Introduction Of Podcast
In this episode, Mohit is joined by Jesse Coomer, who’s an author, speaker, professional breathworker, cold training expert, certified Wim Hof Method instructor & NSAM personal trainer. We dig deep into what are the benefits of extreme temperature exposure and how you can improve your metabolic health.
Timestamps
- (00:00 – 01:06) – Introduction
- (01:27 – 05:28) – Jesse’s Journey
- (05:33 – 07:25) – How is Cold & Heat Exposure Connected?
- (08:15 – 12:56) – How Does Cold Exposure Affect Our Body?
- (14:30 – 20:47) – Heat & Cold Exposure for Beginners
- (26:17 – 30:48) – Cold exposure and effects on metabolism & Jesses’s Experience with Cyborg
- (32:49 – 38:44) – Jesses’s Opinion on Biomarkers
Key Takeaways – Transcripts
Intro (Mohit): There’s been a lot of chatter about cold and hot exposure therapy of late. A bunch of enthusiasts are popularizing this, but what exactly is this? So the whole idea of repeatedly exposing our bodies to extreme temperature temperatures can lower fasting glucose and insulin levels and improve dietary, fatty acid handling. The science of extreme temperature exposure and its effect on health is fascinating. So let’s hear it from the horse’s mouth. Let’s hear it from someone who has been there and done that over years. Today we have with us Jesse Coomer, a professional breath worker and a biohacker. He’s also a cold training expert and a certified Wim Hof instructor. In this episode, Jesse helps us understand how cold and hot temperature exposure works and how both are different from each other. We also discuss how this can help you regulate your metabolic health. Jesse has also used the Ultrahuman Cyborg and shares how devices such as Ultrahuman Cyborg can be a game changer for everyone. So let’s hear it from Jessie now.
(Mohit): Hey, Jesse, good to have you here.
(Jesse): Hey, nice to be here, my friend. Thanks for having me.
Question (Mohit): I was really looking forward to this, your journey around the cold exposure therapy and essentially how that has the power to change the way humanity thinks about health and evolution and everything else as well, right? But, yeah, I think really intrigued to figure how your journey has been, starting with your own journey. And I can probably pitch in with what my experience has been. I think for our listeners here, it’ll be a good context setting as well. In terms of who you are, I think. How did you get here?
Answer (Jesse): First of all, it’s one of those things where when I say, hi, my name is Jesse Coomer and I’m a breath worker, right? This was something that if you would have asked me ten years ago, what is a breath worker? I would have had no idea how to answer that question. And so coming into breath work, cold exposure, heat exposure, all these different things that are kind of at the forefront of human health and wellness is just really an exciting thing. And what’s really interesting about all of this is that it’s really nothing new. Humans have been doing, of course, breath work for ages and during cold and heat and all these other things for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. But only now, recently, has there really been a resurgence. And it’s primarily because we have been able to take some of this to science and say, oh, okay, I think this is what’s going on. But really, for me, and I think you can have all the science you want, but for me, and I think for most people, you have to have some kind of an experience. And for me, my experience has been I started most of my life just completely unhealthy, making every unhealthy decision I could possibly make and it’s like is pizza a vegetable? Can we make pizza into a vegetable? I would love it if pizza were a vegetable, but it’s not. And so what I did is most of my life I just completely made all the wrong choices and I couldn’t understand why. They told me this broccoli was good for you, right? But it didn’t really taste as good as pizza. And they told me I’m supposed to go exercise and all these things but man, I felt sore and I got all sweaty and things. But once I started doing it, I started to realize which is what I think a lot of people realize, especially in this community that you’re building, which I’m a big fan. When you engage with the body, when you really start to work with it, it works back with you and there’s an enormous amount of benefits. So for me, about the age I was in my late twenties, I started to exercise and man, I started feeling better. But then I started to try to meditate and I realized that I was terrible at meditation. The joke that I always give is that meditation is the easiest thing in the world. All you do is just sit there and don’t think about anything. As if that’s possible. That’s really difficult to do. And so what I started to do is I started looking into breath work. I started looking into pranayama specifically, which is one of the branches of yoga. And eventually I stumbled upon this guy named Wim Hof and I was fortunate enough to train directly under Wim Hof and he introduced me to the idea of cold exposure. And that’s whenever the whole world of temperature exposure and kind of what we considered in this modern day as biohacking kind of opened up to me. And the rest has just been a crazy fun time of researching other styles of breath work, doing enormous amounts of research and finding other ways to use breath work. Cold exposure, heat exposure, exercise, mobility, you name it and see how that all works and how we can use it in the modern age to help us live a better and healthier life.
