryotherapy will increase vitamin D levels measured in the blood, at least in the dozens of women who are all diagnosed with multiple sclerosis that participated in this

study. So they had the experimental group, they had the control group, they subjected the experimental group to whole body cryotherapy and they got a boost in these Polish women's with multiple sclerosis vitamin D levels. Now you might know that multiple sclerosis is associated with deficiencies in vitamin D metabolism.

Andreas (48:59.71)

Mm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (49:00.199)

all the autoimmune disorders, whether it's diabetes or Parkinson's or fibromyalgia or rheumatoid arthritis.

They all originate in vitamin D insufficiency during the first year of life when the immune system is developing. Healthy levels of vitamin D then are essential to the healthy development of the immune system. Later on, the vitamin D status of the person with an autoimmune disorder can be corrected, but the immune system is already developed, so it is still susceptible. And in multiple sclerosis patients, when their vitamin D

Andreas (49:24.222)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (49:37.684)

levels get lower, they are subjected to what are called flare-ups. The symptoms of multiple sclerosis can get worse. So this is a population with a vitamin D disorder and in that population, sure enough, the vitamin D that is being made in the brown fat during whole body cryotherapy is traveling through the bloodstream to reach other places in the body where the multiple sclerosis patient needs it. This is an incredible finding.

that although it contradicts my hypothesis that vitamin D would stay in the fat cell and never be found in the bloodstream, it confirms that the vitamin D is being made in the fat cell. This is something that I'm pretty sure Jack Cruz is aware of, but he doesn't quite talk enough about. He talks about using ice baths for leptin sensitivity so you can better regulate your appetite and it's very smart.

Andreas (50:17.656)

Mm.

Andreas (50:32.89)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (50:35.874)

But then he tells everybody you got to move to El Salvador, you know, buy Bitcoin, move to El Salvador, get more sunshine. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I'm saying he could emphasize more that if you live in these northern latitudes, you can maintain healthy vitamin D levels by getting regular cold during the winter. And don't worry about what your blood labs say. If you're not symptomatic, you shouldn't be treating

Andreas (50:57.178)

Mm. Mm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (51:05.848)

a lab report. Treat instead those indications that feel like ill health. And maintenance of healthy vitamin D levels is possible without eating a ton of cod liver during the winter, as long as you're willing to experience some cold.

Andreas (51:23.68)

Wow, this is so mind blowing information really, because I'm sure many people were not aware about this. mean, the more I actually got into studying biophotons and having many other incredible guests on the show, I got more and more deeper into this topic of the biophotons and their roles. And it just seems that there are certain, they are very intelligent, right? Like they are doing different things. for example, some that you mentioned are

they're making that vitamin D production. Some can be doing something else. They're serving as this quantum communication throughout the body, which is traveling throughout the fascial system at the speed of light. it's just absolutely wild. And it would even support your hypothesis, you know, like the fact that the fascial system and the nanotubules, the fact that we can quantum communicate and tunnel energy throughout the body, you you could even possibly tunnel

Vitamin D molecules who knows right because everything in the body once it gets to a certain level it becomes So small and so quantum it's almost instantaneous. It doesn't even take Time to travel from one place to another because the more coherence there is within a system the more the better the communication between the cells and the and the and the yeah, and basically all the organs of the body So we mentioned about the biophotons. We mentioned about the brown fat and

mentioned about testosterone, how about fertility for women? How does cold improve fertility?

Thomas P Seager, PhD (52:55.777)

One of the most...

metabolically demanding things that a woman can do is pregnancy. And this should make sense to everybody because she must nourish the growth of the fetus for nine months and this is metabolically a stressful thing. Her body becomes full of growth hormone and growth hormone will interfere with the action of insulin. it is a state, pregnancy that is, pregnancy is a state of physiological insulin resistance and I mean physiological not

pathological. Some insulin resistance during pregnancy is a healthy condition.

Andreas (53:32.319)

Yeah.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (53:32.374)

The problem is that this metabolically demanding state requires healthy mitochondria. And so you look at the statistics that come out of Europe and the United States and say, the poor women are going to lose their fertility after they turn 35. Fertility just falls off a cliff. It's not fertility. It is the mitochondria. It is mitochondrial health that decline with age and as a consequence of the accumulation of mitochondrial

Andreas (53:57.629)

Mm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (54:02.328)

injury, then fertility declines. So for a woman to maintain her fertility up until menopause, including the early 40s, she must maintain healthy mitochondria. There are a number of things that she can do. I mentioned magnesium and zinc.

CoQ10, get enough choline, L-carnitine, PQQ is another supplement that you can take. So there's some nutritional things that you can do. You must also take care of your gut health. Get the glyphosate out of your gut. Make sure that your gut microbiome is in good shape because it is the gut microbiome that produces free fatty acids that travel to the mitochondria. You get the wrong gut microbiome and that's really where metabolism starts. Then you get the wrong feedstocks for the mitochondria.

