Not everyone would readily agree to do an ice bath and endure the uncomfortable sensations of being submerged in the cold. But Scott Carney, who personally experienced it, found the benefits of doing so.
As a journalist and anthropologist, he has investigated organ trafficking, experienced war zones, and met Wim Hof, the Iceman, himself. Wim Hof’s known for his ability to endure cold temperatures as his meditation technique and alter the immune system's response.
Our mind tends to come up with worst scenarios, to be anxious, to go into fight or flight mode. But with the ice bath experience, Scott became aware of the sensations on his skin and how he could control his reaction to the cold water. His health and autoimmune reactions have improved as a result of this.
In this episode, Scott Carney talks about what he learned from his encounters with Wim Hof and the ice bath, as well as how stress and one's mindset may affect physiology and control the immune system.
Quick Guide:
01:19 Introduction
04:22 The physiological effect of environmental stressors
17:50 How dealing with stressors can be applied in day-to-day life
24:45 The auto-immune system and the Wim Hof Method
30:56 The reaction of cancer cells with sugar and cold temperature
33:50 Cold as the stimulus
36:15 The purpose and the right amount of stressors
40:27 How to practice playing with sensations
Get to know our guest:
Scott Carney is an investigative journalist and anthropologist who has written various topics in well-known publications. He has authored several books, including New York Times bestseller “What Doesn’t Kill Us” which chronicles his journey with Wim Hof.
"And as you feel more comfortable, you said there's a crisis in comfort, is that if you don't have range in the stuff you're gonna do, and you're totally fine staying on your couch and watching Netflix, and that is the way you have organized your entire life so that if you go to the mailbox, that's terrifying. And you could people do get to this point, right? Where you have so narrowed your environment and your range that you can't do stuff." - Scott Carney
Connect with him:
Website: https://www.scottcarney.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sgcarney
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sgcarney
Instagram:
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
Not everyone would readily agree to do an ice bath and endure the uncomfortable sensations of being submerged in the cold. But Scott Carney, who personally experienced it, found the benefits of doing so.
As a journalist and anthropologist, he has investigated organ trafficking, experienced war zones, and met Wim Hof, the Iceman, himself. Wim Hof’s known for his ability to endure cold temperatures as his meditation technique and alter the immune system's response.
Our mind tends to come up with worst scenarios, to be anxious, to go into fight or flight mode. But with the ice bath experience, Scott became aware of the sensations on his skin and how he could control his reaction to the cold water. His health and autoimmune reactions have improved as a result of this.
In this episode, Scott Carney talks about what he learned from his encounters with Wim Hof and the ice bath, as well as how stress and one's mindset may affect physiology and control the immune system.
Quick Guide:
01:19 Introduction
04:22 The physiological effect of environmental stressors
17:50 How dealing with stressors can be applied in day-to-day life
24:45 The auto-immune system and the Wim Hof Method
30:56 The reaction of cancer cells with sugar and cold temperature
33:50 Cold as the stimulus
36:15 The purpose and the right amount of stressors
40:27 How to practice playing with sensations
Get to know our guest:
Scott Carney is an investigative journalist and anthropologist who has written various topics in well-known publications. He has authored several books, including New York Times bestseller “What Doesn’t Kill Us” which chronicles his journey with Wim Hof.
"And as you feel more comfortable, you said there's a crisis in comfort, is that if you don't have range in the stuff you're gonna do, and you're totally fine staying on your couch and watching Netflix, and that is the way you have organized your entire life so that if you go to the mailbox, that's terrifying. And you could people do get to this point, right? Where you have so narrowed your environment and your range that you can't do stuff." - Scott Carney
Connect with him:
Website: https://www.scottcarney.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sgcarney
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sgcarney
Instagram:
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
Announcer 00:10
He was a morbidly obese surgeon destined for an operating table and an early death. Now he's a rebel MD who is fabulously fit and fighting to make America healthy again. This is Stay Off My Operating Table with Dr. Philip Ovadia.
Jack Heald 00:36
And we are back. It's the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast with Dr. Philip Ovadia. I'm Jack Heald, the resident idiot. And we have today somebody, we have a guest today that when I was doing my research, I went, man, I would really love to sit down over a glass of whiskey with this dude, with no time...
Scott Carney 00:57
So, we had to do this on Zoom? Whiskey was an option?
Jack Heald 01:03
I'm sorry. Talk to the doctor. Hey, it’s not my thing. We have today, author, Scott Carney. Phil, over to you.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 01:19
Yeah, very good. I've been looking forward to this conversation for quite a while. I think first learned about Scott a number of years ago. He has a number of very interesting books. The ones that caught my attention at first were The Wedge, and What Doesn't Kill Us. And those are going to be relevant to sort of our usual topics. But then he has others that can go into some other fascinating areas, and then we will get into all of it. Scott's been a contributing editor at Wired. He's written for Men's Journal, Playboy, a number of other very well-known publications, and has been radio, television, NPR, National Geographic TV, all of that good stuff. But really excited to hear about some of the unique health-related topics, and really mindset-related topics that Scott has written about. And with that, welcome, Scott, why don't you fill in a little bit of the detail through our audience as to your background, and how you got interested in some of this stuff.
