Dr. Thomas P. Seager: Unlocking Cold Health Mastery | Nathan Crane Podcast Episode 48

Explore the surprising benefits of cold baths for cancer and immune system health with Dr. Thomas Seager. Dive deeper into this topic at https://nathancrane.com/.

Dive into this conversation I had with Dr. Seager as we discuss the positive effects of cold baths on the immune system and general health. We’ll explore scientific insights and personal experiences related to this intriguing practice.

Sponsors:
Boost immunity with Beljanski’s science-backed wellness products. Trusted by doctors, get 15% off with code “Nathan” and free shipping on orders of four or more at MaisonBeljanski.com

Get Haelan 951, a unique nitrogen-fermented beverage from Mongolian soybeans. Boost cellular health for 30+ years. Visit https://haelan951.com/, and use promo code: CRANE

Your host, Nathan Crane, is a Certified Holistic Cancer Coach, Best-Selling Author, Inspirational Speaker, Cancer-Health Researcher and Educator, and 20X Award Winning Documentary Filmmaker with Over 15 Years in the Health Field.

Visit The Nathan Crane Podcast on YouTube to watch the full podcast!

What was your biggest takeaway from today’s episode? Let me know in the comment section below!

I hope you enjoyed today’s episode and if you got something useful out of it, make sure to Like, Comment & Subscribe so you never miss a new episode!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Check out more of The Nathan Crane Podcast here:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6IO2h2UhUHMD0jFRs416D6?si=102ea8f5cc754cf9&nd=1

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-nathan-crane-podcast/id1672391751

Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/2722a3b5-96bf-4bd9-a14f-56434ef67896/the-nathan-crane-podcast

Tune In: https://tunein.com/podcasts/Health–Wellness-Podcasts/The-Nathan-Crane-Podcast-p3503417/

Stitcher: https://listen.stitcher.com/yvap/?af_dp=stitcher://show/1058629&af_web_dp=https://www.stitcher.com/show/1058629&deep_link_value=stitcher://show/1058629

iHeartRadio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-nathan-crane-podcast-109318006/

Deezer: https://www.deezer.com/us/show/5758827?utm_campaign=clipboard-generic&utm_source=user_sharing&utm_medium=desktop&utm_content=talk_show-5758827&deferredFl=1

Connect with Nathan Crane!

Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/NaturalHealthNathanCrane

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mr_nathan_crane/

Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/NathanCraneOfficialPage/?_rdc=1&_rdr

Websites: https://nathancrane.com/
             
                https://nathancrane.com/becoming-cancer-free-book-nathan-crane/

                https://www.healinglife.net/

Check out our guest Dr. Thomas P. Seager on Social Media!

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ThomasSeager

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seagertp/?hl=en

#ColdHealth #OptimalWellness #HealthTransformation

Audio Transcript

 

(This transcript was auto-generated so there may be some errors)

 

00:00:00:00 – 00:00:30:20
Nathan Crane
Welcome back to the podcast. I am excited to talk about something near and dear to me with an expert in this field, something that I have been personally experimenting with for probably 15 years and have been really committed to specifically for the past maybe five or six years on a weekly basis for the most part, which is cold hydrotherapy and all the benefits of it.

00:00:30:21 – 00:00:53:01
Nathan Crane
You may know it as ice bath, you may know as cold plunging. It’s become a lot more popular, obviously, by Wim Hof and others in the past, past few years, but it has a lot of other benefits that I’m excited to get into with Dr. Thomas Seager today, who is an associate professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State.

00:00:53:18 – 00:01:22:14
Nathan Crane
And he’s the founder of a new concept called self actual engineering, which I’m kind of excited to maybe dove into that as well, because mindset is such an important part of not only health and well-being, but also being able to commit to doing, you know, ice baths or cold plunging cold hydrotherapy on an ongoing basis as as you know, Thomas, I mean, mindset, discipline, commitment is a big part of getting yourself to step into that uncomfortable water.

00:01:22:14 – 00:01:48:21
Nathan Crane
But also, what does that do to yourself as a human being, as an athlete, as someone wanting to prevent or overcome chronic disease, whatever your focus might be, an entrepreneur or a business owner, how it improves your willpower and determination. At least in my own life, it’s been extraordinary. But Thomas also co-founded the Marasco Forge Ice Bath Company, and he’s really an expert in the use of Ice Bath time.

00:01:48:23 – 00:02:16:08
Nathan Crane
I learned about you a lot of the the videos and stuff that you’ve been sharing online for a while on the different scientific research that’s been done on ice baths. And I saw one recently that you shared specifically for cancer. And as many people know, you know, I’ve dedicated the last decade plus of my life to researching cancer and helping millions of people dealing with cancer, following natural, holistic and integrative methods from the peer reviewed research.

00:02:16:17 – 00:02:25:16
Nathan Crane
And so that really sparked my interest. I was one of multiple reasons I want to invite you onto the podcast, and so thanks for taking the time to come on here, man. I’m excited to have you here.

00:02:26:06 – 00:02:28:05
Thomas P. Seager
This is my pleasure, Nathan. Thanks for having me.

00:02:29:02 – 00:02:52:20
Nathan Crane
So let’s talk let’s open up. Kind of a big concept for a minute is like call hydrotherapy, right? Like for people who don’t know exactly what it is, maybe talk a little bit about it. And then we’ll also get into really, you know, protocols and specifics and do’s and don’ts and all that kind of stuff. But can you talk a little bit about it benefits from like a big picture point of view.

00:02:53:12 – 00:03:25:14
Thomas P. Seager
So let me tell you a story from evolutionary biology. Human beings have anatomical features that distinguish us from other creatures with whom we share 99% of our DNA chimpanzees, they don’t have subcutaneous fat bonobos. They don’t have downward facing nostrils. And so the great question is, why are humans endowed these anatomical features that are more in common with aquatic mammals, like the manatee or the dolphin or the whale?

00:03:25:14 – 00:04:00:00
Thomas P. Seager
And the answer is because Homo sapiens evolved in and around the water, it is the water foods, the shellfish, the finfish that provide us with the omega three fatty acids, the DHEA that builds our massive brains and makes us human. So if we evolved under these conditions to forage, to wade, to swim in, to dove in the water, to give birth in the water, then it makes sense that our bodies expect water immersion.

00:04:00:13 – 00:04:40:11
Thomas P. Seager
The only question left is what temperature was that water? When you think about the ice age and the fact that you don’t have to go very far back ten, 15,000 years to a point at which Homo sapiens were confined to a narrow strip of land in Africa between the glacier and the ocean. And you realize that Mount Kilimanjaro, where Imhoff takes his trainees on their, you know, miraculous hikes, is a glacier on the equator, then it’s not much of a stretch to conclude that those waters in which our ancient ancestors evolved were cold.

00:04:41:01 – 00:05:06:15
Thomas P. Seager
Our bodies are evolved to X impact cold water immersion. And it’s no wonder that if we don’t get it, we get sick, we lose our brown fat, for example. Brown fat is what keeps us warm when our muscles aren’t shivering, non shivering, thermogenesis. It happens in the brown fat. The brown fat will clear glucose from your bloodstream. It will burn up the lipids that are stored in your white fat just to keep you warm.

00:05:07:12 – 00:05:28:16
Thomas P. Seager
And if you don’t get enough cold, you lose you to brown fat. And most people would think, well, that’s not a big deal, except that brown fat is essential. It’s not just for thermogenesis. It is also a secretory organ. That is, it creates hormones, it creates more thyroid hormone than your thyroid gland does. It works with the thyroid to modulate your metabolism.

00:05:29:03 – 00:06:10:05
Thomas P. Seager
It creates something called the brain derived neuroprotective factor. Brown fat, protects your brain and helps stimulate the growth of new neurons. Without brown fat, it’s no wonder that you slip into a metabolic dysregulated state of insulin resistance which is associated with Alzheimer’s and cognitive decline. The diseases of Western society that we normally associate with aging are not as inevitable as as your doctor might believe, they’re not associated with old age so much as old age is associated with metabolic dysfunction.

00:06:10:18 – 00:06:33:06
Thomas P. Seager
When you give your body what it needs some sunshine, some exercise, some clean foods and some cold exposure, then there’s no reason that you should age at a pace we would consider are normal. You can maintain high testosterone levels, for example. Well, I’m 57 years old and I’ve still got the testosterone of an older sex 19 year old.

00:06:33:09 – 00:07:05:00
Thomas P. Seager
It’s because I do the cold exposure. I give my body the nutrients it needs in the environmental stimulus that it craves to keep myself healthy. So cold water therapy isn’t just about putting an ice pack on your knees or using it to take away the muscle soreness after a heavy workout or a long run. Cold water therapy is about giving your body the cold stimulation that it is evolutionarily designed to expect.

00:07:05:13 – 00:07:06:18
Thomas P. Seager
That’s what keeps you healthy.

00:07:07:02 – 00:07:31:23
Nathan Crane
Well, what you maybe think of when you’re sharing that is the the taiko school in Russia, which is a really cool school model, schooling model that I learned about years ago, which is basically they have the kids of of multiple age ranges living together. They built the school with their bare hands. They learn how to craft things, make their own clothing, grow their own food.

00:07:31:23 – 00:08:11:00
Nathan Crane
They basically built this school in the middle of the forest, and they live there in the very cold, long winters in Russia. And what they do every morning. So aside from learning martial arts and, you know, self-reliance, skills and, you know, the younger kids helping the older kids with advanced math problems and vice versa, and they get their entire, like high school diploma and literally a few like a fraction of the years that it takes people in the West just because they move through it so much quicker and not separate out you by age, but actually help, you know, bring the young people up quicker.

00:08:11:00 – 00:08:41:23
Nathan Crane
It just seems to work really well. But every morning they all go to the basically freezing river and take a bath and a quick bath and a river to start their day. And to your point, you know, the the nature and this is like as close to living in nature as you can possibly be. Right aside from an indigenous tribe where you’re literally growing your own food, you’re building your own school, you’re making your own clothes, you’re learning all these skills and you’re bathing in the freezing water every day to start start your day.

