Building Metabolic Resilience with Dr. Thomas Seager of Morozko Forge

July 11, 2024

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Dr. Thomas P Seager is an Associate Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University. He is the founder of a new concept called Self-Actual Engineering that emphasizes application of design principles for the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Motivation, rather than the bottom. Seager also co-founded the Morozko Forge ice bath company and is an expert in the use of ice baths for building metabolic and psychological resilience.

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John: Welcome to another edition of The Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and I’m so excited and delighted to have my good friend with us back again on the Impact Podcast. His name is Tom Seager. He’s the associate professor at ASU Arizona State University, but more importantly, he’s the co-founder of Morozko Forge and the author of this new book Uncommon Cold. Tom, welcome back to the Impact podcast.

Thomas Seager: Thanks for having me here, John. It’s a pleasure.

John: Hey, listen, before we get talking about Morozko Forge, your new book, Uncommon Cold, first, in truth in marketing, I have to share with my audience, I am a proud owner of Morozko Forge. It changed my life. Cold plunging and cold therapy have been tremendous for me, for my sleep, for my anxiety, for my acuity. We’re going to talk about that later on. But before we get to that, I want to hear about your background a little bit. You are an associate professor in the School of Sustainability and engineering at Arizona State University. Talk a little bit about where you were raised and how you got on this fasting and important journey that you’re on right now.

Thomas: I’m glad you’re asking because I’m coming to you from my office on campus. So here I am at ASU. I’m a civil and environmental engineer, and I’ve been working in the environment, lifecycle assessment, and sustainability now for more than 30 years because I grew up in Pittsburgh in the seventies.

John: Oh.

Thomas: And this was not a city that was known for a pristine environmental sort of upbringing. For me, and the way I was raised by my parents, I felt an obligation, like a professional ethic to clean up the place.

John: Hmm.

Thomas: The only thing is that by the time I got to grad school, the Clean Water Act had done its job, the Clean Air Act has done its job, and frankly, the decline of the steel industry had done its job. Pittsburgh is beautiful now. Take the incline up the top of Mount Washington and you look out over the city and you’re like, this is a gorgeous little city.

John: It is.

Thomas: The problems of today’s environment are way more complex. You can’t taste them. You can’t see them right in front of you anymore. You need special instruments to detect them, and so I dedicated my life, I thought, to these complex questions of kind of a post environmental movement. That could mean climate change, it could mean sustainability, it could mean the intersection of society, environment, and the economy. But along the way, my son was diagnosed with diabetes. That was 2001. He was six years old. I had to learn about metabolism. I had to learn about insulin. I had to learn what things he couldn’t eat because no matter what your nutritionist tells you, there is no amount of insulin you can inject the 6-year-old kid with to prevent a spike when he’s eating Oreo cookies. It was the worst thing in the world. So I’m looking at what’s happening to my son’s blood sugar. I’m monitoring it very closely. I’m a doctoral student. I know how to get my data, and I’m finding out that what they’re telling me about nutrition isn’t true because what the American Diabetes Association is advising you, “Oh, he can eat whatever you want. Just put enough insulin in him for it,” isn’t keeping him healthy. I banned Oreo cookies from the shopping cart. I didn’t want them in my daughter, I didn’t want them in my son, I didn’t want them in my stepson, or in me. 20 years studying metabolism. In my head, the way I’m thinking about it, I can keep him alive. I had neglected my own health. I got up to 250 pounds. I was not in good shape, John, and I was getting too old to be carrying that much weight.

John: Right.

Thomas: So I said to my daughter, “I wanted to do diet, exercise, I want to take care of myself.” I was taking my kids to the trainer. They’re into sports.

John: Sure.

Thomas: They got to learn how to use their bodies and stuff. They’re playing baseball and softball. I was sitting on the chair watching them do the exercise. It finally clicked that I was paying so much attention to their health I had let my own go. I sat my daughter down and I said, “Those exercises that you’re doing, I want to start doing some of those too. I’m going to go to the gym.” She said, “Dad, this is great.” She got out a sheet of paper and a pen, and she said, “I’m going to write down some good ones for you.” She put at the top of the paper the fat daddy workout. She was right because Dad was fat, and look, it was loving.

John: Right.

Thomas: She wanted to go with me and show me how to do this, and she knew her dad was fat and there was no trying to pretend I wasn’t.

John: Right.

Thomas: So I started changing my diet. I went on what I call a great food diet. If it wasn’t great food, if it wasn’t fresh, if it wasn’t really worth it, I wasn’t going eat it. That kind of led me to meal skipping, some intermittent fasting. I lost a lot of weight. I went from 250 down to 195.

John: That’s huge.

Thomas: Something else happened.

John: How long did that take? How long did that period take about?

Thomas: That was maybe 18 months.

John: That’s great. Not a [inaudible] diet. It took time. It was a [inaudible].

Thomas: Exactly right. Yeah. And a lot of things were changing in my life. Like at first I was losing a lot of weight, but those last 15, 20 pounds, they came more slowly than the first 20, 25 pounds did. I had to figure things out. I didn’t have a drink. I didn’t have a drop of alcohol for over a year.

John: Wow.

Thomas: And it was because my wife was in a 12-step program. She was also trying to be sober. I said, “Okay, great. I’m going to support that.”

John: Sure.

Thomas: But the marriage that we had did not survive the kids going away to college. Your family changes when your kids grow up. It didn’t survive the stress of her sobriety. Sobriety is a wonderful thing, and I’m so glad she’s sober, but it changes things. You have to relearn things. So when we said, what do we want our marriage to look like? We had different ideas of what that next half of our lives was going to be like, so we separated. Here I am trying to get my act together and be healthy and thinking, well, now I’m headed for a divorce and I got to start dating again. I finally got my blood work done, which everybody says you’re supposed to do to take a look at your cholesterol, right? I didn’t even know my blood type, John. I checked like, give me the whole male health panel.

John: Right.

Thomas: And the dang thing is, even though I was taking much better care of myself, my prostate-specific antigen test came back high. It was seven

John: PSA.

Thomas: I was like 52 years old. Normal is supposed to be four or under. I see this thing and it’s got the red exclamation mark, and it’s like, “Hey, you should go to the doctor.” I don’t go to the doctor, John, I go to the internet, right? I go to the library. I’m going to figure this thing out.

John: Right.