Scott Carney 02:34
Thanks so much for having me on. This is, it'1ll be an interesting conversation. I love talking with doctors. This morning, I just woke up like super early and jumped in an ice bath by and tested my bloodwork beforehand. And then right after I tested my blood work again, and I don't have the results yet, but assuming something happened, and we'll see. But yeah, I'm an investigative journalist and anthropologist, and I live six years in India, and I have just a ton of books on like, randomly, seemingly disconnected subjects. I started by investigating organ trafficking around the world. I've written in from war zones. I've written about organized crime; I've written about cults. And I was starting to get my career underway debunking fake gurus, and people, especially with people who are teaching that you can achieve superpowers, like sort of, like abnormally big things. And then I heard about this guy named Wim Hof, who was saying he could like sit on icebergs and like, melt the ice with his body. I was like, that's crazy. And I tried his method. And the short story of this is that it worked. And then I wrote this book called What Doesn't Kill Us about my experience with Wim Hof when he was just at the very beginning of his career, and you know how that journey changed my life. And then I've written some follow up books about that with a concept that I call The Wedge, which is what you do in a stressful environment, your mindset in that environment, how that mindset plus the interaction of the stress that's coming into your nervous system, how that changes your physiology, and then I most recently wrote a book about climate change and war. So, I'm sort of really all over the place.
Jack Heald 04:22
Well, I want to hear about the effect of stress on your physiology. I'm not a doctor, I get to play the guy who says I don't understand what you're saying but you're not a doctor either. So maybe we can talk to each other. Dr. O can keep us scientifically straight as we work through this. Explain for our listeners, what happens when our bodies are under stress physiologically.
Scott Carney 04:52
Oh man, that is too general of a question unfortunately. The human organism or any organism at all in the world has to deal with its relationship with the environment, right? It has to decide, there are like, decisions that your body already has locked in. So, let's say, so we're talking about ice water, right, you're when you jump into ice water, your body says, okay, we're going to shunt the blood to the core by constricting the muscles, the smooth muscle in your veins and move it there. And the body through the process of evolution has said, no consciousness required, right, we can do it, well, we will just do this. However, there's also this conscious component where you could look at an ice bath and say, hey, I don't want to go in there, because that would be bad. And so and it's this tension between what the language is that's going on in your head and your physiological reactions, which is where consciousness, human consciousness, and probably animal consciousness too, exists, and you can still trigger those vasoconstrictions and the responses to the cold water by literally getting in and work the senses of anxiety and depression and these other sensations that we feel in our sort of emotional centers of the brain relate directly to physiological sensations that we would have in the environment. And this is, that's all very high-level stuff. So, we can get down lower.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 06:21
Well, one of the fascinating things to me about the work that Wim Hof has done and others is this, we have a perception, most of us have a perception like that thing inside our body, we are not in control of. We can't consciously alter the reaction to cold water, like for an example. But Wim Hof has clearly shown that you can and that we probably have a lot more control over these things than we think we do than we give ourselves credit for. And it's just fascinating, to kind of explore how far you can take that. Wim Hof has certainly taken that beyond what most people would consider the limits. But maybe talk a little bit about when you were first going through the process. What that was like, trying to control these things that you perceive not to be controllable?
Scott Carney 07:24
Yeah, well, the way I like to think of it is that every sensation that you feel in your body ever is a choice, right? It's all an offering of a choice, right? Where if you get into ice water, for instance, or you're looking over a cliff, or you're driving your car down the road, your body has these automatic responses to it. I mean, think about driving on a highway, you're accelerated with hundreds of thousands of pounds of metal, of steel, going at 60 miles an hour. That is actually legitimately terrifying. Yet all of us are like, this is no problem, I can do this, because we have all tamed our nervous systems in that environment. Now, when I was 15-and-a-half-year-old, I first got my learning permit, I felt all 15,000 pounds of steel around me, and I worried about it. And we just, we literally just decide how our body wants to react to that environment. And we're all mastered, and this is what I call the wedge, right? The wedge is like there's an external stimulus that gives you some sort of stressful choice. And then your decision to alter your perception of that environment has these downstream effects on your physiology. Now in an ice bath, our initial reaction, anyone who's thinking right now, what does it feel like to take a cold shower? What does it feel like to rub ice on your nipples? Right? Whatever, right? You have this idea of like, that will not be pleasant. Yeah. I don't know maybe if people have ice nipple things that's different. But like the idea is that it's not going to be pleasant. And I don't want to do that. Everyone says to me the first time they hear what I do that they do not want to do this because they are especially scared of the ice. But the thing that you learn is that that is just the anticipation, that is just anxiety, that is just like your mind casting the world's worst reactions. And when you get into the ice, you realize that the sensations that it offers are primal. They are evolutionarily hardwired. Wait, it's going to activate your sympathetic nervous system with your fight or flight responses This is adrenaline and cortisol and all these like sort of like pain-relieving, energy-boosting systems, and then you realize that you have this choice. Do I engage that system and hyperventilate, shake, shiver whatever else or do I say to myself, this isn't so bad, and I can do it? Like, whatever that's just sensation on my skin. And everyone, the reason why ice water is such a great training place is because everyone has this evolutionary reaction to cold. And it's always go into fight or flight, always panic, always fly out of that ice water as quickly as possible. But you realize, like, literally within 10 seconds of being in cold water, you realize that you actually have complete control over what you want to do there. And I can relax in an ice bath, I can just be totally calm. And I've taken I've taken half an hour ice baths, a 32-degree water and been fine. Whereas now if you look at like hypothermia tables, I should have been dead at 10 minutes. And it's because I'm able to interact with my nervous system and just say, I am okay. It's going to be fine.
Jack Heald 10:43
What was that process? Because at some point, you weren't there. And then you got there. Talk about the in between the going from then to now?
