Dan and Gus, thank you so much for being on the show. I’m excited about this conversation. I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time. I got to experience the domes a couple of days ago. I get to speak from experience here, which is fun for me. I’d love to dive in and start with you, Dan. I’d love to hear and for our audience to know the origin story of the domes. How did this come about? How did you come up with it?

The long story or the short story?

Maybe a medium. Let’s go medium.

I can try to sum it up. I started a healthcare company years ago, and we sold that to WebMD way back in 2003. At one point in time, we were the largest producer of healthcare claims in the United States. I noticed a trend in those claims, which bothered me. That was that every time you had a claim, there were associated symptoms. Symptoms had CPT codes, and all CPT codes had associated pharmaceuticals with them.

It seemed to be exemplifying this trend in healthcare, where we’re treating symptoms like a whack-a-mole instead of a holistic approach. That led me to investigate the healthcare system and look for errors, and come to a realization. I work with people from Harvard who were trying to get down to the root cause analysis of all health, and a person who wrote a book on Alzheimer’s.

At that point in time, the conclusion was that inflammation was at the core of all problems. After going through that for a couple of years with that person, I realized it’s not inflammation, it’s the processing of inflammation. If we process things, we’re healthy. If we don’t process, we accumulate. It’s the accumulation of inflammation that led to things.

Why do some people process and others don’t process? That led to the realization that we are much less chemical beings and we’re more electrical beings. Our brains have electrical patterns to them. Our nervous system has electrical patterns. Even at the cellular level, it’s called the Cellular Action Potential. It’s an electrical system. When all of the electrical systems are operating properly, we process stressors. Nothing in our healthcare system addresses that. That’s what led me to deep dive and try to figure out what we can do to process.

Wim Hof came out a few years ago, and he started to explode. I realized that he’s missing half the equation, which is that if you’re going to introduce the cold, you’ve got to have the heat too. It led me to experiment a lot with the cold plunges and what other heat mechanisms go with it.

I experimented from hot water to saunas, which a lot of people use. I realized that steam was something special because it allowed you to transition between the hot and the cold in a lot easier way. Unlike Wim Hoff or some of the other people who are doing ice baths, the goal is not necessarily this hyper-stress ice bath environment, but we’re trying to relax that sympathetic response to try to calm down that nervous system. It is based on a simple theory that if we calm the cells, we calm the nerves, which calms the brain.

When we calm all three, we switch from sympathetic mode to parasympathetic mode. When we’re in parasympathetic mode, we heal ourselves. It was a lot of testing to figure out, after a while, that while there is a protocol you can do that can calm that system down and go to a parasympathetic mode, and we can get there and eliminate a huge chunk of pharma that people use.

I was trying to solve a big problem because right now, about 60 million people are over-prescribed pharma or over-diagnosed, which then leads to pharma that they don’t need. What everybody is seeking is this reset. If we reset the nervous system, we can get back to a state of homeostasis, and then we can live our lives in a better way instead of relying on pharma. Eventually, pharma starts to backfire sometimes or a lot because our bodies start to react to the pharma.

We’re taking something that ends up causing the very problems we’re trying to prevent. I say that from the concept of neuropathways, our brain plasticity. Whatever ails us, we start to wire our brains in a way that supports that ailment because it’s a natural defense mechanism. How we react and adjust to the environment is that we start to write neural pathways for that reaction.

We participate in what ails us. If we can reset the brain, reset the nervous system, and we can do it in a way we can relax, that is a necessary precursor to rewiring the brain. That combination allows us to heal ourselves, which we see so often happens during trials and things in the healthcare industry. When we do trials, we always have this earmark. We’ve got to get rid of the placebo effect.

The placebo effect doesn’t have anything to do with the drug, but we don’t ever ask the question, “Why did the placebo effect work?” The reason it works is that we believe it. If we believe it, we can start to rewrite our neural pathways, and we start to achieve it. It’s dawned on me that if we can use them as a way to force that calmness, force that reset, we can do the number one thing that creates health, which is rewrite the neural pathways to change ourselves. Not only change ourselves chemically and enzyme-wise and all that, but more importantly, change the very habits that put us in that situation. I don’t know if that was a long answer or a short answer.