Question (Mohit): Wow, that’s a fascinating story. And I think the most interesting part here is that you mentioned that there is breath work and then there is cold exposure and also heat exposure. So how do these two things sort of like work together, right? I mean, how are these two connected in your way? Well, there’s a lot of different ways to look at it.
Answer (Jesse): So for instance, you’ve got like for instance a modality such as Wim Hof method where is based on combining the two. So Wim HOF method has a specific breathing sequence and then it also incorporates regular cold exposure. Now there are some people who just do cold exposure and that’s their thing. They don’t really get into the breath work, they just want to go into do cold exposure. Cryotherapy is incredibly popular now, and I’ve been fortunate enough to talk to a lot of people who are just into cold water swimming. And I wrote an ebook just on cold training called A Practical Guide to Cold Training. And in that book, I’m going to be coming out with my third edition soon, but I already have an interview with a woman who swam a mile in the Antarctic Ocean just kind of swimming through. And for her, she says it’s her own style of meditation. The beauty behind all of this is that we find out a little bit more about ourselves and what we’re capable of. Yeah, I think all of us, if you’ve ever accidentally taken a cold shower, right, you step in, oh my God, it’s cold. We start to say, well, how could anybody endure that? And we start to say, well, that’s just not possible. And before you know it, we make limitations on ourselves that aren’t really there, they’re just self-imposed. And so one of the beauties behind cold exposure, specifically I think, is that we can free ourselves from some of those self-imposed restrictions and say, wow, what else am I capable of?
Question (Mohit): Yeah, there’s a mental aspect of this which is actually how I got introduced to cold exposure almost ten years back as a way almost daredevil, right? Which is basically that can you spend like three minutes in an ice cold tub And it was very interesting the first along the way there was something called the Ice Bucket Challenge. And then essentially there were a bunch of folks who were known as folks who would do cold exposure, like prolongated ones. There was this mental toughness thing that if you can endure a cold, you have it in you, essentially, right? And then there’s some physical benefits to it. As you mentioned, in the last five to seven years or ten years, essentially, we’ve been able to connect science to the field good effects of cold exposure. So tell us a little bit about like from a biological impact perspective. How does cold exposure actually work for humans? Like, it does feel from extremely petrifying for a lot of people to when they actually do cold exposure, they probably feel the best that they’ve ever felt in their entire life. So what really happens inside the human body?