Scott Carney 10:52
Yeah, well, that is the wedge, right? That is that interesting synapse between the environment and consciousness, itself, like human consciousness. When I said that every sensation is a is a choice, I think that's why we were evolutionarily hardwired in the first place to be conscious, right, is because at some point, you have these evolutionary things that are in there that says, an organism, it runs away from cold or runs away from CO2, or lava, or whatever it is, we go away from that stuff. But at some point, the environment is so complex that it needs to cede some of that information, that sensory information into cognitive processing software. And that's where humans, that's how we experience consciousness is and like, you use it, we are conscious all day, we look around outside, we say, hey, that's the postman and not a murderer coming to drop and look into my mailbox. And if it was a murderer, you'd have a very different physiological response. And the cool thing about ice water is it's so predictable, right? I know how you're going to feel when you get in there. I know that the way I feel an ice water is precisely how you are going to feel in ice water from a nerve standpoint, from an emotional reaction standpoint. And the only thing that's different is how you choose to respond to that environment.
Jack Heald 12:15
What do you say, and time for true confession here, I actually enjoy a cold dip as well. This time of year, it's fantastic in Phoenix, because I just checked the water, it was 52 degrees yesterday, which is not 32. It's a nice enough difference between my 104 degrees spa. So, I go from the spa and then I go into the pool. But so, I'm not speaking from a place of ignorance. But there's an awful lot of our listeners whose health journeys are barely begun. Talk about the physiological benefits, how you feel different? And if you've got this, I haven't read your book so I apologize, if you have the information, what's actually happening under our skin when we choose to master this particular type of behavior?
Scott Carney 13:19
Well, when we get into the physiology, there's a lot going on, right, you have millions and millions of processes going on all the time. So, it's actually a little bit difficult to get really get into that. But I want to talk from an evolutionary perspective. At first, the human species is about 3 to 5 million years old, depending how you want to, like cut that off. And throughout the course of history and life on the planet is about 3 billion years old, the plants about 5 billion years old. Every organism in that entire time had to deal with changing environments. Okay it was hot, it was cold, there were brutal things, there are things and our tool to survive has been you change your biology in some way in order to respond to that environment. Now, one of the things that's terrible about modern human life is that while we were may have been on like, in the plains of the Sahara, and we might go up to 110 in the morning and during at noon, and maybe down to 50 at night, your bodies were making that change, which means the muscles in your arterial system, the smooth muscle in your arterial system would clench and, and dilate and sort of stretch in and out. You use all these different hormones and all these different things were going on your body and it was triggered by the environment. Now come to about 1910, we are now in more or less total control of our environment. We are not cold in the winter and we're not hot in the summer. You live in Phoenix, where in the summer, it's not habitable by humans like no human can live in Phoenix right now in July. But you do and why do you do that? Because you have climate control, because we have water available at a touch, and human biology used to always have these up and down changes of all sorts. And there were sensations that were paired with those changes. Now we live in a numb environment. And we are not getting the environmental signals that change our biology. So, what we're doing not just with ice water, but also with heat, with fear, with anything that makes you feel something, you're giving your body variation. And those variations, because they were the standard before are giving your unconscious system, your nervous system, the stuff that it needs. And if we look at the problems that plague the modern world, where we have autoimmune illnesses, we have anxiety, depression, we have cancers, we have, like, tons of stuff going haywire in us, even though we've figured out with antibiotics and amazing Western medicine, right, we can deal with any acute condition right now, basically. But the chronic conditions, Western medicine’s terrible at dealing with, it's just not good at dealing with it. And probably most of your patients are dealing with chronic problems, things that manifest for a long period over time. And then they have an acute phase where you suddenly have the big painful moment. And then you get, then the western medicine comes in, and we were able to patch that up. But the underlying causes aren't fixed. And I'm not saying that ice baths are the panacea to everything out there. That is not the argument. But what I am saying is that adding these variations into your life changes things. And in particular, in my own experience, it changes auto immune reactions, it changes depression, it changes anxiety. And we can talk about the science of that pretty, pretty deeply if you'd like to.
Jack Heald 17:07
I'd like to talk more deeply about that. But I'd like to, I want to make sure that, that our listeners understand what you just said, that these types of environmental stressors, in this case, extreme, hotter, extreme cold, have a beneficial physiological effect that you can feel. You don't have to go measure it; you can actually tell things are better things are different. And you specifically said for yourself, would you say depression, anxiety...
Scott Carney 17:43
And autoimmune illnesses.
Jack Heald 17:47
Auto immune illnesses? Okay, that's huge. Phil, what were you gonna say?
Dr. Philip Ovadia 17:50
Yeah, just to kind of follow up on that, one of the things that's been said, we sort of have this crisis of comfort, and we have lost the ability or lost the desire to be uncomfortable. And that's contributing to many of the things you mentioned, and I would even add what we focus so much on in this podcast, and in my work is metabolic health, and all of these modern diseases like diabetes, and obesity and heart disease have a lot to do with how we interact with our environment these days. So, for someone, for our audience out there, who is thinking, well, I don't plan to go do a 32-degree ice bath anytime soon, is this useful for my day-to-day life? How can I use this to improve my health and my day-to-day life? What would you say to those people?