Andreas (54:28.767)

Yeah.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (54:50.672)

Thank

Andreas (54:51.443)

Hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (54:51.702)

Cold is one of the best things for a woman's fertility because cold stimulates mitobiogenesis and rejuvenates the mitochondria that have otherwise been injured by all of the other things that we do in Western society. Poor light, poor sleep, too many seed oils, too much snacking, too many carbs, no ketosis. All of these things accumulate injury inside the mitochondria that can be corrected by cold plunge.

Heat, very bad. If you're seeking either a man or a woman, if you're seeking to conceive, men cut out, don't do the sona. Women stay out of the sona if you're pregnant or seeking to conceive.

I've got an accumulation of anecdotes from women in their late 30s or early 40s who said, well, I started doing ketosis and ice baths and surprise, I got pregnant. You didn't warn me. And I'll say, well, hang on a second. I think I did. But you know, you weren't thinking about that. I do not recommend hormonal birth control. I recommend you take care of your metabolism. And I think it's wonderful. Like every message that I get,

saying congratulations it doesn't matter to me whether the pregnancy was a planned event or the accident of fixing the metabolism what a blessed thing for a woman to have even as she's into her early 40s then of course they'll message me and say but maybe I shouldn't do cold anymore while I'm pregnant and no

You should. Because pregnancy is a physiological state of insulin resistance, if you're not doing things to maintain insulin sensitivity, that insulin resistance can go too far. It can show up as preeclampsia. It can show up with gestational diabetes or, heaven forbid, eclampsia. It can show up as placental insufficiency. And all of these things are going to happen in the third trimester. Cold is associated

Andreas (56:45.269)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (56:59.104)

with better birth outcomes. So if you want to take a break from the cold because you think that you've conceived or it's right around ovulation and you say, know what, I don't want to activate my immune system when I'm trying to conceive, when that zygote might be implanting in the uterine wall. It's okay. Take a break for a few days. Take a break for your first trimester and then come back with the cold in the second trimester, in the third trimester.

Your baby is fine. All of the thermoregulatory mechanisms are gonna protect that fetal core temperature. And the benefit you get from the mitochondrial boost, from the reduced swelling, from the improved sleep, is gonna lead to better birth outcomes. So that's the ladies. Men. The biggest difficulty that, let me rephrase that. The first,

Andreas (57:46.99)

Mm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (57:58.688)

clinical indication of metabolic dysfunction in a young man is erectile dysfunction.

The function of the penis, that is an erection, requires healthy mitochondria to produce the nitric oxide that stimulate vasodilation so that blood can reach the penis. If you are experiencing, as a young man, erectile dysfunction, could be related to low testosterone and the failure of the endothelial cells that are responsible for signaling vasodilation to produce enough nitric oxide. Both of those things are mitochondrial in their order.

and both of those things can be fixed with cold plunge therapy. Do not do the sauna because that interferes with sperm production, but cold is a wonderful thing for the male metabolism as well and for the male sex function. In women, the number one cause of infertility among otherwise, know, women of childbearing age is called PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome. That is metabolic in its origin. So both men and women can

improve their fertility by a regular practice of cold-plunge therapy. After the baby is born, it's okay to start sona again. Maybe it will help bring in your milk, maybe it will help improve your circulation. Don't bring your baby into the sona, but it's okay for the mother to do sona again.

Andreas (59:25.967)

That's awesome. Yeah. So basically in the body we have like three of the most energy demanding systems, right? Is the, is the brain, the heart and the reproductive system, as you just mentioned. So that is where we have the highest concentration of mitochondria. And there is, there must be a reason for that, right? Because they must be kind of important for our survival and our basically our survival as a species on the planet reproduction, right? To be able to give birth to new human beings. And so how does it actually

This cold benefit heart health since it's you know since the heart is so abundant in mitochondria what does it actually do to the heart like how does it benefit the heart the cardiovascular system.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:00:06.86)

The mechanisms I'm not an expert in, the association between insulin resistance and heart disease is very strong. When you improve your insulin sensitivity, you reduce your risk of any sort of cardiovascular event, whether that's heart disease or a stroke or deep vein thrombosis or even chronic venous insufficiency, which we just found out President Trump, who gives no outward indication of metabolic health whatsoever.

suffers from chronic venous insufficiency. The mechanisms by which the cold might target improvement in the heart mitochondria, those remain mysterious to me. It is true that you can stimulate one part of the body and find benefits in another part of the body. And there's a medical term for this that I find very confusing because I'm not an expert in the Latin medical terminology. But what we know

Andreas (01:00:58.924)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:01:06.704)

is that you can exercise one aspect and strengthen other aspects of the body. The body is a complex system in constant communication with one another. And this is imperfect, but you cannot change just one thing. As an example, you get your 10,000 steps, you get smarter.

