https://www.listennotes.com/e/7d6132efe56b4b6093da5469e64cf131

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Increasing metabolic demand in a very high oxygen environment has unique metabolic benefits that turn off, in some cases, tons of autoimmune inflammation.

Every year past the age of 25, you lose 1% of your ability to utilize oxygen. One of the major reasons for this is inflammation within the capillaries. Inflammation is at the root of basically every chronic health condition we have out there. Brad Pittsley, founder of 1000Roads. After being diagnosed with metastatic melanoma and multiple autoimmune conditions, Brad discovered exercise with oxygen therapy and restored his health. Now he's made this powerful healing tool accessible for home use, helping thousands of others on their healing journeys. There's a lot of research out there that shows anywhere in your body, you have low oxygen, you have inflammation. And anywhere you have inflammation, you have low oxygen.

How did you get into this strange idea that you should breathe a lot of oxygen while you're exercising? You're listening to The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. You might have heard me talk about being 300 pounds in my early 20s, and I did everything you could possibly do, and I went really deep on all the bizarre stuff. And I was living in a small farming town in Northern California, and I went to the 24 Hour Fitness, and it was called Nautilus back then. And I said, I'm going to work out 6 days a week, 90 minutes a day, no matter what. It doesn't matter if I'm tired, I'm sick, I'm just going to go, and it's going to be non-negotiable because I have to lose this 100 pounds. I do not want another knee surgery. So one of the things I learned about was something called EWOT. It was very unknown. This would have been 1995, maybe something like that, maybe even 1994. And I was like, how do I do this? So I went to Craigslist and I bought an oxygen cylinder that was full of oxygen because medical oxygen is very well controlled. And I went to the gym and I brought in this big oxygen cylinder and I got on the treadmill and I put the oxygen mask on like I had emphysema. And I'm this, you know, fat early 20s kid on the treadmill sweating my butt off, breathing through an oxygen mask and thinking I must be the stupidest looking person in the gym. Little did I know that I was just the coolest biohacker. Just, I was ahead of my time maybe. But that was my first learning about EWOT or exercise with oxygen, oxygen therapy. And it's something I've experimented with ever since. We have a similar technology at Upgrade Labs today. So I wanted to go deep with you on this episode and bring in an expert who's really, really learned what happens when we change the intensity of what goes into our bodies and change the type of oxygen. This is not hyperbaric, it's something different. And I think it's gonna be a really fascinating interview about mitochondria, metabolism, respiration, and all the other cool stuff that underlies everything we do as biohackers and as human beings. Our guest today is Brad Pitzley. And he's by, we'll say, by necessity decided to learn about EWOT. Brad, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks so much, Dave. I appreciate it.

You've been talking about this relatively unknown mitochondrial hack. You've been on Born to Heal and Tick Bootcamp, and you started building EWOT systems and started your company 1000 Roads back in 2018. How did you get into this strange idea that you should breathe a lot of oxygen while you're exercising?

You're right, uh, necessity is the mother of all invention, and mine was nonetheless. Um, I had weird autoimmune conditions my whole life, and then in 2010 timeframe, I was diagnosed with autoimmune arthritis, and it started to get progressively worse. They put me on all the drugs, and they would help for a while, and then when they stopped working 6 months later, I'd be in condition. A lot of those drugs, they, they suppress your immune system because your immune system causes all the symptoms of the autoimmunity. So the theory is suppress the immune system and then the symptoms go away. And I was doing that, and like I said, I'd be better, and then I'd step 2 more steps down after they'd stopped working. And then all of a sudden, I had this weird little patch on my shoulder, and I went and saw the dermatologist, and it ended up being melanoma. And this, a side effect of, of the medications is they can cause a high risk of cancer and specifically melanoma. So I went back to my rheumatologist and I said, so what do I do here, doc? If I take, keep taking these meds, I'm gonna get cancer and die of it. But if I don't take 'em, I'm gonna die of the autoimmunity. I'm like, you know, I'm a, I, at this time I was a father of 3 children and I was like, I, I, you know, I can't die. That's not an option. So he didn't have much of a really good answer for me. It was like, hey, we're just gonna give you more of the same and may, you know, kind of hope for the best. And so that started me down the rabbit hole of alternate wellness practices and trying to find another way out. To your point, like there was, there was no traditional medical way out. And so finally I got sicker and sicker and it was probably in about 2016, I went and saw this, this this doctor who practiced alternate health practices, and he said, Brad, you're in a really bad way and you need to try something. You either need to try hyperbaric oxygen or you need to try exercise with oxygen therapy. And I had never heard of it. Kind of like you, like it was—