00:08:41:23 – 00:09:04:22
Nathan Crane
That’s I 100% agree. That’s our natural, you know, adaptive life, that we should be living that much closer to nature. But what do we do to our kids? We tell them, put a jacket on, it’s cold outside. You’re going to get a cold or the flu, which is total bullshit. And we can talk about that right. Or, you know, it’s where where where are your gloves?

00:09:04:22 – 00:09:30:08
Nathan Crane
And your hat is too cold outside, you know, and it’s like 50 degrees out, you know, always trying to baby and, you know, protect our kids from the weather when in fact, it’s that weather, that exposure to those elements, which is what creates that adaptive process, enhances our immune system and protects us from getting viral infections and bacterial infections in the symptoms that comes from that.

00:09:30:08 – 00:09:50:02
Thomas P. Seager
We forget what we were like when we were kids. I mean, kids know when they’re cold, they’re going to come inside. And then you say, Mom, my fingers are freezing. Can you make me some hot cocoa? I mean, they understand, but we forget what it was like for us because we don’t have any brown fat babies are born with copious quantities of brown fat.

00:09:50:02 – 00:10:14:13
Thomas P. Seager
Their muscles won’t shiver to keep them warm. Their muscles just aren’t developed enough. And so children have way more brown fat than adults do. And we lose it gradually over time until by age 45, 95% of American adults have zero detectable brown fat. And I’m getting this from a study at the Sloan Kettering Center where they were looking at cancer patients and screening them using PET scans.

00:10:14:13 – 00:10:36:14
Thomas P. Seager
And they just went back and said, hey, is there any brown fat in these scans? And very few of the people who had reported to their Center for Cancer Screening had any detectable brown fat. It’s because, you know, now we live with these heated leather seats and we’re all so comfortable all the time. We’re not that far away from the generations.

00:10:36:22 – 00:11:01:07
Thomas P. Seager
My mother and my father, they were born during the Depression. And so for them, times were hard. They went right from their childhood, finished with World War Two. If you told my mother who passed away from dementia, well, mom, you know, let’s get in the freezing cold water. She would say, are you kidding? With me and my siblings, you know, we used to swim in the Gulf of Maine where she was raised.

00:11:01:07 – 00:11:30:24
Thomas P. Seager
I’ve had enough of cold water. I want to be warm now. I’ve had enough of discomfort in my life. And who am I to argue with her? Because it’s true, the hardships that your grandparents, maybe my parents or my grandparents dealt with were thrust upon them. Now, technology has gotten to the point where we lead such comfortable and convenient lives that we have to do the opposite of what our grandparents would have, you know, done for themselves.

00:11:30:24 – 00:11:59:17
Thomas P. Seager
We have to seek out the discomfort because it is no longer imposed upon us. If we don’t, then it’s no wonder we get soft when you know something bad happens in our day, we begin to feel like victims. Instead of like champions. Because the way that the modern technology has raised us for sort of instant gratification in a comfortable life is not doing our bodies any good.

00:12:01:02 – 00:12:19:19
Nathan Crane
100%. You know, you reminded me of when I was a kid growing up in Bozeman, Belgrade, Montana, and we had to wait for the bus to take the bus to school. And we wait out on the street and it’d be 30 below zero. Busses always ran. Schools were always open. It could be snowing. Blizzard being 30 below zero.

00:12:19:24 – 00:12:41:19
Nathan Crane
We they didn’t shut schools down unless for some reason literally like the busses couldn’t run otherwise schools were open. When I lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, you know, it snowed like maybe an inch and they’d shut the whole town down, you know, same thing in Florida. It rains and it’s like they shut the schools down. You know, in Montana, it’s like they’re not shutting it down.

00:12:41:19 – 00:13:00:09
Nathan Crane
You get two feet of snow and it’s 30 below and it’s windy and you’re still going to school. We’d stand outside there sometimes literally with like a T-shirt on, you know, waiting for the bus. And then after a while you start to shiver or whatever and you want a jacket. But it was kids like you didn’t care. You weren’t you weren’t worried about it.

00:13:00:09 – 00:13:16:01
Nathan Crane
And you actually didn’t mind it until a certain point where, like you said, you, you know, we did get eventually cold and it’s like, yeah, I put a jacket on or go inside or whatever. But it wasn’t like, Oh, bundle yourself up, hats and gloves and all this stuff and you know, because you’re going to die from the cold.

00:13:16:01 – 00:13:36:07
Nathan Crane
It was just like it just wasn’t that bothersome. It just didn’t worry. We didn’t worry about it. But there’s a certain sense of resilience that that creates in your body. And we know that the science has confirmed this. Right, that it enhances your immune system. It creates more brown fat to brown fat, as you talked about, helps regulate your endocrine system, hormonal system.

00:13:36:14 – 00:13:59:16
Nathan Crane
Can you talk a little bit about the science behind why cold exposure? And it’s not just cold hydrotherapy, it’s not just cold water. It’s also cold air exposure. Right. Why that exposure like in more depth, what is actually happening with the hormone release production? You talked about testosterone, but what are some other things that are happening?

00:14:00:04 – 00:14:24:15
Thomas P. Seager
Well, you’re right. Air cryotherapy will do it, too. There’s some important differences between a quiet chamber. You know, that might be like a negative hundred and 50 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s very dramatic and an ice bath, which because it’s water, you can’t chill it down to less than, say, 33. If there’s ice floating in the ice is 32. Right.

00:14:24:15 – 00:14:47:22
Thomas P. Seager
But you’re looking for that liquid phase. And so, you know, the temperature of the water has to be above freezing. The cold exposure is going to stimulate the thermal receptors on your skin. They’re going to communicate to the hypothalamus. And it’s when it’s really cold, it will create an emergency response in your nervous system, that fight or flight response.

00:14:47:22 – 00:15:11:21
Thomas P. Seager
Now, whether it’s negative hundred and 40 in the cryo chamber or whether it’s 34 degrees in the ice baths, everything in your body is hardwired to say, hey, get me out of here to your central nervous system. This is an emergency. You your life is in danger. There are two divisions of the central nervous system, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic.

00:15:12:00 – 00:15:36:18
Thomas P. Seager
The sympathetic is the one that prepares you for the fight. So you’re going to get an instantaneous activation of your body’s defense mechanisms that includes vasoconstriction. These are the smooth muscle tissues that squeeze off the blood flow to your limbs, and that’s to minimize heat loss. It includes a glucose boost in your bloodstream. That is, your liver will release glycogen into your bloodstream.

00:15:36:18 – 00:15:56:07
Thomas P. Seager
It’ll say, hey, you might need some fast energy, whether it’s to run or to fight or to fuel thermogenesis. So you get this instant response as soon as you descend into the ice bath or as soon as that blast of cold air hits you. And in that moment, typically when it’s water, you will gasp. You’re going to be inhale quickly.

00:15:56:20 – 00:16:17:20
Thomas P. Seager
When you feel the gas reflex, you know your cold therapy is cold enough and it doesn’t matter. That could be 50 degrees for you. It could be 40 degrees for you for meat. If it’s not in the throes. I get bored because I’m cold acclimated. My body is ready to defend my core temperature, but for someone just starting out, it might be 55 and that’s fine.

00:16:18:09 – 00:16:43:19
Thomas P. Seager
The gasp reflex is the indication that you have activated the sympathetic division of your central nervous system. But working in opposition to that is the parasympathetic division. This is sometimes called the rest and digest. So this is what calms you down. And this is associated with something called the dove reflex. You don’t get that in the cryo chamber, but you do get that in the water.

00:16:44:07 – 00:17:12:00
Thomas P. Seager
The dove reflex slows your metabolism. It is preparing your body to dove underwater. And I don’t know, retrieve a lobster or a clam or harvest some to do your foraging. The dove reflex will slow your oxygen consumption. It will calm down your heart rate. It will prepare you to go underwater. And this is automatic. Your brain will sort of descend into a meditative native state.

00:17:12:15 – 00:17:46:06
Thomas P. Seager
This happens about 30 seconds. Knorr epinephrine and dopamine have hit your brain. It’s sometimes you get what we call the ice face. It’s an involved entry smile. My daughter has a video. She’s like, my toes hurt so much that I can’t stop smiling because these two different evolutions narrowly designed reflexes to keep you safe. There’s sort of you’re transitioning from one to the other and you can help your body make that transition by using your mind to talk back to your sympathetic nervous system.

00:17:46:12 – 00:18:04:07
Thomas P. Seager
There’s a great mantra called This is what cold feels like. So when your toes are telling you, Get us out of here, we’re going to die, and your hands are saying, We’re in so much pain, you’ve got to cut this out. You tell your toes, you tell your hands, you tell your butt. This is what cold feels like.

00:18:04:11 – 00:18:26:20
Thomas P. Seager
This isn’t death. This isn’t an emergency. This is us feeling cold. You hang in there for a couple of minutes, we’re going to be fine. And then when you come out and you’re experiencing that dopamine and that nor epinephrine rush, you feel like you have cheated death because something in your sympathetic nervous system was telling you you were going to die.

00:18:26:24 – 00:18:51:09
Thomas P. Seager
And then your parasympathetic nervous system said, no, we’re now we got this. And when you go through that whole sort of emotional experience and you emerge unscathed, you feel like a superhero. This is when I like to exercise. I get my kettlebells or I get my steel mace and a rewarm my limbs with that exercise. And for men, anyway, that’s when the testosterone on boost shows up.

00:18:51:17 – 00:18:57:12
Thomas P. Seager
So it’s no wonder we feel more alive.

00:18:57:12 – 00:19:24:08
Nathan Crane
Yeah, I. I have my ice bath down to about 35 degrees. 34, 35 degrees, right above ice. Right. And that’s what I do when I get in it. You know, it’s you get a little bit that gasp right away. I do a 10/2. I mean, ten count deep breath to calm my nervous system because you get in and it’s like everything’s elevated.

00:19:24:09 – 00:19:44:01
Nathan Crane
And I just with one big, slow out breath, I can actually calm the system right away. But I do ten just to like because I know that takes me about a minute because I sit in there for 3 minutes and so I used to count 3 minutes and now I know when I’m in, there are ten slow, deep breaths going to calm my system.

