← Biohacking Beauty: The Anti-Aging Skincare Podcast
Biohacking Beauty: The Anti-Aging Skincare Podcast
Alex Tarnava: What Hydrogen Really Does to Your Skin
00:58:47
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- [00:06]
A
This is going to be a game changer. First of all, welcome to Biohacking Beauty Podcast. My name is Amitai, I'm Anastasia and we're the co founders of Yangoos Yangoos Skincare, the world's first and then filling the blank, biohacking longevity, skincare, etc. Today we're talking about one of the most overlooked and in my opinion, most powerful molecules in health optimization and skin longevity, which is molecular hydrogen.
- [00:35]
B
And it's not just a buzzword. We're talking real peer reviewed science. Over 30 clinical and preclinical studies looking at hydrogen's impact on oxidative stress, mitochondrial function, inflammation and even skin issues such as wrinkles, acne, eczema, dermatitis, pores, etc.
- [00:57]
A
Exactly. And it's. And joining us today is someone who's not just involved in the research. He's the reason it exists in the first place.
- [01:06]
C
Yeah.
- [01:07]
B
Alex Tarnava is the inventor of the world's first open cup hydrogen tablet delivery system. You've probably seen it. It's behind a lot of big names
- [01:17]
A
like Dr. Mercola, Gary Brecher, Dr. Gundry, Symbiotica, Quicksilver Scientific.
- [01:25]
B
Yep. Mm.
- [01:26]
A
And this is one of those guys who's disrupting the space from the inside, not waiting for permission, just pushing innovation forward. He is also behind Inhale H2, which is launching later this year the first safe hydrogen gas inhalation system backed by clinical data.
- [01:47]
B
And we're so excited about it. And also I just want to a reminder that this podcast is not sponsored by any of those brands or Alex himself. It's just Sabita and I, you know, bring you the the best source of information. And as we were saying, hydrogen is a buzzword in a way that everyone's talking about it. We also actually talked about the fact that the result of counterfeit on the market. We want you to know reliable sources. So if you do decide to take hydrogen supplementation as one of your habits, healthy habits, that you indeed, you know, give it a proper try with the proper product. It's rare to see a single molecule show this much promise across such a wide range of pathways. And Alex walks us through it all with clarity and a refreshing non BS attitude.
- [02:39]
A
Yeah. For those wondering, okay, but what does this do for my face? We've got you. There's real data on hydrogen baths, improving wrinkles, hydrogen masks, helping acne, and even hydrogen inhalation or oral supplementation reducing radiation induced skin damage in cancer patients and even just like overall systemic benefits, which of Course benefit our skin at the end of the day.
- [03:11]
B
Yeah. And before we dive into today's episode, we as always gonna read a listener review.
- [03:17]
A
All right. Do you have one prepared?
- [03:18]
B
Yes.
- [03:19]
A
I'm just gonna say that if we read your review on air, you are going to get a free product because we appreciate the fact that you are creating this review and these reviews really help us reach more people and change people's, you know, skin longevity journey by providing actionable information. So because you're helping us out, we're going to send you a free product. The way to get the free product is DM us on Instagram or send an email to serviceounggoose.com and we're going to be sending you a wonderful gift, Anastasia.
- [03:56]
B
Yes. So I'm just going to go for. Sometimes I pick them at random. So this is the one I'm picking this week. It's Chris 10 Harv. And it goes. The subject line is New Year Biohacking. And the body of the review is I have enjoyed listening to your scientific information and overall best practices to incorporate. It's hard to discern what products are necessary when there are so many options. I finally took the plunge to try a nighttime mask that is back in stock. Looking forward to brighter and younger looking skin this year.
- [04:30]
A
That's very sweet.
- [04:31]
B
Very sweet. And just a reminder, any review is very helpful. Even one word review is helpful to us because it helps us bring you the guests, helps our podcast grow, and then as the podcast grows, we can bring you the best guests. So thank you, thank you for leaving the review and if you haven't left the review yet, please, please do so and maybe we'll read your review next. And this Chris10Harv, please DM us on Instagram or send a message to serviceyoungoose.com and we'll ship you a free Yungoos product.
- [05:14]
A
Thank you again. And without further ado, please welcome Alex Tarnava.
- [05:19]
B
Yay.
- [05:28]
A
Okay, Alex, welcome to the Biohacking Beauty podcast. Long, long time coming.
- [05:33]
D
Yeah. Thank you for having me.
