Oxygenation Therapy to Boost Your Body and Brain with Tom Butler

In this Episode

• [03:09]What is super oxygenation, and why should we care?
• [04:42]Stephan points out that vascular inflammation is linked to heart disease, cancer, and more, so super oxygenation is about more than just a better workout. Tom elaborates on this.
• [08:33]Tom talks about Chinese medicine and its views of not only the movement of energy in the body, but also the blood. He mentions blood stasis, or blood stagnation.
• [10:30]We learn about the risk of inadequate oxygenation in parts of our bodies.
• [13:18]Stephan describes his first experience using Tom’s device at the Bulletproof Conference, where Kristen Lohneiss told him her story.
• [14:15]Kristen shares her own story, involving a traumatic brain injury due to a drunk driver. We hear how much of a difference the LiveO2 system has made for her.
• [19:51]Super oxygenation can bring someone from near death back to health, Tom explains. He also talks about “pushing up against” injuries, or returning blood flow in a way that breaks through healing barriers.
• [24:57]Tom describes the LiveO2 system, which involves controlling the airflow that someone is breathing with varying amounts of oxygen.
• [28:31]How do you know if LiveO2 is successfully cleaning out someone’s system? Fascinatingly, skin and breath smells are part of the answer.
• [30:09]Heavy metals take a little more work to get rid of than the other pollutants in our bodies, Tom explains.
• [32:55]Stephan is learning about a Kabbalah principle that if you receive something without earning it, it comes with side effects. He applies this to what Tom has been saying about LiveO2.
• [34:36]Tom talks about pulse oximetry, and discusses the issue of carbon monoxide.
• [37:42]Any finger will do for your pulse oximeter, Tom explains. He then talks about possible asymmetry in oxygenation between the left and right hands. He and Stephan then go on to talk about super oxygenation in stroke victims.
• [42:10]Tom gives more details about the actual process that LiveO2 employs. Most first-time participants will stay on the oxygenated air for about eight minutes.
• [48:39]How does Tom coach users who aren’t local?
• [50:51]If you’re interested in working with a LiveO2 practitioner, go to the LiveO2 website or give them a call. They have an unpublished directory of LiveO2 practitioners and may be able to hook you up with someone near you.
• [51:23]Tom talks about the cost of having the LiveO2 system in your own home.
• [54:40]We learn more about Mark Squibb, who invented the device, and how he created it.
• [59:27]Tom discusses how often people should use LiveO2 technology.
• [61:50]To get more information on the LiveO2 system, including getting one for your own home, go to the LiveO2 website. You’re also welcome to give them a call at 970-372-4344.

Jump to Links and Resources

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Get Yourself Optimized, I’m your host Stephan Spencer. Today, we have Tom Butler with us. Tom is a VP and partner at LiveO2, an Oxygen Training System. If you’re wondering what Oxygen Training is, it’s a way of super oxygenating during your workouts. We’ll learn what the benefits of super oxygenating are in just a couple of minutes. Tom is also a founder of the Whole Health Network, Tom’s career path began as a Biochemist in pharmaceutical development. He and I have something in common. I actually have a Masters in Biochemistry, I use that everyday. Tom, he actually does use it. He achieved the status of a senior scientist at the young age of 25 which is quite impressive, he also earned a Master’s degree in Chinese Medicine. It’s a nice melding of both Eastern and Western philosophies in medicine.

Our bodies are very intelligent, much more intelligent than we give it credit for.

He was recently interviewed by Kathy Ireland about LiveO2 Technology. LiveO2 was featured at the Bulletproof Conference which is where I was exposed to it, I actually got the pleasure and opportunity to use the device. I was on an exercise bike, hooked up to the LiveO2 System and getting deprived of oxygen and then super oxygenated, you’ll learn all about the process in just a minute. It was really amazing and I felt so energized afterwards. The most energizing part of this was actually the story that I heard, it’s just phenomenal, this case study example of somebody who had their whole life turned around in a very positive way from this technology, super inspiring story. LiveO2 is going to be a key component of the bulletproof labs which will launch imminently here in Santa Monica.

Bulletproof, if you’re not familiar with it, is the whole philosophy and technology and everything that was developed by Dave Asprey. If you have not listened to the Dave Asprey interview on the Get Yourself Optimized, you need to listen to that as well. We’re gonna get into a lot of biohacking in this episode. I’m super excited, I’ve been talking about this technology, the LiveO2 platform or system. Tom, welcome.

‏‏Hey. Thank you, Stephan. It’s a pleasure to be here with you today.

‏‏Let’s talk about super oxygenation because I’m guessing a lot of our listeners haven’t even heard of that term before or hyperoxygenation, what the heck is that and why should we care?

‏‏It’s a great term to be familiar with. What we’re learning day in and day out is that our bodies are very intelligent, much more intelligent than I think we give them credit for. When we look at super oxygenation, our bodies in a really short amount of time, if we provide it with the right little formula, we can utilize the mechanisms in our vascular system that help us deliver more oxygen to our tissues. We look at our red blood cells and we know that they’re designed to carry oxygen. They also like carrying other things like carbon monoxide and CO2, but when we have enough oxygen, they are most efficient at carrying oxygen. But we also, from the work of Manfred Von Ardenne, know that we can dissolve oxygen into the plasma of the blood. If we give the body enough oxygen while we’re exercising and we have enough heart rate and a breath rate in our bodies, we can very easily produce these therapeutic levels of dissolved oxygen in our plasma. That’s really the first step of becoming super oxygenated. The benefits of that is we get to reverse endothelial swelling which is also known as arterial inflammation or vascular inflammation. We also get to produce more energy in our bodies. This is a really good method of not only having an efficient workout but a workout that actually gets you oxygenated and gives you some more value for your time that you spend working or exercising.