00:19:44:13 – 00:20:01:23
Nathan Crane
Then the next minute or so I have affirmations that I do. I actually it’s funny because I kind of came up with this on my own as I’m sitting there and I thought, You know what? I should train my brain to be thankful for this cold water. So as I sit there, I say I say thank you for this freezing cold water.

00:20:02:04 – 00:20:19:23
Nathan Crane
Thank you for enhancing my immune system. Thank you for helping reduce the inflammation in my body. Thank you for helping me feel better. Think better, produce more testosterone in my workouts, live better, be a better father, be a better husband. I go through this whole kind of gratitude practice, basically, and I do that for about 2 minutes until the end.

00:20:20:07 – 00:20:41:16
Nathan Crane
And then I get out and it’s true. It’s better than three shots of espresso. I actually stopped having caffeine first thing in the morning because I know what it does. Basically, it kind of blocks your Denison receptors, and that’s part of what makes you more tired in the afternoons is having caffeine too early, right? The studies show you should have caffeine out not until about 2 hours after you wake up.

00:20:41:16 – 00:20:58:12
Nathan Crane
And if you do an ice bath instead, it’s like I’m so wide awake, I could be the most tired in the world. And I get in there and I get out and I’m like, I’m ready to go. And then after about a couple hours and then I’m working out, then I’ll have some caffeine. After that. And it just it makes my days more productive.

00:20:58:12 – 00:21:19:17
Nathan Crane
I feel better. I think more clearly my workouts are better. I haven’t retested my testosterone since I’ve been committed to this new protocol. I do four days a week, 3 minutes at a time, kind of following on the the SJOBERG principles, right? Like the 11 minutes per per week kind of minimum. So I get like 12 minutes per week.

00:21:20:05 – 00:21:31:20
Nathan Crane
I have a retested on with this new since I do ice baths and then work out. But I’m going to retest pretty soon and kind of see have you done that for yourself? You tested testosterone like before and then after doing it.

00:21:31:20 – 00:21:55:00
Thomas P. Seager
I have. It was a total accident. I really committed to ice baths when I got a, you know, routine lab blood work comes back and I’ve got all the male health panel thing coming. And I must have been 52 at the time, and my prostate specific antigen jumped out at me and I forget it was like seven or something too high out of range.

00:21:55:07 – 00:22:19:19
Thomas P. Seager
So I had to go online and I had to read about this thing. I didn’t know anything. It said that an elevated PSA indicates your prostate is inflamed and then this whole list of other symptoms and I’m going, what? I don’t know. Am I having difficulty urinating? Like I became so self-conscious, I couldn’t even answer the list because I have a catastrophe running in my mind about how I’m going to die of prostate cancer.

00:22:20:19 – 00:22:45:20
Thomas P. Seager
I don’t think I had prostate cancer, but when you get scared like that, it has a way of playing tricks with your anxieties. I knew I did not want to go to the doctor because at that level of PSA, it seemed like everybody was recommending a biopsy. And that means they have to sample tissue from your prostate and they usually do it in multiple location and then see whether it’s cancerous.

00:22:46:03 – 00:23:06:07
Thomas P. Seager
Instead, I talk to men both over me about what their experiences were like and the horror stories that I was collecting. I wanted nothing to do with it. Sepsis, infection. As a result of biopsies gone bad, indeterminate results where maybe they sampled ten locations and three of them come up positive, but the other seven don’t. Now, what are you going to do?

00:23:06:08 – 00:23:26:13
Thomas P. Seager
More biopsy or schedule a prostatectomy? All of these things sounded like a disaster, and I couldn’t talk to my family about it. I didn’t tell my daughter about it because I was afraid that they were going to pressure me into doing things they didn’t want to do, and I felt like I had to do something. So I said, okay, I’m going to go, kiddo, and I’m going to do these ice baths every day.

00:23:26:13 – 00:23:50:00
Thomas P. Seager
I got into my morasco at the time we had just invented it and I said, I’m going to do my three, my 4 minutes every day. And I got out and of course I was cold. And so I wanted to rewarm. And so it started with jumping jacks and then doing some pull ups. And I would walk into campus where I could teach class and I got it retested and retested and retested.

00:23:50:00 – 00:24:14:16
Thomas P. Seager
And every time I was getting that mail health panel, I got my PSA down to 0.8, which I felt like I was in the clear. But a weird thing showed up. My testosterone went up to 1180 and 1180 is out of range. They said no abnormal, especially for a fat guy in his fifties. But with the 0.8, I thought, I’m in the clear now.

00:24:14:16 – 00:24:31:13
Thomas P. Seager
I can go visit the urologist. You know, he’s probably going to pat me on the back and tell me what a great job I did and ask me how I did it and all that kind of last thing. He’s going to want to do, you know, is a biopsy. So I’m going to make the appointment. Now I can talk to my daughter about how, you know, I have just escaped this cancer risk.

00:24:32:04 – 00:24:51:21
Thomas P. Seager
The urologist took a look at my labs and he didn’t congratulate me on anything. He said, I want to do one more test, and I didn’t know what it was. But I go back. They draw some blood, I get the report back. It’s luteinizing hormone, which I had to look up. Luteinizing hormone is what stimulates testosterone production in your gonads.

00:24:51:21 – 00:25:10:13
Thomas P. Seager
So if your T levels are high and your luteinizing hormone is low, it means you’re on the juice. Instead of my urologist congratulating me on my PSA, he’s suspect I did that. I was doing some kind of surreptitious testosterone replacement therapy. He’s about my age, you know, and he’s looking at these numbers like, I’ve never seen that before.

00:25:10:21 – 00:25:33:02
Thomas P. Seager
My luteinizing hormone comes back off the charts. I send the report to my urologist. He said, okay, fine, Nathan. He never asked me. He had no curiosity whatsoever, and I’m not going back to him. You know, as far as I’m concerned, my PSA is good. I still check like twice a year. Last time I checked, my testosterone on because it’s been a few years.

00:25:33:06 – 00:25:59:04
Thomas P. Seager
I think I was at like 1040, still over a thousand, which is outstanding for someone my age. What I’ve learned is I don’t want to be normal, like normal, at least for my age, among men in the United States is sick. I don’t feel exceptional because I am more in keeping with the way our bodies are designed to age.

00:25:59:18 – 00:26:12:02
Thomas P. Seager
So if this is Abner Normal, sign me up for abnormal. I don’t want to compare myself to, you know, what we would consider usual in the United States anymore.

00:26:12:02 – 00:26:31:14
Nathan Crane
Yeah, that’s that’s a common story that I hear with a lot of the clients that we work with, especially the cancer patients that, you know, shared their healing journeys with their conventional oncologists and basically their doctor just says, oh, it was luck. And they’re like, No, I changed my diet. I started juicing, I quit eating all this sugar food.

00:26:31:14 – 00:27:01:09
Nathan Crane
I started exercising. I’m doing sun every day, and they’re like, None of that stuff works. There’s no science behind any of that. It was just luck. But congratulations. But, you know, get out of here. It’s like they have no interest to actually know that this stuff has tremendous science behind it. And there are thousands and thousands of case studies of people who have, you know, changed their diet and lifestyle specifically and have seen cancers completely reverse.

00:27:01:09 – 00:27:09:18
Nathan Crane
And in your case, you know, your testosterone increase, obviously, energy. You said you were fat in your fifties. You don’t look fat now. So obviously you’ve lost some weight. You look.

00:27:09:19 – 00:27:34:11
Thomas P. Seager
Healthier. My subject genius that ice baths are not effective for weight loss. I don’t care what Gary Brecher says, that it is true that you will stimulate your metabolism, you will remodel the fat, and you’ll go from visceral to subcutaneous, which is much healthier. You’ll reduce your liver fat. There are a lot of great, healthy metabolic things that happen and weight loss is not really one of them.

00:27:35:23 – 00:27:59:07
Thomas P. Seager
When you stimulate that additional through thermogenesis, that additional metabolic activity, you do burn calories during the day. But part of the reason that people report sleeping so great after they start doing ice fast is because your metabolism compensates by going way down at night. The additional calories that you burn during the day are compensated by reduced calorie consumption at night.

00:28:00:00 – 00:28:16:20
Thomas P. Seager
And so in the end, it can be very healthy. But there are no before or after pictures of people, you know, on Instagram you said, well, I was fat. And then I started doing ice baths every day and I still eat my potato chips and stuff. But look at me. I’m ripped now. Ice baths won’t do that for you.

00:28:17:04 – 00:28:41:10
Thomas P. Seager
Fasting exercise. Kido can really get you going. There’s lots of things you can do to lose weight. The ice baths can compliment them, but ice bats alone aren’t going to aren’t going to turn you into an Instagram model. I’m never going to look like Ben Greenfield or something like that. It doesn’t matter how many ice baths I do, and I still do them because they’re still good for my metabolism.

00:28:42:01 – 00:29:05:13
Thomas P. Seager
And cancer is a metabolic disorder. So we should talk a little more about how to get lucky with your oncologist. These aren’t promises. These are just these are case studies. One of them is Dean Hall. I was going through my thing and Dean Hall reached out to me because he found Morasco online and he wanted to do ice baths practice.

00:29:05:20 – 00:29:32:11
Thomas P. Seager
He had this incredible story about how he was diagnosed with an incurable form of leukemia. He wanted to do something to inspire other cancer patients. Before he died, his father had it. His wife died of a brain tumor, and he went to his oncologist and said, I am not going out quiet. I want to do something dramatic that will inspire other cancer patients.

00:29:32:14 – 00:29:55:14
Thomas P. Seager
I’m going to swim the entire length of the William River in Oregon, and that thing is like 180 miles long. His oncologist told him, Dean, you so much set foot in a public swimming pool. Your immune system is so degraded that it’ll probably kill you. And Dean said, then I don’t really have anything to lose. And he put himself in that river.

00:29:55:18 – 00:30:18:23
Thomas P. Seager
And it took him three weeks to I mean, he trained his way up to it. Right. But three weeks of hypothermia and ketosis and extreme exercise. He went into the Willamette with leukemia and he came out without it. He flew down to San Diego to have his blood test done by the same oncologist that diagnosed him. And that guy met him in the, you know, the waiting room there with the results.