Scott Carney 18:55
Well, I would say chronic illness, as in general, right? And we have to talk about the generalities. Because there's always specifics. We're like, Well, yeah, of course, that's not true. Yeah. But so chronic illness is, in general, arises out of your relationship with the things that you do in your life, right. So, you want to talk about, let's do it really easy, if we want to talk about obesity, one of the things, one great way to get obese is change the environment in your kitchen to all Snickers bars, okay? You eat just Snickers bars, and your environment of your food is just Snickers bars, I promise you, you will put on weight. And that's just because you create a food environment. So, lifestyle is very important. I look at lifestyle in a way sort of like a drug. Right? Sort of like if you do these things, you will get these other outputs. If you feel these sorts of sensations. You're able to sort of more fine tune the way that your body reacts. Now I will say it's not a hard science, right? I can't say for instance, that tickling you sets off this hormonal reaction that will cure diabetes. Like that's not the way this works. This is more saying, like, we need variation, we need strong sensation sometimes. And I know that you said that maybe your listeners are never going to want to do an ice bath. Well, one of the reasons they may never want to do ice bath is because they feel so comfortable all the time. And as you feel more comfortable, you said there's a crisis in comfort, is that if you don't have range in the stuff, you're gonna do, and you're totally fine staying on your couch and watching Netflix, and that is the way you have organized your entire life so that if you go to the mailbox, that's terrifying. And you could people do get to this point, right? Where you have so narrowed your environment and your range that you can't do stuff. Now I imagine most of your listeners are not just eating Snickers and watching Netflix, but I wanted to take this to sort of a logical extreme. Now, if you do harder things, like if you got that person off of their Netflix couch, and they walked around the block once a day, the first time’s you do that will be stressful, right? Because it is novel, it is different, there's more stimuli coming into your internal environment into your mind, into your sensory system. And it's going to be hard for me now, when I look at an ice bath, I still think that doesn't look so fun, but I know that it changes my entire perception of what is difficult in the first place. And the cool thing about ice baths is that there's a big difference between the anticipation of the uncomfortable stimulus and your body's response when you realize because you probably haven't done one, if you're listening to this, right? When you actually get in there, and you forget about that anxiety. And then you say, Oh, actually, it's ice water. And it may not be the best, right? I may not want to live in ice water for the rest of my life. But I can handle it. And I can handle it. If I can handle ice water, what else can I handle. And that's where you get this cool generalization ability to handle stress in general, because your body has two basic neural responses, right? One is fight or flight and one is rest and digest, right? And you only can be in both one or the other state. There's not like a third branch of the vagus nerve, which is called watch Netflix, right, where only the Netflix nerve works. No, you can be in fight or flight or you can be rest and digest. Or you can be in some mixture of the two. It's not like a faucet where you turn it on and off, it's actually two branches. And they both have to be innervated at the same time in one way or another. When you can master one of those branches, the ice water is a great way to trigger fight or flight because your body interprets that signal as death. Like it looks at ice water, it says this is death. And then your body goes into the response to I don't want to die response. And then you can control that response in the face of death. When you just look freakin hacked your whole life, you hacked your entire response to your environment. And that's why anxiety gets better. Because anxiety is not only the anticipation of what's going on the outside world looking through your eyes in your mind. It's actually a sensation that you feel in your body. It's a tightness in your chest. It is the release of adrenaline, it is the release of cortisol, it is your fight or flight response, not being properly modulated in a fight or flight situation. Does that make sense?
Jack Heald 23:26
Yeah, absolutely. So, what you're saying is that you used to struggle with anxiety?
Scott Carney 23:33
Well, I mean, everyone's struggles with some anxiety. What I will say is that when I do these methods, the days are qualitatively easier, right? That I've always been something of a risk taker, I've always been someone who has been able to go I mean, I was a war correspondent for years. It's like I've been in the areas where the bullets are flying. Most people wouldn't do that. But I still get anxiety, anxious about things about stupid things. I will sit up at night, I will think about a stupid thing. And I'll crunch through the night and we're all humans. I will say that anxiety is a struggle that we all have to some degree. For me, it's never crashing. But for people I know who get panic attacks and actually do struggle with this stuff. These practices are great. What I will say that's truly amazing as the auto immune stuff. So.
Jack Heald 24:23
Yeah, I'd love to hear more about that.
Scott Carney 24:25
If you want to think about your immune system, like the critters, let's call them critters, right, in your immune system. You got your B cells, you got your T cells, you got your macrophages, you got your killer T cells. I mean, there's all these different components, but we're just gonna call them critters and the type of critters they are is wolves, okay. And their job is to go after the bad stuff that goes in your body say a virus or bacteria and eat them, kill them in various ways. I'm super simplifying this and I hope that our doctor pal here is like oh my god, how do I get from wolves to real science? We've got wolves in our body, and they're wolfing around and they're trying to kill the bad stuff, and they live in a bloodstream and lymphatic systems and stuff like that, but they live in your body, and they feel the same stuff that your body releases. And now we know, there's lots of scientific papers saying that if you give a macrophage and you bathe it in adrenaline, a macrophage eats bacteria, viruses, rips them apart, a big eater. If you bathe it in adrenaline, it waves its flagella a lot faster, right? It's like, oh my god, I'm in an adrenaline, it sort of reacts like you do. And so, if you bathe it in adrenaline all the time, it's gonna like look for things to eat. Now, we live in an environment that does not have a lot of pathogens and in general, right, that is we do not get a lot of variation in our physiological responses because we're comfortable. And like any wolf pack, wolves get bored. Okay. And we got bored, wolf macrophages, and they're going to be like, I'm gonna go eat your, the myelin sheath on your nerves, right? Is that multiple sclerosis? You got arthritis in your joints. You got lupus. It's funny, because when you start talking about these things, the question of autoimmune gets a little sketchy, but like these wolves start attacking you and the stuff that is tagged as you because it is bored, or it is bathe in adrenaline. Now, when we do things like jump in ice water, where the correct environmental response, your body's saying death, and you modulate your adrenaline, so it's down. You are, and this is scientifically speaking, giving those wolves chew toys. Now, so, they're able to chew on the toys, and the wolves don't bother you. Now, again, I'm using all metaphorical language here, right? We can actually use some clinical language. And I'll give you an example of how this worked with Wim Hof a few years ago. I was around during these days. So, Wim Hof Method is a breathing method and an immersion in ice and you can learn it in like 40 minutes. You could be a master in the Wim Hof Method in like 40 minutes, it's not hard, but it does involve getting into ice water and be like, this is okay. And then there's some breathing stuff that you do. Now, Wim Hof made the claim that he could consciously turn off his immune system, if he wanted to in a clinical environment. And doctors say this is impossible. Your immune system is not attached to your brain, you can't turn it off. And so, what he said, Now, that's bullshit, I can do it. So, what he was actually, he lived nearby in Radboud University in Nijmegen