‏‏Vascular inflammation is really one of the main reasons why we end up dying from heart disease. In fact, inflammation is linked to cancer, it’s linked to all sorts of diseases that will likely be the end of us, statistically speaking. This isn’t just to get a better workout, this is to live longer.

‏‏Exactly. The large meta-analysis of the studies that look at oxygen utilization, whether it’s VO2 max or resting oxygen utilization, the conclusion that they all come to is the more oxygen you use, the better health you have and the longer you live. We’re designed to use oxygen, everything we do to produce energy revolves around oxygen utilization. It’s a lot of times hidden in front of our noses literally but it’s one of the most important things we can do in terms of breathing hard for ten minutes a day is a really great recipe for living a long time. When we get into vascular inflammation, I completely agree with you, there is a whole group of disorders and diseases and syndromes that first start with vascular inflammation or some type of inflammation in the body. The interesting thing about that is we recognize that there’s a gatekeeper in that, that’s actually the endothelial cells that line all of our arteries and veins as well as our lymph system. When they have oxygen, they lay nice and flat like a subway tunnel. When they don’t have oxygen, they tend to swell up like a basketball.

For our capillary beds, that’s the difference of being able to push blood flow to the tissue or having it [inaudible: [00:06:31]. As we go through life and we get older and we experience more challenges and become less active and breathe less, we basically have a harder time keeping all of our tissue and our organ systems in this functional pattern of being oxygenated. This endothelial cell plays a really key part in that. Our vascular system actually has a flaw to it. It’s the largest organ or organ group in our body that actually is vascular which means it doesn’t have blood flow to it. It is the blood flow but when it’s still busy trying to oxygenate the rest of the body, it ignores itself and that’s really the start of vascular inflammation. If we can reverse that quickly, then we have a whole lot more to work with, we can return blood flow, nutrient flow, more importantly, oxygenated blood flow and get rid of waste in the body more efficiently. All of these things consume energy but if we don’t have the flow, we can’t get very far with any of that.

‏‏One thing that people mistakenly focus on is reducing their cholesterol levels and in fact, it’s not about cholesterol. We should probably break this down a bit, it’s not just about the number that you get from you blood test in terms of cholesterol, it’s about the particle size of the cholesterol and about, as you were describing the flatness, if it’s flat like tile, the vascular walls, then these particles won’t get trapped in the walls of the artery and you won’t end up with heart disease. Whereas if you’re not well oxygenated, the walls are puffier, there is more opportunity for the particles to get stuck in there, especially if you have the smaller particle size of cholesterol, that’s the more dangerous one, that’s easier to get stuck in the wall.

Chinese medicine has a really great perspective on the movement of energy in the body, but beyond that, it also looks at the blood.

‏‏Exactly. Chinese medicine has a really great perspective on the movement of energy in the body, but beyond that, it also looks at the blood. A common term used is blood stasis or blood stagnation. The premise or the theory is you’re not gonna be able to do anything until you get that blood volume to flow again. There’s a process that we go through in the LiveO2 Adaptive Contrast training where if we have enough of the blood stasis and blood stagnation, just do an activity or maybe some bad biochemistry behind the scenes where we actually have to take these whole red blood cells that have become stagnant. As they’re stagnant, they lose glutathione from their shell and they basically become rigid. That mechanism is actually healthy, we go through a blood cracking method where we actually break up that whole blood cell that’s creating a dam in front of the tissue that we wanna get to. If we never go through that process, we can be doing everything right but still, we can’t get to that tissue. We have to sometimes go in and break up the stasis and stagnation before we’ll get a result. It’s very true in terms of when our body is flowing and moving, it tends to work really well. If it’s not flowing, sedentary, then it’s almost like no matter what we fill it with or what modality we’re using, we basically don’t get good results because we can’t get to the sites that we need to be reactive with.

‏‏Certain parts of our body get more oxygenated than others. If we use your technology then all those areas of our body get super oxygenated and some desperately need it because they don’t get enough. Walk us through what areas of the body get less oxygenated versus others.

‏‏Over time, we do run the risk of less and less of our bodies becoming oxygenated. We go back to the theory of our body being really intelligent, it actually has a priority of oxygen usage. It makes sense, it’s logical, we know this, we’ve all experienced it. What we don’t know is the deeper levels of what’s happening behind the scenes. The first priority of the body is the heart, lungs, and legs. We’re designed to run away from whatever we need to as long as we need to without even thinking about it. It’s instinctual and our body knows that. We’re plumed with those organs being satisfied the easiest. Each organ actually has different permeability. For example, we know about the blood-brain barrier and that’s one of the most protective arterial designs. It’s hard to get things through but it’s by design, we don’t want to let pathogens or heavy metals into our brains. When we look at these priorities, it’s designed by the tissues.

We have to have oxygen going into the Krebs cycle to keep it running.

As we work our way down from the heart, lungs, and legs, the next organ that comes into place is usually the upper extremities and then the brain. The brain is not far behind in terms of, okay, we’ve run away from something long enough and now we need to think about what the next thing to do is. As we move a little bit further down the line, we get into the liver and then the stomach and the small intestines and the skin and then the kidney and then the spleen. This is day-to-day when we get to open up these organ systems, exercise, and satisfy them, that’s the physiology of youth. We almost didn’t know how much of a great thing we had going for us when we were young because we got to satisfy all of those organs regularly with oxygenated blood flows, it allowed those organs to function properly. When we look at the functionality of tissue, we really have to go back to how much of that tissue is involved in aerobic respiration with oxygen. When we have oxygen entering the cells and going into the mitochondria, that’s where we can produce ATP and we look at a whole lot of this Krebs cycle, how do we support the Krebs cycle. We have to have oxygen going into the Krebs cycle to keep it running. It’s the number one ingredient we’ve gotta get in there.

