Remember Who You Are: Harvey Martin on Sauna, Performance & the Nervous System | Sauna Talk #139

What happens when we stop performing and start remembering who we actually are? In this live conversation from Sauna Days 2026, Glenn Auerbach sits down with longtime friend Harvey Martin for a wide-ranging Sauna Talk about performance, identity, intuition, nervous-system regulation, and the role sauna can play in bringing us back to ourselves. Harvey has spent years inside the world of high performance. After playing professional baseball, he worked in player development and spent four seasons doing human performance coaching with the San Francisco Giants. Today, he works privately with elite athletes, musicians, and other high-level performers navigating pressure, identity, and life beyond the performance itself. But Harvey came to Sauna Days with one word on his mind: Remembrance. Remembering who we are underneath the noise. Underneath the information. Underneath the algorithms, expectations, status, and constant pressure to perform. Glenn and Harvey explore what happens when a profession becomes an identity, why facts alone rarely change human behavior, the difference between performance and presence, and why intuition becomes increasingly important in a world built around information and algorithms. And, naturally, they bring it back to sauna. Harvey shares the story of his wood-fired horse trailer sauna in Arizona—with an office in the front and hot room in the back—and why building a fire, tending it throughout the day, and making your own heat forces you to slow down. As Harvey puts it, there's something different about heat you make yourself. In this episode: • Harvey's journey from professional baseball to the San Francisco Giants • Working with elite athletes and musicians under extreme pressure • Separating performance from identity • Why emotional experience changes behavior more than information • Intuition, presence, and nervous-system regulation • What algorithms may be doing to our awareness • Sauna as a practice of remembrance • Why wood-fired sauna naturally slows us down • Harvey's Arizona horse trailer sauna and writing space • The value of making your own heat • Why sometimes "it takes all day to live" Recorded live at Sauna Days 2026. Learn more about authentic sauna culture, sauna building, Sauna Days, and the Sauna Talk podcast at SaunaTimes.com. This episode of Sauna Talk is supported by Kuuma Sauna Stoves, built by Lampa Manufacturing in Tower, Minnesota. Until next time, we'll see you on the bench.