Thomas: And it scared the hell out of me because in my head I thought, I’m going to die of prostate cancer. Now, that’s not true. The prostate-specific antigen test, it is an unreliable indication of prostate cancer. It means you have inflammation, but inflammation could be coming from anywhere. It’s not a diagnosis of cancer. You’re supposed to go and get a prostate exam and then they’ll tell you get a biopsy. I didn’t want to do that because I was already so skeptical of regular medicine based upon the experience I’d had with my son, based upon monitoring his blood glucose, based upon everything we’d learned about nutrition and diet that wasn’t true since I had the numbers on his exercise and protein and fat and all of that. I said, I’m going to figure this out by talking to other guys instead. The stories that I heard… If you call up a friend and you say, “Hey, I just got my PSA done. Have you ever done that?” Every single one of them will say, “Yeah, but I don’t like to talk about… I didn’t tell you. Yeah. It was elevated a couple of years ago and I had to go in for a biopsy and it was really scary, but I didn’t want to mention it to anybody. I’m like, but we’re supposed to be friends here. It’s just, we don’t talk enough about this, John.

John: No.

Thomas: The stories that I heard were terrible, guys who had biopsy, very painful guys who had false positives, guys who had prostate ectomies and could never have an erection again. I decided I wasn’t going to do it. I was going to find another way to treat this inflammation problem, and that’s when I got real serious about ice baths. I said, I’m going ketosis with my diet. I’d learned about that from my son, and I’m going to go ice baths every fricking day.

John: You learned ketosis from your son. Where did you learn ice bath?

Thomas: We’d been fooling around with it, me and my former student, Jason. He and I founded Morozko Forge together.

John: Okay.

Thomas: I was taking cold showers. I thought that was going to toughen me up. I’m working out now to be a tough guy. It’s hard. I felt like I was doing something difficult. I hate cold showers. [inaudible] angry.

John: You and me too. You and me both. Cold showers, even though they say it has the same effect as a cold plunge, in terms of pleasure and after-effect, man, I’m not a cold shower fan at all.

Thomas: Metabolically, yes, it will activate your brown fat. It has a lot of the same effects metabolically that a cold plunge does, but psychologically, a cold shower is different than whole-body-cold-water immersion. There’s a study out of Finland that monitors heart rate, and I’ve measured some brainwaves. This is a physiological difference between cold showers and whole-body-cold-water immersion that we can pick up on, and there’s some good reasons for it. So, when my former student Jason said, “Hey, well, we’re going to do some ice baths,” I get in the ice bath just because I’m like, “Sure, I’ll give it a try.” Totally different response. The cold shower revs you up, your heart rate goes up, and it never brings you down, but when you get into the ice bath about 15, 30 seconds later, the physiological reason that it’s different is because it activates the mammalian dive reflex. Some instinctive response in your body is saying, “Okay, he’s going in the water, he’s going to go get the lobster, he’s going to go spearfishing, whatever our ancestors used to do, he needs to conserve oxygen. We’re going to slow his heart rate down. We’re going to activate his parasympathetic division of the central nervous system here. This is the rest and digest because we don’t know how long he’s going to be holding his breath.” The dive reflex is to prepare your body to be underwater, whereas the gasp reflex, that’s the first 15 seconds. You get in there, it’s like the fight or flight, the sympathetic nervous system. You never get out of that fight or flight when you’re in the cold shower. I probably shouldn’t say never. Some people have a whole different level of meditation than I’m capable of. But me, it just revs me up and never brings me down, whereas the ice bath experience I’d had that first time, I’m like, “Well, this is magnificent. Sign me up for more of this.” And then I come out and I feel fantastic. But that’s not why I started doing it every day. I started doing it every day because I was scared as hell. I mean, on some level, I was scared for my life. But I didn’t tell my daughter about my PSA test. I didn’t tell my wife whom I was separated from, or any of my kids. The only ones that I told were the close guy friends that I felt like I needed their knowledge and their wisdom. I didn’t tell, because I was afraid my daughter was going to say, “Dad, I want you to go to the doctor. Dad, I love you. I want you to take care of yourself.” I was afraid that she was going to make me feel so terrible that I was going to wind up having a prostate ectomy or something kind of against my instincts. So I kept it to myself. I got in there because I was scared. It still happens. When I look at that ice and I know it’s cold, I still get that anxiety. The worst part is the first 15 seconds before I actually get in. And then the next 15 seconds you structure your breathing, you take control, and at about 30 seconds, what was I even worried about?

John: You’re better than me because my 15 seconds actually last a minute. because I’m making excuses for 60 seconds prior to getting in. When I see the ice floating, I’m like, how many pieces of ice is that? Then I look at my phone, maybe I got to answer this text. I create 60 seconds of torture [inaudible] just enough. Get in the damn thing.

Thomas: It’s so true.

John: Yeah.

Thomas: Joe Rogan just posted. I guess it was January and it’s cold out, it’s winter. He’s outside and he goes, “There is no part of me that wants to do this right now, which is why I do it,” because you got to make yourself do some hard things.

John: Well, we’re going to talk about that, but I don’t want to let the podcast get biased without saying, Rogan is a Morozko Forge guy also at his house. There’s a lot of great people that talk about cold therapy and the benefits of cold therapy, including Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman, Gary Brecka, now the UFC famous Dana White. I mean, this is not woo-woo stuff we’re talking about here. This is science back. Your book is a science. This is like a thick science-based back book.

Thomas: I got those 600 footnotes in that book

John: It’s amazing. Your book is just tremendous.

Thomas: It’s three times larger than my dissertation, John. That’s how much I put into that book.

John: You put a lot into it. I know it took a good amount of time and of your life and of your focus, but I think it’s well worth it because I don’t think there’s another compendium of information on cold plunge. People can find great information out there, some great podcasts on it, some great posts on it, but to find one book with all the information that you need to know about cold plunging and cold therapy, it’s right here, Uncommon cold. You’re going to be able to buy this on our website and of course on Morozko Forge. But this is a great book, and eventually, it’s going to be available, I think, soon enough on amazon.com eventually too. This is the book to get to learn about cold plunging. Let’s just go back to your prostate for one last second. Ketosis in combination with cold plunging. How long until you started seeing the needle move in the other direction

Thomas: Almost immediately.

John: Whoa.

Thomas: It took about a month and I started seeing improvement. Less than six months later, my PSA came down to 1.5, which is totally out of the risk zone. It’s like a normal reading, no big deal. But something else happened because my total testosterone went through the roof. I mean, this was an accident, John. I wasn’t trying for that. I was going in the ice bath, I came out and I was cold, I would do some exercise, not even a lot, but some pushups or some pull-ups. I learned to take my steel mace and swing it around my head without breaking any windows. I enjoyed that. It made me feel masculine and tough. And then I walked to campus… I lived about a mile away at the time, so I would get my steps, and a male health panel, four or five months later, comes back, and my testosterone went from the 700s, which everyone would consider healthy, you’re doing great, you’re a fat guy in your 50s, 700, fine, 1180.