Combining Steam And Cold Plunge

That was perfect. Explain to us how you came up with the actual dome with the cold plunge and the steam room together in one space? How does that help us rewire those neural pathways and allow us to go into that parasympathetic state and process inflammation? What we’re doing in the dome is we’re allowing ourselves to process inflammation.

Yes, it’s processing. When we started experimenting, it was walking back and forth, as simple as it may be. You have days when it’s cold outside, and it’s overcast. You have these steamers inside the house, which aren’t very great for the house, and you’re walking back and forth. As simple as it may sound, that walk is a task. It’s easy to quit. That’s the bottom line. When it’s all integrated in one dome, you don’t have an excuse.

This is after months and months of doing it. One day, I said, “Guys, let’s keep going back and forth. Keep going back and forth and see what happens.” About the fifth time, I’m sitting in the steam room and understand, I have a chronic condition, by the way. I have a hyperactive nervous system. We’re sitting in the steam room, and I’m like, “I’m calm. I haven’t felt this calm in years.” I knew I had something. I was like, “I’ve got to figure out how to duplicate that every time.”

That led to the idea that we’ve got to put them together, so take away all the excuses that prevent us from doing the 4 or 5 dips back and forth that get us to that state. That was the impetus to create the dome and to put it outside in nature. Now we can create an environment where we’re not only experiencing this for the first time or second time we do it, but the more we do it, we’re teaching our brain to do it more and more. It’s a reinforcement. It’s a cumulative effect. When you go back and when we go in the domes, now I can walk in a dome, take one breath, and my body starts to relax. My body is trained.

I’ve had the experience of being in the domes. For our audience, so they know, it’s a dome-shaped room with the cold plunge in the middle. Steam is about 125 degrees within the dome. The cold plunge is around 45 to 55 degrees. Is there something special about 4 or 5 dips, and how long those dips are? Gus, you can talk about this a little bit, too, because we did this together a couple of days ago. How did you stumble upon or figure out the right duration of dips and how many dips to do, and is there a science to it?

I’ll let Gus talk in a minute. You’ve noticed the temperature gauge was down low. That’s by design. Up high, it’s even hotter than 125. You can get up to 140 or so. You can individually adjust. Sit down lower, and it’s cooler and easier. The combination of putting the water in there, the steam in there, the shape of the dome, and then speakers in there too, which you may not experience with Gus because he was talking you through it. The speakers are important because now we’re generating meditative-type music at certain frequencies that also assist in creating that relaxation of the brain.

It’s a combination of all those things that creates the experience. That’s as far as I took it. I know I have something besides the physical healing. I’ve never seen so many people who have come out and said they had a spiritual experience in the dome, which was fascinating to me. Gus is the person who dove into the details of how to turn this into a protocol? How does that protocol apply to a chronic disease? Marriage counseling, somebody who might have an addiction. He’s the one who started diving in deep to figure that out. That’s why he’s here.

Thank you. To answer that, I would say that I like applying a lot of the scientific method. You start with one thing. As I shared with you the first time, I thought I was going to die. I had plunged before. I used to start with cold showers. You go in with lots of ice. As an athlete, you’re used to the cold water and everything. The first time I came in, you couldn’t breathe. If you have never been in a steam room that hot, your nose will hurt. You’re like, “I cannot breathe.” Right now, you are starting to work on oxygen deprivation, but you’re there for the water, and you’re like, “This is the heat, and I feel good and I don’t want to step out, but I’m having a hard time breathing.”

When I got into the water, that shock of being in the water brought my heart rate up so high. Now, your entire sympathetic system goes into a fight-or-flight. If you are not used to it, it gives you the sensation that the room starts spinning. Your brain is like, “Get out. It’s time for you to get out. You’ve got to get out.” I’m like, “I don’t want to.” I couldn’t do it. I asked for help and I was helped out of the domes. Dan was around. He was like, “Are you good?” I’m like, “I think so.” He is like, “Take it easy.” The people that I was with in the dome calmed me down, helped me relax, and helped me breathe. I felt this need to go back in there.