- [05:35]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [05:36]
B
We're so excited to have you here and well, I think we should start at the very beginning. Hydrogen and hydrogen supplementation, it's definitely a buzzword, but it also is used as kind of catch all phrase. Can you maybe help us distinguish a little bit about different ways you can supplement with hydrogen?
- [05:55]
A
Yeah.
- [05:55]
D
So there's multiple different, like delivery methods to get hydrogen into our body. They all have advantages. They'll hit different tissues and organs in different ways. So it's not a. Don't think of them as one or the other. They're like an apple, an orange, you know, and like a banana. Right. Like, you want them all to get different benefits, but the most common would be drinking hydrogen water. Right. Now, when you drink hydrogen water, it's primarily getting into your gut. It's interacting with your microbiome, it is interacting with various hormones like GLP1 and ghrelin, and second messengers that play a role in metabolic health and brain health and so on. It's actually getting to our liver in very high concentrations as well, higher than other methods. So it's driving liver homeostasis. So drinking hydrogen water has these benefits, a lot of them, which end up being systemic, even though the hydrogen isn't meaningfully getting into a lot of the tissues because of these second messengers that are in the gut and the regulation of the metabolic and brain components. Then there's hydrogen inhalation. Now, when you inhale hydrogen gas, it is going through your lungs, obviously, and then it's rapidly dissolving into your blood and it's reaching systemic levels throughout your whole body very, very quickly. Now, in this way, it's gonna get to your lungs, obviously a lot better than other methods to your heart, better than a lot of other methods to your skeletal tissue and also to your brain. Now, for the brain, it's important to note that some of the benefits that hydrogen has shown to the brain are from the second messengers in the gut and some are from the hormenic benefit of hydrogen itself. So a lot of brain conditions, I think the future of the research is going to be looking at both drinking hydrogen water and inhaling hydrogen gas because they are working under different mechanisms in the brain in that regard. Now, finally, we can. Well, there's another application in hospitals. They can give hydrogen rich saline on dialysis that's, you know, or like IVs. That's less applicable.
- [08:09]
A
It's like highly specific, right?
- [08:10]
D
Yeah, highly specific, right. So that's less applicable to the average person listening in. And a very interesting delivery method to get hydrogen to our tissue that I think is going to explode in popularity in the coming years is topical application. You know, bathing in hydrogen water and using hydrogen rich, like diet gels and cosmetic products to get into the skin level. You know, it's something I do at home with the hydrogen tablets. We do have larger hydrogen bath tablets. So we do have clinical trials on this. We focused more on like athletic recovery and soft tissue recovery and so on. But I have personally used topical hydrogen to Pretty remarkable results for various, you know, skin.
- [08:58]
B
And I mean, wasn't there a pilot study for like four weeks and it showed the pore reduction?
- [09:04]
A
Yeah, yeah. Which is like a measurement. Definitely. Like, it's one of the hero measurements for like derm studies. If I remember correctly, it was a single arm study. So it's more like there was no placebo group, so.
- [09:16]
B
So they couldn't say. It was more like hypothesis.
- [09:19]
D
Yeah, yeah. There, there, there's been, I think there's about 20 or so maybe 15 to 20 clinical trials or case series. So like series, multiple case reports or these are kind of like this and glm, you know, studies that. It's very preliminary, more preliminary than areas like metabolic health and exercise performance. But it's very interesting research. There's been pore reduction for. There's been like cleaning keratinocytes, you know, from the hair. There's been a couple of clinical trials on wrinkle reduction in older populations. There's been clinical research showing it can attenuate the effects of things like atopic dermatitis, eczema.
- [10:00]
B
Yeah, I would think like anything inflammation driven.
- [10:03]
D
Right.
- [10:04]
A
That's where I'm coming from. And sorry to cut you, but I am very interested. So we know that skin aging and inflammatory conditions are a complex process. It's more of a symphony than just a single violin playing. Right. In other words, can you explain maybe the relationship between these skin issues and the underlying factors hydrogen aims to address? For example, oxidative stress, mitochondrial signaling barrier dysfunction.
- [10:31]
D
Yeah. So basically I'm going to take a big step back. Yes. You know, and you'll see why. So right now, the way that we, we treat a lot of things is based on our prevailing pharmacological understanding of disease treatment, which is basically a single molecule for a single pathway or receptor.
- [10:52]
A
Yeah.
