Welcome. I'm Kevin Miller. This is a podcast about how we make meaning of our lives and experience the miracle of living. In this episode, the benefits of high heat and discomfort.

So when a book came across my desk about the benefits of heat, my first thought was, really? We've been in the age of cold plunges

for quite a while, but now it's heat. I also wonder, does it take an entire book to explain this?

And then I saw the author. It was Bill Gifford. Bill is a veteran magazine writer and editor

who writes about extraordinary athletes and cutting edge

health science. He's co-author of the number one New York Times bestseller Outlive, which I was well

aware of. That book has sold more than two million copies, as well as the New York Times bestseller

spring chicken, stay young forever, parentheses, or die trying.

He's a long time contributing editor to outside. That's also where I know him well from.

And his works appeared in Wired, Bloomberg Business Week, Men's Health, bicycling, the Washington Post, and others, as well as in Best American Sports

Writing. He's got a book that's just come out called Hot Wired, How the Hidden Power of Heat

Makes a Stronger. And in it, he does like all great journalists and shares his personal journey

and real life experience, in this case, with

heat therapy. What I initially intrigued myself with was Bill's look into history, where we

routinely experienced long periods of high heat. You know, I mean, air conditioning wasn't

normal until the 1950s and 1960s. I remember times in the 80s of being in places, apartments that friends lived in that didn't have any air conditioning.

I mean, we always had fire, the ability to heat up an environment and put some clothes on as well.

But when it was hot, I mean, for the span of almost all existence,

we adapted to that heat. So with Bill, we are discussing the issues around our steaming

inability to deal with any discomfort like heat and how fragile we seem to be becoming in our culture. So while we can exist in

temperature controlled environments almost entirely and it may feel comfortable, is this existence

best for our overall health and well-being? So coming up next, my discussion with Bill Gifford on longevity and health and specifically

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