So, we are arriving at this idea of cold therapy and how we can integrate it into our life as one of the tools of improving our lifestyle. So, if you can explain to us your professional background and your journey to basically becoming someone who is well-versed and practicing cold therapy.

I'm glad you asked Max because you're a medical doctor and I'm a PhD. So, when I'm on campus at Arizona State and people call me Dr. Seager, there's no confusion. But when we do podcasts, if you were to call me Dr. people might think I'm in medicine and I'm an engineer. I was educated in civil and environmental engineering and I'm currently a faculty member in the School of Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State. So, it's a legit question to say, how did I come to cold therapy and metabolism? For me, the journey is several decades long. It was 2001 when I was a doctoral student that my six-year-old son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. I didn't know what was wrong with him. I thought he had the flu. I was giving him orange juice because that's what my mother did for me when I was sick and it turned out to be totally the wrong thing. He slipped into ketoacidosis and our pediatrician was also our neighbor. My wife called him up. John was his name and described the symptoms and John said, well, you know, this flu going around. This is around Christmas time. And then when my wife said, and he's peeing the bed all the time, John said, your son has diabetes. Meet me at the hospital. Your life is going to change. I carried him into the emergency room. John handed me an insulin syringe and an orange. He said, nobody leaves this hospital until you figure these things out. This was before continuous glucose monitoring. Before insulin pumps, everything was done by hand. And my son was six. So, I spent the night practicing, drawing up his H and his NPH, blending the insulin, injecting them into this piece of fruit while they IV-dripped insulin into his bloodstream. Because I'm a scientist, I took a very scientific approach to his care. We got journals. We wrote down everything he ate. We wrote down all of the insulin that we injected him with. We wrote down all of his exercise. And so, I was tracking this in kind of a model of how to manage his blood sugars. Well, of course, we met with the endocrinologist and we met with the dieticians and the nutritionist. And they were all full of bunk max. They were telling me things like protein cannot increase blood sugar. And I would get the journals out. And I would say, well, here's how where he had a cheeseburger, no bun, no carbs. And I have to give him extra NPH because several hours later, he will experience an increase in blood sugar. I had to teach myself about neo-glucogenesis. I had to teach myself everything about metabolism. And I knew nothing about cold until he grew up. And I'm not in charge of his blood sugars anymore. You know, he's quite capable. He's got much better technology and he's doing great. But I was neglecting my own health as a dad with young kids and trying to start this faculty career. I'd gained 40 or 50 pounds. I wasn't taking care of myself with the same attention that I was paying towards my son. And I got a lab report back, you know, the standard male health panel. And on it, it said my PSA was 7.8. You know, whatever the units are, nanograms per deca liter or something like that. The lab report said that for a man my age, I think it was 52 at the time, a normal or a healthy PSA would be below four. And here I was sitting at 7.8 and it scared the hell out of me. So I start reading online. Now I know that the prostate specific antigen is a measure of inflammation, but it's associated. It's not that reliable, but it's associated with prostate cancer. So everything that I read said that if I go to a urologist, they're going to want to do a biopsy. And if they do a biopsy, they might find cancer. And if they find cancer, they're going to want to remove my prostate. So this was a cascade of catastrophic thinking that was going on in my mind. I started talking to other men. And men don't talk anywhere near enough about these issues. But I talked to men who were older than me men, they were younger than me. I called up my old graduate school advisor. And I said, Hey, you know, you've you've probably had your prostate check, right? I heard a series of disastrous stories of biopsies gone bad of prostate ectomy that led to incontinence and erectile dysfunction. And I became so frightened that I refused to go see my urologist at all. Fortunately, I had a former student who is a friend who had kind of talked me into doing these ice baths, which I thought was great, cold showers, making angry and miserable, but ice baths, I find relaxing and invigorating. So I'd been doing them. And we had invented the world's first ice bath. So we could do them on a regular basis. I live in Phoenix, Arizona. It's hot. We can buy ice from the store. But you know, it might be 40 degrees Celsius in the backyard, 115 Fahrenheit anyways, typical during the summer in Phoenix and 200 pounds of ice melts in 15 minutes. So we invented our own ice bath. And I said, I'm not going to visit the urologist. I'm going to do more of these ice baths. I'm going to get myself into keto. I'm going to do the ice baths. I did it religiously every day. Three, four, five