It was like a voice telling me to go back in. For the next two hours, I was getting in the water, back in the steam, and getting in. I came home and I told my wife, “Becky, you’ve got to do this with me next week because I felt amazing.” That day, I went home and I took the greatest nap I’ve ever taken. It was like three hours long in the middle of the day. It was amazing. I felt renewed. I have an inquisitive mind, like, “Why? Why did I almost die? Why didn’t I die? What’s going on with the body? Why did I feel this good? Why did I nap?” I was dealing with all these ailments at the time, and it started building into why this thing happened. I got so curious.

Scientific method, it’s like, ‘Next week, I’m going to bring my watch. How long can I be there?” You start looking at all this research that people have done, or the podcast, and I’m like, “That’s a method that talks about the breathing.” The goal was to let me stay in the water as long as I could. Now I break it into little pieces. What happens to the body when I break it into little pieces, and then compare it to other people’s experiences? That created the first protocol, which is the dome, which is getting in the water. 

For most people, it’s like, “I hate cold water. I hate cold.” Not really. If you have ever skied, you have been on at least 32-degree water. The setting is different. The whole idea was to have the body work in the uncomfortable. Through many years of research, one of my favorite things, especially when applied to training, is that we get better when we’re in chaos. You can train all your life, you can practice all your life, but nothing beats the game where you have to work hard to catch the ball, but somebody there doesn’t want you to catch the ball. That’s when you put it into that sensation, that elation that happens when you catch the ball. It moves on to like, “Let’s do it again.” Now you start with the winning and the losing. That led to the next one.

The first time was like, “I’m feeling great,” and then now I’m in the water and I feel like a polar bear in the water for 25 minutes non-stop. Something happened, and I stopped focusing. I’m like, “This is bad,” because now this place where I feel so nice and so calm, it’s not that place anymore, but I love coming in. What’s happening now is I break those 25 minutes into chunks. When I started bringing those 25 minutes into chunks, I started getting great control. With the original three dips, I was very hungry, and I wanted to eat a cow, like I said. After the five ones, I didn’t need to eat the cow anymore. I’m like, “Why do I not need to eat the cow?” You start finding out that what happens in the water and what happens in the cold is that your body is going to ultimately create a huge dopamine response.

If you are eating because you are being trained to eat, then that’s what you’re all going to do. When you start doing the five dips and suddenly, that dopamine is there and it’s already filled up that need to eat, then now you don’t need to eat the whole cow. You just need to eat a steak, and that’s a good thing. You start applying that to the next thing. I start finding out what the plunge does physically and what it does to those stressors.

If you bring those stressors that Dan was talking about down, then good things have to come up. Those things start coming up, so your body starts reacting differently. You are now getting dopamine that is not coming from alcohol, pharma, drugs, or food. Whatever addiction you need to get to, that dopamine is not being produced by a foreign substance in your brain. You are producing it inside an environment.

You step out of the domes, and you are so calm, so quiet, your life feels better, your cortisol levels come down, you are feeling high. That led me to the next investigation. How much dopamine do you produce? I found out that it’s 400 times more dopamine in the heat, and it triggers heat shock protein, and then 315 times more dopamine in the cold, through the body rushing into ketosis. In an hour session, you can have 700 times more dopamine. That’s huge.

There are different protocols that you can go through when you’re having the domes experience. Most of the time, it’s 4 or 5 dips of 4 or 5 minutes each.

Once you get comfortable with the original one, which most people do because they get so excited. The first one is designed for you to change your mindset. That’s what we did the other day. Beat the dome. It’s like, I like the water for a minute. The research shows that it takes 90 seconds for your body to go beyond the gas reflex, which is when you have a control spike of adrenaline. That means that now, as adrenaline goes up, your cortisol level has to come up to top it, and then both levels start coming down. Now your body, after 90 seconds, starts thinking, “I didn’t die. I’m okay. This is good. Alright, let me shake a little.”

Those extra 90 seconds are for you to move that warning in your brain, “I need to get out.” You did something that you didn’t think you were capable of. Those three minutes tend to be a little bit longer when you’re plunging, and then you’re like, “This is awesome. I did three more minutes than most people ever. This is great.”