00:30:18:23 – 00:30:49:24
Thomas P. Seager
And he said, if I hadn’t done your diagnosis myself, I’d swear you were misdiagnosed because there is no trace of leukemia in your system. And I thought at the time, hey, that’s a great story. There is no denying this man’s experience. But I’m a scientist, you know, I can’t really buy or how could that be replicated? And that’s when I found Thomas Seefried at Boston College, who has written about the Warburg effect, about the obligate metabolism.

00:30:50:08 – 00:31:19:13
Thomas P. Seager
What do I mean? How 80% of your cancer cells can only metabolize glucose? There are lots of different forms of cancer and they prefer glucose. Some of them can metabolize other substrates, but 80% as a first approximation, require glucose. Seefried had been using ketones exogenous ketones to inhibit the growth of tumor cells in mice. He bred these mice to die of cancer.

00:31:19:17 – 00:31:44:01
Thomas P. Seager
And then yet when he administered ketones, they lived longer lives and their tumors grew more slowly. I know Dean Hall was in ketosis because he was burning up so much glucose in his cold water swim. So there are some studies now of ketosis as an adjunctive therapy for conventional cancer treatments and they show some benefit. It’s terrific but sexy at all.

00:31:44:07 – 00:32:10:04
Thomas P. Seager
This is a researcher in Sweden came out with the paper in 2022. They implanted tumors in mice and then of course, they created a control group and an experimental group. The experimental group had periodic cold exposure, not chronic, which is which is unhealthy, but it was something like 4 hours at four degrees C in the air. They got this periodic cold exposure and they got the same effect.

00:32:10:12 – 00:32:39:05
Thomas P. Seager
When you activate the brown fat, glucose is preferentially taken up into brown fat and it starves the tumor cells of the glucose that they need. And so cold exposure protected the mice in a way that inhibited tumor growth and extended their lives compared to the control group. So this is now a case study backed up by some science and then additional science, adding another mechanism, ketones and glucose starvation through brown fat activation.

00:32:39:22 – 00:33:02:14
Thomas P. Seager
Finally, another paper came out from the University of Rochester. They wanted to solve the mystery of the bowhead whale. The conventional thinking in cancer is that defects in the DNA in your nucleus, they accumulate over time. There are mutations that never get repaired, and as a result, a cancer cell appears. But that doesn’t explain the bowhead whale, because the bowhead whale is huge.

00:33:02:19 – 00:33:33:18
Thomas P. Seager
It has so many cells. The cancer is bound to emerge in some of them, and they live for like 200 years according to this nucleic DNA, this gene therapy or sorry, this gene hypothesis of cancer. The bowhead whale should be riddled with cancer by the time it’s 70 years old and it’s not. So these University of Rochester researchers, they wanted to find out why and what they discovered is that cold shock proteins will stimulate repair of defects in the DNA in the nucleus.

00:33:34:02 – 00:33:56:07
Thomas P. Seager
So now we have three mechanisms by which cold water therapy might inhibit tumor growth and help cancer patients manage the risks. Well, I got a call from a woman that I was dating. I was in Texas at the time, and she said, I’m having these acute abdominal pains. I don’t know, maybe I have a cyst or something, but it’s worse than I’ve ever felt.

00:33:56:19 – 00:34:16:02
Thomas P. Seager
I said, Get yourself to the hospital. I’ll be there tomorrow. Flew in. She was already in the emergency room. Now she’s got four daughters. She’s a single mom and they couldn’t tell her what was wrong with her. They had to send her scans and her bloodwork up to the tumor board at the you know, every hospital has this sort of panel of experts say, what are we going to do?

00:34:16:11 – 00:34:37:04
Thomas P. Seager
And when her doctor came back into her room and explained to her that she had a tumor on her liver, they could not operate. They could not treat it with chemo, and they couldn’t get it with radiation. She said, Well, what can you do? He said, Watchful waiting, anything? Watchful waiting. It’s like a death sentence because this tumor comes out of nowhere.

00:34:37:11 – 00:35:01:08
Thomas P. Seager
And what the what are you going to do? Just watch this woman die and leave her children without a parent? She said, Tom, what am I going to do? I said, You’re going to do what I did. You’re going to do it, Dean, hold it. You’re going to get into ketosis. You’re going to take all the fruit juice, you’re going to take all the soda, you’re going to take all the concentrated carbohydrates out of your diet, and you’re going to check your P to make sure that you’re staying in ketosis and then you’re going to get in the ice pack.

00:35:01:23 – 00:35:28:20
Thomas P. Seager
And she did. Three months later, she had another scan, and damned if that tumor didn’t shrink more than a centimeter. She has never gone back to the hospital to check again. And I know she’s supposed to. She knows she’s supposed to, but she made me promise because of the COVID lockdowns and because they wouldn’t let her children go with her and because of masks and other things, she made me promise that I would never take her back.

00:35:29:01 – 00:36:03:18
Thomas P. Seager
It is her responsibility now to keep metabolically healthy so that she can manage this risk that she knows exists within her. Well, have a customer in New Jersey who read these stories because I’ve written these up, you know, case studies, Dean Hall and AJ K writer, you can look it up and she contacted me on Instagram and she said, I’ve been through four rounds of chemotherapy and I still have tumors on my ovaries and my doctors are telling me I should a fifth round, she said, I don’t think that makes any sense.

00:36:03:21 – 00:36:21:03
Thomas P. Seager
I don’t want to do more of Well, it hasn’t worked for me. Do you think ice baths can help? And I said, Roxanne, I can’t tell you that. First of all, I’m not a medical doctor. And second of all, even if I was, would be irresponsible to give you medical advice over Instagram. I can’t promise you anything. I can tell you what, Thomas Siegfried’s work says.

00:36:21:03 – 00:36:41:16
Thomas P. Seager
I can tell you what’s sexy at all says. I can tell you what happened to Dean Hall and I can tell you what happened to AJ K Rider, but I can’t tell you what’s going to happen to your ovaries. She has started doing her ice baths twice a day, 2 minutes each time, 45 degrees. She texted me every day and she says, Do you think I should go colder?

00:36:41:19 – 00:37:07:01
Thomas P. Seager
I’ll go colder if you tell me. I think she’s doing great, she says. I feel like I got my life back. If she’s going to die, it’s not going to be in a hospital. It’s not going to be as a chemo patient. It’s going to be as somebody who gets out of her ice baths and dances in her garage to rewarm her body with her husband, she feels like she’s living whatever life she has left.

00:37:07:12 – 00:37:40:03
Thomas P. Seager
And she texted me on Thanksgiving and she said, Tom, my blood markers have come down four points. They have never come down before. Without chemotherapy, they have only gone up. Last month I went up 31. She knows she’s not out of the woods. She says it feels like a small win and it is. There are no guarantees for her or anyone else, but she is determined that she’s going to live whatever life she has in a certain way, that she feels a sense of accomplishment about.

00:37:40:08 – 00:38:07:08
Thomas P. Seager
And I look forward to those text messages every day. How are you doing? She says she wants to go colder like not on my know, but I get it. Gary Brecker was on the Joe Rogan Show recently. You know, Joe Rogan Experience podcast. And Gary said, I haven’t seen any evidence that going cold or has any benefit. And he asked Joe, why do you do it?

00:38:07:17 – 00:38:31:10
Thomas P. Seager
And said, Because it sucks worse hair. He said, Yeah, there’s a lot of evidence that it sucks worse and it shows like that’s the point because it’s hard because I start my day every day. He’s got a morals going, he’s got like inches of ice in it. And he says, I stared down at that ice. I don’t want to do it, but I do it because I feel like I’ve accomplished something.

00:38:31:14 – 00:38:42:04
Thomas P. Seager
And that’s where Roxanne is right now. That’s why she wants to go colder, too, because she’s got a hard road ahead of her and doing the hard things sometimes. That’s what Feeling Alive is really about.

00:38:42:17 – 00:39:07:14
Nathan Crane
Yeah, exactly. She’s talking about that earlier kind of in the opening was about, you know, the discipline that it takes going to something challenging. It’s like if you can do that, you can change your diet, you can exercise, you can do a lot of these other things that actually you feel better when you do them. You know, I want to talk about a little bit the science behind, you know, the mechanisms of action with with cold baths as well in terms of cancer and the immune system specifically.

00:39:07:22 – 00:39:32:24
Nathan Crane
You know, we know that the you know, Dr. Thomas Elodie said it famously in my documentaries, said there is a cure for cancer. It’s called the Immune System. And if you have a fully functioning immune system, you’ll never have to worry about a cancer diagnosis. And why do you say that? Well, because our immune system’s job, one of its many jobs, is to identify, target, destroy, eliminate, remove, recycle abnormal cells.

00:39:32:24 – 00:39:57:09
Nathan Crane
And cancer cells is chronically fermenting cells. That’s its job, produces natural killer cells and T cells and lymphocytes and other white blood cells that literally go out and clean up these abnormal cells, these damaged DNA in these cancer cells. And so when our immune system is functioning and it’s doing its job and it’s able to to to find these cells and clean them up before they metastasize and spread throughout the body.

00:39:57:09 – 00:40:33:16
Nathan Crane
And even so, if it has metastasized and grown in stage four, you know, the immune system still has an incredible capacity. At times it’s not guaranteed, but incredible capacity to actually clean up all of that cancer. We’ve seen it with many case studies out there and many who I’ve interviewed over the years and cold hydrotherapy, ice baths, cold exposure, whatever you want to watch, whatever you want to call it, it has been shown scientifically to enhance the immune system upregulate your immune system produce t cells and NK cells.

00:40:33:16 – 00:40:54:24
Nathan Crane
Natural killer cells, these cells that literally go out and clean up these abnormal cells and cancer cells. So, you know, if if the intention is cancer prevention, living long and healthy and feeling and vitality, you know, cold exposure will probably be your best friend. If it’s I have a cancer diagnosis, I’m gonna do everything I can naturally to help my body heal itself.

00:40:55:06 – 00:40:58:16
Nathan Crane
You know, cold exposure could be a really good friend as well.