it's—

no one had heard of it. And so I immediately looked into hyperbaric oxygen, but it was very expensive and very time-consuming. And I was already kind of like fighting for my job. I didn't have any energy. I had brain fog. I had pain all over, really bad pain. And I just knew I didn't have an hour and a half to spend inside of a tube, and I didn't have the $75 grand. We were talking the hard shell hyperbaric, like the intense stuff, and I didn't have that kind of money. So I was like, well, let me look at this EWOT thing. And, um, started to research it. Sounded promising, but there wasn't much on the internet. There weren't people talking about how they were using it and getting better. There was only the company selling it and a lot of it was marketing material that quite frankly had a lot of hyperbole in it. And I just, I didn't have a lot of confidence and they were pretty high priced and I just wasn't willing to spend $10,000 on an experiment when every experiment I'd tried had failed. So I always joke, I'm a recovering engineer. I started my career in engineering and so I, At this point, I was no longer in engineering, but I decided to put that degree back to work and I kind of just designed my own system. And lo and behold, a year later, I saw that same doctor and I was getting better. And he said, oh, are you doing the oxygen? And I'm like, I am. And he said, well, you know, who'd you buy it from so I can tell my other patients about it? And I said, I actually just made my own, doc. And he looked at me like I was crazy. And then he said, After a pause, he's like, would you consider making them for my patients? And that was kind of the birth of the idea. I was like, well, I never thought about it, but I had— I came in at, you know, it was kind of like this wanting to pay back because I had felt taken advantage of by so many wellness practices where they wanted me to pay $25 grand or more to experiment with this modality or that, or— and it just felt like it's very difficult when you're in a chronic health condition and you're outside the medical standard, you—

yeah, mold and Lyme and all that stuff. Same, same with me. There's a reason I said I spent $2.5 million reversing my age. The first half a million dollars was just getting well from chronic autoimmunity and toxic mold and all this stuff. Right. And so I'm lucky I made enough money in my 20s despite my brain being cooked that I could do that. And without that, I think I would have lupus or MS, and certainly I'd be disabled. So that's one of the things that motivates me to have you on the show is like, let's tell everybody about this. And like you, like, I think it's kind of ridiculous. There's one vendor of EWOT that charges a huge amount of money for basically a big trash bag. And it's just like, not, not the way I would go about doing it. What I want to know is, and by the way, just full disclosure, I've had a soft-sided chamber for 18 years, hyperbaric, and I have a hard-sided chamber downstairs. I'm a fan of hyperbaric and I'm a fan of EWOT. And in fact, I'm a fan of even doing the intermittent versions of it. So, I mean, you could have gone out there and spent $10,000 on a big trash bag, but why didn't you? What made you decide to build it yourself?

Well, the first thing was I just didn't believe in it. Be honest, I didn't believe in it because I have tried everything at this point. I mean, diets, supplements, all sorts of modalities, you know. And at one point, the doctor said, oh, I'm going to give you the big guns, we're going to do ozone treatment. And by the way, all these things are great things and I'm not putting them down. They just didn't work for me. So, when I was looking at $10,000 or plus, it just wasn't palpable for me to spend that kind of money on an experiment that at the end of it, I was going to be like, "No better. Now, what do I do?" So, I started researching and kind of to your point, I knew I could do this better and I think There's a couple of things I saw wrong with the industry. One was it was a lot of hyperbole, and I just wish someone would bring me some science. I wish someone would bring me real people talking about it so that I could hear from other people using it and have some confidence in it. You know, the market back then, like when you started, the market was primarily these companies selling to chiropractors' offices and wellness clinics, and that's a small universe. And so it makes sense that they had to charge high prices in order to make it a viable business. And my thought was, well, what if we just trashed that price and brought it way down? And then, we could extend this out to people. And the other thing about it is the most effective oxygen therapy, the most effective wellness modality regardless is the one you can do consistently over time. And so, if you can— and that's what I loved about this. It was 15 minutes a day is all it takes to do EWOT. And if you could bring the price down so people could do it in their home, they didn't need to go to a center, That's something most of us can do. And you know this, Dave, like when you're chronically ill and you're taking the supplements and doing all the modalities, every one of them only takes you 25 minutes counting pills and this until you're like, holy cow, my entire calendar is all this stuff all day and I feel great for that last 10 minutes and then back to bed and back to square one. So it's like I was called to ceremonies and so like there's too many ceremonies when you're, when you're sick trying to get well. And so anything that was you could do in a very quick period of time and it would have multiple positive impacts. That was amazing for me.

Now you understand why Upgrade Labs exists. If you're a new listener, this is my franchise company where we have about a dozen biohacking modalities in the same place for a single membership fee because I had to build a $1 million biohacking lab in my barn because I have time to drive everywhere or you just couldn't get it where I lived. And so like, no one should have to do that. And the idea that the thing you need to do every day, just do it at home. And I also want to point out, Brad, a lot of the biohacks that we're using, they go back at least to Tesla. Like if we're looking at electrical things or some of the PEMF and some of it much longer, like Pliny the Elder from way back in the day was using electric eels to cure migraines. So we have this long history of biohacking, but EWOT, only was invented in East Germany in the 1960s. Right. So this is a very new thing that just didn't exist. In fact, hyperbaric has existed longer. That's why it's so unknown. It takes a long time for things that work to get out there. And so it was invented in the '60s, but the book on it only came out in 1990.

Right.

I was doing it in 1994 because I don't know, I'm a futurist or something. I found out about it from the longevity nonprofit stuff I was doing. So I got to try this. and I ran out of oxygen and found I could not refill it. Oxygen is incredibly restricted here. In the system that you make, where'd you get the oxygen?

