Not saying you are wrong, but I'd like to see some evidence on that. Just because your heart is pumping faster doesn't mean your cardio fitness is getting better. Otherwise we could all just snort cocaine and skip the gym. Alcohol does that too, anyone with a fitness tracker can check that.
Athletes already know the answer from years of cultural knowledge, research, and firsthand experience. No, it doesn't make your cardio fitness meaningfully better. If you did sauna training for years and then tried to ramp up for a marathon, you'd be hopelessly out of shape.
Endurance athletes obsessively track VO2 max, basically your body's ability to consume oxygen during workouts, and it certainly doesn't improve with sauna training.
It's like asking "if you only did puzzles, would you be smarter?" Well, in a way, yes, but if you actually want to compete with someone with a good education you have to read.
Same with physical exercise. It puts a lot of different stresses on your body that saunas don't. The question isn't "do saunas make you physically fit," because they don't. The question is "for people who don't want to exercise, does sauna training alone meaningfully extend your healthspan?" I'm guessing the answer is "a little but not enough," but I'm not sure.
Cardio of course is short for "cardiovascular system," which consists of a whole lot of moving parts. Saunas improve some parts of it but certainly not all of it.
Will fixing up your radiator fix your car? Maybe, if the radiator was the problem, but there's a lot of other stuff inside a car to work on, too.
Your body evolved under the expectation that it would be stressed in numerous different ways, but those stressors can all be avoided in the modern era. If you want to most reliably recreate those stresses you need to do cardio and resistance training.
A light treadmill session won't do much to improve your cardiovascular system health either. I mean it's better than nothing but don't expect too much.
Moreover, I'm from a very hot and humid tropical region. Its normal to ne 40°C with 80% humidity there. And you dont see people having better health or longevity (Yucatan peninsula) .
Right, it's just that a sauna at 60 degrees is not warm, it's cold. Take a shower, go into the sauna at 60 degrees C, and it'll feel cold. Nothing happens in a sauna until you're getting near 80, and it's much better if you go somewhat higher (90 or more for active users). 60 is when a sauna will be closed off in public baths because there's a technical problem somewhere.
But that would be like exercise all the time which may not be optimal. (Not saying the theory holds that sauna equals exercise, but if it does, sauna all the time may not be great. Plus, there may be other confounding factors with living in various locations.)
The great but not super healthy Mexican diet might offset the potential heat exposure benefits! Although I’m basing that on the diet of my Monterrey-based in-laws, not sure how different Yucatan is.
I think it will be more similar to the cloud. I remember people predicted that once you move to the cloud, you'll realize how expensive it actually is, but the cost of migration back will be high. While, yes, the cloud is expensive, most people realized that it is kinda worth it.
There are even people who listen to music at home! They even buy expensive speakers just for this purpose =) I listen to music pretty much all the time except when I talk to other people and sleep.
I got insanely more productive with Claude Code since Opus 4.5. Perhaps it helps that I work in AI research and keep all my projects in small prototype repos. I imagine that all models are more polished for AI research workflow because that's what frontier labs do, but yeah, I don't write code anymore. I don't even read most of it, I just ask Claude questions about the implementation, sometimes ask to show me verbatim the important bits. Obviously it does mistakes sometimes, but so do I and everyone I have ever worked with. What scares me that it does overall fewer mistakes than I do. Plan mode helps tremendously, I skip it only for small things. Insisting on strict verification suite is also important (kind of like autoresearch project).
I grew up in Siberia where it gets cold down to -40C (coincidentally it's also -40F). I don't recall power going out for more than a few seconds. 24h without power or heating sounds batshit crazy for me. If it's a regular occasion it means either the infrastructure is outright non-existent or it gets literally blown up like in Ukraine. Same goes for shoveling snow. Yeah, I did it. Probably about 5 times in 20 years.
> Have we? It feels like a lot of stuff in my life is unnecessarily expensive or hard to afford.
We have, yes. If you notice things to be too expensive it's a result of class warfare. Have you noticed how many people got _obscenely rich_ in the last 25 years? Yes, that's where money saved by technology went to.
2 well identifiable classes in western societies are landlords vs renters, where the latter is paying a huge chunk of their income to be able to use an appreciating asset of the former.
This class thing is especially identifiable in Europe, where assets such as real estate generally are not cheaper than in the US (with the exception of a few super expensive places), yet salaries are much lower.
Taxes tend to be super high on wages but not on assets. One can very easily find themselves in a situation where even owning a modest amount of wealth, their asset appreciation outdoes what they can get as labor income.
reply