00:40:59:13 – 00:41:24:18
Thomas P. Seager
You’re so on the right track. Drugs don’t heal your body. You heal your body. You have to give your body the things it needs to heal. My father died a couple of years ago, and I don’t know, he had like six different kinds of cancer in his body. And it wasn’t any of the cancer that killed him. He thought that his health was his doctor’s problem.

00:41:25:14 – 00:41:53:06
Thomas P. Seager
And and I get it. You know, his generation my father was born before antibiotics were discovered. His generation was taught to think of health that way. You go to the hospital, you get the best technology available, and then that’s what heals you. And I think of it as in a totally different way you give your body what it needs to heal itself because we are already equipped with everything we need to maintain a state of health.

00:41:53:06 – 00:42:20:01
Thomas P. Seager
I think my father died because he gave up because he got tired and he didn’t feel that sense of of self-efficacy about taking charge of his health. He was obese. He had no energy. He could tell that his brain was declining. It was, you know, when I was a kid, he was the smartest man I’d ever met. But in his old age, his doctors would say, well, you’re still fine.

00:42:20:07 – 00:42:43:23
Thomas P. Seager
But he knew what he used to be like. He could self-police his own decline, and he didn’t want to do it anymore. At least that’s my theory. I don’t want to go out like that. His mother, my nana she lived until she was 99 and she didn’t do it because she was so comfortable all the time. She raised chickens, you know, and she lived in Connecticut.

00:42:43:23 – 00:43:09:05
Thomas P. Seager
And it sounds preposterous now, but her life was way more difficult than mine is. And so I think about it, you know, I had my biological age done by Patrick Porter and his brain tap. He doesn’t measure your telomere length. He doesn’t measure your DNA methylation. He measures your electrical fields. He says life is energy. It’s not in the material quantities inside your body.

00:43:09:05 – 00:43:35:13
Thomas P. Seager
It is in your capacity to produce the right energy that keeps you alive. So he hooked me up to his electrodes and he says, Tom, you’re 32 years old now. That only makes sense because, you know, I’m in my fifties. That only makes sense if you think about your biological age as your expected mortality. So when he says your biological age is 32, what he means is you have to expect the life span of a 32 year old.

00:43:35:17 – 00:43:53:09
Thomas P. Seager
So I had to do some math like this, that and the other thing and say, okay, if I have the expected lifespan of a 32 year old to my current age, at the time he did this test, I was 54. I said, Well, it means I’m going to live to be 107. Now, most people would say that sounds purpose to us.

00:43:53:14 – 00:44:10:14
Thomas P. Seager
And I say, why shouldn’t I live eight years more than my nana? You know, if she lived to 99, why can’t I make it to 107? And when you put it that way, it makes more sense. So I saw Patrick again, this is a couple of years later and I said, Hey, you know, why give me up? I want to know how old I am now.

00:44:10:24 – 00:44:52:04
Thomas P. Seager
And he does the thing and he gets the results and he says, Well, congratulations. Now you’re only 30. In this respect, it is possible to age in reverse, but it is not the methylation of our DNA that is really going to capture this. It is our mitochondria. It is our capacity to convert the food and energy that we’re eating into the type of energy that keeps everything in our bodies alive, whether that’s wound repair or whether that’s fueling our immune system or growth or anything that your body needs requires the energy that is principally produced by your mitochondria.

00:44:53:12 – 00:45:23:19
Nathan Crane
Yeah. And that’s really, I think, fascinating from from where Otto Wahlberg’s work in the early 19 Howards when he won the Nobel Prize for discovering the adaptive ability of a chronically fermenting cell, which is a cancer cell, to change its primary fuel source to glucose right to produce ATP. That’s really what he a lot of people kind of misunderstand what he does, what he won the Nobel Prize for and what his discovery was about.

00:45:23:19 – 00:45:51:24
Nathan Crane
But that’s really what it was, as you mentioned, early on, which was, look, the the cell, as it becomes damaged and dysfunctional to stay alive, it ferments. It chronically ferments. And to do that, it switches its fuel source and it goes from healthy cellular respiration to a robot glycolysis, which is funny because it’s a robot. It’s called a robot glycolysis, but it’s actually an anaerobic process.

00:45:52:09 – 00:46:29:05
Nathan Crane
But that process is highly inefficient, meaning it only produces about two ATP per molecule of glucose where a healthy cell produces like 32 ATP right through an oxidative oxygen process. And so, you know, we need glucose in our bodies. Our brain needs glucose, our cells. Nick Glucose glucose is not the enemy, as many people think. And actually I have a lot of cancer patients we work with on, you know, healthy levels of glucose in their body and in their diet that still see incredible reductions and reversals of cancers.

00:46:29:05 – 00:46:50:13
Nathan Crane
It’s not as simple as get all the all of the carbohydrates and glucose out of the body and the cancer goes away, though that is one way to do it. As you talked about the ketogenic diet or ketosis on himself went on a plant based ketogenic diet and you know, he had stage four cancer. And that was one of the many things that he did.

00:46:51:02 – 00:47:16:14
Nathan Crane
But then I have other people that I know and I’ve interviewed who didn’t reverse their cancer in a kid junk diet. They did it by cleaning up the diet, eating whole foods, real plant foods, you know, good, complex carbohydrates, king was and brown rice and black beans and these kinds of things. But point being, is the the cell as it switches to to primarily glucose as its fuel source is highly inefficient.

00:47:16:14 – 00:47:44:01
Nathan Crane
So it needs more glucose. So when we’re putting in these processed sugars in these high fructose corn sirup and all this processed sugar crap into the body, we are basically just fueling the cancer. But again, I say it’s not as simple as that because actually most cancer cells only get about 50%. If you look at the research, about 50% of their energy from glucose.

00:47:44:01 – 00:48:10:07
Nathan Crane
Now, some cells are more, some cells are less. Also, some cancers can actually switch to ketones and get their energy from ketones. They can also get it from glutamine. I believe there’s different fuel sources. So again, like I said, it’s not like there’s not a one size fits all when it comes to that with every single cancer. But the concepts, the principles are there where the research was continued by other scientists over the years.

00:48:10:07 – 00:48:37:20
Nathan Crane
And then eventually, Seefried, as you’ve mentioned, has led to the discovery that cancer is not a a upstream DNA problem. It’s not a genetic problem. Even cancer dot gov says, you know, cancer is only 5% hereditary and 95% non hereditary. Right. And we know through epigenetics that we can turn on and turn off these cancer genes. We can also turn on and turn off longevity genes and all kinds of healing genes.

00:48:38:07 – 00:49:07:11
Nathan Crane
But that the mitochondria, as you were just talking about, it’s this is the cancer theory that makes the most sense. And through Siegfried’s work and other scientists work has actually been proven that it’s the it’s the damage and dysfunction of the mitochondria in the cell that leads to that cell actually becoming dysfunctional. And the DNA damage is a downstream effect from the mitochondrial damage that then causes that cell to chronically ferment and become cancerous.

00:49:08:01 – 00:49:29:01
Nathan Crane
So, yes, there is DNA damage in cancer. Yeah, we know that. Yes, in cancer cells. Yeah. But if you look at the root cause, what all the leading science is showing us is it’s the mitochondrial damage and also the reduction of mitochondria within the cell. Right. We know the mitochondria are important for so many functions within the cell.

00:49:29:12 – 00:49:56:19
Nathan Crane
They’ve been called the batteries of the powerhouse of the cell, but they are even much more than that, that energy of the cell. They, you know, they manage a lot of the processes, the the detoxification of the cell, as well as the import of new nutrients into the cell. So not only having lots of mitochondria, but having very healthy mitochondria in our cells is essential for our bodies to repair and regenerate and to thrive and to fight off all kinds of metabolic diseases.

00:49:57:03 – 00:50:11:16
Nathan Crane
Right. And so that leads, again, cold hydrotherapy as one thing that you know through for Mrs. is it it is through hormones this with with cold hydro therapy that actually leads to mitochondrial improvement.

00:50:11:16 – 00:50:37:02
Thomas P. Seager
Right we should make a distinction between chronic cold exposure, which is dangerous and unhealthy and acute. Everything in your body is meant to cycle if you exercise. We know how great exercises. If you exercise continuously without getting rest, you die. We know how great sleep is, but you can’t stay asleep all the time. Everything is there’s light and there’s dark.

00:50:37:05 – 00:51:01:13
Thomas P. Seager
Your body needs them both. There’s exercise and there’s recovery. Your body needs them both. There is cold and there is warmth. Your body needs them both. If you find yourself in any chronic stress sake state, it will lead to disease. So what we’re talking about, this hermetic cold water therapy effect is, is brief acute cold exposure followed by periods of recovery.

00:51:01:21 – 00:51:25:21
Thomas P. Seager
The acute cold exposure, they really rev your mitochondria up. You’re going to start this cold thermogenesis process. Brown fat cells are packed with mitochondria. You stimulate what’s called micro biogenesis. That is the creation of new mitochondria, especially within your brown fat. And you improve your insulin sensitivity throughout your whole body. But you need to give you might. Okay, Andrea, a minute.

00:51:26:08 – 00:51:51:03
Thomas P. Seager
You need to stop your cold exposure and then give your body 24 hours to recover. So it can do the marrow biogenesis that is going to prepare you for the next comedic medic exposure. And this is the case of all things with our body. We must cycle through. Taleb calls it in antifragile. I think variability. We are not machines.

00:51:51:08 – 00:52:16:02
Thomas P. Seager
And so when they say the mitochondria is the battery of the cell or it’s the engine of the cell, I object to these technological metaphors. Mitochondria are not a poor approximation of a battery or a poor approximation of an engine. An engine is a bad approximation of a mitochondria. We are complex creatures. We are not meant to be the same thing over and over and over again.

00:52:16:02 – 00:52:41:21
Thomas P. Seager
That’s why we create machines. I’m mitochondria aren’t a battery. They’re what? Take the glucose and take the triglycerides of the lipids into the fatty acids and convert them into the forms of energy that my body needs. Why would a cancer cell resort to this inefficient Warburg effect this this fermentation that hardly yields any of what they need? Why would it do that?