That's a great question. So we use a device called an oxygen concentrator, and effectively what it does is it takes the air you're breathing that's at 21% oxygen and it purifies it to 93% oxygen. 93 is the medical spec they use. So these are the same sorts of machines that people who have like COPD or emphysema would use in their home when they need supplemental oxygen.

It's exactly how to do it. By the way, anyone who had one of your systems during the pandemic had oxygen, right? So when it looked like there was a lung issue, I'm like, well, I have two oxygen concentrators at home and I just bought all the welding oxygen that was around me. So I'm like, I have enough oxygen to treat my whole neighborhood if they're— if they need it, because going to the hospital probably is a good way to die at the time.

Yeah. And these machines, they just last. I mean, if you get an oxygen concentrator for, for the purpose of EWOT, because we're only using it a small number of hours a day, for it to last a decade is nothing to bat an eyelash at.

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The idea here is understand changing the amount of oxygen that you breathe during intense exercise. It's a big deal, right? Why does it work?

That's an awesome question. So as you mentioned, there was a gentleman named Van Arden in the 1960s and '70s who did some research, and he's the same guy who invented the scanning electron microscope. He's about 600 patents to his name, just prolific inventor, super smart. He was part of the commercialization of the first CRT TV sets in the 1930s. So really smart guy. And he got very interested in oxygen and particularly oxygen for anti-cancer purposes. And he started doing this research. And so here's the thing that happens every year past the age of 25, you lose 1% of your ability to utilize oxygen. And most of us don't, like, notice this right off the bat. So 26 and 30, you don't necessarily notice it, but that's the reason why you're at a lower energy state when you're in your 60s than you were in your 20s. And so what he found is the reason— one of the major reasons for this is inflammation within the capillaries. And so as we get older, we hear this term inflammaging. And so this inflammaging builds up inside of our capillaries, and it actually pinches the capillaries shut so the red blood cells can't get through. And all of your cells downstream go from aerobic respiration to anaerobic respiration, where they're using glucose in the absence of oxygen to produce energy. Now, there's a problem with that. If you look at— compare aerobic respiration to anaerobic respiration, aerobic respiration produces about 16 times as much energy. So now you've got this cell that's kind of on life support. It has to cut out nonessential functions, things like taking out the trash. It just lets all this metabolic waste build up inside the cell walls. It's at a low energy state. What he found was that by doing a couple of things happen. First, we start saturating our blood plasma with oxygen. And now, the way our blood works is we got these red and white blood cells that float in this clearish brown liquid called blood plasma. The red blood cells normally carry like 98% of our oxygen, and the blood plasma has very little. But when you're doing EWOT, because of the massive amount of oxygen you're bringing in, you actually start to saturate this blood plasma. And while the red blood cells can't get through, the blood plasma is much thinner and it can get through there and start oxygenating the cells downstream, things that have been choked off from oxygen for perhaps a long time. And then the second thing it does is it creates an anti-inflammatory effect and it actually causes the linings of those capillaries to, to reestablish normal blood flow. And so he had some elderly folks do a few sessions of EWOT. And then he had them come back like 3 months later and he, he measured them and he saw that there was a durable change. It wasn't just opening these capillaries while they were doing EWOT. It continued to remain open and it reestablished more youthful blood flow. And so that's more youthful oxygenation of your cells. It reignites mitochondrial biogenesis and ramps it up. So that is the root of it. And one of the most powerful things— it does so many things. So oxygen is intensely anti-inflammatory. So there's a lot of research out there that shows anywhere in your body you have low oxygen, you have inflammation, and anywhere you have inflammation, you have low oxygen. You can't have one without the other. So obviously, when you start flooding your tissues with oxygen, you're creating this powerful anti-inflammatory effect, not just in your capillaries, but everywhere. And so as I'm sure all your listeners know, inflammation is at the root of basically every chronic health condition we have out there. So that's the first thing. It's anti-aging, it's anti-inflammatory. Obviously, it's important for energy. It increases our energy production. And that's not just about us feeling like clear-headed and having energy for the day. That's about your liver, your brain, your skin, all of them doing the things they need to do at their best. And then the last thing really, I, I think is really potent about it is its power for detoxification. The one thing I don't hear many people talk about, which surprises me, is actually 70% of your body's detoxification actually happens through your lungs. That's your biggest detox organ. And so obviously breathing in and out oxygen is helping there, but oxygen helps detox in a variety of ways. We talked about your body being in a low energy state and building up all these toxins inside the cell wall. Well, when you flood them with oxygen and they re-energize, they can start dumping all these toxins out. Once they, once they get out into the system, you're doing exercise, which is really the power of EWOD. It's that synergy of massive amounts of oxygen and all of the benefits of exercise. And so what happens is now you're moving your lymphatic system around, you're moving your lymph fluid, so you're moving that stuff around. And then lastly, when you have toxins in your system, you need to oxidize them, which is you use oxygen in a reaction to break them down into simpler substances that allow your excretory organs to move them out of your body. So we're doing all of these things simultaneously. And so that's really the power is anti-inflammation, detoxification, more energy all at once.