‏‏I don’t wanna geek out too much before we get to what are the tangible benefits beyond just feeling better and this amorphous idea of living longer. The case study example, the person who walked me through how to use your device at the Bulletproof conference, she was first a customer and it completely changed her life using your LiveO2 system.

‏‏I’m here with Kristen Lohneiss. Kristen’s been working at LiveO2 for the last two years. She had a really compelling story that she shared with me at the LiveO2 booth area inside of the Bulletproof Conference. I’m inviting Kristen here to share her story and the impact that LiveO2 had on her life. Kristen, thanks for joining us.

K: Hello, thanks for having me.

‏‏Let’s dive into your story. What happened to you and how did you end up with the LiveO2 system, what did it do for you?

K: About seven and a half years ago, I was hit by a drunk driver while walking. I was thrown 120 ft and I landed skull first on the pavement, followed by the rest of me. I suffered a severe traumatic brain injury, brain damage, nerve damage, and lots of body damage. I spent time in a coma and learning how to be alive in a human body again. Basically, the options that were given to me by the doctors were surgeries and narcotics. Something guided me to say no to those things. I really truly felt from my guts that there were true potentials for healing and not this kind of makeshift patchwork model that was being presented to me and drugs. I really did suffer for many years. It was about five years before I found anything that worked, and it was really accidental that I met Mark Squibb who is the inventor of the LiveO2 oxygen systems. I met him and we started talking and he mentioned what he does, I mentioned my situation. He invited me to try a system.

The five years were spent in severe pain and in brownout brain functioning where I couldn’t relate with people and I was slow in processing and I was really limited in my brain function. The doctors really didn’t have much to say about that. My physical experience was lots and lots of pain and actually double vision from the nerve damage. I see double all the time. I was really suffering when I met him and I tried this system. What I first noticed within just two sessions with him was that my energy reserve actually had something in it. I actually had energy. It was so clear because it was such a distinct difference from what I was used to for these five years. I used some of my settlement money from the wreck to invest in one of these and I began using it. It’s not been a little over two years and my energy levels came back up. When I’m using the system consistently, I feel great.

My brain functionality really came back online and it was a process, but I witnessed it actively.

My brain functionality really came back online and it was a process, but I witnessed it actively. I could feel the difference and I’m able to engage socially again which for a while there I couldn’t keep up with simple conversations. I really was like a fly on the wall. That was a huge difference for me, it really brought me back to life. The pain levels have become manageable most of the time, sometimes I have something go out and it’s a challenge but most days I feel good enough to be functional in the world. Now, I’m beginning the process of sharing what I’ve benefitted from this with other people. I have my own system and I have it set up in a studio, and I have clients who come and use my system as well as a couple of other health technologies that I have accumulated so that more people have access to this health creation type of situation.

‏‏Wow, that’s amazing. Essentially, the LiveO2 system saved your life.

K: Right. Exactly, it brought me back to life. I was really a zombie, I couldn’t function, I didn’t want to be alive for a really long time, I really resented the hospital’s mentality of, “Keep them alive at all costs,” and plug them in and then let them back out in the world without any tools to function. I really felt like my spirit was gone and I just didn’t wanna be here. Yeah, the LiveO2 absolutely gave me my life back.

‏‏Thank you so much for sharing your story. Wow, what a journey. I don’t even know how to describe it, I can’t even imagine what you must have gone through, it sounds so hard, yet there’s a beautiful silver lining that came out of it and hopefully lots of people’s lives will be changed because of what you’re doing now.

K: Definitely, that’s my hope. On a mass scale, we’re not given good options from those who we trust to guide our health. I’m urging people more and more to take their health into their own hands because there are true solutions and we don’t need to be suffering.

‏‏This can take somebody who is almost near death and bring them back to health.

‏‏It does have that potential and we’ve seen it enough times throughout different organ systems and we’ve started to develop a methodology for getting there. We know for instance when the brain is going to be the next guy in line for oxygenation or when the liver is going to go through detox or when the vascular system is gonna start to heal. The short of it is when we go through an injury, we a lot of times have residual inflammation, sometimes there’s enough traumatic injury where there is scar tissue and even surgery. In this particular case that we’re referencing, the individual was pronounced dead on arrival to the hospital and was in a coma and revived and went through extensive surgeries to get back to a place where life was functional. But behind the scenes, there was still a lot of dysfunction in terms of a pain pattern, a mental pattern. What we can do with adaptive contrast and the right environment and with the right tools is we can determine where or how much we can push up against that injury. When I say push up against, I mean returning blood flow.

Detoxification tends to happen quicker when we’re oxygenated.

Basically, we’re using your own best tools, your heart rate, and your breath rate and your body exercising to actually break through that barrier. It’s fairly predictable in terms of we know how to get there and if we can get past that barrier, a lot of times, almost all the time, we find that there is functional tissue behind it, it just needs the blood flow or enough turbulence in the system to actually overcome either that inflammation of that scar tissue or lack of flow that’s existing there, that existence is what’s perpetuating this dysfunction. We know that we can challenge the body in the right way, that we can return function to that tissue, we’ve seen it in the neurodegeneration areas, we’ve seen it in cardiovascular issues, stroke recovery, we’ve seen it in traumatic head injuries. Detoxification tends to happen quicker when we’re oxygenated and we have the right organ system going through deprecation and we’re able to go through a detoxification process much faster.