John: Wow.

Thomas: And guess what had the red exclamation mark. My PSA now is normal, but my lab report says my testosterone is out of range too high. So I got to go back to the internet and I got to say, what is going on? Now, I’m not complaining. This is a good thing. I’m feeling this, like the energy that I’m feeling, the confidence that I’m feeling, the libido that I’m feeling. I’m in favor of all of that, but I have to know what happened. I find this 1991 study. Nobody has ever really looked at this, except for this one paper that hardly anybody pays attention to. It’s coming out of Japan, and they did a study of exercise and then cold. If you do the cold after the exercise, like everybody tells you to do it, testosterone goes down, and luteinizing hormone, which is what stimulates your gonads to produce the testosterone. Luteinizing hormone goes down too. For some reason, the Japanese switched it around. They said, “Okay, well, we’re going to do the cold first, and then we’re going to do the exercise.” And guess what? Testosterone goes up. Luteinizing hormone goes up. That was exactly what I was doing, not because I wanted to boost my testosterone, but because I wanted to treat my prostate inflammation. I was just so dang cold. I’m like, “Okay, I got to warm myself back up.” So this explained the phenomena. I took this to my urologist and I said, “Look, aren’t you going to congratulate me? Aren’t you going to give me a big pat on the back?” He said, I want to do this other test. At the time, I didn’t know what luteinizing hormone was. I hadn’t figured out the whole library. I hadn’t read the Japanese study, and that’s what he wanted me to. Luteinizing hormone through the roof, 8.9, out of the scale. He thought I was juicing. He thought 1180? There’s no way. I got to get Seager off the roids. But when he got my luteinizing hormone test, he knew that I was natural. My body was stimulating itself to produce this testosterone, which is exactly what the Japanese study said would happen. So here I am, I’m in the ice bath business, we’re selling maybe two of these a month. This is not a craze. We have this little website that nobody pays any attention to. I’m writing these articles and I’m like, “Well, I got to write an article.” Nobody read it, John. Who is going to find this and who’s going to pay attention to me? But then I remember December 2022, I’m in Iceland with AJ. We’re like, we’re going to go see the Northern Lights. And Morozko is getting bigger by now and Joe has his forge. I get off the plane and I get my service back on my phone, and it’s blowing up. People are going, Tom, you’re on Joe Rogan. I’m like, “Well, no. I would know if I was on…

John: I was on Joe Rogan. Yeah.

Thomas: Joe Rogan is reading your article about your testosterone. He has David Goggins on. And this was when the liver king just got outed for using roids to which nobody’s surprised, I guess, except maybe Paul Saladino, who’s like, “I didn’t know.” But the thing is, testosterone was in the news. And Joe goes, “Hey, there’s this guy, and he had his PSA.” He tells the whole story because he reads out my post. All of a sudden, the views on that article go way up. You have to pause the video. You have to zoom in to find out. He never mentions my name. He never tells people where to find it, but I start getting DMs from guys all over the world, and guess what? Their testosterone is going up too. They’re like, “I tried your protocol. I started doing cold showers, then I did my workouts, and I feel all this energy, and now my T levels are going through the roof.” Last week I talked to two guys. They were both in the 200s. So they were on TRT, they got themselves up to 700, 800, what you and I would consider healthy, and then they read my article. They said, I’m going to do ice baths, then I’m going to do the exercise. One of them was at 1300 and one of them was at 1500. And I said, “Well, hang on guys. You’re going to stop the TRT now, right?” And they go, “I’m not so sure.” The reason they’re not ready to go off the TRT, the testosterone replacement therapy is because they were in such a bad place in their lives when they were down in the two hundreds. Both of them were saying, I didn’t know if I wanted to be alive. I didn’t know what was going to get me up in the morning. There was my wife and there was my kids, and I had no energy and I couldn’t do anything. I started having these ideas, like they might all be better off without me. And I’m afraid that if I don’t do the TRT, what if I go back to that place in my head, mentally, psychologically.”

John: Right.

Thomas: They’re not worried about getting buff, John. I weigh 210 now because I gained back some of the weight. I’m not obese like I used to be, but I’m still a fat guy and I’m going to be 58 this year. It’s not about me being some ripped Ben Greenfield Instagram model. It’s about how do I feel. What’s my metabolism like? What’s my energy level like? What’s my confidence like? Am I performing well at work? And these guys haven’t been at high testosterone long enough for them to really know that they’ve got a handle on it now. They don’t want to take any chances with their mood. They don’t want to go back to those dark days. I don’t blame them, but I’m like, “Hey, this summer, you have a lot of vitamin D, you’ll get some good sunshine. You’re taking care of your magnesium levels. Maybe that’s the time to see if you stop. Keep monitoring, right? Take yourself off the TRT, you’re still going to feel good. Let’s say you go down to a thousand, you’re going to feel good.”

John: Right. You’re going to feel great. For our listeners and viewers who have just joined us, we’ve got Tom Seager. He’s the associate professor at ASU Arizona State University. He’s also the co-founder and chief science officer at Morozko Forge. To find Tom and to buy his great cold plunge machines, go to morozkoforge.com. It’ll be in the show notes, it’ll be on our website, morozkoforge.com. Tom, so now you have the Cold Plunge company. You’re teaching at ASU. Talk a little bit about the journey of being an entrepreneur at the same time as being an associate professor, and how did that journey go, what did you foresee, what did you not foresee in terms of your entrepreneurial journey and the rise of the coal plunge whole trend in the whole movement,