Answer (Jesse): To really understand it, I think it’s important to understand what hormesis is. So hormesis is basically the process where we stress the body the right amount to get a beneficial result. So basically you can go in there and just splash around and then you’re not really getting a whole lot of benefit. You can go in there and stay an hour and then you’re probably going to have hypothermia. So the idea is to find the sweet spot that you’re going to get a benefit from. It’s a lot. Like, I think most people can relate to how exercise works. If all you’re doing is getting your steps in, right? I’ve got to watch and it congratulates me. Oh, you’ve walked this many steps a day. Oh, wow. I’m not really making any progress, right? It’s just I’ve moved my legs that many times. Now, if you were to, every day, go to the gym and lift weights and do some other kinds of cardio in the right amount, then you get stronger. And that’s just our body’s natural response to stress. But if you were to go, like, for instance, if I were to go and try to bench press on day one, 300 pounds, you’re going to hurt yourself. So the idea is to find the right amount of weight to lift or the right amount of cardiovascular exercise so that you get the beneficial result. The same can be said with the cold. So the cold actually is a stressor. So that means that if you just go out one day and get into ice bath or a cold shower and then you don’t do it again, you’re not really going to receive the benefits that you could. If you get consistent, it’s just like any kind of a practice. So for the first time you get in there, you’re going to shiver. Your body is going to really be like, oh my God. Now the nice thing is, after you get out, you do feel really good. And this is because your body releases a whole bunch of happy chemicals. One of those chemicals is your endocannabinoids. So those are the same things that shut down pain receptors and they’re responsible for a lot of pleasurable experiences. When we get into the cold, there are a few things and there’s a lot of things we could talk about, but I’ll focus specifically on one. This is probably, in my opinion, the most powerful one. And it’s that when you get into the cold, your brain will release a chemical. There’s a part of our brain called the locus ceruleus, and it will release a chemical called norepinephrine. Now, that is a very powerful neurotransmitter, and it is literally the same neurotransmitter that is responsible for the feeling of anxiety. So everybody’s like, okay, wait a minute, wait a minute. Why would I want to feel anxiety on purpose? Well, if you do this, if you go into a situation that’s out of your control and you’re feeling anxious, well, that’s no fun. But if you go into a situation, for instance, a cold shower that is in your control and at any time you could turn it off and you’re doing this on purpose and you understand, okay, I’m doing this because I want to do this, you start to associate the feeling of anxiety with excitement and with a reward. And we call this in the cold training community, we call this some people call it stress inoculation because you’re giving yourself a certain amount of stress on purpose in order to make yourself more resilient to stress outside of that cold shower. So what most people will find is that yes, they’ll go into the cold shower and maybe it’s a little uncomfortable and before you know it and of course in my ebook I talk about how to really make it a pleasurable experience. But before you know it, you kind of look forward to it. And even if you don’t, after you get done each day, the rest of your day, you feel less stressed because you have started to train yourself to deal with that feeling of anxiety. There’s an author here in the United States, he was a long time ago and he said if you eat a frog every day for breakfast, the rest of the day can’t be that bad. His name is Mark Twain. Just imagine how that would be to eat a live frog. But the thing is, if you take a cold shower first thing in the morning, the rest of the day, oh wow, I’ve already had this amazing amount of stress and I’ve come out of it healthier and happier as a result, the rest of the day is that much better.
Question (Mohit): Well, I think that’s the best way to summarize this that I’ve ever heard. Like you start the day with the worst thing that you can do and probably everything else will look greener and better in many ways. And the other aspect that’s really interesting is that you’re treating cold like stress, right? Essentially it’s like you mentioned hormesis. So essentially you’re trying to achieve in a way homeostasis in your body by some stress. Essentially controlled control is the keyword here, that you’re actually controlling this. And that’s actually pretty cool because when we think about cold exposure, right, and there are different ways to do cold exposure out there as you mentioned, right? And then there are some folks who actually do cold water swimming like the bolas essentially. And then essentially they have a different body type, different adipose tissue, essentially, right? But for a lifestyle individual, like somebody is trying to get better, what sort of balance does an individual need to crack? Like how much cold is good? And also asking this from the perspective that I also had this sort of my journey for myself where initially I thought that hot and cold alternate is pretty cool. So you do a sauna, you jump into ice bath and then you do alternate. And then after that I read some research that you should get cold exposure only till the point is shiver. And beyond that it’s just like it’s not very useful. It just helps you develop some like you’ll get cold tolerance but then it’s not helping you build your adipose tissue and then I start moving towards that and then sort of like flip-flop between these two. But what’s your perspective? Like how do you think about cold and how do you think about cold exposure? For a beginner, for example?
