Welcome to this episode of Sauna Talk recorded on multiple sauna benches at the Culture of Bathing Sauna Village in New York City. I'll keep this introduction brief as we turn the microphone over to four pillars behind the second annual Culture of Bathing gathering. This year, the gathering was layered adjacent to the opening of New York Cities first sauna village. A village of 15 architecturally-distinct saunas set along the Williamsburg waterfront.

Featuring:

Mikkel Aaland: The Godfather of Sweat

Cosmin-Nicolae Cîrîc: King of the Sauna Experience

Robert Hammond: President and Chief Strategy Officer, Therme Group US, United States

Adam Bamba Tanaka: Chief Operating Officer, Therme Group US

Event Info:

Culture of Bathing Sauna Village, New York City NY

15-17 saunas, NEW YORK'S FIRST EVER SAUNA FESTIVAL

DOMINO PARK, WILLIAMSBURG

FEBRUARY 12 — MARCH 1, 2026

7AM TO 10PM DAILY.

More information is here.

Today's episode comes to you from the recent West Coast Sauna Summit, outside Vancouver BC Canada, where I had the honour of interviewing Mikkel Aaland, the Godfather of Sweat, live in front of a packed room of thermal enthusiasts.

It's no secret that Mikkel has been a mentor to me, in sweat, in sauna, and in life. What I've always admired is his refusal to stay inside the box. Instead, he works the edges of it, where things are more interesting, more impactful, and where real change actually happens.

In this conversation, we dig into three ideas that are front and center for him right now:

• Sauna Aid,
• A different operating model for bathhouse owners and aspiring saunapreneurs,
• And sustainability through his three-pillar approach to the sweat bathing ecosystem —physical, social, and spiritual.

Mikkel may be ten years my senior, but he can hang, and party, with people half his age. Timeless, ageless, and endlessly curious.

I'm proud to present my conversation with Mikkel Aaland.

For more with Mikkel Aaland, please check out my 2020 interview with Mikkel here. And my 2016 interview here.

Today on the bench, we sit together with Keegan Kittock, co-founder of Deep Wave Sauna. With the rising tide of sauna also comes marketing talk, pedantic chatter, and graphs and charts about how air supposedly moves in the hot room.

So it's extra special and refreshing to visit with someone like Keegan.

In this episode, we start at the beginning—picturing Keegan after elementary school, dragging a magnet around a building site, earning bubble-gum money working for his father's contracting company.

And like many of us, catching the sauna bug at a young, impressionable age up north at the family cabin: long rounds, long dock time, and plunging in the lake, splashing around with neighbors, friends, and family.

Love of sauna and love of construction are two powerful forces pointing toward building saunas for others. Add to that Aaron—Keegan's lifelong friend, collaborator, and business partner—and you have Deep Wave Sauna.

Ask them at Sauna Days or outside one of their builds how the company got its name and you'll get right to the heart of it. Deep Wave. A nod to the nerdiness without the pedantic edge. Keegan can talk in great technical detail about different wavelengths of heat and steam, but he's well past trying to impress. He's relatable and genuinely fun to Sauna Talk with. Deep heat. That wave that feels so good on the bench.

That's enough.

When we consider the holy trinity of good sauna (heat, steam, ventilation), the first two we can get our arms around, but ventilation is oblique—impossible to see, harder to feel, and easy to misunderstand.

But Keegan has earned the title of "thermal whisperer" among fellow sauna aficionados. He's the one who taught me that air is a fluid and should be understood as such. So when we talk about good ventilation, we talk about the lazy river. Stay tuned for more in this episode—why this is what we aim for, and how many saunas can achieve it naturally and passively without the mechanical buzz-kill easy street.

Keegan brings it down to earth. And I'm overjoyed to have made my way out to his prairie-style sauna on his property west of the Twin Cities. I love his sauna. Spiritual Patina rating: solid 9.0.

Within this article on SaunaTimes are a few photos taken from Keegan's sauna. And you can check these out and it'll likely bring you right there with us, on the bench, where we recorded this episode for you.

Today on the virtual bench we visit with longtime thermal enthusiast, friend, and SaunaTimes contributor Kev who takes us through the public bathhouses in and around Chicago for this Sauna Circuit.