Thomas: I had so much to learn. There’s so many things at work in science that are the opposite in business. I’ll give you an example. Marketing. In science, you write a proposal, you send it to the National Science Foundation or the National Institute of Health, and the model is you overpromise. You say, “Look, all these wonderful things could come out of this research, and we’re going to do this and we’re going to do this.” And then three or four years later, you spent $2 million and frankly, you’ve under-delivered because you don’t know what research is going to work. Nine of the things didn’t turn out the way you’ve… And maybe there’s a couple of really good ideas, and you write some journal articles and you train some students, and everybody goes like, “Eh, that wasn’t so bad.” But in business, you got to underpromise and over-deliver. It’s the opposite of the way you do it in the university. I had to learn that. As a teacher, you invest deeply in people and you got to be patient with students. You got to say diagnostic teaching. What are they ready for? What do they need? How do I get them these resources? To some extent, that’s okay in business, but you can’t just take somebody who hasn’t earned a job and isn’t qualified for a job and throw them into it. What I’ve learned is they’ve got to emerge. In teaching, I’m like, set a high standard, and it’s okay if you shoot for the moon, and if the student gets halfway there, they’re going to be so much better than they were. But in business, if I promote somebody to a level that they’re not prepared for, then I just created all these disappointed customers. Then everybody else on the team is like, “Hey, what’s going on with that guy? He’s not ready.” I can’t take the same attitude as a teacher. In business, I got to let people promote themselves. They show me that they’re ready for the next challenge because they’ve already started doing it. So these things are opposite. In science, you don’t market. You don’t go on Twitter and say, “Well, this is the latest, greatest thing that I ever figured out.” You let the work speak for itself. You let the data speak for itself. John, I knew nothing about marketing. It turns out I should have been following Gary V or Jesse Amoroso or all these guys, like the a hundred million dollar offer in the sales funnel and all this stuff that I just didn’t know anything about. I thought we’re going to make great product and I’m tweaking my thermodynamics and stuff like that and people are going to love buying it. To some extent that’s true, but now there are a thousand cold plunge companies. It turns out that just about anybody can drill holes in a bathtub and hook it up to a Chinese chiller. That’s not what Morozko does. Morozko makes ice. We’re the only one in the Western Hemisphere that makes ice. We were the first people to ever make an ice bath, and that turns out to be hard. But it’s easy to take a chiller and make a bathtub cold. Now, I didn’t know this, but evidently the way that it works is you go on Instagram, you say, this is a revolutionary new breakthrough technology in cold, and you should buy this right now, and you scale way faster than a professor at ASU could ever scale because I’m just figuring these things out.

John: Understood. Now you’re an established brand. When folks like Joe Rogan buy your product and talk about your product, you’re an established brand. The nice thing about a thousand competitors… The bad thing is of course, as you and I know, irrational players in the marketplace, irrational pricing, irrational construction, things that just don’t make sense, and the bamboozling of the client base that exists out there. But the good news about it is that it proves you are onto something that’s a big idea, a super big idea. Not just something that’s going to be the next pet rock or Rubik’s cube. This is here to stay. As you said earlier, at the top of the show, this goes back to our caveman era. This taps into our DNA and our genetics more than almost anything else can. So you’re onto something big, and the world is a big marketplace. So let there be a thousand and let’s just say there’s a dozen good competitors and 8 billion people, the world is your marketplace. So talk a little bit about how you look at the opportunity that exists today for Morozko Forge, and then why did you write this amazing and important book, which I love?

Thomas: There are two things. Morozko’s expensive, and that’s not for everyone. So if we are really going to change the world and change health, there have to be people in the marketplace that are less expensive. Now, it’s not for me, it’s not my style, so to speak, but there’s a guy here in Tempe, he started a company called Desert Plunge. It’s kind of an unfortunate name because all these companies have the same Arctic Monkey, Snow Pod Plunge thing. I can’t keep track of them all, but he makes a good product. When I first saw him, I thought, “Oh, here comes another one, and he’s right in our backyard.” I had these mixed feelings about another competitor, but when I met him and I got his story. He said, “I was in a pretty dark place.” You used to work as an electrician. Covid lockdowns shocked a lot of people. He’s got kids, they’re out of school. He was feeling in his life, like he wasn’t a good father. He said, “I didn’t know what to do, and I saw Morozko and I knew I couldn’t afford it, so I did this instead. I got a cooler, it’s a grizzly cooler. I hooked it up to a chiller just like I’d saw some other companies do on the internet and I started getting in there, and that brought me out of that dark place. And I said I don’t want to be an electrician anymore. I’m going to do this for other people too.” It was the mental health benefits. Now you meet a guy like that and he’s got a story like that, and how can I not? I’m like, all right, how do we help?

John: Right.

Thomas: I said, “If you meet these standards that are important to me, grounding, cleanliness, sanitation, then I’ll put your product on my website,” because not everybody is for Morozko. There has to be a less expensive alternative. Maybe I can help people sort this out in the marketplace by saying, “Look, here’s a good one. It meets our standards. It just doesn’t do what we do.” That’s great. So why write the book is the second one. Knowledge should be free. I mean, because I already get a salary. I’m a professor, people pay me for this, and I write the papers, and sometimes I wind up behind these paywalls so nobody can read them. It’s a kind of a bummer. Everything in the book, you can read it for free at morozko.com. You don’t have to buy the book. But people are saying, you really got to put this all together in one place. I want you to curate it for me so that I don’t have to go sort through all these, and I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” But then the lockdowns lifted. I finally got to see my mother. This goes back over a year now, year and a half. Two weeks before she died, I got to visit her. Dementia Alzheimer’s in the extreme. She has no idea who I was. This visit was not really for her. It was for me, and I knew it was a goodbye visit. And then she passes on, which was merciful.

John: Hmm.

Thomas: And then I thought, they’re right. I got to write this book. I got to put it in a place where people can find it. There’s two chapters on the brain. I did a chapter in which I talked about Alzheimer’s. Gary Brecka is doing a really good job. He calls Alzheimer’s type three diabetes. Alzheimer’s originates in a disorder of the metabolism. My mother didn’t know. My mother went to Harvard. She met my father at Harvard. The epicenter of nutritional misinformation at the time they were there, was Harvard University. She thought that margarine was better for you than butter. You know why? Because that’s what the margarine industry told her. That’s what she fed us when we were little kids. She battled weight problems her whole life and nothing that she did worked. So when I went to visit her, I watched her eat breakfast. Breakfast was cream of wheat made in apple juice with an Ensure drink and a cookie for a dessert.

John: That’s sick.

Thomas: John, they finished her off with carbs. Everybody is well-intentioned here. They’re not doing it out of malice, but they’re doing it out of misinformation. I said, “These people are right. I got to get that book out.” Even though I look at the book and I see everything that’s wrong with it, I’m like, “Oh, no, I should change that. Oh, no, I forgot that part. I got to get another one.” But it’s got to be in a place where somebody can say, “Okay, I need to know about autoimmune disorders,” and they flip to chapter nine and they’re like, “Holy crap, I didn’t know. Here it is, multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s or whatever it is.” So where people can read about what they care about in this context, and they can get the scientific good information instead of whatever they’re getting off of Instagram. So I said, I’m going to write it for the people that are asking for it. We’ve only printed up 300 copies. And now people are like, “Are you going to do an audible version? Are you going to get this up on Amazon?” And I’m like, “Dang it. The answer is yes. Give me a minute, give me a few months. We’ll revise it. We’ll get it on Amazon. I will read this thing so you can listen to it in the car and more people can have this knowledge.”