One reason is because we have the energy but we’re also running a cleaner, more efficient metabolism. It’s a neat process for us to look at, the prioritization of organs. When we look at that backwards, it actually predicts how we age. The spleen for instance is a guy at the end of the line. In Chinese medicine, the spleen function is defined as helping the body build blood, maintain lean muscle mass, and transform and transport nutrients in the body and also help modulate and run the immune system. All those are very intangible theories in the Western world but that’s all where we start to experience aging if we haven’t been injured. We know as we get older we get sick more often, we lose lean muscle mass, we lose a little bit of our blood supply so we can’t do as much exercise as we used to do. Our digestion all of a sudden doesn’t translate into growing muscles, it translates into something different, maybe storing fat or just not being as efficient with our blood building process.

‏‏This individual that we’re talking about as the case study example, when she talked to me, she’s basically crediting LiveO2 as saving her life. It completely brought her back to function where life was horrific and super painful for her on a daily basis. She had discovered LiveO2 and then implemented it and then she was so grateful with the results that she contacted you guys and asked for a job. What an inspiring and amazing story to have heard that. I felt lucky to have been walked through using the device by her instead of one of the other team members. That was one of the big reasons why I felt compelled to contact you guys and have you on the show because of that compelling story. It’s amazing, I get goosebumps just thinking about it. Let’s talk about the actual system and what it looks like. Let’s describe what this looks like, how often you use it, what the process is, how you deprive yourselves of oxygen, and then you super oxygenate, how that all works.

‏‏Sure. The system itself is really simple in its function. For Adaptive Contrast, what we’re doing is we’re controlling the airflow that someone is breathing. We found this ratio initially 80% oxygen air is where we wanna train somebody if we’re trying to help them overcome an oxygen deficiency and recover. The other side of this is we have a switch that we can now deliver through the same mask of rarefied air, about 25% less oxygen than what you would receive with room air. The system is in the form of a large reservoir, you place it next to any piece of exercise equipment, even infrared saunas, micro impact plates work well, we even have people that do hot showers as they’re doing a little bit of something to elevate their heart rate or open up the exterior vascular system to work on their skin or work on detoxification. There are a lot of modalities that work with this but it’s simply a reservoir and then the work of it is an air separator, an air splitter that’s actually taking the room air and it’s creating a concentrated stream and a depleted stream. We have a designed reservoir that allows us to switch between those, it’s also within design to be able to train most anybody.

For Adaptive Contrast, what we’re doing is we’re controlling the airflow that someone is breathing.

We can work with somebody who’s only gonna breathe 20 liters per minute, or we could work with the top athletes that are gonna breathe up to the 150 liters per minute. The way we go about challenging an individual for a while, we were writing standard protocols and we reverted more to what I’ll call standard training of actually training the person’s physiology while they’re on the system, whether they’re riding a bike or walking on a treadmill or an elliptical. We’ll monitor their pulse rate and their breath rate and also their pulse oximetry, we’re looking at how their hemoglobin is responding to the oxygen levels we’re giving them and also what type of artifacts that we can pull out of that. Are we seeing detoxes as more blood supply comes online, are we seeing organ systems move. When I say move, basically the liver is the best example of this where at night, the majority of your blood flow comes back to your liver as a large blood reservoir. When we start oxygenating somebody and getting him into the super oxygenated state, basically the liver looks around and says, “Wow, I’m holding onto this kind of mediocre blood.” It actually opens up and has a blood change. We typically see that as something we call as sludge tide or a detox event where the liver basically cleans the attic out in the middle of the exercise workout. A lot of times, this feels sluggish to the person but it’s really a good sign that their body just got rid of a lot of things that they don’t need. A lot of those things get expedited into the bowels and help the body to go.

‏‏How do you know that this is happening? Do you see a color change in their face or something? Do you get a readout, I had these clips on my fingertips that were monitoring my oxygen level on my blood, how you know that you’ve gotten that sludge tide happening?

‏‏There is an art and a science to this. We have the visual observations where we can look and see if an individual is slowing down a little bit or if their breath rate is what would be kind of an increased level for them. Even when we have them on 80% oxygen, they might be breathing harder than we would anticipate. We can pick up on smells through the skin, it’s interesting that that’s one of the quickest ways but not the quickest way to get rid of something from the body is the sweat. One of the things we pick up on consistently is actually the breath, the quickest way to get something into the body is actually through our lungs and incidentally it’s also the quickest way to get something out. When we have somebody in the super oxygenated state, the body is doing just that very quickly actually. It can take volatile compounds and will actually smell them through the breath, that’s a detox event as well. Sometimes it smells like a fracking facility, sometimes it smells like a brewery but we can get a good idea of what’s happening behind the scenes in the physiology as the person starts to volatilize some of these small pollutants that we’ve just observing day to day that are just kind of perched in our vascular system waiting to be picked up and taken outside of the body but we just didn’t have the resources to do that.

‏‏I gotta ask you about another pollutant then we’ll get back to the pulse in just a minute. What about heavy metals?