As you'll hear in this episode, Kev is no stranger to the saunas, banyas, and bathhouses in his hometown. What's cool about Chicago is that the banya culture is well developed.. and also quite historic thanks to aptly entitled Chicago Bathhouse, a traditional bathhouse at 1914 W. Division Street in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, which has operated since 1906. Formerly Red Square, this Russian-style bathhouse has been in operation since 1906. Featured in a 2016 SaunaTimes blog post here.

And layered on top of that, you'll hear about the Asian inspired King Spa, the deep heavy heat offered at Chicago Sweatlodge, the new Kiln floating sauna – a dream come true right there floating on Lake Michigan at Navy Pier, and a Kev fan favorite the Sauna Club, where its affirmed that "we can solve for heat, but sometimes solving for the cold is more of a challenge." And in this case, the time to leave the hot room is when the idea of a fresh cold lake plunge in Lake Michigan, just steps away, is about the best idea you've ever heard.

And each Sauna Circuit includes a few gems and "adjacencies." These are special places shared with you by Kev, the Chicago Sauna Scout. These adjacencies are in the spirit of "people like us do things like this." For example, the Navy Pier and Lakefront Path give Chicago visitors a real flavor of the city, and also a chance to get some exercise before round one. And there's some extra special restaurants to check out – each conveniently adjacent to a Chicago bathhouse, like Smoke Daddy BBQ, Lou Malnattis Pizza, and SuperDawg Drive-In, just to name a few.

So, whether you live in Chicago, or thinking of heading to Chicago for a vacation, or on the march to the Windy City for work or a trade show, this Sauna Circuit is right here for you. To access, simply go to SaunaTimes.com, click on the Sauna Circuit map, and then the Chicago Sauna Circuit.. and from there, you're well on your way.

Let's visit with Kev, and bring you along to the Chicago Sauna Circuit.

Today, on Sauna Talk, and almost on the sauna bench, I'm pleased to bring you the folks behind the three major American sauna stove makers. American manufacturing at work!

• Garrett, Lamppa Manufacturing, Tower, Minnesota, Population 421
• Philip, Nippa, Beulah, MI, Population 303
• Lynn, Ilo, Dollar Bay, Michigan, Population 1,070

We talk through what their company looks like, their community, and what their opinions are on the North American sauna industry.

Small town manufacturing. Direct to consumer, factory direct.

Products

Made with quality with longevity in mind.

A couple of terms:

Cost engineering: Designed in a way that reduces manufacturing costs—sometimes at the expense of quality, durability, or performance.

Margin stacking: When every step in a product's journey — manufacturer, distributor, wholesaler, retailer — adds a profit margin, and those margins compound into a much larger final price. More here.

Today on the bench, we bring you to Larsmont Cottages, Two Harbors. Minnesota for a special roundtable discussion with four sauna builders from four different countries as part of Sauna Days 2025.

• Alex, Bsaunasusa, Belarus
• Keegan, Deep Wave Saunas, USA
• Jake, Finnmark, UK
• Andrew, Sauna Builder, Canada

The weather was wonderful, the heat was resonating, and our conversation went deep.

Today on Sauna Talk, we are joined by the dynamic duo of researcher from Emery University, Deanna Kaplan and Roman Palitsky.

Deanna Kaplan

Deanna Kaplan, PhD is a clinical psychologist with expertise in digital health technologies. She has more than a decade of experience using wearable and smartphone-based technologies to study the dynamics of health processes and clinical change during daily life. Her research is grounded in a whole-person (bio-psycho-social-spiritual) model of health, and much of her work focuses on investigating the dynamics of change of integrative interventions, such as psychedelic-assisted therapies and contemplative practices.

Dr. Kaplan is the Director of the Human Experience and Ambulatory Technologies (HEAT) Lab, a multidisciplinary collaboration between the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine and Emory Spiritual Health. More information about the HEAT Lab is here.

Dr. Kaplan is the co-creator and Scientific Director of Fabla, an unlicensed Emory-hosted app for multimodal daily diary and ecological momentary assessment (EMA) research. Fabla is an EMA app that can securely collect voice-recorded, video-recorded , and photographic responses from research participants. More information about Fabla is here.

