Hello my fellow cold-shocking mitochondrial loving listeners. In this podcast I speak with my friend

Ray Cronice, a former NASA material scientist and co-founder of Zero Gravity, a company that offers

weightless parabolic flights to consumers and researchers. The interesting thing about this

interview isn't strictly Ray's professional background however, but instead his propensity towards

aggressive self-experimentation. In fact, this podcast was recorded on the tail end of a rather

extreme 23 day water fast. Ray brings this sort of rigor into his personal life that most people

would only reserve for the professional world, even going so far as to buy and set up an indirect

calorimeter in his home in order to quantify the effects various dietary experiments have on his

metabolism. While Ray is quick to note that his lifestyle may be socially perceived as extreme,

whether we're talking about sleeping without blankets in the winter or fasting for days on end,

in fact exposure to these brief biological stressors may actually be biologically normal because

from an evolutionary perspective, humans certainly would have been exposed to famine and the occasional

temperature extreme without the modern comforts of heating and air conditioning that we enjoy now.

In this two hour podcast Ray and I discussed a great number of our common interests, including

all things related to health span fasting, cold-shock. In addition we talk about fasting, a lot about

fasting, since of course Ray was doing some serious water fasting leading up to this conversation.

We also talk quite a bit about cold-shocking the body. Shifting one's perspective from looking at

nutrition only through the lens of meeting day-to-day nutritional needs and instead also considering

optimizing metabolism for longer term effects as well. The importance of thinking about longevity in

the context of functional health span, how evolutionary history might explain why occasional

periods of caloric deprivation seem to be beneficial at this cellular level, both some of our mutual

anecdotes about the effects of cold stress and heat stress, as well as what some of the scientific

...