Andreas (01:01:17.74)

Mm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:01:28.332)

Was it your brain that was doing the steps? It's not like you, you know, sitting there doing crossword puzzles is also very good for your brain. But just visualizing exercise will improve your muscle tone. How is it that you can give your brain exercises that improve the quality of your muscles? How is it that you can give your muscles exercises that will improve the quality of your brain? Because there's no such thing as changing just one thing. This is one of my objections to the pharmaceutical industry.

Andreas (01:01:51.016)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:01:58.308)

They want you to believe that you can take one pill to correct one symptom and everything else is in side effects. There's no such thing as a side effect, Andreas. There are only effects because everything in the body is connected to everything else. When you change one thing for the better, you change everything for the better. And the opposite is also true. When you change one thing for the worse, you change everything for the worse. So I wish I could answer with greater expertise about what changes.

Andreas (01:02:06.641)

Yeah.

Andreas (01:02:11.624)

Yeah.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:02:28.112)

in the mitochondria and the function of the heart, but the mechanisms aren't my area.

Andreas (01:02:31.665)

Mm-hmm.

But could we hypothesize, for example, that when we are in the cold environment, we do we cause vasoconstriction at first, so all of the blood from the surface is going to the internal environment, close to our organs, right? To keep us warm as well, in addition to the brown fat. basically that oxygen now is getting, mean, the blood is getting more oxygenated because it's closer to the organs, right? And so I can imagine that it's going to have

more systemic benefits once our body starts heating back up and the temperature is starting to come back to our extremities, that blood is going to be more oxygenated. Am I correct?

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:03:16.592)

You make a great point.

I'm glad you brought it up because it allows me to correct another misconception in the United States. Thermal contrast therapy is one of the best things you can do for cardiovascular function. The cold restricts the blood vessels. The smooth muscle tissue that controls the diameter of your blood vessel contracts and it shuts down blood flow to the extremities to increase perfusion in the core and in the brain to protect all of these elements against the cold. That's wonderful.

the the sauna causes vasodilation, the relaxation of the smooth muscle tissue. So thermal contrast therapy is like a workout for your smooth muscle tissue and it improves cardiovascular function so your heart doesn't have to work as hard. And that might be one of the mechanisms of heart benefit. But the misconception in the United States is people think sauna just means sweating in the hot box. Sona is the only word in the Finnish

Andreas (01:04:05.541)

Hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:04:18.224)

language that has been incorporated into English, at least as far as I know. And we misunderstand it, because sona in Finland means hot and cold. And then we say, I'm gonna do sona, and we think it's only heat. Well in Finland you jump in the lake, you know even in the summertime the lake water there is cold, or you roll in the snow in the winter time, they're always doing cold. It is not possible to do an epidemiological study in Finland of sona without the cold exposure to

Andreas (01:04:37.776)

Yes.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:04:48.164)

And they will say right in the research papers by Sona we mean hot and cold but then Rhonda Patrick or you know Andrew Huberman or somebody they do a Podcast and they say if you saw enough three times a week, know You get a reduction in mortality according to this finished study that also did cold But I'm not gonna tell you about the cold and so people get the wrong idea thermal contrast therapy is hot and cold if you're only doing the heat you're probably getting some benefits, but you cannot

Andreas (01:04:56.293)

Mm-hmm.

Andreas (01:05:13.508)

Mm-mm.

Andreas (01:05:17.316)

Mm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:05:17.924)

rely upon the work done in Finland that Rhonda Patrick and Andrew Huberman and other people cite. You cannot rely upon that research if you're not doing the traditional Finnish sauna with the cold back and forth. If you're in an infrared sauna, that research doesn't apply to you. If you're in a traditional Finnish sauna but you're not corporate in cold, that research does not apply to you. So enjoy yourself. Just don't fool yourself into thinking that the statistics are the benefits.

So that's important and there's another caveat. People misunderstand hot tubs. Hot tubs feel great and at first hot tubs will make you sweat a little bit.

Andreas (01:05:49.092)

Mm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:06:01.314)

but your skin understands when it is saturated with water. When you get into the hot tub, you only sweat through the parts of your skin that are not in the water. It is the evaporation of the sweat, not just the release of the sweat into the water. And so there's this phenomenon called hydromiosis. Your skin knows that sweating into the water will not cool the body. So how does it defend the core body?