John: Let’s talk a little bit about what’s in the book and what’s important to cover. I studied the marketplace after getting into cold plunge last year in Los Angeles at my favorite cold plunge place in Los Angeles, Remedy Place. I had to study the marketplace and to find out what the best equipment was to put in my house. I discussed this with many different companies, and I’ve shared this story with you offline, Tom. By far, the Morozko Forge was the best. Like you said, not only the only one that produces ice, the only one that also grounds you, has the ozone, has the filtration system, is a wonderfully well-sized, and you guys do what you say you’re going to do in terms of under promise, over deliver. I remember I was told by your salesperson, I think it was an eight-week delivery period. I think I had my Morozko Forge four weeks later in my house and it was operational. It was amazing. I’d been nothing but thrilled with it since that day. I try to use it at least six days a week and I sort of regret the seventh day when I miss it. Talk a little bit about what people can expect to find in this book, and what are some of the myths that you bust and some of the important topics and important benefits that people could get from cold plunge that you lean into and discuss here.

Thomas: I’m really happy that you are so pleased with your Morozko. Thank you for sharing that.

John: Sure.

Thomas: We have the best warranty, for example, in the business. It’s cover to cover. There are no disclaimers. There’s no loopholes in the warranty. And the reason is when something goes wrong, and my gosh, John, the last five years, like a lot of things have gone wrong, but we want our customers to call us up and we want them to say, “Oh, my pump leaks.” But we need to know that because how can we make it better if we’re not getting that feedback from the customers? So I will send somebody to their house and we will figure out what’s wrong with that pump. I’ve probably spent a quarter of a million dollars in the last five years trying to find a pump that will work under our freezing cold temperatures. I’m still struggling, like we’re still testing pumps. Finally, my engineer said, “Shit, get me the pump that keeps the water out of the Alaskan King crab fishing boat. I want one. Whatever is pumping their builds, I want that.” And I’m like, you’re right.

John: [inaudible]

Thomas: It’s going to be more, right? It’s going to be more expensive. We’re going to find that pump. It’s going to be made of stainless steel, it’s going to be bulletproof, and that’s the one that we’re going to use. So this is our attitude. You see when you’re feedbacking and you say, “I’m so pleased with it and it’s the best,” and I go, “Yeah, and then this is the three ways that we could make it better,” that’s the tension. We are obsessed as engineers with ringing out every ounce of performance that we can get. So the book is not so much about the technology. I don’t think you’re going to see Morozko Forge mentioned in there like five, six times maybe. And it’s always in an anecdotal way because there’s something going on in science. I’ve changed the way that I do my science. I don’t do the environment, I don’t do lifecycle assessments so much anymore, and it’s because they locked me out of my classroom during COVID. I had [inaudible] with my career. It’s left people with a massive mental health legacy. Jonathan Haidt just wrote a book the Anxious Generation, and he talks about smartphones, and he’s got a really good point. The children have been raised in a phone-based childhood rather than a play-based childhood. They’re anxious, they’re depressed, they’re subject to these mental health disorders. And what’s the remedy for them? Well, it, it wasn’t a Zoom classroom, it wasn’t the way I had to teach when we were on Lockdowns, and so I thought, I want to change the way I do science because of the personal experiences that I’ve had. I’m going to take those personal experiences and I’m going to blend them with the scientific research. So when you read the book, you’re going to read about things that happened to me, and you’re going to read about the mechanisms that explain the things that happened. So one of the things I have, I got this PSA, and then I boosted my testosterone. Now let’s go to the library and let’s find the science that explains the experience that I had. You’re going to read about Dean Hall. He had two types of cancer. One of them was leukemia. He decided because his leukemia, not treatable, no radiation or chemo was going to save him from dying of leukemia, he decided he wanted to do something to inspire other cancer patients. So he goes to his doctor, he says, “I’m a swimmer. I want to swim the entire length of the Willamette River in Oregon where I’m from. I’m going to set a record on my way out, and people are going to know that even if you have cancer, it’s worth doing something with your life.” And his doctor said, “You so much is set up foot in the public pool, it could kill you. Your immune system is so degraded, Dean. What are you thinking?” Dean says, “I’m thinking I don’t have anything left to lose.” He goes into the Willamette River with leukemia. Three weeks later, he comes out of the Willamette River. He doesn’t have any leukemia anymore. Where did the leukemia go? I mean, John, it makes no sense to you and me, but that’s his experience. So I’m like, I got to go to the library. I got to figure that out. I learned everything about the metabolic origins of cancer and mitochondrial remedies for cancer. That’s in the book. My mother is in the book, she dies of Alzheimer’s. Where did this come from and what can we do about it? Well, Alzheimer’s originates in the metabolism. There are now good scientific studies that show when you fix the metabolic disorder, you can reverse cognitive decline. Way too late for my mother. But that’s in the book. Now, people can go to that chapter and say, how do I take care of my brain? How do I take care of my metabolism so my brain has the energy that it needs? The ice bath will help you with that. PTSD, trauma, recovery, psychology of the ice bath, that’s in there. I have a friend with Parkinson’s and he knows that Parkinson’s is a dopamine receptor disorder and it’s often treated with L-Dopa and Patch Adams. The movie with Robin Williams, because Oliver Sachs wrote about this, he administered L-Dopa to his patients and it was like an awakening. But he knows that if he relies upon exogenous dopamine, over the long term, it’s not going to help. He gets an immediate relief, but it could burn out his dopamine receptors. He’s afraid anyway, that it might accelerate the degradation. He wants to stay away from that. He gets in the ice bath, two to three times the dopamine endogenous produced by his own body as a consequence of being in the ice bath, and it relieves his symptoms of Parkinson’s. So now his gait improves, his posture improves, his motor control improves. He’s in the book. But what’s the science behind that? So now I have to blend the experience that people have with the science that explains those experiences. In the forward, I explained nothing is more important than your experience. I don’t care if there’s a double-blind randomized controlled trial with a P factor less than 0.01 because are you in the 99% or are you in the 1%? What works for you is what works for you. So this is what I mean. I’ve changed what I study. I’m now all about what are the technologies we need for mental health because that’s the crisis in this country. It’s not the environmental crisis. I grew up in Pittsburgh and the streets were dirty and the air was dirty and the water was dirty, and now Pittsburgh is beautiful. I’m prepared for a different crisis. I mean, my education was all about the environment and pollution, but that is not the crisis that we face here in the second part of my career. So I’ve retooled my career. It’s technologies for mental health. How do I build resilience in human beings? I’m changing the way that I do the science. I start with the human experience first, and then I go to the library, then I go to the laboratory. Let’s explain what people are already trying to tell me.