in Holland, there was one of the people who had designed the test for anti-rejection drugs for when you get like an organ transplant, so like cyclosporine. But if you get someone's kidney into your body, and you install it, and it's not a perfect match, your immune system will eat it. So, what you need to do is you need to turn off or down your immune system, so that your body doesn't eat that thing. And he had designed a test of those drugs. What Wim was saying is that I am the drug, right? That I can do the drug without the drug, that's what he was saying. And the way the test works is you inject somebody with a heat killed E. coli bacteria, this is called endotoxin. And so, it's not dangerous, but your immune system recognizes it as a foreign pathogen. When you inject it, your body should respond like you're under attack, you get a fever, you get the sweats, you get the achy joints, you get all the primary immune responses. Wim said that you could inject it with endotoxin with just a little power of willpower and some breathing, no response. And that would be identical to cyclosporine. So, what did they do? They injected Wim with the endotoxin. And there was no response. Nothing interesting anyway. And that was like, crazy. That was bananas, and maybe Wim’s a freak. And I will tell you from experience, Wim is a freak, so that was correct. And maybe it's some genetic anomaly because 99% of trials go one way, but there is that 1% weirdness. So, one week after I met him in 2013, they brought, I believe it was 20, it might have been 12. Look at the paper, you can link to it somewhere. I believe it was 20 Dutch college students and they did the training with him for a week where they dunked in ice water and they did the breathing and blah, blah, blah. And then they brought them back to Radbound University and they injected all of them with endotoxin. And none of them had any response after just a week of training and I think you could even do it faster. And now here's my personal experience after training with Wim in 2013, but prior to that I would get canker sores in my mouth, which are about the size of a dime. I was like, I was terrible. I would thought of myself as like a canker sore survivor because they'd come one and they'd last for a week. They'd be there about once every month and it sucked. It wasn't like cancer, right? It was a canker sore. But I hated it. I started doing the Wim Hof Method, not thinking about canker sores at all, just that was not the reason I was doing this at all. I just did it because it felt good. And the canker sores never came back. And they have, I've only had two in 10 years of doing the Wim Hof Method. And they used to come every week. And canker sores are probably a response to a herpes virus that I contracted as a kid, and then that you sort of clear the herpes virus. And then but the body still occasion is like, oh, you bet your lip, let's start a canker. And, uh, now that doesn't happen, because my wolves, well, they have two toys.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 30:56
I mean, yeah, quite fascinating. I guess. What do you think the limits of this are? So let me, we talk a lot about on this program, like I said, metabolic health and diet and lifestyle to overcome your metabolic health problems. How much of a bad environment can you fight off with it? And I'm sure you probably eat pretty well; you probably eat a pretty healthy diet. But could you imagine, can this fix metabolic health without changing your diet? For instance, if someone is eating the Snickers bars, like you said can we change our response to Snickers bars?
Scott Carney 31:44
Oh, I don't know, let's do a test. I think maybe, maybe if you want to be really uncomfortable, right? So, there was a study that came out in nature, I think about six months ago that looked at this question of the Warburg effect, right? So, the Warburg effect is essentially cancer cells, like I think it's like 90% of cancers, feed abnormally well on sugar. They eat more sugar than the average human cell for metabolic reasons. And I'm sure you can science it up for us, but like, basically, cancer feeds on sugar. And if you give someone a low sugar diet and pair that with mild, prolonged cold exposure, so like turning the thermostat in your house down to like 60, all the time, what they found is that tumor growth radically reduced in both mice and in humans. The study was still small, I think they need to do some follow up to make it as really, really good. But basically, what the idea was, is that if you cut sugar in your diet, and then you do cold thermogenesis, that's like heating yourself in the cold, what happens is that your body in cold environments sucks sugar out of your bloodstream. And wherever else sugar is stored, and burns it directly for heat energy. And this is what, if you've heard of brown fat, this is a metabolic tissue that humans genetically have, but we usually just never use it. But its role is to suck out sugar from your system, burn it for heat. But if you've never lived in an uncomfortable environment, you've never really activated it in your recent life. And so, for the Snickers question, maybe if you want to over ramp up your BAT, like if you lived at like 34 degrees ambient air temperature forever, you might be able to get away with just Snickers bars, but I would not recommend it. And I'm not going to do the experiment because it sounds actually really horrible.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 33:50
No, I wouldn't recommend it either. Certainly. And then I guess the other question is there something unique about cold as the stimulus versus other possible, uncomfortable things that you could do?
Scott Carney 34:05
Cold’s easy, and I think that's what it is. It's primal, and I can and I feel like, and there's a little bit of a philosophical question here, I feel like my sensations that I feel with my nervous system are similar to your sensations. And I think this is somewhat of a leap of faith, right? Is that you feel what I feel because we can't actually communicate what our feelings are, we can only communicate emotions, but I believe as an act of faith that your sensations are similar to my sensations, and that if I dump you in ice water, you're going to feel roughly what I feel in ice water. If I dump a cat in ice water, it's going to feel roughly the same things that I feel in ice water. And I think that now I've totally lost the question. Why was I talking about cats and ice baths? I don't know, what was your question again?