The second one is like one minute more than what you did in the first one. Not just for pushing, but also because physically, what happens is that now your body starts to learn that it’s okay to be in the chaos. The third one, you go in, and that one means that your body can work through the chaos. You reestablish organ function. Now your gas reflex, that huge control adrenaline that happens once the cortisol levels, both of them, now stay low.

Now we have a conversation in the last one. The moment you step off the water, you’re like, “I killed it.” That’s a great thing. Joe Rogan said cold is the hardest thing you’re going to do all day. That’s why he starts with a cold plunge in the morning. It’s the hardest thing. You start with that, and you’re ready to take him to whatever task, which is awesome.

I think it’s important to note, too, that Gus has got a few different protocols. We’ve got a lot of Russians. The Russians think we’re crazy because they’re like, “Why do you guys do the cold?” They use it for the heat. They go on there for the heat, and they dip in the cold to get a little bit of refresher, but then they’re back in the heat, which is a totally different kind of enzymes when you’re pushing it that high level heat than when you’re pushing into the cold. It’s interesting. The other thing I should mention about the whole domes is that it’s not an individual effort. We design them purposely. It’s 3 or 4 people can go in there, and the social aspect of it is as important as everything else.

Again, talking about that neuroplasticity, they’ve done studies and they prove that when you’re doing group activity, compared to individual therapy, for example, the efficacy is 25% to 30% higher because of the group activity. We started doing some magic around a little community because we started developing a community of domers. It has been amazing that these people are connecting in the domes. They haven’t met each other. When you get in there, you’re getting in the cold water in front of other people. It breaks down all the walls. Nobody is pretending anymore. You can’t do that.

People see each other, and there’s this communal aspect that is very cool, very amazing, which is one of the reasons I was starting my nonprofit in the first place. It was to set out and to try to create something good for health, but it can also create cultural change. When you see these communities, you see people that are meeting each other for the first time, and then coincidences start happening, bizarre connections that are magic that come from a source that’s bigger than us. That’s cool to me.

That’s amazing. I got to experience that. Gus and I never met each other, and then we spent an hour in the domes, and now I feel like we’re great friends.

I think the best part of bringing so many people to the dome experience is that everybody reacts differently. Your brain is so busy trying to warm up that the BS shield has to come up because it’s so busy trying to warm you up. If somebody said, “Honey, you’re going to be okay.” “Don’t talk to me.” Most people are like, “What happened? That’s not this person.” You just let go. My favorite part is that you’re still conscious of how you reacted. On that second plunge or the third plunge, “I’m sorry for the way I reacted the first time.” You are giving yourself self-knowledge, too. It’s amazing the things that I have been able to witness while being in the dome. It has been spectacular.

At the beginning, some of the protocols are designed for the heat to help you get in the cold. Later on, through that scientific method, I found out that the heat is its own therapy, and then the cold is its own therapy. You have both extremes, then now you have the balance. You’re getting the most out of them. The stuff that happens in between is cool to see.

You and I could cold plunge if you come in another day. The room is full of strangers, or I invite a couple of other people, and everybody is there to see you win. It’s so cool because everybody claps or like, “Yeah, good job, man. That was great.” When the time kept getting longer and longer, you got support from the next person you just met. You’re all embedded in suits. This is even better. You know that you can be naked. It’s awesome.

It’s like, “He did three and a half minutes. Let me know when he is 3 minutes, 45 seconds, please.” “Okay, let’s do this.”

Training Your Body For The Reset

I think, too, when we were in the other day, our first dip was about 3 or 4 minutes, then we were in the steam for about 5 minutes, then we went back for like 6 minutes. We sat in the steam for maybe another 5 minutes, then we did 11 minutes for our last dip. I felt like, because my head was out of the water and still in the steam, it was easier to stay in the cold water longer. Is there something to that as well?

Yeah, that’s the whole experience. It’s interesting because a lot of people are doing saunas and cold plunges. It’s too bad that that took off like it did, because when your body starts to cool down and you go sit in a sauna, if you do want to go back and forth, it doesn’t work because when you go sit in the sauna, your body is cooled down. You quit sweating, and then your skin feels like it’s burning.