00:52:42:04 – 00:53:14:13
Thomas P. Seager
And explains, he says, because their mitochondria are no good. If the cell could rely upon healthy mitochondria, do you think it would be using the Warburg effect for its energy? He’s taken cancer cells, extracted their mitochondria, replace them with healthy mitochondria from another cell and reversed cancer in those cells in the the test tube, so to speak, in vitro, just to prove to the world that the origins of cancer were in the mitochondria and not in the nucleus.

00:53:14:23 – 00:53:36:21
Thomas P. Seager
It’s true that your DNA in your nucleus will suffer mutations, will suffer defects in duplicate, but you have way more DNA in your mitochondria than you have in your nucleus, which is something that they don’t teach us in high school biology, that your mitochondria have their own separate DNA and they don’t just have one copy, they have thousands of copies and you have thousands of mitochondria.

00:53:37:02 – 00:54:02:10
Thomas P. Seager
So your mitochondria for Metal Biogenesis, they’re always sorting, which are the copies of mitochondrial DNA that are the best. And how do we replicate those as we create new mitochondria? When you get into the cold water and you stimulate metal biogenesis, you don’t just get more mitochondria. Your body preferentially selects the best copies that are available. You get better mitochondria.

00:54:02:16 – 00:54:27:24
Thomas P. Seager
And so cold hydrotherapy is a mitochondrial therapy. We should talk about a couple other things that your body needs and one of them is magnesium because the the mitochondria need that magnesium. If you don’t have it in your diet, it will steal it from your bones because magnesium is not stored in the bloodstream, it’s stored in the bones, something like 1%.

00:54:27:24 – 00:54:56:00
Thomas P. Seager
And I’m not making this up. It’s a very low percentage of the total body burden of magnesium is held in your bloodstream. And so if you get a blood test, the results are not a very good indication of whether you’re magnesium deficient or not. You must if you’re practicing cold water therapy, then you must have sufficient magnesium in your diet to keep mitochondria enriched with what they need to stay healthy.

00:54:56:14 – 00:55:20:16
Thomas P. Seager
You also need your rest. You need good sleep. You also need to balance your omega six and your omega three fatty acids too much linoleic acid, for example, like you would find in canola oil or in corn oil or what they called the vegetable oils, even though they’re not derived from vegetables at all. This will not cure omega six, omega three fatty acid balance out of whack.

00:55:21:01 – 00:55:43:12
Thomas P. Seager
Now, you can burn omega sixes, you know, for their caloric density. You can fuel off of them. But what most people most people don’t realize is that they’re also the basis of every cell membrane, including the membranes of the mitochondria. So when your omega six, omega three gets out of whack, now your body is forced to build its membranes to use those omega six fatty acids to build membranes.

00:55:43:15 – 00:56:07:01
Thomas P. Seager
And they don’t work the same way because they don’t have the right fatty acids in them. And this can lead to metabolic dysfunction. So there are three routes to to mitochondrial injury, carb overload with no rest. That is your concern, only eating carb. You’re not doing any fasting. You’re never in Quito. You never give your mitochondria a break, disrupt your light and circadian rhythm.

00:56:07:11 – 00:56:31:05
Thomas P. Seager
Mitochondria make their own melatonin. They depend upon that melatonin to scavenge the reactive oxygen species that are sort of part of the energy conversion process. You don’t get your light right. You don’t get your rhythm right. You can enjoy your mitochondria. And this last one, the sort of the seed oil, the omega six, omega three imbalance is another way to lead to metabolic dysfunction.

00:56:31:18 – 00:56:42:21
Thomas P. Seager
When you avoid those three, you can keep your mitochondria healthy and slow the rate at which you age.

00:56:42:21 – 00:57:05:04
Nathan Crane
Yeah, those are really important points to pay attention to. We could dove into some of those specifically if you want to. We also know that, you know, environmental toxins damage our mitochondria. Right? Heavy metals can damage mitochondria. We have, you know, a lot of these exposure to these manmade chemicals that are in our food, water and air that can damage the mitochondria as well.

00:57:06:18 – 00:57:29:23
Thomas P. Seager
I can’t disagree with you. My doctorate is in environmental engineering and of course, environmental engineering started with this idea that we have to remove the toxins from the environment. We’ve done a good job. That is, we’ve cleaned up our water and we’ve cleaned up our air. The toxins now are not the ones that you choke on. They’re not the ones that you can see and that you can taste.

00:57:30:13 – 00:57:56:16
Thomas P. Seager
They sort of escape our senses early detection. And in that way they’re much more insidious because we can’t rely on our eyes and our nose and our mouth to know when we’re in a toxic environs. And so I’m glad you mentioned it. We almost we also must avoid those things which have no hermetic basis. They have no they have no benefit in this type of stress.

00:57:56:16 – 00:58:04:22
Thomas P. Seager
It is only distress rather than to you stress that we expose ourselves to when we exercise, when we get the cold or when we get out in the sunshine.

00:58:05:19 – 00:58:36:12
Nathan Crane
Yeah. You’re talking about basically the chronic stress that people experience every day, right? The fear, the self-doubt out, the the anger, the resentment, these emotions that we harbor and hold on to, you know, often from, you know, subconscious belief systems that we’ve taken on through childhood adverse events, through traumatic experiences in our lives, but then also just through behavior patterns, you know, driving down the street and get pissed off at someone for cutting you off and then go to a job that you hate.

00:58:36:12 – 00:58:54:12
Nathan Crane
And so you’re, you know, stressed out all day doing work that you don’t enjoy. And then you go home and you watch the news, you’re stressed out again. And it’s like this chronic stress that actually inhibits the immune system and is one of the underlying core factors of basically every chronic disease that we experience today.

00:58:56:07 – 00:59:22:00
Thomas P. Seager
Eleanor Roosevelt, who’s not known for her health advice, she has a great quote called Do something that scares you every day, because when you’ve gotten over that, the guy who cut you off in the road doesn’t matter anymore. The thing that’s on the TV, these people whom you don’t know from halfway across the world who are going through whatever their version of hell is, that’s not your life.

00:59:22:04 – 00:59:47:11
Thomas P. Seager
You don’t need to take that on. And whatever just happened in social media in your Instagram account, that makes you feel inadequate because everybody leads a better life than you. That’s not for you to get upset about because every day you’re confronting something that scares you, you’re getting over it, and you can say, I’m good now. This is what the ice bath helps me do because I hate it.

00:59:49:00 – 01:00:09:24
Thomas P. Seager
You know, here I am. I sell ice baths and I should probably adopt the Joe Rogan perspective. Buy a morasco. It’s the ice baths. It sucks worse. You know, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s so counterintuitive. When I look down at the water and I see those ice chunks floating in there, I get what Viktor Frankl called anticipatory anxiety.

01:00:10:02 – 01:00:36:07
Thomas P. Seager
You think I like going in? David Goggins was on the Joe Rogan experience, and he was telling this story about how he read my articles. And so now he does his ice baths in the morning before his workout. And David Goggins, who knows something about willpower and discipline and cold water, interrupts Joe, and he says, There is nothing in this world that will make you question everything, like cold water.

01:00:36:21 – 01:01:03:00
Thomas P. Seager
And so, David Goggins, you know, he’s like, get hard. Just be careful about that cold saying this. Then I look at that and I go, How would my daughter want to see me? Now, my daughter is 26 now, like she’s all grown up. But when she was little, she thought, I was her hero. She thought, Dad can do anything right.

01:01:03:00 – 01:01:27:00
Thomas P. Seager
Nothing scares my dad. I look at myself in the mirror and I see all my flaws, all my inadequacies, all my defects. And the shame comes welling up. And I look down at that. I said, I know I don’t want to get into. And I say, Could I be for this moment the man that my little daughter thought I was so well, God damn right I can I can get into I can do 2 minutes.

01:01:27:00 – 01:01:53:22
Thomas P. Seager
I can do 3 minutes, and then I come out. Nothing bothers me. I get hauled down to my director’s office. You know, I’m a professor at ASU and the university’s been through a hell of a time the last two or three years. And I have lost a lot of friends because my views on health are in opposition to the policies in the institutions that pay the university so much money.

01:01:54:02 – 01:02:14:01
Thomas P. Seager
It’s like we have to throw science out the window. The last two or three years and I’ve gotten in a lot of trouble. And now my director calls me down. He says, Tom, you can’t post anything like that again. You can’t put this stuff up on Twitter. I’m getting hate mail all about the things that you’re saying. It used to bother me, Nathan.

01:02:14:09 – 01:02:41:01
Thomas P. Seager
And now you know what? It’s not a big deal because I’m already the man that my little daughter thought I was when. When I knew sort of that I wasn’t because I’ve done that today, you can’t upset me anymore. And you can go to my Twitter and you can see what upsets people. You can go to my Instagram and you can see what makes people angry at me.

01:02:41:09 – 01:03:10:07
Thomas P. Seager
And yet I remain a man of science and I’m not going to lie so I can get another NSF. Grant You mentioned self actual engineering at the beginning. This is a new phase of my career. I’m a civil engineer. I’m trained in the environment, and what used to be my focus was resilience, how to recover from disaster. And I discover that it’s not in the concrete and it’s not in the steel and it’s not in the infrastructure.

01:03:10:07 – 01:03:38:17
Thomas P. Seager
It’s in the human creativity. The disaster recovery is not by building back better and making things stronger. It’s in the way we psychologically respond to the stress. How is it that we can the two people can emerge from the same experience, one of them with PTSD and one of them stronger? Peter Levine has written about this. Kelly McGonigal has written about this.

01:03:38:17 – 01:04:07:05
Thomas P. Seager
She has a book called The Upside of Stress. She’s a psychologist at Stanford. It’s a wonderful book. I don’t think she’s ever been in an ice bath, but she wrote this great book and she says, The story you tell yourself about the experience is more important than the experience, right? So the people who have the stressful experience and they feel helpless and they feel like victims, they’re the ones for whom the stress is converted into trauma.

01:04:07:19 – 01:04:25:05
Thomas P. Seager
The people who say this is a difficult time and it’s going to make me better, I’m going to rise to this challenge. They are the people who live longer, more satisfying lives because they experience the same thing. But this time as you stress, rather than as distress. So it’s a powerful book.