Andreas (01:06:15.587)

Yeah.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:06:31.288)

temperature against getting too high it's also vasoconstriction. So when you get into the hot tub in the you know water there is I don't know a hundred and four degrees or you know forty something Celsius whatever it is it's too hot for the body the body will respond all those parts that are in the hot water will experience vasoconstriction. So if you go from the ice bath

Andreas (01:06:44.579)

Mm-hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:06:55.724)

vasoconstriction into the sauna vasodilation. You're getting a good workout. But if you go from the ice bath into the hot tub, that's vasoconstriction and vasoconstriction. I love hot tubs. They feel great, but they do not give you the heat that will cause vasodilation, which you're really looking for in thermal contrast therapy for cardiovascular benefits.

Andreas (01:07:07.01)

Mmm.

Andreas (01:07:20.898)

That's wild and such an important distinction for people to understand if people want to do this contrast therapy. And so how does cold benefit our brain, especially dopamine, what's actually happening there, what is it doing for our mental health?

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:07:39.948)

The most widely cited study was out of Poland and it's widely studied because it's the one that Huberman talks about. 2.5 X increase in dopamine. This is wonderful in particular for Parkinson's patients. I have a friend who has Parkinson's, he's in his 60s.

And he's started doing cold plunge therapy because he knows he could take L-Dopa. He could take exogenous dopamine and it would improve all of his symptoms of Parkinson's and would also burn out his dopamine receptors. So instead of taking L-Dopa, he's hypothesizing that if his body is making its own dopamine, which is stimulated by the cold, then he will not burn out his dopamine receptors and he'll get the benefits of the dopamine without the downside.

This seems to be working out pretty well for him. He's been doing this for a couple of years. I've seen his posture improve, his gait improve, the cadence of his words improves. He's doing some other things, some methylene blue. He hasn't gone into ketosis, but he's doing some nutritional support. So how does cold support the brain? Cold is neuroprotective.

Andreas (01:08:33.502)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:08:52.174)

Hyperthermia is very dangerous. Hyperthermia is when the body temperature gets too hot and it begins to kill the body. The brain is in particular susceptible to temperatures that are too great. But hypothermia, low body temperature, is brain protective. I spoke to an emergency room physician in Baltimore. She told me that when they get a cold water drowning case, they cannot

Andreas (01:09:07.71)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:09:22.128)

declare that person dead until they rewarm the body. She has brought people back to life as much as 24 hours after they've drowned. And that's without a pulse. That's without brain activity because the body when it's cold enters, it's not even right to call it a coma, but enters this state in which it is not active. It's not thermodynamically giving any signs of being alive.

Andreas (01:09:35.506)

Wow.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:09:52.052)

but it can be resuscitated because it is not damaged either. And when this happens, she re-warms the body, resuscitates them, and they come back to life. These people are lucid. They're like, what am I doing here? I was just, I was diving in the lake with my buddies. How did I get here? They do not suffer the kinds of brain injury that you can when your body temperature gets too high. Now, we talked a little bit about the neuroprotective factors that are produced by brain.

Andreas (01:09:52.454)

Uh-huh.

Andreas (01:10:11.387)

Huh.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:10:21.936)

brown fat when it's activated. And I think that's important, particularly if you have traumatic brain injury and you're trying to heal the brain. Brown fat and cold are super important. The cold increasing perfusion in the brain, for example, can increase healing and the neuroprotective factors can help rebuild those neurons that have been damaged in traumatic brain injury. But the relationship between brain activity and temperature itself, the cold is inherently protective of the brain, whereas the heat

Andreas (01:10:23.258)

Yeah.

Andreas (01:10:42.349)

Mm-hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:10:51.937)

is not.

Andreas (01:10:53.263)

Wow, it makes you think that we can preserve human beings in ice probably for thousands of years and they would still be if you reheat them back up or to a regular temperature they come back to life. That would be absolutely wild. Which part?

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:11:06.464)

I disagree.

I disagree, but for an important reason.

The ice, the cold is protective of the brain. But once you begin to create ice inside the cells of the body, that's frostbite. The expansion of the water into the crystalline ice structure can destroy the integrity of the cells. Now there's this, you know, what is it? A tree frog. You can freeze it solid and then you can thaw it out and it'll start hopping around again. There are like some instances of, you know, of complex biology.

Andreas (01:11:21.723)

Uh-huh. Mm.

Andreas (01:11:38.583)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:11:42.894)

that can be frozen solid. Human beings are not one of them.

Andreas (01:11:46.776)

Yeah, it makes sense because when you put a fruit in the freezer, right, it usually expands or loses its structure. And that's probably what happens because like ice, you know, water normally expands, whereas our system is probably not. And if you kept us in water, our body would probably start to disintegrate, right? Or something like that if it was kept in the water long enough.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:12:10.52)

Probably right.

Andreas (01:12:11.905)

So let's talk a little bit about your light, that green light, because that's very interesting, I don't know much about it. Why would someone want to shine this light into their eyes or their face?