Jack Heald 34:51
Well, we originally started with what are the limits?
Dr. Philip Ovadia 34:57
And then we were talking about what's unique about cold as stimulus.
Scott Carney 35:01
There we are, what's unique about all that we'll get back to the other question in a second. What's unique about cold is it's standardizable, right? I can say at 34, your nervous system is going to react a slightly different that 48 to 56 and onwards, and I find it very easy and quickly teachable tool. However, I did write an entire book called The Wedge that which said, like after you've been doing this for 10 years, what's next? And honestly, that concept of putting yourself in a stimulus and realizing you have a choice is a practice that you can use in any situation, you can use it while giving a podcast, you can use it while sitting in your office, you can use it while skydiving like the environment’s always offering you a choice, like every second, you have a choice. And you can pilot a lot of your life by saying is this really a danger? Is this not? And then calming your nerves in those situations. And you do that by both the internal calming nerves and then also giving yourself range of sensations like actively seeking out range in general, in any in any horizon, and anything that you do looking for range’s very, very important.
Jack Heald 36:15
This reminds me of just a weightlifting principle of progressive overload. Every session, every leg session should be just a little bit heavier, a little more weight than the previous one. And we're constantly pushing our boundaries. My oldest son does powerlifting and I went to a meet with him. And there was a guy there 70, I think he said he was 76 years old. I asked him I said how long you've been lifting. He said since I was 14. And he was there that day to attempt to set an age group record in the bench press. He was going to bench press 450 pounds as a 76-year-old man. Parenthetically, he got the weight up. But it wasn't, the judge said, whatever. In the powerlifting world, it wasn't an official lift. So, he didn't get credit for the record. But he got the weight up. I remember when my kids were, we first moved to Arizona, this is back in the mid-90s. And we took them to a place called Biosphere2. It was an outside Tucson. Yeah, outside of Tucson. It was a biological experiment where they put, I think it was seven people inside this sealed environment in an attempt to, I think that what they were attempting, what I think long term it was can we build an environment that humans can live in on another planet. But the thing that that has stuck with me from that particular visit goes back to this range thing. The proctor told us about these trees that had grown inside the biosphere. I don't remember the species. But they noted that the trees grew very fast, very straight. And they were really impressed with this beautiful environment for growing they'd created inside biosphere right up until the trees fell over under their own weight. What they realized that in the absence of wind, in the absence of these constant stressors, the trees, although they appeared to be as healthy as a tree could be, actually had no tensile strength whatsoever, and literally couldn't support their own weight. So that's a principle that apparently is woven into our biology everywhere we look, I suspect woven into more than just biology.
Scott Carney 38:57
Yeah, it's I mean, I agree that this is the concept of hormesis. Right? If you want a fancy Greek word, right, where you give subtle stresses to things to make them stronger. And one classic example of this is that if you give something a little bit of poison, not a lot of poison, just a little bit of poison, there, everything gets better about the physiology of that creature. And a famous example is arsenic on birds’ eggs, right? You put a little arsenic on the birds' eggs, and you put it in that environment and all of the birds like many more birds hatch correctly, but if you put too much, it's, obviously kill all the birds. So, it's finding the right amount of stress, right and the right amount of things that could kill you, but not overdosing on it. So, it's like, yeah, it's exactly what you're saying. It's that subtle train. It's the subtle tensions that we feel all the time because otherwise you're that tree that falls over in Biosphere 2. And that was the worst movie ever that came out of the 90s had Pauly Shore in it. And I do not recommend it.
Jack Heald 40:06
Well, if it had Pauly Shore in it, I think it goes as a don't-see, anyway. So, Phil, let's bring this thing back around to what this show is typically about, which is how to go from a state of poor health to a state of robust health.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 40:28
Exactly. And I think this can certainly play a part. So, my question for Scott would be how do you start? The people in our audience that are intrigued, should they just go jump in the cold river? Or do you build yourself up gradually? Or what are some resources? How should they get started with this?
Scott Carney 40:52
Well, everyone's different. So, you gotta go find your own way. Because there's not going to be one practice that works right for everyone. And you also can't be forced into doing something like you can't say to your wife I really want to get an ice bath and force her into the ice bath, she's not gonna say yes to this, you're gonna break up your marriage, right? But I think that you can start easy, right, there's no problem with starting easy by sitting in a warm shower, and then turning it cold. And actually, in some ways, I find that harder than anything else, because you're in this already, like, ideally comfortable environment. And then why are you going to go ruin it and actually, the swing in temperature from like, 104 degrees out of the faucet down to colder, depending on where you are on whatever the water table is at can actually be a little jarring. But it is locally available to you right now, I actually think it's better to start off in a cold shower, and then turn it warm later, like, start off with the anxiety and be like, okay, I'm gonna go in, and it's gonna be hard, and you sit there until it is sensation on your skin, right? That it's no longer an emotional reaction to it, which is the tensing the Oh, cold and, and nothing like that. It's like you're there and you sit there until it is sensation on your skin, and then you move the cold water to the part of your body that you don't want it. Wherever it is, you don't want the cold water, put the cold water there. And this is a very easy practice available that anyone who has a shower. Go into, if you're in California right now, go swim in the Pacific Ocean. If it's liquid water, it's got to be above 32, I promise you. And if it's above 32, I know you personally, you listening to me right now can handle three minutes in that in that temperature. And your goal is to be calm. And that's it. Now in addition, if you want to start building up, what I do every morning is I do three rounds of the Wim Hof breathwork, which is just look that up on YouTube, it's everywhere. But it's essentially hyperventilating, exhaling and holding your breath on the exhale. And then until you're at the point where like, oh man, I really gotta breathe, this is uncomfortable. And then you hyperventilate and you get dizzy. And then you exhale and you hold your breath, until you feel like you have to you have to go again. And then you do that three or four times. And then you hyperventilate, exhale and do push-ups, maybe as many as you can, I don't care about your form, you don’t need to be a Navy Seal, you're on your knees, don't care, whatever you want to do, but you're doing this while holding your breath, and you will realize that the push-ups are easier than you've ever tried before, like than they've ever been for you before. And this practice, I find really useful because it's very eye opening for people because they're like, oh, this was cool. Oh my god, I held my breath for two minutes. Oh my God. Isn't that amazing? And I don't think it's the time that matters. But that surprise is the doorway to a whole world of playing with sensations.