‏‏Heavy metals take a little bit more work, that’s something we’ve been accumulating through generational compounding since the industrial age, that’s becoming more and more of a problem. It’s basically like anything else, it’s almost everywhere. The heavy metals in particular are ones that can rod up your physiology quicker. You have to have your detox pathways open. A lot of times, we also need to work with supplementation, we’re talking about rebuilding tissues, basically, to get the heavy metals out so we can chelate them to some degree and then we have some practitioners that will do chelation and add junk with the adaptive contrast, Live O2 adaptive contrast, and then others will work with the oral compounds over a little bit longer period of time to help the body have the right chemical composition so that it can get rid of the metals as it’s rebuilding the tissue, the metals being released from. Our blood is the carrier of all of that. If we’re not moving our blood, we don’t do as good a job detoxing or if we’re not getting into the capillary beds to react with this tissue, we’re not gonna detox that part of the body. We can open the body up first, the premise is that we can detox it a lot faster.

‏‏It’s like if you’re chelating, if you’re working with a professional to get rid of heavy metals and you’re not doing super oxygenation or the Adaptive Contrast in conjunction with the chelation, you’re really missing out on an opportunity to detox the heavy metals faster.

‏‏Exactly. Think about it as owning more of your physiology. We’ve grown up in a little bit different medical system where we’ll go to a doctor and get a prescription. What we don’t realize but I feel it’s important to have our awareness is basically that prescription owns a little bit of our physiology now. It’s making an adjustment and it’s simple because we get to take a pill and that’s a short term solution. What we have to get back into is the long term solution, we wanna own as much our physiology for as long as we can. We also wanna do things to earn that. That’s one thing that sets us apart from other oxidative modalities, it’s an earned result. Your body is responding differently to a stimulus and that’s a result you get to keep. You not only get to maintain it, but you get to keep it and you get to start chasing the best version of you.

‏‏I love that distinction that you earn it because I’m learning about this idea in Kabbalah which is a spiritual discipline but it applies the physical realm too, what we’re talking about. If you don’t earn it and you get the benefits, it comes with side effects. You win the lottery and the people who win the lottery, they didn’t earn it so they end up getting the side effects, they lose it all, they get scammed by somebody, they have problems with addictions or whatever and they end up in a worse state than before they had even gotten the money. I think that idea of earning it is really profound.

‏‏Yeah, we’re training our bodies whether we know it or not. We get a whole lot of stimulus in this world that teaches us to sit or stand at a computer or doing something repetitively. The body is soaking all of that in, after a while it stops listening and it says, “Okay, I know this program. I’m gonna be efficient at it.” But really we’ve got so much more to tap into. It’s not a lengthy process to introduce, we’ll call it a new program to the body where it basically has to say, “Wow. I’m not sure what Stephan just did but I gotta be ready for him to do it again.” We have a really intelligent blueprint and as long as we keep that moving, we still have room to grow and improve and create health.

‏‏I had interrupted you earlier and you were gonna start talking about pulse. I’ll let you go ahead and pick up where you had left off.

When we have a sedentary life, there’s some good science that says our body actually creates carbon monoxide.

‏‏The science part of the training, the number that we can easily look at is pulse oximetry. This is accompanied by a heart rate, a beats per minute as well as a percentage number that is the percent of oxygen bound to our hemoglobin. At least we presume it’s oxygen bound to the hemoglobin, we don’t really know until we’ve done a few things that assure us, okay, primarily that’s oxygen. Our hemoglobin is really an interesting part of our vascular system. When we get into what it likes to pick up, there’s a very small difference, I mean minute, between it picking up carbon monoxide and oxygen, it’s a little bit greater between it picking up oxygen and NCO2. It’s the reason why carbon monoxide is so dangerous because we don’t know that we’re accumulating it and it’s occupying the place that oxygen should be. When we have a really sedentary life, there’s some good science that says our body actually creates carbon monoxide. When we first put a pulse oximetry on somebody, we actually don’t wanna blindly say, this person who hasn’t been oxygenating or exercising who’s flashing a 97% which is well within the range of normal, we actually don’t wanna make the presumption that we’re only looking at oxygen attached to the hemoglobin. The presumption we also don’t wanna make is that that’s their entire body. If they’re not exercising, chances are it’s only their heart, lungs, and legs and the rest of their body is going through this consumptive health pattern that likely is gonna become a disease.

‏‏The pulse oximeter, that’s what’s hooked up to the fingertips?

‏‏That’s the easiest way we can do it. We can hook it up to the fingertips. While somebody’s writing, we can quickly get a glance how the blood is changing. What’s interesting is it is about the five- to eight-minute mark. We’ve actually shifted the hemoglobin to where it likes oxygen more. That’s very similar to going and spending about a week at elevation where our body has to change and recognize, “Okay, we prefer oxygen over these other things because it’s a little bit of a limited quantity.” We get there by providing a lot of oxygen and forcing the hemoglobin to change really quickly. That’s an impactful event where the body has that left phase shift of hemoglobin which means we’re more efficient at carrying oxygen. It got it for about 120 days or three months. That right there, that’s worth doing your first session.

‏‏Interesting. Let’s walk through the process here. You get hooked up with the pulse oximeter devices, the monitoring devices on your fingertips, which fingers? On both hands? The ring finger? Which finger?

‏‏Any finger will do. What we found is as long as you’re getting good blood flow to the hands, you’ll get decent readings. What we found at the first time we trained somebody, it’s really helpful for us to have the pulse oximeter one on each hand and what we can see is this left leading tendency in the body and that’s just because our heart is a little bit more on the left side and we’re gonna see the saturation happens sooner on the left side than we do on the right. We also have to think about this in terms of plumbing, what we know about looking at both hands is if we initially are starting a session with someone and we see an imbalance in their pulse oximetry, they give us some information to ask questions. When we see enough of an imbalance, it’s usually related to a traumatic head injury that’s still subsisting in the body and the circulation on that part of the body is not correct. It can be other things but that’s usually the one that it hits and then we’ll always train off of that low side. We want to resolve that low side in the first couple of sessions before we go anywhere else, that’s what the body is telling us. It’s telling us it got this imbalance, do something that happened, it could be ten, twenty years ago but it is still impacting the plumbing.