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:12:23.586)

to relieve pain and anxiety. turns out that this is narrow band LED green. It turns out that that green light, we don't know the mechanisms, but that green light will relieve migraine pain and reduce anxiety. So why would that be? The dominant wavelengths of light in the shady forest are near infrared and green. Will this make sense?

When have we ever, as human beings, failed to feel calm, failed to get that sense of relaxation from being in nature, being surrounded by the trees? Now, I'm not talking scientifically, but I'm talking experientially. Of course, the green, shady forest fills us with a sense of confidence and serenity.

In Japan, there's a practice called forest bathing and they send people out into the forest just for a few hours a week. It speeds wound healing. It improves mood and metabolism. It makes them in general healthier in all aspects. And they used to think it was because the leaves in the coniferous forest, you know, release something into the air and it gives you that pine smell. I think there's some truth to that. It does not mean that you want an air freshener in your kitchen.

Andreas (01:13:36.819)

Hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:13:50.04)

to try and recreate that pine smell with these artificial... Forget that, right? I think that the air in the forest is good, but what we've been overlooking is the light in the forest. So there was a study at Harvard University with migraineurs. One of the things about having a migraine is you become photophobic. Any amount of light can increase the pain. so migraineurs will lock themselves in a dark bedroom or in a closet or something for hours until the migraine pain

passes. And so at Harvard they wanted to study this and they tested each wavelength individually and every single wavelength including the white which is all the wavelengths together.

Andreas (01:14:20.809)

Mm-hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:14:29.74)

made the migraine worse, except green, where they got a reduction in migraine pain. University of Arizona does a follow-up study, and they're using narrow-band green LED light, and they saw among chronic migraineurs, I forget the exact statistics, but it's something like a 60 % or an 80 % reduction in the frequency and the severity of the migraines. So these papers, they showed up in my inbox somehow. I was working on a vitamin D lamp and phototherapy, and probably Google thought I'd

Andreas (01:14:52.126)

Wow.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:14:59.664)

interested in some papers on green phototherapy. Turns out that I was dating a woman who experienced regular and debilitating migraines. So I said, hey, you know, let's try some of this green light. I bought one of these commercial devices that was based upon the Harvard study and she had a headache and I asked her to try it. She said,

Andreas (01:15:09.423)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:15:19.304)

If I hold my eyes in just the right way and I relax my face in just the right way, I can feel a little bit of benefit in headache reduction. I okay, that's interesting. I called up a friend who's in the red light business and I asked him to make a portable red light device, but put green in it instead. He did. He called me up and said, Tom, this is garbage. It's too bright. You know, it's going to give you a headache if you didn't have one.

Andreas (01:15:39.054)

Yeah.

Andreas (01:15:45.452)

You

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:15:47.948)

And sure enough, the Harvard study showed that green was only beneficial at low intensities. So my girlfriend and I, we went out to visit her to take a look at the prototype. And she's already got a headache. She's about a six out of 10 on headache. And I'm like, well, come on, honey, you know, we're to check this out. I'm like, gosh, he's right. this is terrible. We could never sell this. She says, let me see that. She takes it out of my hand. She closes her eyes. She puts it right up against her face. And she says,

Andreas (01:15:54.704)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:16:18.264)

This feels really good. What happened, Andreas, was closing the eyes, blocked out all the painful wavelengths.

Andreas (01:16:20.272)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:16:26.318)

When you close the eyes, you can you wait about 70 % of the light intensity with the eyes closed. This high intensity green was an advantage, not a disadvantage because it meant it was the only wavelength of light penetrating to the retina. It took her headache from a six down to a two right away. So I started testing these with other runners when she had a full on like visual distortion migraine. I begged her to

Andreas (01:16:26.361)

Mmm.

Andreas (01:16:44.24)

Mmm.

Andreas (01:16:48.025)

Wow.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:16:56.292)

try the green light. She said no no I know my sequence you know I'm gonna have this and the pain is gonna hit here and then take some meds there and I'll be out for about four hours. I said please try it. She experienced all of the normal symptoms that is the visual distortion, the brain fog, the loss of cognition.

Andreas (01:17:04.62)

Yeah.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:17:16.364)

No pain. Zero pain. And she didn't take any meds. So now I'm getting these reports. Sinus headache. Pain gone. Post concussion headache. Pain gone. High altitude headache. Pain gone. Certainly migraine headache. Pain gone. The only headache that the green light can't seem to touch is what I call a high estrogen headache that some women get at a certain part of their cycle. Every other headache.

Andreas (01:17:20.651)

Mmm.

Andreas (01:17:44.654)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:17:46.24)

male adults children without medication ten minutes of this high-intensity narrowband green wavelength takes the pain away. is a remarkable finding that I wish more people would know because migraine is a billion dollar a day problem just in the United States. But Andreas nobody believes me.