01:04:26:02 – 01:04:55:04
Nathan Crane
As such an important point. You know, in my past decade plus in the cancer research, you have come across some really, really fascinating research on cancer patients, particularly who I call cancer conquerors, not just survivors, but people who have overcome cancer. And the and they were study there was a number of cancer patients that were studied and asked a series of questions about their mindset and how they looked at their cancer diagnoses.

01:04:55:04 – 01:05:22:05
Nathan Crane
CIS And it’s a very common mentality among people who actually heal from cancer is that they have a very specific perspective that they choose, right? It is a choice. It has to be a choice that they choose to have about their cancer diagnosis. And the choice is and the perspective is, I will get better from this. I will beat this.

01:05:22:05 – 01:05:40:11
Nathan Crane
I will use this cancer as a way to make me better. I will not let this beat me. And it’s a it’s a mindset shift and it’s not a victimhood approach, which, you know, I’m not judging anybody out there. The cancer diagnosis that feels like they’re a victim. I mean, it’s it’s an incredibly devastating and fearful diagnosis to have.

01:05:40:18 – 01:06:00:22
Nathan Crane
Certainly, you go to a conventional doctor who says, hey, you got three months left to live and there’s nothing you can do. I mean, you know, go home and die. But the people that I’ve met, you know, who are who are told that and here they are 15 years later telling me their story. They have that same mentality that’s in the research, in the literature that they said to themselves, You know what?

01:06:01:11 – 01:06:19:10
Nathan Crane
I didn’t believe what that doctor told me. I went home and I decided I am going to do everything I can to overcome this. I’m going to learn everything I can, talk to as many people as I need to read as many books, make as many changes in my life as possible. And these are the people five, ten, 15 years later, who are saying, look, cancer was a blessing.

01:06:19:23 – 01:06:44:02
Nathan Crane
Cancer was something that literally changed my life for the better. It made me a better husband or wife. It made me take better care of my health. It made me quit that job that I hated. It made me actually find passion and purpose in my life. And so the fact that you’re talking about, you know, just that shift in mindset, it is very clear that among cancer conquerors that they have that same mindset.

01:06:44:02 – 01:07:10:20
Thomas P. Seager
I think it’s really hard for someone who has a cancer diagnosis to hear this message. Well, cancer was a blessing for me. They don’t feel blessed in that moment. It’s very difficult and I haven’t experienced it for myself. So I’m only speaking sort of vicariously about what I’ve learned from talking with others. I know that when Dean Hall describes it, he didn’t think that he was going to beat this cancer.

01:07:11:09 – 01:07:36:04
Thomas P. Seager
He instead said, What am I going to do with the time I have left? I know that Roxanne is not. I mean, she says I’m going to do this. I’m going to make this work. She is not harboring delusions about her condition. And how about how difficult this will be? One of my daughter’s favorite movies. She works in film now.

01:07:36:16 – 01:07:59:11
Thomas P. Seager
And, you know, I’ve watched it with her. A lot of the old films that were my favorite as a kid, one of her favorite one, Rocky. And she says if Rocky knew he was going to lose, why did he get into the ring? I mean, it’s a great question. What keeps the human being going under such difficult circumstances when they feel like there is no hope?

01:08:00:00 – 01:08:28:15
Thomas P. Seager
It wasn’t that was wasn’t the hope of winning. It was the idea that he could go the distance. And so I think that there may be for some patients, this kind of interim period in which they say, no one can make me promises. I don’t know for a fact that this is going to work, but I am going to do these things with the agency that I have to make the time as best for me as it can be.

01:08:29:05 – 01:08:54:23
Thomas P. Seager
Now, it could be that as they progress and as they practice and as they get progress, their confidence goes up and up and up. But when they’re first having their diagnosis, I think it is a very difficult, emotional time to take baby steps towards the kind of courage that they need to to tell their doctors, I’m going to take responsibility for my own health.

01:08:55:02 – 01:09:12:12
Thomas P. Seager
I’m going to do some things that other people have told me that work well for them and see if they work for me too. Poor action. I’ve got a video and I haven’t put it up on Instagram. She gets into that ice bath and you can bleep out if you want. She’s like, Fuck you, Dr. So-and-so, fuck you.

01:09:12:12 – 01:09:36:15
Thomas P. Seager
Chemotherapy. She’s angry and people have a right to be angry. But she also knows that that anger isn’t going to heal her. So she sort of gets out of her system when she first gets in the ice baths under sympathetic systems, all activated. And when she comes, she’s not angry anymore. She’s dancing. She’s with her husband. She says, now I feel alive.

01:09:37:16 – 01:09:44:12
Thomas P. Seager
Well, good with every day. I want her to have that feeling, no matter how she leaves this her.

01:09:46:02 – 01:10:18:00
Nathan Crane
Yeah, that’s amazing. Now, in terms of protocol, you know, are you in agreement with some of the research that Susanna Sjoberg published on kind of the minimum weekly time in called Exposure being like 11 minutes to get the metabolic benefits from it? Or where do you what do you think about when it comes to exposure time in exposure, how many days, a week, that kind of thing?

01:10:18:00 – 01:10:24:12
Nathan Crane
And you yourself are you said you were doing it every day. Do you still do ice baths? Every single.

01:10:24:12 – 01:10:39:22
Thomas P. Seager
It’s right here. You know, it’s right on my balcony. I was in there this morning and this morning was a tough time to get in there. You know, it’s always easier when it’s like 110 degrees in Phenix and then the ice bath feels great. And I don’t mean that.

01:10:40:10 – 01:11:03:07
Nathan Crane
It’s in the forties here in northern I’m in northern Florida. I’d moved here a couple of years ago. I didn’t know Jacksonville actually got cold like thirties and forties in the wintertime early in the morning, but it’s in the forties here. My ice baths in the low thirties. And on those days it’s windy is cold. It definitely takes a little more oomph and courage and resilience to get yourself in there.

01:11:03:07 – 01:11:04:12
Nathan Crane
I feel. Yeah, for sure.

01:11:06:10 – 01:11:34:17
Thomas P. Seager
But when it comes to the protocols, I don’t disagree with Soderbergh’s data. I think she’s done the most comprehensive PET scans of brown fat that that are related to winter swimming and to cold hydrotherapy than anybody has. But and so we’re kind of oversimplified the data. She studied winter swimmers at the University of Copenhagen. Right. So these are Danes and they hop in the fjord and they’ve got sort of the Scandinavian tradition of it.

01:11:34:24 – 01:12:01:22
Thomas P. Seager
She said, Come into my lab, I want to do a PET scan. The p t measures, glucose uptake into brown fat and it was developed to detect cancer because cancer cells preferentially metabolize glucose. You do a PET scan and you can locate the tumors in the body, but you can also see brown fat, especially when the instrument room is cold and you’re kind of activating the brown fat while you’re doing the scan and.

01:12:01:22 – 01:12:25:24
Thomas P. Seager
She asked them, How often do you winter swim? And you know, people fill out the survey and they said this, that or the other thing and the average was 11 minutes a week. And so this is what she’s reported to her credit. But we don’t know what the sort of minimum effective dose is. We know that 11 on the average, 11 minutes a week is sufficient for the people that she studied.

01:12:25:24 – 01:12:53:13
Thomas P. Seager
And that’s a great place to start. You might find we might discover that less dose is just as effective because that part has never been studied. And the other thing about how subjects work has been popularized is it focuses on metabolism because that’s what brown fat is measuring. It does not focus on, I’ll call it psychology there’s another guy, Mike Tipton.

01:12:54:01 – 01:13:15:18
Thomas P. Seager
He’s in the United Kingdom and he has a whole lab outfitted so he can study cold water therapy. And he’s documented case study of a woman who did winter swimming to resolve her major depression. She was resistant to drugs. Talk therapy, wasn’t doing a damn thing for her. And so then she joined a winter swimming club and the depression went away.

01:13:16:09 – 01:13:35:00
Thomas P. Seager
There is a psychological element that is not captured in, the brown fat, and I can’t tell you what protocol to you to use. I mean, I know what Joe Rogan does. I know what I do. But you might get the same kind of Cold Challenge, all right? Not you, Nathan, but someone just starting out might get the same kind of cold.

01:13:35:00 – 01:14:02:05
Thomas P. Seager
Challenge it 50 degrees Fahrenheit. They don’t have to do 34 or something like that the rule of thumb, regardless of the protocols that you’ve heard about, is go cold enough to gasp long enough to shiver, especially when you’re starting out. But that shiver is a real big question mark, and I’m going to get into why we can either suppress or promote our shiver response.

01:14:02:05 – 01:14:33:07
Thomas P. Seager
It’s like a reflex, but we can use our mind to either calm ourselves and not shiver, or we can that shiver on. If what you’re doing is metabolic and you say, Well, I really want to work my brown fat and so I’m going to try and suppress my shiver response. Good on you. I think you’re in talks about this, but the shivering has something else happening psychologically and I’m getting this from Peter Levine’s work and other work as well.

01:14:33:07 – 01:14:55:22
Thomas P. Seager
Peter Levine is a psychotherapist. He got run over by a car. He wrote a book called An Unspoken Voice, another one called Waking the Tiger. And I forget which one it is that he talked about this traumatic experience because he didn’t lose consciousness. He’s on the pavement, laid out, and he begins to tremble. An off duty paramedic found him and wanted to stabilize his body because he doesn’t know what’s broken.

01:14:55:22 – 01:15:22:11
Thomas P. Seager
I mean, this is what the first aid protocol is. And was conscious enough to tell him to back off because Levine knew he needed to tremble. All mammals do this. If you’re if you’re a hunter like campaigns and you’ve probably seen like that trembling, that happens. Have you ever hit a deer on the highway? You’re from Montana. This happens all the time and you’ll see it shake in the stress and that trembling is the stress leaving the body’s nervous system.