When people are using your LEO system, what does it look like? Like you put a mask on, you're on a treadmill. How long do you go? Like, what does the protocol look like?

Yeah, and it's, it's really relatively simple. So the equipment looks like an oxygen concentrator is this device that's probably a foot and a half tall and it's maybe a foot and a half wide by a foot thick, if you will. And you plug it into the wall and it's got oxygen tubing coming out. The challenge with these devices is they don't produce nearly enough oxygen for you. So we, the two systems I talked about, one produces 10 liters a minute and the other one produces 5 liters of oxygen a minute. When you're exercising, you can breathe in like 50 or 60 liters of oxygen a minute quite easily. And so what we do is we use— rather than try to gang up 10 of these machines on you and, you know, watch your power grid fail, what we do is we have one machine and we use it to fill a large reservoir. So this, in our case, it's a— what looks like a bag, which is like 6 feet wide and 5.5 feet tall. Our, our reservoir can hold 1,000 liters. So if you think about a 2-liter bottle of soda, you know, it's 500 of those. So it's a lot of oxygen. So we fill that reservoir up. And then from there, there's a hose that comes to a mask that you wear. And you basically just—

you—

that's what the equipment looks like. As far as the protocol, you put that mask on and you do 15 minutes of cardiovascular exercise with the mask on and you're breathing. 93% pure oxygen. We have it designed with a specific two-way valve, so one valve opens when you're breathing in pure oxygen, and then when you breathe out, it shuts, so none of your exhaled gases go back in the reservoir. They, they exit out a separate valve into the room, and in that way, the next breath is also 93%. And so we're keeping it a high percentage of oxygen for that period of time. Now, that people can easily use 900+ liters of that reservoir in a 15-minute session. And to give you a feel for how much oxygen that is, that's about the same amount of oxygen a person uses at rest in like 14 hours. You said you've got soft shell and hard shell. It's comparable to spending an hour in a hard shell chamber sort of thing. So it's a massive amount of oxygen and we're able to do it quickly because of the synergies of exercise and all of the physiological changes that occur in our body when we're exercising.

So you get this surge of oxygen and you said 15 minutes. Is this like zone 2? Are you doing high-intensity intervals? What's the protocol you like?

So for me, what I— we deal with a lot of folks with chronic illness, and some of them can only start with like walking or stretching, or in some of them, if they're very sick, oftentimes What can happen at the very beginning, particularly for sick people, is they can have a detoxification reaction. All of a sudden, your cells start dumping all this toxic waste. It overwhelms your elimination organs. So for folks who are very sick, we kinda say you kinda, you kinda walk into this, so to speak, no pun intended, but you kinda start slow and build up to that 15 minutes. And, but the end state kind of intensity we like for folks is about 70 to 80% of your theoretical max heart rate. And you want to try to hit that for that 15 minutes.

That's pretty hard to do for most people.

Yes. Well, and that's the other thing we do tell folks is we say, you know, perfection is the enemy of progress in this sort of thing. So if you're doing it, you're going to get benefits. Go out and do your best. The thing is, when you're exercising with oxygen, it's much easier. And you— so I always give this example, like when I started doing it and you can attest to this, Dave, is I would do my elliptical at a resistance of 12, which was pretty stiff at the time, and then I threw that mask on and immediately had to go up to 13 and 14, and then a month later I had to go up to 15, and today, you know, I do it at like a 17 and it doesn't feel any different from when I used to do it at a 12. So your endurance improves and your ability to perform exercise improves dramatically. As a matter of fact, a lot of the research on EWOT was done by, you know, the the US Olympic team and some Russian Olympic teams. So there's a ton of research on it improving athletic performance.

It's funny, a lot of the biohacks came out of Russia and East Germany during the Olympics in the, in the '80s. They were just willing to do all the crazy stuff. And, you know, some of the fundamental things like whole body vibration came out of that. And then NASA, some of the stuff around lasers, and certainly this oxygen stuff. So there's a lot of research done early on on it. And it's, it's basically a 15-minute workout. And I've seen people do it with high-intensity interval training. And I've also seen people do, you know, 2 minutes on, 1 minute off and all kinds of different protocols. How do you know which ones are the best ones?