Answer (Jesse): Yeah, it’s a great question. And this is something where and I didn’t even plan to even bring up my ebook today, but I feel like it’s necessary. The reason I wrote it was specifically because I saw a lot of people get hurt. I saw a lot of people training to the point where they were having negative effects as opposed to the positive effects they were trying to get. So that’s on my website, Jessecoomer.com, that would be for really in depth, but as a general summary of my philosophy on cold training and heat training, too, have you heard the saying take it with a pinch of salt? Yeah, absolutely. Have you ever heard yeah? Okay. So we say that’s part of the heritage of many countries comes from ancient Rome. There was a general named General Pompey, and we’ve all heard of Julius Caesar, but his arch enemy was General Pompey. And General Pompey believed that, of course, at the time, they were trying to poison each other and they were trying to kill each other, all these awful games. But General Pompey believed that if you swallow just a little bit of poison each day with a pinch of salt, that he could become immune to that poison. And it is true, he did become immune to the poison, and the pinch of salt had nothing to do with it. But that’s where we get that saying from. And the interesting thing here is if he would have swallowed too much poison, he would have died. If he wouldn’t have swallowed any poison at all, he wouldn’t have had the immunity because he took a little bit of poison with a pinch of salt. It’s not like a thing, but just a little bit each day. That’s how he got better and that’s how he got immune. When it comes to the cold and the heat, it’s very similar because these are two lethal forces. You can die if you stay in the cold or the heat too long. However, if you don’t stay long enough, you don’t get the benefit. So with regards to the cold, how long should I stay in the cold? Well, it does depend on how cold it is. So in my ebook, I tried to figure a basic way of figuring, okay, if it’s this cold, stay in this long. If it’s this cold, they only stayed in this long. Now, most of the research out there points to limited benefits of cold exposure at long periods. So these people that are staying in there for like 20 minutes to an hour beyond generally aren’t getting as much of a benefit as maybe we might think, because, however, it depends on the temperature. We use Fahrenheit here in the States. So I apologize to everyone else. No one else uses fahrenheit. I don’t know why. We were just like, we’re just going to do something that no one else can understand. But let’s just use some basic numbers. If you are in I think four Celsius is 40 deg. So that’s kind of an easy one for me to remember. But that is quite cold. So that’s a very cold, cold exposure. So in that kind of a case, you might just want to spend two minutes. And beyond that, the benefits are kind of going to drop off. Now, it always depends on a few things. One, the primary thing is it depends on the person. So it’s just like, you know how a lot of guys will go into the gym. I don’t know how it is over there, but here in the United States, a lot of guys will go in the gym and they should be lifting like a small weight. But they look around and they see all these other guys lifting these big weights. So then they get the big weight because they’re ego, right? Ego lifting. Well really. Yeah, exactly. So really, for most people it has to do with well, do I have much experience with this? If I’m not very experienced, I want to start really mild. I want to gently bring myself into it. I would never say stay in the cold to the point of shivering. That is because once you’ve gotten to that point, it’s very likely that you’re going to experience possibly some of the negative effects of cold exposure. So I generally would recommend a person always think about this. You want to feel really strong when you get out. You never want to feel run down, tired, lethargic or just you never want to feel bad whenever you’re getting out. So don’t wait until you’re just shivering and wishing you were dead. I always say to stay in the cold as long as you feel you are comfortable and you are in control. That might sound weird to some people. Wait a minute, how can you feel comfortable in the cold? Well, it still feels cold, but it’s not just making you miserable. And in my book I described there’s a few zones to training. There’s the initial shock of the cold. Everybody is going to experience that. Then after you get past that, you’re in what I call the training zone. And when you’re in the training zone, that’s when all the good things are happening. You’re in control. Even though it’s cold, you’re still able to relax or you’re still able to be somewhat comfortable. But after that, if you stay in too long, then you get into the danger zone and then that’s when some bad things can happen, like after drop and hypothermia. And so we want to make sure to try to get out before that. A good way to gauge that is self awareness, which is difficult for most people because we were so disconnected from ourselves. Now, in the heat it’s similar, but in the heat it’s interesting. With the heat, you can generally most people can feel when they need to get out a little easier. In my experience, in the heat, you tend to feel a little bit of claustrophobia, so there’s a little bit of, like you start to feel a little uneasy, and when that happens, you just want to get out. And I love what you said about doing heat and cold, that contrast, because one of the things that we get whenever we’re doing cold exposure or heat exposure, and especially both, we actually work out an enormous amount of our circulation on the biggest organ of our body, and that is our skin. There’s an enormous amount of little capillaries. And in modern life, right, we rarely ever work those out. And so the atrophy and so whenever you are in the hot and cold, you open and close, open and close, open and close. And so it does you a lot of good.