Andreas (01:17:56.952)

Wow.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:18:08.524)

You know, I go on Instagram or something and I say, yeah, close your eyes, 10 minutes, no migraine pain, and they think I'm a liar. They have to try it for themselves. And then they write me and they say, this is unbelievable, this is incredible, this must be a miracle because my headache pain is gone.

Andreas (01:18:11.648)

Mm-hmm.

Andreas (01:18:15.886)

Yeah.

Andreas (01:18:26.254)

Mm.

Well, what you're doing is a great service to the world for sure, because it's and it's amazing that you are sharing this information because first of all, you brought it to my awareness. I wasn't aware about it. So it's so cool to learn new things. And also the fact that light touches every single aspect of your body, every single aspect of your biology. So anybody who thinks that light cannot possibly influence clearly just does not understand.

quantum biology, circadian biology, it is the foundation of our health. Our circadian rhythms are basically the way that our body is supposed to respond to light. It just tells you that your body is wired and you can manipulate the way that your body responds based on different light frequencies. We know that, for example, when we're exposed to artificial blue light, in isolation, we get negative symptoms.

when we are exposed to blue light from the sun in combination with all the other colors of the spectrum, the red there, near infrared, the UV, we actually have a massive benefit because that's actually entraining the circadian mechanism. It's actually accelerating our metabolism, right? And the same thing, for example, just studying even as well, red and infrared light in isolation is incredible for the body and the mitochondria and the exclusion zone water. So,

Again, your panel, this green panel that you have made is another incredible addition, biohack that people can have in their homes in case they actually need it. And why take a pill when you can use light as your medicine? Because actually, I can imagine it has very little side effects, right?

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:20:15.15)

I'm tired of the term biohacking. It makes it seem like there's some technological software code shortcut to health. And I don't think of it that way. I think about returning to nature. I think about...

Andreas (01:20:18.801)

Yeah.

Andreas (01:20:23.739)

Yeah, yeah.

Andreas (01:20:29.797)

Yeah.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:20:31.574)

There are no trees, there's no shady forest in Phoenix, Arizona. So how am going to get the benefit of the green light? I need to build a machine that is going to bring the forest to me. There is no beachfront in Arizona. So how am going to get the benefit of the salt water? I must build a machine that brings the ocean to me. Now, some people will say that's biohaving, but I don't think so. I think it's like biohaving. If there are things absent from my environment, because of technology, you know, I can't

Andreas (01:20:40.965)

Mmm.

Andreas (01:20:50.087)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:21:01.468)

use technology to create the environment that my body needs and it doesn't have to be all the time. It can be a few minutes a day, it can be 10 minutes a day of green, it can be four minutes a day of ice bath and these things will repair. It's enough to repair a lot of the damage that has been done by being disconnected from our environment. I would much rather take that approach than start doing you know speed running NAD drips or if you have a serious ailment

Andreas (01:21:23.526)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:21:31.248)

and peptide therapy is gonna fix it, do it. There are occasions for bio hacks, but just as regular lifestyle, more of a bio have kind of guy.

Andreas (01:21:38.236)

Yeah.

Andreas (01:21:42.31)

I love that. Fantastic. Is there anything that we didn't cover today that you would like to talk about? Because I feel like we touched on so much, but there's also so much that I'm not aware of and that I don't know. So is there something that was important that we didn't mention today?

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:22:00.184)

There is one thing and it is relationships. You are talking about the heart. It is not a metaphor.

Andreas (01:22:03.477)

Mm. Mm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:22:08.046)

We use the heart as the metaphor for love and attachment and connectivity. And I don't think it is just a metaphor. I think there is so much wisdom in the folk tales and the metaphors that we use when we relate our emotions to the body. And so the question that I've been asking at Morozco is how do we build an ice bath that will help bring people closer together?

and it could be you and four or five other people and you're doing it together and you feel a stronger sense of attachment. Part of the neurological and health benefits of the sauna is the fact that you're doing it with other people and no one has done this study to say is sauna with friends more beneficial than sauna alone. But your intuition in mind is telling well of course it is you know. Right now all cold plunges on the market are focused to doing it individually.

Andreas (01:22:45.113)

Mm-hmm.

Andreas (01:23:02.223)

Yeah.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:23:08.14)

You know, they have some temporary like pop-ups, but I've been thinking how do we build the ice bath experience that you share with other people? Because some of the data that we've got shows that it is a bonding experience. It is a relationship building experience and that is probably the mechanism, one of the mechanisms by which you keep your heart and your other vital organs healthy.

Andreas (01:23:11.407)

Mm-hmm.

Andreas (01:23:36.065)

That's amazing and do you feel like Do you do you feel that like it increases oxytocin as well when you're in the cold?