‏‏Like somebody suffers a stroke and then they’re gonna get different levels on their two hands.

‏‏It’s possible that they’re experiencing some peripheral paralyzation or some speech impediments. It’s possible, we may see that in the pulse oximetry.

‏‏Is that something that can be helped with the LiveO2 device? Like if they are stroke victims and they’re still suffering symptoms?

‏‏Yes, we’ve seen that quite a few times with participants that we worked with over the phone. These are high-level folks, both of the two that are coming to mind are dentists. The interesting scenario is they probably, more than any others or like others, are getting exposed to heavy metals through their career and that eventually evolves into a cardiovascular event. Both of these gentlemen were in retirement but had strokes and were really just trying to find their health solution but took the step of purchasing a system and we worked with them virtually and over the phone. This one particular gentleman about a month and a half period, he called me back and my jaw just dropped because I recognized his name but his whole way of speaking and his mental clarity was normal and he’d been far from that originally. I just knew from the voice quality that a lot has changed since I last spoke with him.

The body knows how to take care of itself the best.

There is LiveO2 Adaptive Contrast primarily, the function that we see has been very useful here is it is a recovery tool. Recovering from injuries or recovering from overexertion or just life challenges. It really does matter how we recover from those and then of course we can prepare for the next event and maybe not be so impacted by it, but that’s the premise, it’s part of recovery. If we can’t get the recovery that we want initially with the Adaptive Contrast, then we know there are other places we need to look. There can be deeper level pathologies also that kind of rob the body of voltage. When we don’t have any voltage, we can’t carry oxygen. It’s kind of like dumping into a container a lot of oxygen and a lot of nutrients but there’s a big hole on the container. When we see that happening, we have to go to some different things, but most times, it’s just the matter of blockage and once we can remove that blockage, the body knows how to take care of itself the best.

‏‏Let’s go back to we’re on this exercise bike, you’ve got the pulse oximeters on both hands-on whatever finger, it doesn’t matter. You’ve got the mask on, the mask is hooked up to our reservoir with a way to either reduce the oxygen level or increase it.

‏‏Yeah, the first thing we’re gonna do is get you comfortable on the bike and get you warmed up and make sure this mask that we’re putting on you is something you feel like you can breathe through comfortably. Once we get you into this target heart rate, Manfred Von Ardenne basically described this as 170 minus age. If you’re 50 years old, we would be targeting initially a heart of 110. It doesn’t have to be that but that’s a good target for us where you’re gonna start to move out of your aerobic range and your body is gonna start to bring on functional and aerobic processes to help you exercise. You can’t stay forever there but that’s where we wanna start because shortly after we get you to that target heart rate, we’re gonna plug you into this nice, soft 80% oxygen air and keep you looked in this aerobic pattern. That’s really the beginning of giving the body more of what it needs as we exercise.

The need phenomena that happens there as we’re exercising, our muscles are contracting and relaxing and they’re actually acting, you can think of it as a PASO electric generator where through flexing, we’re creating a voltage. Chinese medicine loves the idea of everything being connected. When we can create voltage in these muscle groups, they’re actually tied to our organs and they’re gonna impact our functional health. When we have a nice muscle tone and we exercise with plenty of aerobic capacity, we’re actually generating the second level of energy in our body. A lot of this is still unexplained but we know it’s there because we see the increases in health and the function of the organ tissues even though they’re not the ones necessarily doing the work. It’d be hard for us to ask our liver to do push-ups or something but we know we can get some pressures where our liver will open up and the liver is connected to a nice, large muscle group that can act as a battery pack for it and be the reserve and charge the liver and its function.

‏‏Cool. On the bike, you’re at 80% oxygen level, breathing in through the mask and you’re softening or different organs are enjoying the extra oxygen and so forth and then what? You switch to the rarefied air, you get people sprinting, what’s the next stage in this process?

‏‏We’re gonna find out what the individual’s body is asking us to do. Most of the time, for first-time participants, we’re gonna keep you on the oxygen air for about eight minutes just to let your body get saturated. That’s where if the detox events are gonna happen, we’ll see those roll by, they’ll get smaller and smaller and we basically know that the body has opened up as much as it’s gonna do for us at this particular effort event or effort level. First, we’re just watching. We wanna see that your body comes up. Let’s say you started on 95%, SPO2 95% oxygen saturation to your hemoglobin really quickly on 80% oxygen air, most people will come up to 99%. And then what we’ll watch for is basically that saturation number will start bouncing around. A lot of times, we’d look at this and say, “Okay, this is blood that either hasn’t been mobile or hasn’t been oxygenated for a while but it’s coming back into the network of vessels and passing through the lungs and the heart and getting oxygenated.” We typically see all of that happen by about the eight-minute mark and then things start to maybe get a little bit boring especially if the person is used to exercising. That’s where we like to throw in these challenges.

It’s nice to have a coach because sometimes you don’t wanna do that last effort event but a lot of times the coach can recognize, “Okay, this is the breakthrough.”