Dr. Kaplan holds an adjunct appointment in Emory's Department of Psychology and is appointed faculty for several Emory centers, including the Winship Cancer Institute, Emory Spiritual Health (ESH), the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality (ECPS), and the Advancement of Diagnostics for a Just Society (ADJUST) Center. She also holds an appointment as an adjunct Assistant Professor at Brown University in affiliation with the Center for Digital Health. Dr. Kaplan received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Arizona, completed her predoctoral clinical internship at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University, and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at Brown University, where she received an F32 National Research Service Award (NRSA) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Her research is funded by the NIH, the Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA), the Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance, the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, and the Vail Health Foundation among others. She was named as a 2025 Rising Star by Genomics Press for her work in mental health assessment innovation.

Roman Palitsky

Roman Palitsky, MDiv, Ph.D. is Director of Research Projects for Emory Spiritual Health and a Research Psychologist for Emory University School of Medicine. His research program investigates the pathways through which culture and health interact by examining the biological, psychological, and social processes that constitute these pathways. His areas of interest include biopsychosocial determinants in cardiovascular health, chronic pain, and grief. In collaboration with Emory Spiritual Health, his research addresses cultural and existential topics in healthcare such as religion, spirituality, and the way people find meaning in suffering, as they relate to health and illness. His work has also focused on the role of religious and existential worldviews in mindfulness-based interventions, as well as implementation and cultural responsiveness of these interventions.

Dr. Palitsky's academic training includes a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Arizona with a concentration in Behavioral Medicine/Health Psychology, and a Master of Divinity from Harvard University. He completed clinical internship in the behavioral medicine track at Brown University Warren Alpert Medical School, where he also completed a postdoctoral fellowship.

Deanna and Roman were in town attending and speaking at the 2025 SSSR Conference, Society for the Scienific Study of Religion. And as you will hear, we get deep into the spirit of sauna, a spiritual connection we allow ourselves to have, presented to us through the wonderfulness of time on the bench and chilling out in the garden, all misty wet with rain.

I've had the pleasure of sitting on the sauna bench with well over a hundred guests for Sauna Talk. Whether you're listening in your car, out for a walk, or sweating it out on your own bench, my goal as host is to help keep the conversation flowing. Like good löyly, Sauna Talk rises, rolls, and wraps around us—natural, unforced, and alive.

That same spirit was there last night with Chris Heck.

Chris grew up in Northern Minnesota, made his way into engineering school, and deep into his electrical engineering career. He spent a couple years living in Finland—where sauna isn't a luxury, it's an everyday way of life. He travels to Finland regularly working for Wärtsilä a global company with over 10,000 employees, a leader in innovative technologies for the marine and energy markets. Big equipment for ships and energy plants.

We met on a late fall afternoon under cool rain and heavy clouds. The last time I stood in his backyard was several months previous. His sauna was still just a shell—bare studs and roof. Seeing his completed sauna brought a different kind of warmth. Before round one, I snapped a few photos, smiling at the thought that my Sauna Build book helped Chris bring his own health and wellness backyard retreat to life.

Once we settled onto the bench, the talk found its rhythm—thermally aligned in good spirit. Just like a good sauna round, it built naturally, with heat, laughter, and a shared appreciation for how something so simple can feel so good.

As the rounds went on, so did the conversation—about work and life, Finland and Minnesota, and how sauna has a way of connecting it all. That's what Sauna Talk is about: real people who recognize that good heat knows no borders. So grab your towel, pour a little water on the rocks, and join us for this session with Chris Heck.

Welcome to this episode of Sauna Talk, where we head back to Farris Bad, resort spa and wellness retreat South of Oslo, Norway. We get to sit with Jerome, who is a long standing steam master at the resort. Here he leads aufguss ceremony and assists two time Sauna Talk guest Lasse Eriksen.

10,000 hours

One thing I wish I had asked Jerome in this interview is to venture a guess at how many guests he's "entertained" (if that's the right word) over his 10-plus years leading aufguss sessions at this world-renowned facility. Some quick farmer's math gets us close: a few sessions a day, five days a week, for 10 years… that adds up to well over 10,000 people.

I'm one of those 10,000—a repeat guest for a couple of years, attending several of his aufguss ceremonies.

An Aufgussmeister, in my view, is best to not be lead into temptation. For like a church paster, there could be that ego boost that comes from standing in front of an audience, performing. Controlling the movement of steam, and the administering of essences and microclimate manipulation could give one a feeling of power, dominance even.

Aufguss master responsibilities

Yet Lasse instills some deep and powerful education with his students. He gives them freedom to be creative with their art, yet he also instills true message that the sauna is the teacher. The stove and the heat and steam it creates is to be respected. The duty an aufgussmeister has to those sitting on the bench is an important one. Safety is critical. For the under educated, pushing steam and controlling time in the hot room is a noble and great responsibility.