John: So it’s the one-two punch of great storytelling backed by science.

Thomas: You got it.

John: I love it.

Thomas: There’s a really good book, it’s called Brain Energy. Chris Palmer wrote it. Now, he’s a psychiatrist, which means he’s been to medical school, right? He’s in clinical practice and he is also a faculty member at Harvard University. There’s a wonderful book about the metabolic theory of mental health. He dedicated to his mother. But what’s not in the book, John, is that his mother suffered from schizophrenia, and as a result, Chris as a child, spent a part of his childhood homeless.

John: Hmm.

Thomas: Now, does that change the way you do your science? Because I’ve never met Chris. We traded some messages or something, right? I’ve never talked to him. But if you haven’t experienced like that as a child, it changes the way that you think about the world, the hypotheses that you want to investigate. I want to know that about the scientist now. I wanted to talk about that because I think that will inspire other people to learn. It is stories that change the way people live. It’s not data, it’s not a figure. We bring those in after the fact and we say, “Look, this is why that’s working. This is why that’s happening to you.” But it’s the story that motivates you to change.

John: A hundred percent. You asked me off the air, John, what did the cold plunge do for your life? And I shared with you my mental acuity was directly impacted, my anxiety level on a daily basis was reduced, and my sleep improved. Is it perfect? No, but who has perfect sleep, but it’s much improved. As Brecka talks about or Dana White, even more specifically, who has a very personal relationship with Brecka and credits him with teaching him how to live his best life in terms of health and wellness on his journey, he said he doesn’t even go to a city now without scoping out where he’s going to be able to cold plunge because he feels it shreds weight and also puts him in the right mental space. I would agree with both, by the way. I try to scope that out before I go somewhere as well, and sometimes fortunately and sometimes unfortunately, because it’s hard to find in some cities still. But acuity, anxiety, and sleep are these common themes that you’ve come across time and time again?

Thomas: Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned them because the reputation of the ice bath, it’s per the spartan racer or it’s for the bodybuilder. Certainly, there are a lot of good examples of that. But I was talking to a guy in the NFL, he’s an offensive lineman. He just signed a big contract. We will probably do some social media. He loves his Morozko. I said, “What does it do for you? What do you get out of it?” He goes, “It’s about the mental acuity. It is the mental game.” I’m looking at him, he’s 6′ 3″, he’s 310 pounds, and then it clicked for me, John, there are bigger guys than him. He’s enormous, right? But he’s going to line up next to a nose guard or something who could be 6′ 5″, 3′ 40″. What makes him so successful at his level when the guys that he was playing with in college who might have been stronger even faster, haven’t attained it? At his level, it is the mental game. So I looked him up. He hasn’t been called for a false start penalty since he started doing his ice bath. And I’m like, “This is a great story right here.”

John: You got to get that up. You got to make sure every college coach and every coach in the NFL here’s that story. They’ll all buy Morozko forges. They don’t want ever to be offside. Come on. That’s awesome. That’s awesome.  Thomas: So this is sort of the hidden part that we don’t quite talk about enough. I mean, Joe Rogan’s really good at this. He talks about it and he’s so buff. He’s taking testosterone and he’s hanging out with his MMA guys and stuff, but he says it is the psychological, it is the doing the hard things. This is why he goes so cold. He is teasing Huberman about it. Huberman’s like, “I don’t know, Morozko might be too cold for me,” and Joe’s like, “I don’t like what I’m hearing. 33 degrees.” Because that’s what really scares you. You never get used to it. So the guys who are regular practitioners, they’re telling me the same thing that you’re telling me. Anxiety, mental acuity, that cognitive performance is why they’re doing it. It’s the weirdest thing, John, because you’re super successful. I’ve visited your facility, I’ve talked to your people, they’re so well organized. You’ve got the materials coming in and it’s all sorted out and people are performing it at extremely high level. For me to see that, we say, “Well, what’s John got to be worried about? John’s got his act together.” Nobody really knows what it’s like, what it takes to build an organization like that. You probably go through there and you’re going, “Here’s the six things that could go wrong at any minute, is that fire suppression system. When was the last time that was inspected? Hey, have you looked at the filters on the centrifugal? What’s our particle count? It smells a little funny.” Like all of the things that could collapse. If we are not paranoid it to some extent, we’re not successful in the way that we run our businesses because this is no Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. You are out there on the technological leading edge, figuring out what isn’t going to work and saying it’s important because we got to save the world because we’re not going to take all this lead solder and all these electronics and just dump it in the Earth’s crust anymore. Somebody’s got to figure out what to do with these lithium-ion batteries or we’re just headed for another environmental crisis. So I get it. On one level, I don’t because you’re doing great. I’m like, how could he have this problem? But on the other level, I’ve been in your shoes.

John: You’re in my shoes. You’re the CEO.

Thomas: This is hard.

John: You’re the CEO of Morozko Forge. You’re in the same shoes. Size doesn’t matter as an entrepreneur. Like the late great Andy Grove said, only the paranoid survive. There’s a lot of truth to that. That’s not to throw cast extra anxiety over all of us because we don’t need it, but if you really care about what you do, if you really bleed it and care about it, and it means everything to you, anxiety’s going to come with that. It just part and parcel with the journey. With your journey, with my journey, and every other great entrepreneur’s journey, young or old, male or female, or anything in between, that’s the way it is. I to ask you a question about though, I saw this post up on your Instagram. I’ve listened to this podcast, of course, I don’t remember the part of the brain that Yerman talks about, but let’s talk about doing difficult things leading to the increase in size in the brain that literally creates the will to live.

Thomas: So I’m paraphrasing Huberman on this. I had no idea what this research was. I had to practice in front of the mirror to be able to say anterior mid-cingulate cortex.

John: That’s it. That’s how smart you are. I can’t even remember it, but I’ve heard it 10 times, 50 [inaudible]

Thomas: That’s right.

John: Yeah.

Thomas: Huberman knows how to read this research way better than I.

John: Brilliant.

