I Called Saunas a Scam — Here’s What Changed My Mind (Pt.1)

I used to think saunas were a total scam. I didn’t trust the marketing, I didn’t believe the hype, and I definitely wasn’t about to drop thousands of dollars on something I wasn’t sure even worked. So I built my own setup with heat lamps and a dowel rod in my shower and tried to see for myself.

What happened next is what changed everything — not just how I felt physically, but how I think about detox, inflammation, and recovery. This is the full story of how I went from a total skeptic to someone who’s now tested over 40 different saunas and owns more than 30 units.

If you’re on the fence about whether saunas actually do anything, this might give you a new way to look at it.

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Transcript

Yeah, I haven’t tried everything, and I’ve been wrong before. I’m sure it’s not the last time I’ll be wrong about something, but I’m very persistent. I’m pretty diligent about getting to the bottom of stuff. Why shouldn’t someone trust me?

That’s a hard question to answer. I’m not a scientist. I’m not a doctor. However, I see some people who are doctors, or at least doctors of chiropractic, giving sauna or detox advice on YouTube that is wrong.

And you would only know that if you had enough experience or have done it yourself the wrong way and had not a great time with it, to know that there might be another way or a better way. The way I interpret PubMed studies or other doctor recommendations, I suppose there could be margin for error.

Generally, my stance comes from my own personal experience, either trying it myself and or combined with feedback from thousands of other people who I’ve interacted with over the years, doing detox protocols, having various health issues, kind of developing an internal barometer for somebody has X condition. Generally, most of the feedback is if they do this, this, and this, they get a decent outcome.

They’re better off than they were before. And a lot of times you might hear me say, in my opinion, you know, this is all opinion, that is better than going to the doctor and trying medications that either aren’t working for them. And I guess you could say, you might not want to trust that or take it at face value because not every person is the same.

And you should always do your own research, make your own choices for yourself. Never let anyone talk you into anything that’s not right for you. Whether it be me, you know, suggesting something, another person, a salesperson trying to sell you stuff. If it’s not within your means, not within your budget, it’s not a good fit for your household or.

or whatever the goal is that you’re trying to accomplish, you know, obviously you don’t do it. I’m pretty clear about that, though. I don’t do hard pushes for stuff, usually, unless I see somebody just spinning their wheels and it’s like, dude, you just get off the pot. It’s time.

You know? You do what’s best for you in situations as far as signs go. And so- You mean me using them? Yes.

Yeah. But I have choice now. I didn’t always have choice. For one thing, I’m in a different financial position now than I was 10 years ago.

You know, a lot of seeds that I planted bloom. I don’t understand why people don’t realize that, actually. Even the Sonic companies themselves. Everyone’s like, oh, how does Matt make money with this stuff?

Well, I always try to make money with everything that I do so that it’s tax advantage, right? If you do stuff that’s in an entity and it’s a for-profit business or something, it doesn’t really matter how much money you make. If you’re getting things in your lifestyle that are tax advantaged, I mean, I don’t want to spell it out in this type of thing.

It’s a different sort of topic. I think we would alienate the viewers, but no one’s asking themselves, well, how did he have money to buy all this stuff in the first place? Because one thing to start a side business to try to make money with it, you still have to purchase all the equipment.

None of the companies that I originally reached out to just handed me Sonos. They didn’t- No one gave me one. I had to buy them. But I was going to do it anyway because of my own health challenges.

So I didn’t have an HSA. I wasn’t able to take pre-tax money and buy stuff. None of this was covered by health insurance. And I’m like, okay.

But I am a hundred percent committed to getting myself better. And this is the path that I think I need to go down because everything else that I’ve tried so far didn’t work. Yeah, I used to have chronic sinus infections and wanted to do like a, you know, the next step was to do whatever that surgery is.

I did a bunch of research and I was like, well, most of the people that do it doesn’t work. Year later, they’re back in the same position. So I was looking for alternatives. Most of the alternatives that I was interested in were thousands and thousands of dollars.

So I was trying to figure out a way, but you know, I had prior business experience.