It really depends on your goal. Okay. So a lot of— I start from a place of people with chronic illness because I have a lot of empathy for that. If you're dealing with chronic illness, none of this HIIT stuff. I mean, we don't want you to wear your body out. We're trying to heal your body from the inside out. So it's— this isn't about killing. Yet. This is about getting your heart rate up for an extended period of time. What we're really trying to do with EWOT, like I said, it's about the physiological changes. When, when you start exercising, your body immediately recognizes it does not have enough oxygen to produce the energy to keep the exercise up. And so it compensates. You start breathing heavier, deeper, more frequently. Your heart starts beating deeper and more frequently. You have vasodilation. All these compensatory things happen. To allow your body to carry more oxygen. And we're effectively hijacking all of those changes to bring a massive amount of oxygen into your body in a short period of time. So what you want to do is you want to get your heart rate up and you want to get your blood pumping. And that's really what we're going for. And then— and it's not about perfection, it's about progress. So that's for on the chronic illness side. Now, if you're a high performer looking to get the best out of it, There's two great ways to use EWOT, or two great benefits, and there's kind of a little bit of a different use for each. One is it will improve your VO2 max, it will improve your endurance, it'll improve the intensity at which you can work out. So you're— what you want to do is you want to, you want to do EWOT when you're doing some of those intensity sessions. So I mentioned myself, I went from a resistance 12 to resistance 17. Now, there's days I don't fill the reservoir and I go out to go do my workout and it's not filled and I still go do it at 17. So it's not like I need that mask to do it. I've, I've built that endurance. So you want to do it on those, those push days and really help push yourself because you're going to be able to do more work and train your muscles to do more and get your system going and more mitochondrial biogenesis and all that. The second way, equally as powerful for people who are looking for high performance, is to use it for recovery. So when your body runs out of oxygen and it switches to anaerobic respiration, it produces a massive amount of waste products, including lactic acid, which is what makes our muscles sore. When we use— when we use oxygen, it actually— you need oxygen to break down lactic acid. And so when you do it for recovery, it helps you so you can get to the next thing more, more quickly. And my example there is like weightlifting. I'll— I'll lift weights a couple of times a week and I'll do EWOT right afterwards. But if I miss a week or two because I'm traveling or something's come up, I, I never get muscle soreness, which is like shocking to me because when I was like 33, if I missed a week and a half and I tried to come back, that hurt. So it's kind of the magic of oxygen. So it's those two places where you want to use it. You want to use it to push to improve your performance and you want to use it for recovery to help get yourself back for that next session sooner.

How do people feel when they do it? Some of the targets for biohacking, things like brain fog, energy levels, VO2 max, HRV. How would I know it's working?

You know, the interesting thing is we have a lot of folks, you know, obviously we have a lot of folks who are biohacking and doing it, and many of them come back to us and just say, this is my favorite thing because it's the most noticeable results. We have folks who get on and immediately they noticed a boost in energy and clearheadedness. and, and in sleep quality. Those things they'll notice right away, or they'll notice they're able to do more exercise than they've been able to do before. Some people don't notice that. I was actually in the former camp where— or in the latter camp, excuse me, where I didn't notice any benefits from EWOT because I was so sick that it took about 3 months before I started to notice the benefits. Because I had so much infla— I was described like a bathtub filled with inflammation, I was draining it, and you just don't notice it it's draining until it kind of comes down to a level like, wait a second, wasn't this thing to the top? It's now 8 inches down, sort of thing. So it kind of depends. Most folks will notice something within a few weeks. You'll notice clear-headedness, you'll notice energy, you'll notice sleep, and you'll notice better athletic performance.

That's, uh, that's pretty noticeable. The day of it though, you ought to feel a clearing of brain fog, right?

Yes, a lot, a lot of folks, myself included, I've noticed that, where it clears your brain fog. So brain fog really comes down to a lot of times inflammation in the brain. Our brain uses like 20% of our oxygen and it's only 2% of our mass. So it's the biggest oxygen consumer. So when you're flooding your body with oxygen, obviously it's getting a ton of oxygen. It's relieving that inflammation and it's helping your— all of your cells go back to aerobic and be able to do everything they need to do. So we do have folks who notice a lot of clear-headedness. I've often joked that this should be, we should put these on college campuses for the kids the day after, because just clear their head out and clear all of the sins of yesterday out.

Yeah, for hangovers, I like it. It seems like it would pair well with something like Vascanox from my friends at Calroy, the supplements that open up your capillaries so you get better blood flow, or anything with nattokinase in it. Stem Regen has something like that. I think it's their Mobilize product. And the idea here is more liquid blood or more open capillaries would make a huge difference while you're doing this. So I would want to probably pretreat if I was going to do it. What else should people do before or after they do a session on EWOT?

Yeah, those are great ones. Those and L-arginine, anything that leads to vasodilation is, is, is a, is an awesome idea to kind of boost the power of it. As far as afterwards, there's not a whole lot you necessarily need to do, but what I do love is I do love to pair it with red light, and there's a couple different ways you use it depending on what you're using it for. So if we think— the way I think about it is, you know, red light basically works from an oxygen standpoint as well. A lot of folks don't realize this, but EWOT's all about driving oxygen supply. It's a massive amount of supply. It's 14 hours. Worth of oxygen in 15 minutes, flooding your system. And then red light kind of works on the inverse. It's all about oxygen demand. It stimulates your mitochondria to suck in oxygen and produce ATP to generate more energy, to do everything they do their best. And while EWOT's coming from the inside out, deep within, the great thing about red light and near-infrared light is it's from the outside in. And so we're hitting, if you will, that last mile delivery, so to speak. And so it pairs really well with that. And there's two ways you use it. For if you're going for athletic performance, I recommend you do the red light first. So the reason is now all of a sudden your, your mitochondria are fired up and they're ready to suck in oxygen. And now you're throwing in a huge amount of supply and you're going to improve the amount of work you can do, the amount of exercise you can do in the performance. For people with chronic health conditions, it's a little bit of the opposite. I, I recommend they do it afterwards. So you first flood your body with oxygen so that has all the supply. When you get off the exercise equipment and you go lay down underneath that red light or however you're using it, you've got that excess supply still floating around. And then you turn those red lights on and generate the demand, which is pulling more of it in, and it's already there within your system. Because for those folks, asking for more demand when they have kind of a supply problem due to inflammation is a challenge. So that's how we stack that.