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:23:37.39)

So I gotta do more work.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:23:44.972)

I know it does. Yep, there's good data on that. It increases oxytocin, it increases vasopressin. So in addition to the dopamine and the noradrenaline and the adrenaline, you get these other hormonal benefits that cause you to feel closer or more attached to your partners.

Andreas (01:24:02.433)

Wow, yeah, and I guess that also plays such an important role with the hormone optimization like the fertility and the testosterone as well, right? Because that drive and that feeling that you want to be close to your partner, for example, it kind of all goes together like hand in hand. It's not like as you mentioned, it's all a system. So you have to have all the pieces of the puzzle. You can't just have the testosterone, you know, just.

you know, just floating around. have all those other beneficial things that are going on that accommodate this feeling of love, right?

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:24:39.118)

When you get into the cold plunge with your partner, it is like a love potion.

All of those hormones and neurotransmitters associated with every dimension of love, whether that's lust or romance or the feeling of familial attachment, they are all augmented by the experience you have with your partner in the ice bath. And I've experienced this for myself. This is the same woman who has migraine headaches. We're in such an enormous argument, but we'd agreed to do a photo shoot. know, relationships are like that sometimes where I was full

of resentment for her and she was full of resentment for me and you we have a video of this and it's not very good because we'd procrastinated until the light was crappy and the capture was not very but we said okay you know this is what we're here for we got to do it and we went in and we held hands we looked at one another and she broke a smile I thought okay that's good then she started to giggle

Andreas (01:25:40.498)

you

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:25:41.966)

And then she started to crack jokes, you know, with the camera crew. And I'm like, well, this is all right. You know, my resentment melted away. Men need to exercise after the ice bath to get the testosterone boost, but women do not. Women get an immediate testosterone boost. So not only was her resentment melting away, but her testosterone was going up. And as you know, testosterone is the lust hormone. So after about two minutes, maybe two minutes, 15 seconds.

Andreas (01:25:57.438)

Mmm.

Andreas (01:26:07.028)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:26:11.892)

She reaches in, she leans in. We're holding hands, we're making eye contact, we're breathing together, and I pull her a little closer and she kisses me on the lips. We start making out in the ice path. All of our arguments were forgotten. My daughter is the videographer and she's like, okay, cut, you know, that's, we got it, we have everything we need, you two get a room. We had the best weekend. We fell back in love. And it wasn't because

Andreas (01:26:32.457)

You

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:26:41.976)

of talk therapy. It wasn't because of compromise or understanding. It was because we created the neurochemical conditions of attachment. Andreas, I wish we could have kept that feeling our whole lives. How many times have we done an ice bath together since then? Zero. And we're not going out anymore.

Andreas (01:27:00.325)

Really?

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:27:02.824)

I recommend cold plunge with your partner. Anytime you're beginning to feel those relationship doubts, you want to reconnect, you want to give the relationship the boost that it needs in that moment, get in the ice bath together, hold hands, make the eye contact, breathe together, spend two minutes, and when you come out, rewarm together. You will feel closer.

Andreas (01:27:29.149)

That's fantastic. Yeah, wonderful breakdown and thank you for adding the relationships in there as well because that is a very under talked about discussion in terms of health in general, because we tend to forget, you know, that our emotions and the way that we feel about each other massively influences our health. I mean, we can see that so many things in physics like biophysics is altering our biochemistry, right? So obviously, brain waves and thought is frequency.

And that is obviously going to impact our biophysical, our quantum system, really, that is just constantly scanning its environment, trying to pick up this vital information. So last question would be for you to explain to the audience why your ice baths are the top on the market. And I also believe that they are as well. They are also the first ice bath, really, which I ever heard of, which, you know, is with self-cleaning.

grounding and all the materials, everything about it looks like super premium and I think the first time which I ever heard about your ice bath actually was on Luke's stories podcast and it wasn't one of his recent episodes, it was a really really long time ago. It was two people who were representing Morosco Forge, I don't remember their names but anyway it sounded so convincing and since then I've been wanting one.

So Matt, why don't you tell the audience about...

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:28:56.726)

That was my former student. His name is Jason Stalper and that was his wife Adrienne. Adrienne reversed her Hashimoto's thyroiditis with ice baths because she grew up in Florida and then she lived in Phoenix. She had no brown fat. She became dysregulated in her thyroid and when she started getting into the Morosco, she recruited brown fat. The Hashimoto's gone.

Andreas (01:28:59.534)

Really? Wow, that's amazing.

Andreas (01:29:09.86)

Wow.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:29:21.142)

And so, yes, they make a very compelling case. And we founded Morosco together, although they don't have a day-to-day role in the company anymore. I don't really talk about the technical features. But you've asked, there are four. We make ice, we're electrically grounded, we're warrantied for Epsom salt. You can put as much Epsom salt in there as you want. And important...