Each session is led with an important statement. You are welcome to leave the session, but once you leave, do not come back in. The door to the hot room opens in one direction during an aufguss ceremony.

But back to Jerome. After producing over 100 Sauna Talk podcasts, I've learned what makes a guest unforgettable: someone who can take us right to the edge of the box. During my visits to Farris Bad, Jerome would casually share insights about aufguss—and every time, I'd think, people need to hear and feel this for themselves!

Today, we get that chance, right now. Let's step behind the scenes into the fascinating, ever-evolving world of aufguss. Please welcome Jerome to Sauna Talk!

Podcast summary

Jerome Farris, a sauna master at Farris Bad in Larvik, Norway, discusses his role and background. He has been at Farris Bad for eight years, having moved from Switzerland. Jerome speaks multiple languages and has a Montessori teaching background, which he applies to his sauna master role. He emphasizes the importance of sensory experiences and the therapeutic aspects of sauna rituals. Farris Bad has seven saunas and offers courses for aspiring steam masters. Jerome highlights the collaborative and non-prescriptive nature of the sauna experience, aiming to connect guests with their roots and elements. He also shares insights into the sauna's cultural significance and its benefits for well-being.

Key Moments 2:36-3:48 Jerome explains how his background with kids at Montessori and performance art helped him with his current job in sauna- so interesting! 8:44-9:03 Jerome talks about proposing to his wife! 30:12-31:00 Jerome discusses people pushing themselves/ MMA fighters- this was interesting

Today on Sauna Talk, we welcome a very special guest. Dr. Hans Hägglund.

Who is Dr. Hans Hägglund?

Hans Hägglund MD, PhD, is a medical doctor and professor at Uppsala University, in Northern Sweden. Professor Hägglund has a strong research back ground in clinical research within medicine. He graduated from Karolinska institute, Sweden and did his post doc at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, USA. Between 2013 and 2018 he served as the director of the Cancer Center at Uppsala University Hospital. Professor Hägglund also had the position as the national cancer coordinator at The Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SALAR) between 2019-2022.

He currently holds a position as a senior consultant at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, which is where we catch up with him for this episode of Sauna Talk.

Hot facts

On this episode of Sauna Talk, we recognize that Hans Hägglund is a man who wears many hats in the world of health, wellness, and sauna culture. Hans is an affiliated researcher at the Center for Resilient Health at the Stockholm School of Economics, and co-founder of Vision Zero Cancer in Sweden. Known by many as the "sauna doctor," he serves at the Swedish Sauna Academy, sits on the board of the Sauna Research Institute and the International Sauna Association, and played a key role in organizing the XVII International Sauna Congress in Haparanda/Tornio back in 2018. His book The Sauna Book – Hot Facts on Sauna and Health, published in Swedish in 2020, has attracted wide attention for the way it bridges science and tradition.

We explore why sauna and cold bathing are seeing a surge in global interest, and what challenges remain in researching their health benefits. Hans shares his thoughts on why sauna bathing should be considered alongside traditional medicine, gives us a glimpse into the new book he's writing, and reflects on how prevention can be far more cost-effective than treatment. Along the way, we discuss his professional journey, the boards he serves on, and even his earliest sauna memories.

And, of course, we'll hear his take on one of my favorite questions: from a Swedish — and global — perspective, what's the most misunderstood thing about sauna that he wishes more people knew?

Let's welcome Dr. Hans Hägglund to Sauna Talk.

Here's a short intro for social medializing:

"In this episode of Sauna Talk, I sit down with Hans Hägglund — "the sauna doctor" — affiliated researcher, co-founder of Vision Zero Cancer, and board member of the International Sauna Association. We dive into the rising global interest in sauna and cold bathing, the challenges of sauna research, and why prevention may be the most powerful medicine. Hans also shares personal sauna memories, his upcoming book project, and what he believes is the most misunderstood thing about sauna."

Punchy one sentences:

From Swedish sauna congresses to cold plunges, Hans Hägglund brings the heat — and the science — to Sauna Talk.

What's the most misunderstood thing about sauna? "The sauna doctor" Hans Hägglund has a prescription.

Sauna, science, and a splash of cold water — Hans Hägglund joins Sauna Talk for a deep dive into the health of heat.