It’s not a fun experience. You’re starting to rewire your neural pathways the other way. It says that’s not that fun. You need that 3 or 4 times to get that breakdown because the real goal that is for health is stopping the sympathetic and building that bridge to parasympathetic. With that being the goal, you don’t want to create those stressors. You want to have something that progresses to the same end goal. It’s fundamentally different.

There’s no data on this, but from early on, because I did studies with the sauna people, I know from personal experience, the adoption rate is 3 or 4 times for people who use the domes with the integrated steam, because of that. As I said, it’s a cumulative benefit. You’re training your brain that, “I like this.” Whenever you feel sick or a little off, it’s like, “I need to go back and do a reset.” For longevity and health, that’s exactly what we need. That’s something that reinforces not only the reset of the nervous system, but also then rewrites the neural pathways for the benefit of that reset.

I can’t wait to go back myself. It’s been a couple of days. I’ve been experiencing that and can’t wait to take you guys and my family.

You guys killed it. I think you’re ready for the next one. The next one should be a little bit more challenging. I’m looking for the challenge. It’s not like, “It is too easy for you. I’m going to make it harder for you.” No. It’s the same thing that happened to me. Once you own that first one, then now we can concentrate on like, “How can I get the most out of it while I’m here, and what is it going to do?” That’s what the protocols are, and they’re happening.

They’re helping with craving testosterone production, obviously calming people a lot more. There’s one that helped me and my family again to boost our immune system. There’s one where Wim Hof talks about deep core memories. We were able to unlock the deep co memories in the heat and with the cold, and the resolution, it’s incredible.

Certain things that he mentioned, he’s taken couples in there.

It’s couples therapy.

That’s the one that I was talking about, where he goes, “Just stop talking to me. I can’t hear Gus.” At the end, he’s like, “I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to yell at you.” Also, it’s a beautiful metaphor. I had a couple that went in, and you’re in it together. You are in a struggle together. Both of you are cold, and one of them is going to have to help the other, or both of you’re going to have to feed off each other. Nobody is going to get out, but you are going into it, and that’s life. In life, you go through chaos together. You’re not quitting. The thing about the domes, too, is that the door is there. The door is unlocked. You can walk out any time you want.

If this is too much for you, you can go. When you’re with somebody that you love, it’s different. You’re looking at each other and like, “We got this, honey.” That’s life. It’s stuff happening in your life, with your children, with your family, whatever. “We got this, honey. Let’s do this, babe.” That’s an amazing thing. You see them hugging again and like, “We did this, we killed this.” It’s awesome.

Children with their parents, too. That has been a cool breakthrough as well. Sometimes, the position of a parent is the authority and everything, and sometimes they’re lying to the kid to give you that support, or the dad or the mom is like, “We got this. Let’s do this.” It’s awesome. It builds. It’s doing something good, something healthy, and building each other up.

On a very serious note, one of the reasons this is all in our non-profit that we want to commercialize, but when you look at some stats of our healthcare industry. Some people will call it sick care. It’s like 17 to 22 veterans die every day from suicide, that’s every single day, from PTSD. When you get up to mental health, there are 135 people a day who commit suicide from mental health disorders.

When you get into substance abuse, that number jumps to 290 every single day. Every day, people are dying from substance abuse disorders and overdoses. When you get to chronic disease, chronic disease is chronic. It’s something that is preventable through a lifestyle change. It’s a whopping 4,600 people who die a day from diseases, which can be preventable.

That’s some of the stuff early on that drove me crazy because things like statins or hypertension, those two are acutely something that can be fixed pretty quickly through the domes. It’s about heart rate regulation that is driven off of the sympathetic response. We calm the system, calm the brain, calm the cells, we reset that. This is another realization early on. I was doing the dome with two different people. One person started out the week at 180 over 130 blood pressure. Something high. Another gal was opposite. She was like 90 over 60, low. At the end of the week, he went down like this, and she went up. Same dome, same experience. That proved to me that it’s a regulator.

It resets the system for what we’re supposed to be naturally, without any drugs. I was like, we’ve got to commercialize this everywhere because when we start to rely on pharmaceuticals to try to do what our electrical system can do for us, or make a fundamental mistake compared to what we can do naturally. It’s not just the physical body. I’ve had a guy who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He goes, “After I’ve been doing these domes for a few months, I no longer have this diagnosis.”