minutes in freezing cold water. And I get out and I'd be cold. So I would exercise my steel mace and my pull ups and my pushups. And I'd go for a walk into campus. And sure enough, Max, I brought my PSA down from 7.8 to 0.8. I got my labs again. I was like relieved to no longer have an inflamed prostate. And I don't know if I ever had cancer. But I mean, probably not. It's such an unreliable test. But I felt healthy and I felt more confident. And I went back to my urologist with my lab reports because I felt like now, you know, he's not going to try it biopsy. I mean, look, I'm great. I kind of want that clean bill. And he looked at that. And he didn't care about my prostate anymore. All he saw was my testosterone, because part of the male health panel is, you know, you got to get your T levels checked. And my total testosterone had jumped to 1180 nanograms per decoliter. It had a big red exclamation mark next to it saying too high out of range. My urologist thought, I must be juicing. Because a lot of guys, you know, in their mid 50s and they're not feeling vigorous. And so they'll go to testosterone replacement therapy or not necessarily prescribe, you know, they'll try and find something to regain that youth. And he was about my age. He said, you know, I just want to do one more test. And what did I know? I'm an engineer. He wants luteinizing hormone. Now, I found out later, luteinizing hormone is what stimulates testosterone production in the gonads. So he must have been thinking, if I'm natural, right, then my luteinizing hormone would be high too. But if I'm juicing, then luteinizing hormone would be low T levels high. And then he's going to scold me. Luteinizing hormone came back 8.9 off the charts, big red exclamation mark. And I sent that to my urologist and he said, Oh, okay, then, he never asked me about my prostate. He never asked me, well, how did you get your T levels up so high? He wasn't curious in the least, but it was this regimen of ice baths followed by exercise. And by that time, the ice bath company was starting to grow. And I was starting to get curious about how cold therapy impacts metabolism impacts the immune system impacts our, this is all before COVID, but impacts our overall health. Sure enough, I found a study in 1991, there was a team of Japanese researchers and who knows what motivated him, but they put a bunch of young men on an exercise bike, then in they just did cold stimulation, not even whole body immersion, but a non dominant hand immersed in ice water up to the elbow. And sure enough, when you use cold to recover from exercise in men, testosterone goes down, luteinizing hormone goes down. But then they flipped it around. They said, well, what if we did the cold stem? And then we did the exercise bike. So it's just 20 minutes on the exercise bike. Testosterone went way up, luteinizing hormone went way up. So I published this article. Few people read it, my partner Jason read it, you know, he's impressed. He gets his testosterone checked. He moves from 600 up to like 990. And he's maybe 1314 years younger than me. So you would expect him to be higher. Other men started reading it and trying it, we sort of replicated this like n equals one four different times. But it didn't really take off until liver King. If you know liver King on Instagram, he got caught in he'd lied about taking testosterone supplements. And Joe Rogan had called him out and said, look, everybody knew that he was on the juice anyway, like you can't get a physique like that. It's just ridiculous. But Joe got pretty curious about testosterone. He found my articles. And I remember it very well, December 2022. I was vacationing in Iceland at the time, and I started to get text messages. Hey, Dr. Seagar, I saw you on Joe Rogan's podcast. What are you talking about? I haven't been on Joe Rogan's pocket. I wasn't David Goggins was the guest. But Joe Rogan pulled up my Instagram post. And he read out the text of my story to his audience. And I started getting messages from all over the world from men saying, well, do you think this can work for me? Now this goes back to me being an engineer. I'm a problem solver, not a prescriber. And so I said, I don't know what's going to work for you. I can know what worked for me. And I know what the science says. But the only thing you can do is try it. Max, people have been trying it all over the world. There's a 62 year old guy in Massachusetts. He said, I was on testosterone replacement therapy. I decided to try your protocol instead. So now I go down to the lake, I jump in in the morning, and then I power walk home. That's all he does. He doesn't like wait lift or, you know, take supplements or anything. He sent me his lab reports. He was over 1200. There is no reason any longer that our testosterone has to decline with age. The way that most doctors are telling us is normal. I don't want to be normal. I'm not satisfied to be normal because in our Western countries, normal is diseased. And so without the qualifications or the license to use drugs or prescribe them, what am I going to do? I'm going to use cold. I'm going to use sunshine, vitamin D. Taya, the things that I've learned about my body, both from managing my son's diabetes and from the experimentation that I've done in the last five or six years to find out what works for me without drugs.