Question (Mohit): That’s a very good way to visualize this. I think you have these capillaries, and you have the largest organ of your body, which you often like. I mean, most of the sections are completely unused, and via the hot and cold alternate. It’s a great way to essentially activate some of those parts of your skin and essentially the circulation in your body, but with control, deeper control. And I think the first time I did this, I did with a stopwatch of two minutes, and I felt, like, really strong. Like, right after this came out, it was so good because the blood is just flowing through, and you feel like you get that pump. There is a pump in the muscle, and then you just want to go back to it again. I think that’s really interesting, because just like exercise, by the way, it should energize you. It shouldn’t drain you out. You should want to do it again, basically, right? You should want to enjoy it again. Yeah, exactly. It’s a thing to be experienced, rather, right? Nobody can really explain it, because if you tell somebody that somewhere yourself in like four degree Celsius or three degree Celsius, and then people say, Are you crazy? Like, how would that be a pleasant experience? But I think that’s really cool. Have you been teaching people over the last few years around how to do this in a safe way and sustainable way? As a follow up question to that, Have you also been to India and to Himalayas?
Answer (Jesse): I have not been to India. I’m going to answer that question first. I have not been to India. I would love to go. I’ve got some friends who have been and who lived there for a while, and they’ve raved about it. But yes, I would love to go. And obviously the Himalayas would just be fantastic just to see just to experience that. But yeah. So that’s on my wish list. Now, when it comes to how long I’ve been training people in this since 2017, the very beginning of 2017, actually. I saw on Facebook how it shows you your memories. My very first Wim HOF Method Workshop was last month, I guess in 2017. So I’ve been training people with Wim HOF Method, which involves cold exposure. Since then, I also started having people reach out to me and they just wanted to train cold exposure by itself. And so I started to do that. And then I wrote my ebook in 2019 on how to train in the cold because I’d had so many people reach out and they had negative effects. This is something I want to make clear, where the cold is a powerful force. It is something that it should be respected. And a lot of times we look at things as like, if a little bit is good, a lot is better. And it’s not really always the case. Whenever we’re using temperature training, the most important thing is consistency and safety when it comes to these things. I’ve had my ebook, and now, like I said, it’s in its second edition, and I plan to come out with my third edition this year, and anybody who buys my ebook gets the update. So I want to make sure everybody has all my most updated advice. But yeah, I’ve been training people for quite some time in this, and the goal here is health and longevity. It’s not breaking records, it’s not bragging, right? I mean, you’re going to take pictures and post it on Instagram, probably. Yeah, that’s fine. But my main message is to do it as a practice. I don’t take an ice bath every day anymore. I used to take ice baths every single day, ten minutes every single day in an ice bath. I don’t do that so much anymore. I don’t always have the time, but I always have enough time to take a cold shower. And where I live, it’s a very cold shower. Right now, I would say we’re about five celsius, maybe between four and five celsius in our showers here. So it’s a nice, cold, refreshing shower. By the time you’re done, you’re just like, yes, let’s conquer the day.
Question (Mohit): Wow, I’m literally getting goosebumps while you’re speaking about this. I’ve tried booking or tried reaching out to HOF via his website long back. And almost every time I used to try and book a session like his stores and basically the one day sessions. Essentially it was always full and I couldn’t get access till 2020. I think the pandemic. Like three Four months before the Pandemic. I happened to be in Europe and this was happening in Amsterdam. I remember this was probably around, I think, October and November 2019. And it’s really cool because it was a community of people trying to basically have fun with cold. Very different from seeing this like a daredevil exercise, daredevil activity that seemed really cool and interesting. I think one of the things that I noticed for the last few months of combination of cold exposure with glucose monitoring specifically, is that on the days I’m more cold trained let me use that phrase maybe we have more cold exposure. My food response is significantly better. The days I start with sort of like an ice bath or ice water dip, the same food, just sort of like, response in a much better way from a glucose perspective. So what really happens with, like, is there any connection between metabolism, glucose metabolism, cold exposure? And also as a follow up to that, what’s your experience been with the Ultrahuman Cyborg?