So in my mind, I was like, well, wait a second, I could start a little side business. I already do blogging. I already want to teach, you know, business owners how to do local lead gen and things like that. I’ve got 15 years of experience with it.

Why don’t I myself do exactly that? You know what I do for other people, but for me, who cares if I make money with it, then I can put a little money in to start the business and buy all this and we’ll use it for media production. Meanwhile, it’s like owning a retail store.

Like if you owned a gym and you had sauna, cold plunge, float tank, or cryotherapy, when the gym is closed, it’s not during normal hours of operation. Is it an issue if you use that equipment personally? How are you going to talk about this equipment if you don’t know?

Right. So you got to use it. So I viewed doing this the same way in the beginning, but it’s different now. Like now what I mean is now I have choice.

I can pick or choose any equipment that I want. I have more access to stuff, more financial means to do different stuff if I think it’s really advantageous. A lot of seeds that I planted 10 years ago came to fruition and things changed. You didn’t know me back then though.

You would never know that I was the biggest skeptic ever of sauna. Really? Yes. Big.

Big, big. I remember that I was paying like $400 a session to go to this functional medicine doctor lady and all we would do is sit down for 45 minutes and review my labs, my blood work. She would do hair mineral analysis and a few other things. It was part of a clean heart protocol where we would do muscle testing.

I don’t know if you know what that is, but basically you’re doing muscle testing against certain supplements to have a gauge of whether or not your body responds positively to them. Here we are years later and I don’t know if I subscribe 100% to that methodology. There’s a few quirks with it that are kind of out there and could be wrong.

The point is, she was the one that was telling me, hey, based on your labs.

told me over and over for months, you really need to be using infrared sauna. You gotta get in a sauna like yesterday. That’s the way she put it. And I’m like, yeah, but there’s thousands of dollars.

I really don’t know if this shit’s gonna help me. And I was suffering at the time. She kept telling me and she’s like, okay, you know, we’ll do whatever you have to do to, and that’s how I started. So at first I went and rented a session in Baldwin Park at the float tank place.

Paid like $45, whatever it is for an hour. And then I still wasn’t convinced. I felt better, but I was like, I tried. Dude, I tried to buy one and I got sucked up into some Facebook group and with some guy.

And he was like, oh, you know, clear light’s the only thing on the planet that could ever do you any good. And back then I was like, but I didn’t even know what that was. Like what the hell is a clear light? Like it didn’t mean anything to me.

All I knew was the guy wanted $5,500 for some, you know, a two person sauna. It was supposed to be amazing. And I was like, yeah, I don’t think so. So what I did was I went to the store, Home Depot, and I bought a three foot, one inch dowel rod.

And I ordered some clamp lights, some heat lamp enclosures from the internet, from some light store. So I went and I bought these. Obviously not a TheraBulb. I wasn’t about to spend $25 per bulb.

I bought the cheapest bulbs that you can get for reptiles. So basically I bought. Yeah, dude, I bought five or six of these. And I had a little dowel rod.

I don’t know if anybody’s ever seen this before. What I did was I would disassemble the clamp light and I would drill holes in this and I screwed it to a dowel rod. And I made a little thing where you could take a string and screw it onto the shower handle.

So I had a shower that you could block off with insulation. I got a piece of insulation board. So I would get in my shower. I would screw this to the shower handle.

I would take an extension cord, put it in there. I put a wooden stool. Well, dude, I wasn’t convinced. I was like, I don’t think this is gonna help me.

And I’ll just have five grand. You know, I’m gonna have-

takes five grand out of my savings or retirement in order to buy this thing or put it on a credit card which I didn’t want to do and my finances you know weren’t as strong as they should have been and so I would sit in the sauna put a piece of insulation board over the hole and then screw this to the to the shower handle you know and try not to turn the shower on while the electrical was draped on the floor and I would sit on a stool and I would do my therapy that was that was my version of rebellion of I’m not gonna spend money to buy this stuff because I didn’t believe in it yet and it was in hindsight it was short-sighted because I’ll never get that time back I should have just spent the money