That is a very, very interesting story, Thomas. Thank you for sharing that journey. I have reflected or I've seen prostate PSA levels. And as you mentioned, it's not the best reliable marker for screening of prostate cancer. And it is fraught with a whole bunch of basically cascade of interventions. So there's a lot of nuance around the topic, but essentially PSA is expected to go up year on year. That is what clinically is expected from a conventional medicine point of view. So to be able to take your PSA from over seven below one and using lifestyle intervention, that is not something that is recognized by urology in general. And then to see a level, a testosterone level, that high, without exogenous supplementation, each is again, incredibly, incredibly impressive. And I guess it's another whole rabbit hole to go down, which is the testosterone levels of men in society today. And I think a big contributing factor is metabolic dysfunction and insulin resistance, as well as things like endocrine disrupting compounds. But what you showed is how powerful that protocol of cold exposure followed by exercise is maybe to really lay a solid foundation for people who really wanting to get into this. Maybe we could define the terms because there's things called by cryotherapy, there's cold thermogenesis, there's the cold exposure, maybe explain to us the differences and you want it around the

terms. There's a phenomenon in science, you know, I've published hundreds of journal articles and they've been cited thousands of times. And there's the phenomenon when you invent a term and people cite it and it sort of catches on, it raises your reputation, your prestige among your colleagues. And so there's always pressure to come up with the new catch phrase. And what I've learned is that this happens in marketing too. So as someone might say, biohacking, and then, you know, Dave Ashbury said, well, I invented that, you know, if you say biohacking, then you've got to cite me. Everyone at this point has a little bit different way of phrasing it. So Andrew Huberman, as far as I know, coined this phrase deliberate cold exposure. And what I really like about it is it emphasized the deliberate part, accidental cold exposure, chronic cold exposure, these are not good for you, but deliberate with intention. And it could be cold air or it could be cold water. So it's encompassing and it emphasizes the deliberate component. So I've quoted Andrew, you know, copiously in my writing, I use this term deliberate cold exposure. But cryotherapy, which could be cold water or could be cold air has become associated with the cryo chambers that use liquid nitrogen or super cooled air. It can go down to like 100 negative 140 Fahrenheit. I'm trying to do the translation. I mean, the two scales had negative 40 Fahrenheit and negative 40 Celsius, they sort of cross. And then I've lost track of how you would measure it, but it is bitter cold. And there's a risk of frostbite. So when people say cryotherapy, it's almost always associated with this frigid cold air. Cold water therapy is the term that I'm using more and more because I favor the cold water compared to the frigid air. I think it's safer. I think it comes with other benefits like grounding. And I would rather narrow down when I'm communicating my protocols and my expertise that I'm really talking about cold water. Cold thermogenesis is a term that Ben Greenfield uses. And he's really talking about the body's reaction to the cold activation of muscle shivering, which can clear glucose from the blood stream activation of the brown fat, which is going to improve your insulin sensitivity. So we do have a myriad of terms, whether it's deliberate cold exposure from Huberman, emphasizing the intention, no matter how you're getting cold, or cryotherapy, which is more of a medical term, but become associated with those cryo chambers, cold water therapy, which I'm increasingly going to reference when I write, and Ben Greenfield's cold thermogenesis, which says, this is the state in which you want to put your body. On some level, they're interchangeable. But at the level that I'm trying to work, that I want to be specific about these details so that people don't get the wrong idea.