Answer (Jesse): Okay, so, yeah, I guess with cold exposure, you certainly will have a noticeable change. A few things are happening physiologically whenever you engage with the cold or just temperatures of extremes, because your body is trying to achieve homeostasis, and the only way that it can do that is to induce thermogenesis. And so when you do that, your caloric expenditure is going to raise. Another thing that’s going to happen is that your body is going to be using that glucose to produce more ATP. And so those mitochondria are going to start working really hard. Your brown adipose tissue is called brown adipose tissue because it is chock full of those mitochondria. So those mitochondria are going to chomp up two things, oxygen and glucose, and they’re going to produce ATP or cellular energy. So they’re going to do that a lot, and they’re going to do it really fast. I guess they don’t know technically, but your physiological self understands the fact, okay, I have to produce an enormous amount of heat very quickly because there’s this outside force that’s trying to reduce my temperature. Now, I’ve had the glucose monitor. I was able to use that glucose monitor for about two weeks. I’ve been able to test that with Cyborg, and my most profound experience was with breath work. So the cold exposure, I got some noticeable change, maybe a little bit, but maybe it’s just because I’m regularly training with cold exposure that I didn’t notice a huge change depending on, because I train every day anyway. But the times whenever I was testing out the glucose monitor were incredibly stressful. And this is one of those reasons why it’s so good that I do what I do, and because I need breath work, I need it to really maintain and to help with my stress levels. And so what I noticed is that whenever I became more stressed, of course, I had a lot of event and a lot of workshops and a lot of things around my book, a Practical Guide to Breath Work, a lot of those things were kind of swirling around. And so I noticed that whenever I was more stressed, that my blood glucose would go higher. And this is normal because whenever you’re under stress, your autonomic nervous system believes that you’re under attack, and so it releases more blood glucose from your liver. And so my physiological self was saying, okay, we’re going to have to run from something. It seems as though we’re stressed, right? So the body was doing actually is trying to do me a favor, but at the same time, there’s no bear that I’m running from. It’s just that I’m really busy and there’s a lot of things going on. So I used breathing techniques to kind of experiment with this. And so it was really kind of cool to see how the effective breath work on my blood glucose. And I’ve noticed that when I’m stressed, I can jus break down into some cadence breathing, which I described in my book, and just really calm myself and relax myself to bring myself into a more relaxed state. And when you’re in a more relaxed state, your blood glucose is going to go down and your blood glucose, it’ll level out because your physiological self, your autonomic nervous system is no longer raising the alarms, hey, we need fuel so that we can get away from this predator. I would say the biggest profound things that I notice is, okay, stress equals raised blood glucose even more than any food that I would eat. So I don’t care what the food was. It was interesting watching the food spike blood glucose and things like that. But stress was the number one spiker of blood glucose because I was trying this because my first blood glucose monitor arrived and I tried it over the holidays, Christmas and New Year’s. So even more than alcohol, which actually induces a state of stress, which I was really I was like, wow, that’s crazy. Those stressful times, that’s when breath work is especially helpful.
