Sean Foster didn't set out to build a wellness empire. He went to a Tony Robbins event, heard Wim Hof talk, came home to Utah, and started getting into cold water. What happened next is the interesting part: he opened a facility, offered unlimited memberships as a trial, and almost immediately hit a wall. Not a wall of disinterest — a wall of demand. Fifty people wanted to come every single day, and they couldn't accommodate more.
That's the real claim buried in this conversation. Not that cold plunging works — we already know that. The claim is that when you build the right environment around a genuine recovery protocol, people will show up with a frequency that surprises even the founder.
I've read Ryan Duey's story in these pages, and there are striking parallels. Different geography, different personality, same fundamental discovery: when you give people a structured, aesthetically intentional space for contrast therapy, they don't treat it like a gym membership they guilt themselves into. They treat it like a ritual they look forward to. The Japandi aesthetic at Plunge isn't decoration — it's functional. Environment shapes behavior. A sanctuary produces sanctuary-seeking behavior.
The Chase Jarvis piece on cold and heat therapies going from garage startup to nine-figure business reinforces something else: this isn't a niche. The demand is real, broad, and growing. Foster stumbled onto the same wave from a different entry point — not product sales, but daily immersive experience.
The science on cold exposure for recovery is solid. Norepinephrine, dopamine, reduced inflammation, improved circulation. Huberman, Rhonda Patrick, the Finnish epidemiological literature — it all points in the same direction. What Foster's experience adds is the behavioral data: people self-select into daily protocols when friction is removed. A cold shower at home has friction. A dedicated space with warm lighting and proper temperature control removes it. This is why facilities like Plunge work when home setups often get abandoned after two weeks.
The gap in this conversation is mechanism depth. Foster speaks from lived experience and entrepreneurial observation, not from the research literature. That's fine — it's an honest account of what he built and why — but it means the listener has to bring their own context to understand why the daily ritual matters physiologically, not just psychologically.
If you're evaluating whether to invest in a dedicated cold therapy space — as a consumer or as a business — Foster's experiment is instructive. The unlimited membership model succeeded because the protocol has genuine daily utility. Design your practice with that frequency in mind: short sessions, consistent temperature, environment that makes you want to return tomorrow.
Foster mentions that Wim Hof was the spark — and there's something quietly circular about that. Hof's work was always about making extraordinary physiological states accessible to ordinary people. Foster took that idea and turned it into infrastructure. The speaker and the facility exist on the same continuum: democratizing a practice that once required either extreme nature exposure or elite athletic resources. That lineage matters. What started as a Dutch breath coach talking at a motivational event became a thriving Utah business that 50 people visit every day. Adaptation begins with a single cold encounter. Then it becomes ritual. Then it becomes culture.