Jack Heald 44:07
I have a suspicion that we've got people who are struggling with their weight and have been for a long time listening to this. I know that is your audience. But I have a suspicion that some of those people might need this psychological lever or wedge maybe, to borrow a phrase, as a way to get started. I can see, yes, I'm a big fan of cold plunges. I was feeling crappy yesterday. I just had a bad day. Went and gotten the spa, 104 degrees, sat there for I don't know how long, and then went and got to the pool and three minutes in the pool completely redid my... Everything felt better, just everything felt better. It was like I got a burst of energy that I didn't have. I've been doing this long enough that I don't get freaked out by it most of the time. I do occasionally have one of these. Oh, crap, okay here. And when I do that, when I feel that way, I realized if I will dive into the pool, rather than walk in on the stairs, just get it over with quicker. I just...
Scott Carney 45:33
I think you're right that especially if you're talking about weight, right, there are totally metabolic things that are going on here that will help you lose weight from a metabolic perspective. But I'm actually not super interested in that. I'm more interested in the sense that you get into that cold environment, and then you realize you have control over yourself, I think that's actually more important than the sugar-burning aspects of this. Because once you start feeling you have control over some aspect of your life, your breath, your responses, that can trigger changes overall your whole body and in your whole life in general is like, look, I do this thing, and some people think it's weird, but I do this thing. And it makes me feel good, because it's gonna give you this boost of bent of like endorphins, when you go in there, and then you realize you have a tool to click it, flick over to me, I think that with weight it's funny, I've lost a fair amount of weight recently, and I don't credit it to the ice bath. I've been doing that for a while, but it's all about small changes, right? It's not about saying, look, you can lose 15 pounds in a month by never eating again, or whatever. It's about like creating habits that are sustainable. And look at where you're gonna be in a year from now, not where you're gonna be in February. And those are the things that really changed. And I think the easiest way if I was gonna give a recommendation to somebody, if anyone cared about my recommendations, which is they don't have to, it's that cut out alcohol, reduce your sugar intake, and do some sort of exercise that you like, doesn't matter what it is. Some exercise that you like that you find joy in and focus on the fun of that exercise, not whether or not you're going to get a six-pack. Focus on this is going to be fun. And for me what I've done recently, and this was like this is bananas. And this is the advantage for all of you male listeners, this is incredibly useful for you. Because you have some natural hormone in your body called testosterone, which is an unfair advantage. What I started doing in July is I would do 100 Push Ups a month. And I tried to do like the hard ones, I started 100 pushups a day and the hard ones where I sort of went inside, I went different than I usually do them. And I said I'm going to do 100 pushups a day, no matter what. And it can be one pushup at a time. And I can do that 100 times, one pushup, walk around my house and then just do that over the course of a day. And at first, like doing 10 Push-ups the hard way was really, really, really hard for me. And I would do 10 sets in the day to get to 100. Now I can do them in, in two sets to get me through to get me through my day. And honestly, the muscle changes have been bananas, and I lost like 15 pounds for with no other change in my anything that I did.
Jack Heald 48:26
Just pushups.
Scott Carney 48:28
That was it. That was all I was doing. And that I continue to and I'm like, oh my God, my wife's like, oh, you've got muscles, I'm like, I do 100 Push Ups. It's just nothing, it's nothing. And you can split it up between 8am and 8pm. It doesn't matter. It's just a thing that I did. And it actually brings me joy to do it. It's really funny.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 48:48
I'm gonna go do some push-ups in the cold-water bath and really take this next level but I mean, it's interesting that you just kind of talked about some of those concepts about making sustainable changes and recognizing that you have control over these aspects of your life. And that's certainly concepts that I talked about in my book and all the time. And I've seen so many people now that you're right, you just need to find that one area of your life to first kind of take control of and make changes and it ended up translating into so many other areas of your life. A lot of my patients, it starts with, they take control of their diet, and then everything else is getting better. And specific to this. It's amazing how many people I've seen, who start with metabolic health, low carb, whatever it is, and they end up at Wim Hof and doing cold plunges and all this other stuff, because you just keep saying to yourself what else can I take control of in my life?
Scott Carney 50:05
Look at that, you're using your consciousness to decide what sort of environment you want to create around you. And that's what we do really well. Right and, and it's just our complacency which we all have, like, we all love Netflix. White Lotus had this great season this month. I loved it, I watched, I binged the whole thing, and you don't have to give up on comfort. But yeah, you're right. It's like this beachheads, you create one beachhead and then you build on it. And you don't bite off the whole thing, and you don’t have the destination that you're trying to, you don't plan on your destination, right? You don't say, I need to look like this person, right in this magazine, or what or I need to lose 15 pounds, that goal is irrelevant to your daily practice, because you're not going to lose it in a sustainable way if things go up and down, and they change. But like, if you make that beach, this makes I like doing this, this is joyful to me, whatever it is, and if it's in a positive direction, you will build, and you will get better. And that I think is that's the adventure of being alive.