Question (Mohit): Well, that’s a great way to sum this up, because the impact of because physiology, everything is sort of like connected and often feels like a pack of cards, right? Like essentially sort of like a flywheel that’s connected, interconnected. You move one lever and then everything else also starts moving. And there is correlation between your stress levels and your insulin sensitivity as well. I mean, it makes you release more glucose, but also makes you more insulin resistant over time. So your glucose spikes are going to be more pronounced, which is extremely interesting because for a lot of people, and we observe this via the Cyborg community here who put on the CGM devices, they noticed that in many cases, of course, food plays a huge role in terms of shaping one’s lifestyle. But then the catalyst often is the lifestyle and the stress, the activity levels in the stress, if people are not fixing that, then removing food layer by layer, essentially getting rid of all your favorite foods over time sort of like feels like a downward spiral. Like you remove few food items and then you say that I’m still not getting results I want, and then you remove more and then you’re dissatisfied. That itself is a lot of stress. Like, you can’t eat what you want to eat, so some stress is good. Of course you can’t be in all relaxed state, but a lot of stress just works like a downward spiral. The other interesting thing is that you mentioned a little bit about developing this instinct, let’s call it sort of like interoception, right, which is like you can feel from inside and there is exteroception, which is like the external feeling. And then what we are essentially building is something called a technoception, which is the technology is essentially helping you understand what’s happening inside your body. It’s sort of like a new layer. Apart from glucose devices, glucose is one of the ways in which you can understand more about your body. But how do you see this evolving over a period of time? Like essentially as more and more biomarkers come to picture for people, how would technoception actually shaped the humanity or history of humanity, the future of humanity, rather from here.
Answer (Jesse): So I see, for instance, the glucose monitors and other things, right? So, for instance, if a person has a smartwatch, that test tells you what your heart rate is or that you can track your sleeping with, all of these things are just a regular, continuous thing that we’ve I mean, we started this a long time ago with, okay, what is your blood pressure, right? Blood pressure cuff is essentially the same basic idea. It’s impossible. It’s very difficult to know what your blood pressure is without a device, right? However, if we use the device, we can actually start to learn to use our interoception even more strongly. And this is something I’d like to see because I think so much of we’ve unlearned how we feel. And this is sad because we could say, I am this many years old, I’m this tall, I weigh this many, I weigh this much. But when someone says, oh, how are you? Fine. I’m okay, right? We’re very disconnected with how we feel. And I like these devices because they can help us learn the correlation between this is how I feel and this is what’s going on in my body. So I noticed that I was, for instance, just the thing I was talking about a minute ago. I noticed that I was under stress, but I had no idea how that affected my glucose. Intellectually, I understood it. I understood what should be happening, or approximately. But it was interesting how it was different than what I expected because I noticed that psychological stress that changed my blood glucose more than physiological stress. For instance, I go to the gym and I work out really hard and that is a heavy physiological stressor. But I noticed that my blood glucose spiked far higher, at least for me, in a psychologically stressful situation. This is where I think that hopefully we’re going to start to see that there’s so much biodiversity in our species, right? Because all of us, we are humans, we have the same basic makeup. Our genetic potential is very similar, but the way our genes are expressed are different depending on the individual. And so a person might see the two of us talking and say, well, obviously this guy, he’s of European descent and he lives in the United States. His genes are going to be slightly different than a guy who’s in India. Yes, okay, fine, but I could have another person here who’s in a European descent here in the same area that I live, and we’re going to be completely different, same with you and someone in your neighborhood, and we’re going to have different responses. So, for instance, it’s interesting because the way our physiologies work, I think, are far more nuanced than what we’ve been led to believe because so often we’ve researched our species, and it’s just a small subgroup of people, and it’s not representative of the whole. So what we get is questions that are like this if I take vitamin C, what will happen? If I take a two minute ice bath, what kind of hormonal profile will that do? Is that going to boost my testosterone? The answer is always, well, here’s the thing. The answer is I don’t know. You have to test. You have to find out for yourself. You need to learn more about who you are. And I hope that devices like Cyborg this is going to help us learn more about who we are and why we I mean us as individuals, as opposed to this just mass of people that believe we’re all completely just robots that are off of an assembly line. And the thing is, in breath work, we really try to focus on you as an individual, how special you are. And I think when we learn to have these devices, we’re going to start to see measurable changes rather than just, I feel this way. It’s like yes, you do. And let’s look into what’s happening on the inside. Notice how it’s a little bit different than even people who are from your same hometown, who you grew up with, because you’re an individual and your physiology and your psychology are your own. So I think I’m really excited about how this is going to work because I hope it helps us open up to, wow, I can’t always just look at the data. That’s always good to see what this research was. I can look at my own data.