What we’ll do is we’ll actually switch over to what we call MinusO2, it’s about 25% less oxygen in the air but what it does is it lifts up the heart rate, lifts up the breath rate. Behind the scenes, this small hypoxic event that we can create, the desaturation of the body actually gets our whole vascular system to respond in a way that we typically don’t get to trigger it. Our vascular system actually opens up, and there are a couple of mechanisms behind that. When that vascular system opens up and we have a little bit higher heart rate, a little bit higher breath rate, it’s the perfect time for us to actually go back to oxygen. We have more pressure produced by the heart, it’s a little bit higher arterial blood pressure and a little bit more of a diameter of a pipe to drive oxygen through so we can go deeper into the tissues. We’ll progressively up that challenge as the person becomes a little bit accustomed to it, initially we start with about a 30-second challenge and then we go to a 45 second and then we get into a minute where we have a sprint at the end of that but we continue that sprint when we actually put somebody back on oxygen so that their recovery is accelerated.

We’re maximizing this little window we’ve created of having a fully open vascular system with a nice amount of turbulence behind it to actually push deeper into the body. This is very much the story of you earn it, it’s nice to have a coach because sometimes you don’t wanna do that last effort event but a lot of times the coach can recognize, “Okay, this is the breakthrough.” It’s not only the fourth or fifth signal that we’re sending the body that it has to respond to but it’s also maybe that effort event where the body is gonna open up on that x level for us and push through an old injury or push through a part of the body that we haven’t owned for a long time. Literally, we can go decades without oxygenating certain parts of our body but the longer we go, the more risk there is that actually that part of our body becoming host to the pathogenic influences that exist in low flow, low oxygen area.

‏‏When you are coaching a customer or client, they’re using your technology, are you on video Skype with them? Are you just over the phone? How does that work?

‏‏We can teach most individuals in 2 or 3 15 minute phone conversations a general protocol that will work for them. If they need more assistance, we do the Skype video conference where basically we have them set up their computer and we can see what they’re doing and have them turn up the volume enough to say, “Okay, let’s take you through your first challenge event, here’s what you do.” Primarily, over the last two and a half years, we’ve been working with practitioners so they have a really good mindset of how they already work for patients. We just have to get them into the comfort level of saying, “We’re now gonna get patients that exercise in your clinic or instruct them to do this at home. We’ve learned how to do that with a really nice group of practitioners that range from biological dentists to holistic cardiologists, pain management, dentist, and homeopathists. It’s a really encompassing approach to actually saying, “Okay, let’s get the body moving.” It’s designed to do that.

We can’t get away from the fact that we need to breathe, we need to move. When practitioners adopt that, usually the patients are not far behind. A lot of times we get a call and it says, “Hey, I did this with so and so and I feel great. I wanna start doing it at home.” That’s where we have to put on the virtual coaching hat and say okay, this is something we think you can do. Sometimes we say, “Well, let’s keep you with that practitioner a little bit longer.” But most of the time, people, what they wanna do it at home, they start educating themselves and they start learning and it’s an enablement. For some people, it’s enabling them to exercise and they might not have exercised in years. In other cases, it’s enablement to completely heal from whatever might have been the issue behind the scenes for a while but they just haven’t been able to figure out.

‏‏How would you find a practitioner who has a LiveO2 set up that you can use and can get that oversight and assistance from the practitioner? Do you have a directory?

‏‏You would wanna call us, we do have a directory, it’s not published but one of the things you can do is go to liveo2.com and basically say, “Hey, I’m in this part of the world, who do you have nearby?” Initially, it wasn’t the case that we could hook people up with practitioners close by but we’re becoming better at that. Chances are, if you’re close to a larger city, West of Mississippi, we can usually make a good connection for you.

‏‏Cool, awesome. What about the cost if you want to have it in your own home?

‏‏If you wanna own this in your own home, the Adaptive Contrast System retails for a little bit above $4,000. Some people initially say, “Oh, wow, that’s a little bit more that I wanna spend.” And then we have to have a conversation about the benefits of this. Dollar for dollar, it’s really the best modality that you can get into and you wanna precede all of your other modalities with it because if you’re not oxygenated, not much is gonna happen in your body. Our projected life span for a system is ten years. When you get into looking at if I do a session every other day or a couple of times a week over ten years, it’s literally less than half a dollar or so to have this as a tool. And it’s not just for you, it’s for your whole family, it’s for friends, it’s for folks that you can introduce it too. It’s one of the things that I think is enabling about it is once you learn it and experience it, it’s really easy to deliver. There’s not necessarily a way to do it wrong and we’re here to help you if you wanna refine that and make your results better.

‏‏Does the $4,000 include the stationary bike or is that an addition?

‏‏It’ll work with any piece of exercise equipment. We do sell a stationary bike but it is additional. What we find is at least 85% of people have either a rebounder or an exercise piece of equipment that they just haven’t used in a while that basically our system sets up right next to it and gives it new life so they already have one of the components of the system. The Adaptive Contrast System is the reservoir and the air separator and pulse oximeter and high volume air hoses and the mask assembly. That’s what they’re purchasing for $4,000. The other thing to acknowledge is they’re coming to the source for it. It’s probably been close to a ten-year process for us to develop our understanding of this. Our mission is really to help people explore their own physiology and identify with their health solution. We had a lot of answers out there in the world but if the answer doesn’t fit your solution, we need to keep looking. It’s not that we’re the silver bullet, we just found that the majority of modalities that people are pursuing that work a lot better if we’re nicely oxygenated and that runs from stem cell procedures, could be anything on the surgery range or just having an anti-aging protocol that allows you to really thrive in that sweetness of your life that you’ve gotten to, you’re retired, you have time, the last thing you wanna do is spend that in a rut with multiple health consumptive events, spending all your savings. This is actually pretty inexpensive in terms of some of the other options that people take and spend a lot of money without good results.

‏‏You’re not the inventor, your business partner was the inventor. How did he end up inventing this device?