Okay. I like it.

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It seems like something like CoQ10 might be really helpful. Anything that helps mitochondria— mito, mitoQ, PQQ, Timeline— like, you should take a full mitochondrial stack at the same time, shouldn't you?

You can definitely do that. What, and all of those things can help speed up the end game is what it really comes down to. Because at the end of the day, you are supplying so much oxygen that you, you generate this mitochondrial biogenesis at such a large level that it, you kind of effectively over time, you optimize. Now, sometimes over time, like for me, I continued to see incremental benefits from EWOT into my third year. Which I found is pretty shocking. You know, any— you think any kind of exercise program you're doing, you're going to like level off at like 6 months or something. Now, doing something like that will probably compress the timeline. You probably won't be looking at 3 years. You can probably bring it down to, you know, 20 months or 2 years sort of thing by something like that.

What aging markers change when you're doing EWOT therapy?

Oh, you know, obviously inflammation comes way down, which is a big one. Energy production goes way up. I had— so this same, you know, I'll tell my story on this one, and I don't remember, I don't remember all of the age markers on this, but so that same doctor who recommended EWOT, a few years later I went in and he says— maybe a year or two later, I still wasn't all the way better, but I was on the way, and he said to me, hey, you know, I've got this new machine, it's called a bioenergy tester. And I want to have you do it. I want to get you in my database. Let's see what you can do. He just had a hunch. So basically, this was a machine where they had you, you know, basically you sat down and took your blood pressure, your heart rate, your breathing rate, all these biomarkers. And then while you're resting, first thing in the morning for me, and then they put me on the bike and the nurse says, look, this bike is going to keep progressively increasing intensity until you fail. And fail is, I think, your heart rate gets up to some point or your breathing rate. And she said, it'll take you about 8 to 12 minutes. And so I said, okay. So I got on the bike and I just kept going, and it was 8 minutes, no, 12 minutes, no big deal, 20 minutes, no big deal. Finally, at like 24 or 25 minutes or something like that, finally it hit. And so I got off the bike and she was just shocked, staring at me. She's like, what are you, some sort of ultra endurance athlete? I laughed. I'm like, no, I'm definitely not doing that. I'm like just trying to get over this chronic illness. And they gave me all these test results and they looked at my mitochondrial function. They looked at, they looked at my, my, my heart health and, and, you know, some of my other organ health sort of thing. And they're like, they were telling me, they were quoting me that I was 10 and 20 years younger than what they would've expected for someone my age. It was, it was really kind of shocking. And at that time, I still wasn't like 100%. So it was, it was kind of shocking to me.

Incredible. One of the guys who did talk about EWOT and may have been my inspiration was Frank Schellenberger back in the day, and he's been a major proponent of ozone therapy as well. And so it's all about mitochondrial function here. But other than that research, I haven't seen much in the literature about EWOT unless I just missed it. So have you done new studies? Are there other people doing studies?

There are new studies. There's— there were some studies at the University of Cincinnati on COVID that they were working on, long COVID. There's actually was one in 2018 on mitochondrial biogenesis. If you look up— so the term you research, if you're looking to look up EWOT, it's called hyperoxic, you know, hyperoxia or hyperoxic exercise. So hyperoxic is just the fancy medical term for high oxygen. It's the opposite of hypoxia, which is low oxygen. So hyperoxic exercise, there's a ton on that. There's— so obviously, von Arden did a lot of great things on like the cancer. He showed that he could use— by using EWOT, he could take a cancer cell and unprime it, so to speak. And he did some of the anti-aging research, which is foundational. We have— since then, we've had a lot of sports and athletics. But the other thing that it's relevant to is anything you see with Hyperbaric is generally relevant to EWOT because they're two modalities that are effectively using high volumes of oxygen to flood the blood plasma and the body with oxygen. So, they're pretty much— oftentimes, they're analogous in that respect.