(Mohit): So machines are essentially going to bridge the gap between instinct and reality. In some ways, we do become robots, and some we will become robots in a positive way, potentially.
(Jesse): Well, I’m hoping that we use devices to learn more about our humanity because I think that we often look at our bodies like a machine. It’s as if I could just from the neck down, is just this robot machine thing, and we come off of an assembly line. But in reality, there’s so much diversity, there’s so much specialness. And I think these devices, rather than turning us into machines that are just duplicates. I think what they’re going to do is say, wow, this body that you were born in is incredibly special and powerful, and you need to learn more about it because there’s so much more to you than there could ever be with just a robot, right? A robot is just a duplicate. And we come off in a similar line. You are special. There’s only one of you, and there’s only ever been one of you, and there’s only ever going to be one of you. So I’m hoping that that’s where we go with it.
(Mohit): It’s a great sell. It potentially creates a lot of self-realization that this is what you can actually do. This is your true potential. And as this bridge between humans and robots starts building, essentially, and over time, we will figure out better ways to leverage robots, and robots will figure out better ways to integrate with humanity, I hope. We’ll have just like we have a Black Mirror, we’ll have a neutral mirror or a white mirror, maybe. We’ll probably put technology to better use and ensure that basic technology will ensure that we are all, at least most self aware. Being better is an outcome, but being self aware is definitely like evolutionary outcome, for sure in this case.
(Jesse): Well, I was just to close up. I think awareness is the foundation of all positive change. That’s when I teach breath work, it’s language of breath is how I teach it. And that’s the first thing a person learns Awareness is the foundation of all positive change. If I don’t know what’s going on, how can I ever improve it? Right? And I think you guys have a great opportunity to share that kind of awareness with the world.
(Mohit): I think it’s a joint mission, like what you’re doing with cold exposure and making people understand what they can potentially do. It’s fascinating because ten years back, most people wouldn’t really know that. Most people that you would also come across, they wouldn’t really know that they could actually enjoy cold exposure, right? I certainly never thought that ten years. I just think that cold is actually bad for you because if you get too much of cold exposure, you might probably hurt yourself and you might probably get sick, which is totally changed, like in the way that looking at cold is something which is positive in control and limitation in optimal amounts. It’s interesting that actually you’re not leveraging nature, you are actually synchronizing humans with nature. And that’s the ultimate synchronization. Because if people understand how to live with nature, then most cases people would understand more about themselves as well because we are a part of nature anyways, right? Two things from my side. One is add us to the list of people inviting you to India and consider us Basically whenever you are here, we would love to host you. We would love to travel to Himalayas with you and do a bunch of sessions. Actually, I’m like basically on this podcast, but anyways as well, if you plan to come to India, we could set up like we have thousands of people who are using Cyborg users who would love to do something like this. Wonderful. And we would love to set this up. And I’m sure if this just goes out to people, I can see thousands of people already being interested in something like this. So that’s one. Awesome. And second, we’d love to evolve the product with you. I think we have a lot in the pipeline. I think it’s not out yet, but we are coming up with our own way to measure HRV real time and measure stress, some of these markers around hardware to actually measure stress and recovery. So I think with cold exposure and with glucose markers, it’s going to get really interesting in terms of how people can further understand their own body. So we love to give you early access whenever that’s out. And I really enjoyed the chat. I really learned a lot as well and such a pleasure having you here. Thanks a ton.
(Jesse): Thank you for having me.
Outro (Mohit): That was intriguing, right? Not just how temperature exposure affects our health, but how finding the right balance here is equally important. Too much isn’t good and neither is too less. This is amazing because if this is brought into practice, not only you will see positive impact on your metabolic health, but also mental resilience. If you are into the practice of cold or hot temperature exposure, we would love to hear your experiences around it on Twitter and Instagram. You can find us @UltrahumanHQ. We are also now live on all leading podcast platforms such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher and many others. Do share this episode with as many people as you can. We have a lot of exciting guests lined up in the upcoming episodes. We’ll see you soon with the next one.