Andreas (01:29:22.372)

Wow.

Andreas (01:29:29.572)

Mm-hmm.

Andreas (01:29:43.546)

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:29:48.046)

The number one most important thing is that you feel comfortable with the people from whom you are buying. So I don't talk about all the technical features that much. Yes, we're chlorine free. We use ozone exclusively. And it's not true to say that it's self-cleaning. You have to vacuum the lint and the sediment out every once in a while. But you don't have to buy chemicals, right?

Andreas (01:30:06.977)

And I

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:30:12.822)

All those things are wonderful. That's not the point. The point is, if you want to know what ice bath to buy, go on Facebook Marketplace. You will find a lot of used cold plunges. Some of them, the owners are like, hardly ever used it. Or a lot of them are like, well, all you have to do is fix the chiller and then replumb the thing and then, you know, repair the filter housing and then it's all going to be good.

Morosco is a no regret purchase. You get a 30 day ecstatic guarantee. If you aren't experiencing ecstasy, you know, because that's what the ice bath does. That's fine. You can return it. You know, we'll refund the product price, not the shipping, but the product price, and we will find a home for that ice bath somewhere else. The customer service and the quality at Morosco is unparalleled. And we're competing in an industry in which people are buying ads like crazy.

Andreas (01:30:51.608)

Mm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:31:07.248)

Everybody seems to have the next revolutionary, ultimate, cold-plunge, technological breakthrough. If what you really want to do is save money, go to Alibaba.com, where all of our competitors are buying their ice baths. And save yourself, you know, several thousand euro and just buy it directly from the Chinese, where everybody else gets it anyway. We are made in America. That might not be an advantage for someone who's in the EU. We will ship

Andreas (01:31:14.454)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Andreas (01:31:30.136)

Mm, mm.

Andreas (01:31:36.77)

Mm. Mm-hmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:31:37.32)

to the EU, of course it's expensive. Every single one of them is handcrafted in Phoenix, Arizona. And when we have had to do a service call in the European Union, we have technicians in the EU or we fly somebody over. Because when you pay...

Andreas (01:31:52.438)

That's amazing.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:31:54.798)

prices, it's because you aren't sensitive to price. You are sensitive to quality. so Morales Co. isn't for everybody. I wish that we could make it cheaper, but I don't know how to do that and employ people who are craftsmen in the United States, paying them living wages with good materials that we're sourcing from local areas in Phoenix. I don't know how, when I figure out

Andreas (01:32:02.922)

Yeah.

Mmm.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:32:24.772)

how to make it cheaper, the price will come down. In the meantime...

I shudder to think about the people buying the inflatable tubs with all the plasticizers and brominated flame retardants. When you take it out of the bag and it smells funny, that's because it's not good for you. And so to think that you're to get into one of those plastic inflatable tubs for your health is sort of ironic. But if that's what you need to do to get started so you can kind of get some of the experience, OK, fine.

Andreas (01:32:41.334)

Yeah.

Andreas (01:32:56.886)

Fantastic and for everything that you just mentioned today in the show I will be linking the link to Morosco Forge bath tubs as well and for the audience we have a special special listener discount so the discount code is mobility fitness so if you add that the checkout you'll be able to get a massive discount on your order as well so definitely check those out how about the the links and everything to your green light what's the website for that

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:33:23.84)

Mygreenlamp.com. So M-Y-G-R-E-E-N-L-A-M-P.com. I don't know if it's the best name, but it sounds like migraine. So Mygreenlamp.com and you can buy directly from there. We ship all over the world.

Andreas (01:33:39.491)

that's clever.

Andreas (01:33:43.932)

Awesome. And do you want to hold up your two books again? Do you have them both there?

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:33:49.9)

I got the Uncommon Testosterone book, you can purchase on Amazon. There's an audiobook, there's a Kindle version. Amazon has the hard copy. You can get the paperback from moroscoforge.com. The other one is Uncommon Coal, which is bigger, more comprehensive, and I didn't bring a copy to show you, and you can only get it from moroscoforge.com.

Andreas (01:33:59.476)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Andreas (01:34:13.428)

Awesome, fantastic. And thank you so much for coming on the show, Professor Thomas. It was an absolutely pleasure to talk with you today. I learned so, much. And then I feel that the audience is going to absolutely devour this episode because my audience is very quantum biology and circadian biology based. Everyone's really interested into this kind of frequency and, you know, all the stuff that actually matters in mitochondrial health. it was an absolute pleasure to talk with you. I would love to do it again in the future. If you have any new

revelations or if you come up with any new devices or any new books.

Thomas P Seager, PhD (01:34:49.058)

I'd be happy to. Thank you, Andreas.

Andreas (01:34:51.7)

Thank you.

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