I can say there's a huge amount of new research. We just did an episode looking at the different pressures of hyperbaric oxygen that 1.3 atmospheres does something different. And I feel like in the world of biohacking, this idea of manipulating the mix of gases and the pressure of gases is just now coming into maybe its teenage years in terms of being known. And we definitely use a hyperoxic hypoxic system at Upgrade Labs. I mentioned, you know, I have the OxyHealth system downstairs, and it's definitely helped a lot with brain injury. And I've first used EWATS. Good God, I'm dating myself. That is— is that really 31 years ago? It is. Geez. So all of these are part of my biohacking stack, and I feel like over the next few years, way more is going to come out. In fact, I'm waiting delivery of a xenon gas cylinder. I wrote about that in— that was in my longevity book, in Superhuman. Where it actually increases EPO and gets more blood cells going without having to use EPO. So I don't think the World Anti-Doping Association would complain, but if they would, that just means it works better. So my, my personal mission is to remove the Anti-Doping Association from the planet because it's a, it's a scam and they're harming athletes. And I like athletes. So, okay. So what else is going to happen in the future of EWOS? So you've got a very accessible system. I would say it's the best one on the market. It's also very fairly priced. And it— and the bag you use is like, it's a good bag. The original stuff I tried from the $10,000 guys, it was just— it was not a good experience. We'll put it that way. So what you've got works pretty well. It takes up some space in a room. You put it behind a couch or something, it's probably not going to win any decor competitions except for maybe Halloween because you put like big googly eyes on it. But it's like, it's, it's totally functional for someone who's recovering or for a pro athlete. But what's coming next? Are you going to, you know, attach oxygen sensors, add some kind of switching? Like, where's it going?

So we don't generally do the switching that you refer to, the altitude switching where people—

you don't now, but I'm saying, like, where's the future going?

Yeah, we, we haven't had interest in that, and I'll tell you why. Because our real goal is about serving folks who have chronic illness and helping them get better. And the issue with the low oxygen switching— so there's one company that was really big into that, and there was a couple other companies that did it, and several of them kind of had gotten out of that. But the issue is any— like I had mentioned earlier, anywhere in the body you have low oxygen you have inflammation. And so a lot of our customers are dealing with runaway inflammation. And so we don't recommend that. Quite honestly, if you want to do that, we tell folks the easier way to do it is you can do breath holds while you're exercising because a breath hold is 0% oxygen. It's even more severe than low oxygen, and it doesn't require you trying to turn a switch while you're trying to balance on a machine sort of thing. But for people with chronic health, we don't do that. Our goal is to build out a suite of available products for folks with chronic health conditions and make them affordable, things that are science-backed. You know, you know this, Dave, you learn so much getting better, right? Like nowadays I see so much of it's actually becoming mainstream, more and more of it. But, you know, there's so much I've learned too, and I want to bring some of that out and bring that to folks and bring more of that. So there's some other ideas we have in the can even beyond EWOT. But as far as the, you know, the future of EWOT, I think is less about the technology upgrades to it because like you can't, you can't measure the oxygen difference. So you can't put one of those pulse oximeters on your finger and see a difference because you're at 99%, you're at 99%, right?

Yeah.

It's not, it's measuring red blood cells and what we're talking about plasma, which you can't measure, right? So there's not like a feedback mechanism that's readily available to the public. Really, I think it's really about a revolution in availability, right? If we can get more people, make it available, that's the big revolution. I mean, in the eWatt space for me.

So just getting it out there, making it more affordable. Any opportunities to make it more portable?

More portable. That's a, that's a good one. I wish there were. The challenge is if you need 60 liters of a gas every minute you're exercising, imagine trying to run outside. While you're carrying a floating balloon with, you know, you're going to hit the power lines. And, you know, I don't know if I've got the insurance for that. So just to be honest, you— so then you're talking about compressed gas, and compressed gas is where you get into a dangerous situation. You don't want to have compressed oxygen if you have a leak or something that gets into a challenging situation. So that's difficult. There are ways to make instantaneous generation so you don't need that reservoir. Unfortunately, those are price prohibitive for home use. Now, if you're talking about that for clinic use, I think that's something that you're going to see more and more of in the future.

And for highly motivated listeners, you, you can buy probably 4 oxygen concentrators and put them all together and get enough to be useful, right?

Probably not 4, probably 5 or 6.

5. Okay.

You could. Now, here's the challenge with that. The challenge with that is, as I mentioned, our mask and what we use with these kind of traditional EWOT systems, it seals around your face and it has this two-way non-rebreather valve so that you're not breathing back in your exhale gases. If you're trying to gang up these concentrators using oxygen tubing, it's going to be forcing— like, you're going to feel like you're underneath a pressure washer of oxygen, and likely you're going to have a mask that leaks around the edge. So you're not going to get quite as good of a workout as if you had a sealed mask and a kind of a bigger hose feeding you.

Okay, that's a fair point. Do people mix it with, with ozone? Like, do you do ozone before or after? Do you mix it? Maybe do hyperbaric one day, EWOD another day. Like, do we know what works?

You can mix it with ozone, no problem. I've mixed it with ozone. I've used it for, like I've said, I've, I've used ozone for a variety of things and no issues with that whatsoever. They work in a little bit of different ways and kind of, I think of them as different purposes, although obviously you do get oxygenation through ozone as well. It's also the— it's also basically causing all the free radical changes in the body, I believe, that have a chain reaction. As far as with hyperbaric, you can— like I said, they're effectively offering similar benefits. We do generally see folks tell us, and you, you can tell us if this is true for you, Dave, it's more noticeable with EWOT versus hyperbaric early on. They notice a bigger difference when they start doing it. But we do have some folks out there who— we have folks out there who've come from hyperbaric and go to EWOT. We have some folks out there that are doing a little bit of each as well. So you can mix them. There's no harm in it whatsoever, as long, you know, within bounds, obviously. Like, there are folks out there who are doing alternate cancer protocols who are doing, you know, and there's people out there recommending you do EWOT 3 times a day. I don't— there's no harm in doing that. I just think you're overworking your body because there's exercise involved sort of thing.