‏‏There’s a great story. Mark Squibb is the inventor and I think he was in his late 40s and surrounded by three young boys. Basically, he was looking around saying, “Okay, I’ve merged out of a startup entrepreneurial tech company and I really challenge myself in that up to the extent that I no longer have a lot of health I used to enjoy.” In addition to that, he was living at about 7,500 feet. He was starting to hit the oxygen deficiencies and it was just pure and simple necessity that he said, “Okay, I need to find a way to run my body that’s gonna allow me to be around as a dad primarily for these kids.” Not only just be a dad but be the happy, energetic, healthy version of a dad so he could be the family guy that he wanted to be. This was really all along the heels of starting the whole health network and the first process of the whole health network was to develop a list of the most effective modalities.

When we ran back and tested those modalities, the results were all over the board and we would find one modality for a certain condition would work really well and that same modality for a very similar condition it wouldn’t work at all. That was the signal we kept getting and finally, it amounted to okay if the body wasn’t oxygenated, it really didn’t matter what you did, nothing would work. That was the process that initially we went through to develop if we get somebody oxygenated, a lot of these modalities not only work, but they work a whole lot better. It’s very simple, you can call it an emergency or immediate needs viewpoint. If we’re not breathing, we gotta do something quick. When we combine that with the longer scope of things, we have to recognize we should be breathing 20,000 to 30,000 times a day to oxygenate ourselves. If we don’t have the two or three hours it takes to do that and to be active and to move, then we gotta find a quick way to do it, then that was the mother of invention.

‏‏What was the length of time that this happened over? He started figuring out ways to increase his oxygenation levels because he was at 7,500 feet and he was not feeling energetic and so forth. Was this like a two-year-long period or how long did this take?

‏‏My understanding is we were working a lot with nutritionals and it was primarily this nutritional riddle that we were trying to figure out, how much of the right things do you need. Looking at the body as a vessel, it’s like how much of this do we need to fill it up with before we get the result? It went through a nutritional phase and then evolved into a hydration phase, do I have the fluid body to move all of this? And then it initially, I think, went into this exercise phase without oxygen and then we went to the modalities, “Okay, let’s exercise with a little bit of oxygen.” This has been known as E-Watt. The result from that was basically like, “Okay, I think I get a little bit of benefit but it really doesn’t cut it. I’m guessing that was about a year and a half process before Mark discovered Manfred Von Ardenne’s book.

To give you an idea of Manfred Von Ardenne’s book, he was a doctor living in East Germany in the 1960s and ’70s, basically doing some cutting edge research, a really brilliant guy but he did the oxygen clinical research known as the Oxygen Multistep Training and that’s what we’re built off of. That book was released into English in the 1990s and basically nobody saw it. I’m guessing we were maybe about 10 or 15 years behind the release of that book in recognizing the substance of what Manfred Von Ardenne had done. That was where it transitioned into, “Okay, we’re gonna do this quick step protocol that Manfred looked at and that’s the 15-minute session that we now run with Adaptive Contrast.” These E-Watt sessions that are there where you’re doing a much lower volume, Manfred shows that these actually take 8 to 10 to 36 hours depending on your level of oxygen you’re using to get to a therapeutic result. It was almost impossible to pull off. But once you get it down to 15 minutes, show me somebody who doesn’t have 15 minutes to exercise and then there’s nothing we can do for them. But most everybody can do 15 minutes of this.

‏‏Is this daily?

‏‏It ranges. Some individuals who have a really large health challenge will do this daily and they’re trying to eke out every little bit of oxygenation and efficiency from their body because behind the scenes there’s a lot of healing. What Manfred tested was that on the third day, he could still see a dissolved level of oxygen that was above normal in the plasma. He determined that this is therapeutic for about three days and then he got some longer-term benefits from doing this at least once or twice that eventually helped the physiology. When you can do it about every three days or every other day as part of a normal routine, that’s where we see people thrive the most whether it’s getting out of the jaws of the aging scenario and health consumptive events or if they’re just trying to run a marathon faster, if they can challenge themselves with different air quality. First, we’re trying to resolve the oxygen deficiency and let the body behind the scenes heal. The second step of this and really the most important is that we wanna teach you to become a stronger breather. We want you functionally using more oxygen. Again, we go back to that metric. We can supplement with oxygen but we want you to earn that result of functionally using more oxygen and that’s the meta-analysis of you’ll not only be healthier but you’ll live longer, really make the most of your time here.

‏‏You have better digestion, better mental clarity, less pathology.

‏‏Your organs and your cells will know what’s up. It’ll function much better for you.

‏‏Awesome. This has been really fascinating and I hope that our listeners will take action here of trying out your device because it is amazing, I felt fantastic the whole rest of the day after using it for ten minutes. Maybe even taking the step of purchasing it for their own home. If somebody wanted to either find a practitioner who has the LiveO2 system or to work with you guys, virtual coaching, and buy the system for their own home, where would they go? They’d go to your website at liveo2.com?

‏‏The website is gonna have all the information they’ll need, just liveo2.com and call us, we’re a personable company and we really value the relationships. When an individual calls us, we completely understand that they’re looking for a health solution. If we can align and make that our primary mission with them, that’s a success for us. Sometimes it results in us telling them about a practitioner or enabling them to do this at home in the comfort of their home on their own. Other times, it results in a lot of introductions of individuals we’ve met along the way that we think can help them in finding that health solution that they’re working on.

‏‏Awesome. Thank you so much, Tom. Thank you, listeners. This is Stephan Spencer signing off, we’ll catch you on the next episode of Get Yourself Optimized.

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