Thomas: He told David Goggins that he’d read this work and he was waiting to talk about it until he had Goggins on the podcast. I’ve never met David Goggins, right? I don’t really know him. I’ve read one of his books, but he keeps showing up in my life because Rogan was talking to Goggins when Rogan was quoting my testosterone story. Turns out that David Goggins suffers from Raynaud’s syndrome. I didn’t know this. When he’s talking with Rogan, he goes, “Wow, you know, there is nothing that will make you question everything about your life like cold water.” He’s trained at Coronado Island, the Pacific Ocean, Navy Seal, so you’re like, yeah, that’s a funny joke. No, David Goggins, his circulation to his fingers will completely shut off when he gets cold because that’s what Raynaud’s does. Raynaud’s is the combination, the interaction of a physiological response, vasoconstriction, and a psychological response, extreme anxiety. When these two feed off of one another, it shuts down circulation to your extremities. When Goggins says that cold water makes him question everything in his life, it’s because of his Raynaud’s. So he goes on to Huberman and Huberman says, “Hey, David, I’ve been saving this for you.” When you do difficult things, not things you enjoy, but things you don’t really want to do, those hard things, it expands a part of your brain called the anterior mid-cingulate cortex. And some scientists believe that is the seat of the will to live. That is where your willpower to keep going when you have lost all hope and you are in despair, what gets you up? What gets you moving? What gets you rocky up for another round, so to speak? It is the anterior mid-cingulate cortex. And Huberman meant it as a compliment. They talked about the ice baths. He’s like, “If you enjoy the ice bath, you’re not going to grow your anterior mid-cingulate cortex, but if you hate it and you do it anyway, that expands the part of the brain that is the will to live.” He meant it as a compliment to Goggins because Goggin’s probably like the toughest man alive, right?

John: Yeah. [inaudible]

Thomas: It was like a month later that Goggins posted a picture of his hands, and said… This is on Instagram, “This is what cold does to me,” and they are chalk white. You can resolve Raynaud’s and you can do it using cold therapy. It’s called exposure therapy. So you give yourself a little bit and then a little bit more, and then a little bit more. AJK, she wrote the forward to my book. We’ve been dating now for more than seven years. She suffers from Raynaud’s. She was never going to get into the ice bath, but then her daughter challenged her. Her daughter, nine years old, gets into the ice bath because she sees me doing it. As a mom, you’re like, “Hey, my kid’s getting in? Is that a good thing?” But her daughter was born with cerebral palsy, went through a year of the Forest Gump leg braces. Doctors didn’t know if she was going to walk. She said, “Mom, this feels really good on my feet. Can I go in a little more? Can I go in a little more?” She’s up to her armpits, nine years old, 34 degrees, and she goes, “I really like it, mom. When are you going to get in?” Now what’s AJ going to do? She could tell how brave the daughter is, but it’s not really for mommy. She could say that, but she didn’t. She said, “Alright, I’ll give it a try.” She did one ice bath. We’ve never posted the video, but she wanted to be there in solidarity with her daughter. And then she went to the hospital with acute abdominal pain. She was diagnosed with a liver tumor. Inoperable, can’t radiate it. Chemo isn’t going to help it. They told her watchful waiting was all they could do. What the hell is that, John? Watchful waiting. It sounds like a death sentence. So AJ said, “Well, what am I going to do?” I said, “You’re going to do what I did. You are going to do ketosis. You’re going to do ice baths. We’re going to see if we can treat this thing metabolically.” That’s what got it in there, it was the coaching and the support and the inspiration of her daughter. It was the breathing exercises that got her over her Raynaud’s. Now we do have a video where she talks about Raynaud’s, she talks about her gas reflex. She went back for another scan and that tumor shrunk. This is the power. Now, we’re not even talking anterior and mid-cingulate cortex anymore. This is the power of gaining control of your metabolism back of the metabolic healing. She’s not out of the woods. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen with this tumor, but she knows not to be drinking the soda anymore, not to be drinking the fruit juice. She knows that she’s got to stay in ketosis. Every once in a while, when that fear comes back, she’s like, “Oh yeah, I got to get back in the ice bath.” She doesn’t do it every day like I do, because some part of that anxiety is what if the Raynaud’s comes back? She sent me a picture the other day. She said, it’s been a long time, but there were her fingers chalk white. So if I ever do meet David, I’ll talk about how we breathe through it. We can start at a warmer temperature, that kind of thing. He has got no business taking my advice. He can figure this out for himself. What I’m trying to do is respond to your question. When we do those difficult things, and it’s a cliche to say it makes us stronger. It’s also true because I get out of the ice bath, nothing can bother me during the day. My department chair can call me down here and they can say, “Seager, we had another complaint about what you put up on Twitter.” That’s okay. Alright, let’s talk about that. Nothing bad can happen to me. I just did three minutes of my Moronzko for goodness’ sakes.

John: I have at least a half a dozen colleagues here at ERI and I’ve challenged them. I said, “You go into my ice bath or an ice bath that exists locally, and you try to have a bad day after that, it’s literally impossible. It’s literally impossible.” Talk a little bit about the after drop effect and why that’s so important and what that does physiologically for us.

Thomas: You probably remember that Joe Rogan did 20 minutes in his Moronzo, and he only did it because I think Jocko Wilnick dared him to. He was talking about Jocko called me up and he was making fun of me because I only did a minute and a half, and I’m going to do 20 minutes. Now, it’s probably the most boring Joe Rogan post you’ve ever seen. Just him shivering in the ice bath. But he did it, and he kind of proved a point. That wasn’t dangerous. Some people made fun of him and said, you’re not supposed to do that long, but it was fine. What was dangerous was he got in his car and then he drove to his studio. You got to rewarm because vasoconstriction will shut down the circulation to your limbs. This is part of how your body defends core body temperature. When you come out of the ice bath and you dry off and you’re in the sunshine and maybe you’re doing some squats or you’re rewarming, your body releases the blood vessels. So now the blood can return to the limbs, but the limbs are cold. So the blood comes out of the core and it gets cooled as it passes through your limbs, and then it returns to your core in that cooled state. So your core body temperature, your limbs are warming up, but your core body temperature continues to decline. That’s called after-drop. I mean, on the one hand, it doesn’t make any sense. You’re like, I’m not even in the ice bath. Why do I start shivering three minutes after I get out?

John: Right.

Thomas: That’s the after drop. You’ve got to let your body rewarm before you start to operate heavy machinery or do anything that requires dexterity for goodness’ sake.

John: Outside of the heavy machinery issue, walk me through… I’ve heard different stories and you’re the expert. I’ve shivered up to 45 minutes after I get out.

Thomas: Aame.

John: But talk a little bit about, I have friends that go immediately into a hot shower or go into an exercise mode right immediately and warm themselves up via exercise. Is it better to just allow yourself to naturally warm up whether you do exercise or not just get dressed or do you still get the benefit of a cold therapy even if you go into a steam room or a hot shower soon thereafter?