Oxygen is also a pro-oxidant at very high levels. You can get an overdose of oxygen. I'm— I don't know that I would recommend 3 times a day. And, and we know with hyperbaric that the pressure change, the going up and going down, appears to have a piezoelectric or some other effect. So I would say it's okay to mix them and it's okay to say, well, I wanted to do EWOT because it was abundantly affordable and I could do it at home, right? And there's nothing wrong with either one of those. So I, I think if I was saying, all right, I'm facing cancer or this autoimmune stuff that we've both dealt with, I would definitely want an ozone machine. I'd want your EWOT machine. I'd want a soft-sided hyperbaric or access to that kind of stuff. Like I'd wanna live next door to an Upgrade Labs.

Yeah. Right. Or go in there and get the hard shell stuff.

Yeah, exactly. Um, although actually strangely at Upgrade Labs, we don't do hyperbaric for a good reason. Most people need 40 sessions and then they're done and they're very long and people get claustrophobic and also I find that leasing a soft shell for, for use like that, people do it, they do the whole family, they save a ton of money and then they're done and they take up a lot of space. So it's a, it's rough to run a business that does hyperbaric and other stuff. Um, but to do something instead. We do hyperoxic hypoxic training, which is in the same universe what we're talking about. It's just more, more time and, and cost efficient for, for our clients. So the, the general lesson for our episode is that increasing metabolic demand in a very high oxygen environment has unique metabolic benefits that turn off, in some cases, tons of autoimmune inflammation. My view on things has just only gotten stronger over the years that autoimmune issues are ultimately mitochondrial. You fix the mitochondria, drop the stress response, the cell danger response, and you fix everything. So having abundant energy in the cells and working cell membranes and working redox potential seems to fix almost everything. I don't care if you're talking about Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or cancer, like those all could be symptoms of mitochondrial dysfunction. Now, the cause of the mitochondrial dysfunction could be, you know, in just for Alzheimer's, Dr. Dale Bredesen came on the show. He's like, oh, there's 7 kinds of Alzheimer's, right? Okay. Or even things like ADHD or autism. Daniel Amen, I'm on his board of directors, good friend, been on the show multiple times saying, well, there's different kinds of ADHD, but all of them are symptoms. Mitochondria, mitochondria, mitochondria. And what you did and what I did was reboot and enhance mitochondrial function, which resolves all sorts of weird stuff.

Yeah. You know, one of my favorite quotes is from that, right in that strain, is from Arthur Guyton. So Arthur Guyton wrote this medical textbook called Medical Physiology in the 1950s. And every doctor, any one of us or anyone listening to the show has ever gone and seen, had to use this medical textbook. It's still the gold standard today. So, very well-respected guy. And he said, and I'm paraphrasing here, but basically the root of all disease is lack of oxygen. To your point, that becomes a metabolic issue because at that point that when our metabolism goes from aerobic to anaerobic, then we don't have, we don't have the energy we need.

Oh, makes so much sense. In fact, if you go back to maybe the first 10 episodes, this is like 13, 14 years ago, Dom D'Agostino. Came on talking about hyperbaric oxygen with ketones as a form of cancer treatment. So like, gee, do ketones cause more electrical output for mitochondria? Yes. That leads me to a question. Seems like I'd want to be in ketosis when I'm doing EWOT with your system, right?

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

That's one of the things where all these biohacks that, you know, we've been talking about for a decade, they all stack and they're all ultimately, let's get more blood there, let's get more oxygen there, let's get more mitochondria working. Let's get the right signal into the body. And the signal that you're putting in with your system, Brad, is high metabolic demand and high oxygen. Therefore, it's safe to increase your capacity. And then when the demand goes away, the capacity remains increased and then you improve. So would make sense that that works for exercise, for professional exercisers or athletes. And it works for chronic illness. And I very much appreciate that you've lowered the price to make it accessible. Without democratizing EWOT. The reason is that I don't think other people should be allowed to vote whether or not you're allowed to do EWOT. So we don't need democracy for this. We just need affordable pricing. I agree with you. Less regulation, more freedom, right? Amazing.

If I can keep them out of my health care, that'd be great. Thank you.

Exactly. Exactly. Well, I very much appreciate the work you're doing, guys. It's 1000roads.com. And if you're thinking about some kind of oxygen therapy, this is a very affordable one and is something that can make a difference. Downside, you're going to have a balloon in your living room or wherever you put the thing. It's less of a footprint than I think you'd have with hyperbaric, which is also a big balloon in your living room. So if you're into balloons, oxygen therapy may be your thing. If you are not into balloons, you could get an ozone device. Which is in about the same price point. Um, you just have to be okay— you hate balloons, but you don't mind squeezing a balloon to put ozone in your butt. So really, this is a balloon-centric episode now that I think about it. Um, on that note, Brad, thanks again.

Hey, thank you so much, Dave.

You have a great one. See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.

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