Rhonda: I sort of serendipitously started using the sauna when I was in graduate school, which is a very stressful time for me. And there was a sauna across the street from where I lived. And so I started using the sauna every morning before I would going to the lab and do my experiments. And I noticed that I felt really good after, and I was able to handle stress better. So I started to figure out, why is this? And so I started diving into the science and I'm trying to understand how it affects the brain. But how did you become interested in sitting in the ice or taking ice baths?

Wim: I thought there was more than meets the eye. There is more into all the system. And I was like grown up in a big family, but my, you know, school results were not so big. And everybody was into, "Hey, you have to become a doctor. You have to become this. You have to become that. Otherwise, you are lower in the system." And I thought, "No. What I feel is okay. What I feel, it's not what really I want." So I began to wonder. I began to look. Hundreds of books in psychology, philosophy. Though I was, by school system, narrowed down as being, "Yeah, you can be a carpenter. You can be a painter." And I said, "No." I knew there was something different. So I went into books. At my age of 12, I began to read about psychology already. Going into Hinduism and Buddhism and all these religions and traditions and cultures, and began to learn languages, different languages, by my own. Not by the school system.

Rhonda: By your own interest and passion for it.

Wim: Yes. And when I reached the age of 17, then my head was full up with all these philosophies and philosophying about it, all the traditions and cultures and the languages and everything, and all I did was karate and kung fu and yoga. I could do it all. All. But it still did not satisfy the depth of which I wanted to reach inside, which my mind, in the start, was looking for. And a Sunday morning, I was wandering throughout the park, and I saw this thin layer of ice on the water, and it attracted me. And I thought, I got to go in. I was looking around, nobody was there because, Sunday morning, everybody is working, you know, they have their tranquility...tranquilidad in Spanish. The have to...you know, they want to have a easy time in bed or something. So I could...take off my clothes and went in, and it just, in one minute, I felt the sense I'm really going deep in. This is really responding to the soul searching I did for many years before, and about that what I think is there is more than meets the eye, I found it at that moment. And I came out, and I felt great. And from there it all started to... Whenever you feel great, you come back. So the other day, I came back, and then once again, once again. And I noticed that the pattern of the breathing changed. It changed, and it brought me more oxygen inside the body, being able to withstand the cold, say, for 20 minutes, ice cold, huh? Ice water, and then stay for five to seven minutes under the water. And it brought me a sense of tremendous power within. A control. I was looking for that. That's the way it all began.

From there, I began to do my own study of life itself. And yes, it brought me to all kinds of challenges. Staying in shorts, no t-shirt, no nothing, just in freezing temperatures all night out. The human potential of his physiology is far beyond than what we exercise right now. And because of this comfort zone way of thinking, we think we can control nature, but we do not control the inner power anymore, which is the physiology, which goes far deeper than we exercise right now, which causes all these diseases, all the depressions, all the lack of oxygen. The right chemistry in the body is not there, causing all these ailments. And we have no control. And yeah, right now we have found the techniques, and we brought it back to the laboratory setting, showed that everybody is able just to tap into their deepest levels of their physiology, which is the autonomic nervous system, related to the immune system, related to the endocrine system, which means the immune system is the health. The layers of the immune system after millions of years are really perfect, but if you do not tap in, you're not making use of these immune systems. Another one is the endocrine system about glands, the hormones. If you don't feel good, if you don't feel happy, make some happy hormones working. If you don't feel strong, you feel weak and...make some strong hormones working. We have shown people lying in bed producing, it's all science now, producing within a half hour, more adrenaline than somebody in fear going for a bungee jump. Comparative study of blood results. So the endocrine system, the immune system, just in a couple of days, we are able to access, every individual in the world therein. And we've got to spread this news!