Thomas: Huberman and [inaudible] are really big on the you warm up naturally. I think it’s good advice.

John: Right.

Thomas: It’s your body trying to metabolically respond to the stress that you gave it. If you go into the steam room or to the hot shower, I think what they’re trying to say is you’re short changing the experience a little bit.

John: Yeah. You already did the hard work. Don’t mute it. You already did the hard work. Don’t mute it out.

Thomas: However, there have been people who go too far. They do too much. I would say they cold overdose. You remember AJ’s daughter? She’s a little older now. She’s 13. She said, “What do you mean Joe Rogan did 20 minutes?” And I said, “Well, he is on Instagram.” She says, well, I could do 20 minutes. So she goes into my Morozko code and AJ is texting me. I’m on my computer and I’m doing my stuff and AJ’s like, “Well, it’s been 15.” I’m like, “Oh, she’s fine.” “It’s been 20. Hey, congratulations to her. Well, she wants to keep going. No problem. It’s been 25 minutes. Don’t worry about it.” She goes, “It’s been half an hour, Tom.” I text her back, “Get her out of there.” There’s no point to this. Because of the CP, because she already has some of these motor issues, John, she couldn’t walk. We didn’t know. She spent too long, we knew that, but we didn’t know how her body was going to respond to this uncharted territory. She’s like, well now I’m really worried. What are we going to do? I said, “Put her in the car.” I don’t own a sauna. I own an ice bath. I live in Phoenix, Arizona for going to sake, if I want a sauna, I park in the sun it’s 180 degrees inside my car. I sweat it out. I said, “So put her in the car. Just drive around with the heater on.” If you overdose your cold, yeah, rewarm. If you got to go to appointment or if you go too far, it’s okay to rewarm. I had an experience where I did 14 minutes. I couldn’t operate my phone. I had no dexterity in my fingers. I drive a stick. I was supposed to go to hot yoga. So I’m like, “Uhoh, I got to give myself a few minutes.” I probably shouldn’t have driven, but I got this appointment, I get there late, the instructor’s really very understanding, come on in, we’ll just fit you right in, but John, I was discombobulated. There’s the half monkey moon twist thing and I couldn’t do it. So she comes over to me to adjust my posture. It was really very helpful. After I warm up and after the class is done, I go up to her and I say, “Thank you. You fixed me there and then I had a really good experience and thank you for accommodating me.” She goes, “No problem. That’s what we do.” But I have to ask you a question, “What’s that?” She goes, “Was it hot enough for you?” I go, “Well, yeah, I don’t know. Would you have it like 110 or something?” I didn’t check the thermometer, but it fell hot. She goes, “No, when I put my hand on your back, you felt cold.” And I thought, I better crank up the heat in this room. So I had to explain the whole thing. I had overdosed my cold. It is okay. Wrap yourself up in a blanket. Get your red light to help stimulate your mitochondria. If you’ve done too much, don’t be a martyr. However, two to four minutes, 34 degrees, sometimes that’ll put you like a half an hour. You feel cold and it’s really uncomfortable. Good for you. Go for a walk in the sunshine, do some pull-ups, do some pushups, get your body going. This is the best thing for you. Like you’ve said, if you’re doing three minutes and you feel cold, you’re doing great. Don’t shortchange it. Here’s the most important one. Don’t jump in the hot tub. The hot tub feels great, but it is not going to give you vasodilation. There’s an interesting physiological phenomenon. It’s called hydromiosis. Your body knows when your skin is wet. You will shed heat by sweating. But it’s the active evaporation. When the sweat evaporates off your skin, that’s what extracts the heat. So you’re exercising outdoors and you sweat and you lose that heat when the sweat evaporates. That doesn’t happen in the hot tub because your body knows when your skin is wet, you will sweat from your head, or if your arms are out on the hot tub, you’ll sweat from your arms, but your legs, your torso aren’t sweating. Hydromiosis prevents that. Instead, what your body does is vasoconstriction. So, the cold gives you vasoconstriction and the hot tub gives you vasoconstriction. If you’ve overdone it and you’re going to rewarm, go with dry heat because that’s vasodilation, like you’ll get in a sauna. Do not rewarm with a hot shower, do not rewarm with a hot tub because you’re just stacking the vasoconstriction on top of the vasoconstriction. Now that was a real complicated answer but it gives some very specific advice.

John: It’s great. Tom, this book is amazing. For our listeners and viewers, it’s called Uncommon Cold. You’re going to be able to buy it on Amazon soon, on our website on Impact podcast website and also on Morozko Forge. Any last thoughts before we sign off on this episode of the Impact podcast for our listeners and viewers about the cold plunge and cold therapy and the benefits they could get?

Thomas: One of the things that you said today was, you can’t have a bad day after an ice bath, and it’s been true for me. I’ve never regretted one. Those first 15 or 20 seconds where I’m staring at the ice and I feel like I could skip today, I’ll be fine, nobody’s watching, right? I’ve done this a thousand times, do I need another one? All those things go through my head. Joe Rogan says, “You got to kill your inner bitch man.” My mother would not approve of his language, but he’s got a point. So I get in. I have never regretted an ice bath, so I keep doing it.

John: I love it. We’re going to have you keep coming on this show to keep sharing the journey at Morozko Forge and the Tom Seager journey in sustainability and all the great work you do at ASC, which we’re also very proud of. Tom Seager, he’s the co-founder and chief science officer of Morozko Forge. To find Morocco Forge and to buy a Morozko Forge like I did, and like Joe Rogan did, go to www.morozkoforge.com. It’ll be in the show notes. To find Uncommon Cold, you’d go on our website, impactpodcast.com or morozkoforge.com, and eventually amazon.com. Buy this important book, share it with your loved ones, share it with your family. This is a great book. I’ve already given away a dozen copies that I bought from Tom. I need another dozen copies because this book is where it’s at. Thank you so much again, Tom Seager, for joining us on the Impact Podcast. You are not only just an amazing, great person, and a lovely friend of mine and a wonderful friend of mine, but I appreciate you spending this much time explaining the important aspects of cold therapy and what you’re doing at the Morozko Forge. Also, I appreciate all the good you do for this planet because those Morozko forges I know change lives and these no regrets. You never have a bad day after you’ve used a Morozko Forge.

Thomas: Thank you, John. This has been a pleasure.

John: This edition of The Impact Podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking platform revolutionizing the talent booking industry with thousands of athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs, and business leaders. Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent, for speeches, custom experiences, live streams, and much more. For more information on Engage, or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com. This edition of the Impact podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States, and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com.

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