Jack Heald 51:13
I want to ask some writing nerd questions. Is that okay?
Dr. Philip Ovadia 51:18
Sure thing.
Jack Heald 51:20
What's the one book that you wish that somebody else wrote that you wish you had written?
Scott Carney 51:26
Oh, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer.
Jack Heald 51:28
Oh, that's a good one. You're kind of a Jon Krakauer type of author, aren't you?
Scott Carney 51:35
Oh, totally, very experiential. But I also would have liked to write Harry Potter and 50 Shades of Grey. And everything that Stephen King wrote.
Jack Heald 51:45
I'm taking your first answer. What's the book you haven't written yet that is percolating inside you?
Scott Carney 51:55
I'm working on four books right now. And the one that's I'm doing like next, like I should write it, probably in the next three months is on napping, and why all of us should take more naps.
Jack Heald 52:10
Here, we're talking about press your boundaries out, stretch yourself.
Scott Carney 52:15
No, not napping is a boundary too because we live in this working grind culture. And we often see napping as lazy, right, we see sleep as lazy, but sleep is restorative. And if you set time aside, specifically for napping, it's another one of these beachheads that's changes your life. And honestly, I don't even care if people read the book, as long as they look at it. And they're like, oh, yeah, I should take a nap. And I won. So that's one book. I'm working on, I’m thinking about a book about a cat parasite called toxoplasmosis. And how it may have like, made civilization as we see it. So that's an idea. And I want to write another book about the Alamo. And why Santa Ana, the at the Alamo, the guy who killed all the Texans was the hero. So that's gonna be fun.
Jack Heald 53:06
Oh, yeah. And I suggest you never go to back to Texas after that was published.
Scott Carney 53:13
I know. But getting banned in Texas would be so fun.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 53:18
Texas is a hard place to get banned from.
Jack Heald 53:21
If I remember correctly, I was looking at your at your books, you wrote one about despots, about I don't know.
Scott Carney 53:39
I wrote a book recently called The Vortex about the deadliest storm in human history.
Jack Heald 53:44
I must be thinking about somebody else.
Scott Carney 53:46
Some other dude, there are despots in that book.
Jack Heald 53:50
Yeah. Okay. Well, it got me to thinking about Santa Ana, actually. But if it wasn't you that there's no point in pursuing that particular rabbit trail? Go ahead, Phil.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 54:05
Yeah, I would love to hear the maybe because we're coming up on time here. But I'd love to hear a little bit about the organ trafficking book in the story.
Scott Carney 54:16
Yeah, that's how I got my start. I was a foreign correspondent based in India. And I discovered that a village right next door to where I was living, all the women had sold their kidneys to the local hospitals, essentially. And that triggered just a six-year investigation into all the ways that human bodies get bought and sold around the world. And we have a real problem with the way we deal with human tissues, where we have not resolved any ethical, many ethical issues with them. And there are, while the idea of donating organs and things are saving lives is a really good to save lives, right? The privacy that we have around and HIPAA with the with the idea that people are protected by medical privacy provides extremely wonderful cover for people to commit horrible crimes. And so, I covered that for six years, I met a lot of organ traffickers working in obviously, with kidneys, but also people have bought and sold human skeletons and human hair and human eggs and hold children. And this, while we have great people who do really good work in the organ network, there's also a lot of really bad people. And when you start treating human tissue as a commodity, in the legal markets, what happens is you create this, what I call a red market, where crimes really proliferate. And there's quite a bit that's going on all the time, like, there's quite a few stolen kidneys that end up in being processed by American doctors. oftentimes there's not a ton that happens in America, but oftentimes, people from America will fly to a place like Pakistan or South Africa, or Brazil or Philippines, on and on and on by and get a kidney and then are processed by the American medical system later. And it is a several billion dollar a year industry.
Jack Heald 56:22
Wow. So, Scott, what's the best way for folks to get a hold of you or get a hold of your work?
Scott Carney 56:29
Yeah, I've got a great mailing list that sort of highlights whatever I'm on in that particular week. I don't know. You can just go to my website, Scottcarney.com. And there should be a pop up. I also have a YouTube channel, which is on my website is Scottcarney.com. I have a YouTube channel, which is search it out. I don't know, it's where it is. An SG Carney at all the places like Instagram's and the Twitter's and...
Jack Heald 56:54
SGCarney at all the places,
Scott Carney 56:57
All the places. Yeah.
Jack Heald 56:59
Very good. Well, this has been fun. I would love to talk writing nerd stuff with you for a long time. That's not what this is about.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 57:11
Yeah, thank you so much for coming on. It’s a great conversation. I think it's really going to open the mind of many in our audience as to what is possible, and hopefully push them to push their limits.
Scott Carney 57:28
I love it. Well, thank you so much for having me on.
Jack Heald 57:30
Appreciate it. Well for Dr. Philip Ovadia and Scott Carney. I'm Jack Heald. This is the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast. I want to encourage you to go ahead and subscribe to the podcast on whatever your favorite podcast platform is. We drop a new episode every Tuesday. Go to Dr. Ovadia's website at ifixhearts.com and take his metabolic health quiz. Get yourself a baseline about where you really are metabolically, a good way to start and know how you need to improve. And we'll talk to you next time.
Jack Heald 58:06
America is fat and sick and tired. 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy and at risk of a sudden heart attack. Are you one of them? Go to ifixhearts.co and take Dr. Ovadia's metabolic health quiz. Learn specific steps you can take to reclaim your health, reduce your risk of heart attack and stay off Dr. Ovadia's operating table. This has been a production of 38 atoms