01:15:22:15 – 01:15:50:24
Thomas P. Seager
Levine knew if he trembled, he would not be traumatized. I mean, physically, yes, but psychologically no. Sure enough, when they got him into the ambulance, he asked for his blood pressure, he asked for his pulse rate, and the nurse said, I’m not really supposed to tell you. And Levine kind of fibbed, said, It’s okay, I’m a doctor. Well, he’s a psychologist, not an M.D. But the nurse shared that with him and he said, Well, thank goodness then I won’t be experiencing PTSD when I get into the ice baths.

01:15:51:09 – 01:16:11:13
Thomas P. Seager
There are somedays 15 seconds in and I am shivering like you wouldn’t believe. I either had an argument with my girlfriend or I had a customer who wants a refund or had something else. It might have been being called down to my director’s office and chastised vehemently whatever it is that my anxieties they just come out of my body and I shiver like crazy.

01:16:11:22 – 01:16:32:21
Thomas P. Seager
It’s not because I’ve failed to be cold acclimated, it’s because there is something else going on in my nervous system and the shivering is bringing it out. And sometimes I’ll be in there and I’ll say, Good shiver. I want that shiver. I want to feel shiver. And then I get out and I’m more relaxed. I can handle whatever it is.

01:16:33:00 – 01:16:59:20
Thomas P. Seager
My, you know, catastrophic mind is no longer playing with me in living in my imagination. That look, nothing bad has happened, but the shivering is what releases that stress so it doesn’t turn into trauma. And sober doesn’t write about that because she didn’t measure it. So I’m not disagreeing with anything that she’s published, but I am adding to it.

01:16:59:20 – 01:17:09:24
Thomas P. Seager
There is a deeper quality about what happens to us in the ice bath and there’s something goes on psychologically. Can’t be captured in a PET scan.

01:17:10:12 – 01:17:32:13
Nathan Crane
Mm hmm. Yeah, that’s pretty incredible. Yeah. You reminded me of David Pacelli and his work with trauma prevention exercises, and someone I’ve come to know really well the last about year, year and a half, I think I’ve actually interviewed him on the podcast. I recommend people go listen to that. It’s it’s fascinating. And these exercises, I’ve done them.

01:17:32:13 – 01:17:53:04
Nathan Crane
I’ve had him guide me through them and you basically induce the tremors and. You know, he learned about this when he was overseas in war torn countries, when they were, you know, bombings were going off. And he would see the little children, you know, shake like this. They were tremor. And then he’d see the the next kind of younger teenagers that would some of them would do it and some of them wouldn’t.

01:17:53:13 – 01:18:17:00
Nathan Crane
And then the adults, nobody would tremor, nobody would shake. You know, when would go off. And he would ask any of the adults, you know, why do the kids shake? But the adults don’t. And the adults told them, Well, we don’t want to show the children that we’re afraid. And what he learned through his research over the years, this was decades of research and experimentation and also with tribes, with women giving birth after the birth.

01:18:17:00 – 01:18:43:23
Nathan Crane
They allow, you know, and encourage the woman to to tremor to release that energy. He found that that is just like you talk about is our body’s natural mechanism to to release these stored traumas as energetic traumas in the body. And you can actually induce this through exercises. You can do it induce it into cold. Right. But I would have to be in there a really long time to shiver because I do the deep breathing and then and then just the relaxation.

01:18:43:23 – 01:19:03:09
Nathan Crane
Like I have to be in there a really long time before I start to shiver. I mean, past 5 minutes, six, 7 minutes, probably more so. But for anyway, with that being said, I still feel the benefit from it being in there, you know, 3 minutes, for example, I get out and it’s, you know, I feel the benefits from it.

01:19:03:23 – 01:19:21:19
Nathan Crane
I don’t know if I’m not getting as much of benefits as I should if I’m not shivering. But it’s really interesting that you can activate that mechanism through some very specific exercises within your body and you can get your I actually have videos out there of me doing these exercises. You see my whole body tremor. Yes. Own and these weird ways.

01:19:21:19 – 01:19:27:17
Nathan Crane
And it’s and it feels amazing, by the way. So anyway, I just I wanted to share that because you remind me of that.

01:19:27:17 – 01:19:48:09
Thomas P. Seager
You are the perfect subject of I want you to try something you’re going to get in. You know, Jacksonville is going to be breezy and all that kind of thing in the winter, which isn’t cold. You and I, you grew up in Montana. I went to school in northern New York. We know 40 degrees is not cold, but now I live in Phenix and I see people all bundled up with their winter coats when it gets down.

01:19:48:10 – 01:20:10:06
Thomas P. Seager
And rain is like some kind of emergency in this city because oh no, it’s not today. But when you get in, what if you said, I’m here to shiver this morning instead of, you know, your long breath and I’m going to strengthen my vagal tone? And, you know, instead of that, what if you got in? You said, I’m here to shiver.

01:20:10:18 – 01:20:13:20
Thomas P. Seager
Where’s my shirt? Let’s bring that shiver on. Come shiver.

01:20:13:20 – 01:20:20:12
Nathan Crane
Oh, I could probably I could feel it now I can activate it in like 20 seconds. I got someone I want out of here almost shivering, just thinking of it.

01:20:21:03 – 01:20:44:10
Thomas P. Seager
I got goosebumps. Yeah, just think, right. I think you can do it. I think you are the perfect subject for this. And if you report back to me and you say, Hey, Tom, you know, I had a different kind of experience in the ice baths. I want to know what it was like for you, because I have had this experience where I get in and I see what’s going on and I say, Oh, that’s the argument you just had with your girlfriend.

01:20:44:16 – 01:21:05:16
Thomas P. Seager
You know, that’s the that’s the fear there is somewhere deep inside you that you are going to be abandoned by the world forever. You know, all this like stuff that we carry, that’s the fears that, you know, your children don’t love you anymore or whatever’s happening in your head. Bring that out. I want to find that in my body.

01:21:05:16 – 01:21:11:00
Thomas P. Seager
I want to release that because I don’t want to live in that fear anymore. And so I send it into the water.

01:21:11:18 – 01:21:31:01
Nathan Crane
That’s awesome. I will try that and I will let you know how it goes for sure. I’m actually excited to try it. I know there’s, you know, energy that just we take on that it, you know, needs to be released all the time. So you’re excited to try that also? I know we’re we’re out of time. We’ve already got an hour and a half.

01:21:31:01 – 01:21:53:00
Nathan Crane
And, you know, I have 100 other questions I want to ask you. So, number one, you know, we’d love to have you back on in the future at some point. Number two, anybody tuning in and any questions that we didn’t answer that you would love to have answered in a future episode? Please put them in the comments. Any questions you at all about?

01:21:53:00 – 01:22:12:24
Nathan Crane
Anything. Maybe we can maybe we can address those in the future. And number three, Tom, it’s just number one. Number one, number two. Number three, I’m at number ten already. I don’t know how many numbers I’ve already shared. Thank you for coming on the podcast. I appreciate you coming and sharing. I mean, your passion, your wisdom, your your scientific research.

01:22:13:05 – 01:22:21:16
Nathan Crane
This has been awesome. And where can people find you online? Where can they connect with you? What’s a good place for them to get in touch with you.

01:22:22:12 – 01:22:52:00
Thomas P. Seager
Whether it’s Twitter or Instagram, you’re going to find me. Is Sieger TPC a DJ RTP? I’m on Substack. I write about a lot of stuff not just called, but most of what I write on cold is that it? Morasco Forbes.com hit the science button and you’re going to get a bulletin board of like, whatever’s on my mind. There’s something like 130,000 words now up in our blog and condense them, got them down to maybe 100,000.

01:22:52:00 – 01:23:13:17
Thomas P. Seager
It’ll be coming out in a book called Uncommon Cold The Science and Experience of Cold Water Therapy. That book could come out in 2024. I’m shooting for the end of January. When it does come out, it’s going to be the definitive work on cold water therapy, and I think the world needs it, but that doesn’t mean it’s finished.

01:23:14:03 – 01:23:24:24
Thomas P. Seager
Like there are so many more questions. You inviting your audience to is going to be really helpful to me to say What do people need to know next?

01:23:25:18 – 01:23:35:16
Nathan Crane
That’s awesome. Well, this episode should come out right around the time that your books are being released, so that’ll be on Amazon Barnes and all that everywhere online or where’s it going to be?

01:23:36:08 – 01:23:55:11
Thomas P. Seager
It’ll be on Amazon, and I don’t know about anything else. I’ve been rejected by four different agents and six different publishers. They all tell me, you know, ice baths. It seems like a niche market. And I guess they don’t think anybody wants to. Yeah, exact. But that’s okay. We’re going to self-publish this thing. We’re going to put it out there.

01:23:55:19 – 01:24:17:18
Thomas P. Seager
I’ll be on the stage at cryo con 2024 in Dallas March 1st through March 3rd. And by then the book will be out and you know, I’ll be selling it there. I don’t know where else it goes online because I don’t have any of these publicists or people that are going to help me figure this thing out. But I’ll shake your hand.

01:24:17:18 – 01:24:20:13
Thomas P. Seager
I’ll sell your copy and cry. Okay, if you’re there.

01:24:20:19 – 01:24:35:19
Nathan Crane
That’s awesome. Yeah. And if you can if you can send me a book ahead of time, I’ll. I’ll read it. We can get you back on the podcast and talk about it. I think once that book comes out and, you know, get on a bunch of podcasts, talk about it, it’s probably going to be a mega success. I can already see it.

01:24:35:19 – 01:24:37:05
Thomas P. Seager
So yeah, I’d be publishers.

01:24:37:07 – 01:24:49:13
Nathan Crane
I don’t know what they’re talking about half the time, so I wouldn’t worry about it. You’ll be better off self-publishing because you’ll make a lot more money, do they? They give you pennies, you know, you’ll. You’ll do a lot better self-publishing.

01:24:49:17 – 01:24:50:18
Thomas P. Seager
Nathan Yeah.

01:24:50:19 – 01:24:54:15
Nathan Crane
Awesome. Well, thank you, man. I appreciate it. Appreciate your time. Appreciate you coming on.

01:24:55:08 – 01:24:57:05
Thomas P. Seager
This is my pleasure. I’ll talk to you soon.

01:24:57:12 – 01:24:58:14
Nathan Crane
All right. Take care.

 

Please leave comments and questions below