- [10:52]
D
That affects a single marker to either drive down inflammation signaling here or there. Now that was developed in the late 1950s, that theory, it was highly popularized by specific journals owned by someone with private interests that was later determined to be a fraudster and convicted of such. But it really guided what we view as empirical evidence. And before these prevailing notions about medicine and treatment, which are very favorable to things that are patentable, you know, emerged in the late 50s into the 60s and 70s, we treated things more systemically, you know, system wide as an organism. You know, with this shift to the single molecule, single receptor. That's also when the rise of statistical significance came into play. Now it is exceptionally easier to show something like a statin effects cholesterol than something like exercise or diet does there. You know, lifestyle interventions tend to be a lot more subtle. You know, they move many markers, you know, in pleiotropic type manners that are a lot more subtle. Yeah, right. So basically this shift occurred. Now, this is why we need to step back, because we're looking at it through this lens of pharmacological understanding of the drug model. And a lot of people try and look at hydrogen through that lens, and it's the wrong lens to look at because hydrogen at its core is a lifestyle intervention like exercise or diet or fasting or cold exposure or heat exposure. It's something called a mitohormetic effector, but it's a little bit more too. So what I mean by a mitohormetic effector, it's hormesis for the mitochondria. So hormesis is an adaptive stress, something that we evolve to anticipate, that we adapt from, makes us stronger. Now, exercise is hormesis, so is colds, fasting, caloric restriction, red light therapy, all these things are hormesis. Hydrogen is also hormesis. So it is weakening and targeting a specific protein called risp, right, the rice key, iron sulfur protein. You know, that puts a stress on our mitochondria. Now, a lot of other hormetic agents target RISP as a secondary effect after doing physiological damage. What's different about hydrogen is RISP is the target. So we don't get any physiological stress. We just get this mitochondrial stress. Now through this mitochondrial stress, we get adaptation because the stress is subtle enough. And this is why hydrogen is incredibly safe. Right. We haven't shown ways that we can really overdo it yet. It will exist because that exists with all hormesis.
- [13:48]
A
But at its core, because dudes are in charge of like, of studies, you know, we're just going to push the limits until.
- [13:55]
D
And people are like, oh, if one is good, 100 is better, right? So we will find, you know, the upper limit.
- [14:01]
B
That's unlimited. By the way, when he speaks of dudes, you know, he's included in those dudes.
- [14:06]
A
I'm the dude.
- [14:08]
D
So when we. And I'm guilty of that much of my life too, I have to temper my behavior a lot. Especially like, gotta learn to settle this down. But so in putting this slight stress on the mitochondria, our mitochondria adapts and gets stronger. So a lot of people. And it's most commonly claimed that hydrogen is an antioxidant or.
- [14:30]
B
Yeah, that's what I knew that it's like a selective antioxidant.
- [14:33]
D
So it is in vitro. Right. So in a cell culture you can force it to react with things like the hydroxyl radical and the nitrosyt of peroxy nitrite, you know.
- [14:44]
A
So the bad oxidative stress.
- [14:46]
D
Exactly. In vivo, there's no evidence it can do these things. And the mathematical probability of it coming into contact is like slim to none. So even if it happens, it's meaningless. But what it does is a lot more profound because it's actually triggering a slight elevation in oxidative stress in the cell, which triggers our endogenous response.
- [15:11]
B
Kind of how like red light therapy works, right?
- [15:13]
D
Yeah.
- [15:13]
A
Nerve two, keep one more path more far infrared.
- [15:17]
B
Yeah, that's what I mean.
- [15:18]
C
Yeah.
- [15:19]
D
Basically like we'll start producing more glutathione, superoxide dismutase catalase. And this is critical because it's only going to do it towards redox homeostasis. So that harmony between oxidation and nitrogen stress and are reducing molecules. Now this is very important because you can go into something called reductive stress if you take too many antioxidants. Right. And reductive stress is just as harmful as oxidative stress. We need this yin yang between reduction and oxidation.
- [15:51]
B
Yeah. It's the dose that makes the poison. So if you overdo something or remove that actually has a positive effect, it will be again negative effect.
- [16:00]
D
100%. Right. A lot of these oxidative and nitrosy of stressors are signaling molecules that are critical to our health. Like nitric oxide is a free radical.
- [16:09]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [16:10]
D
But obviously it's incredibly critical to the function of our system. So that is what makes hydrogen really unique. So it's not an antioxidant, but it regulates our production of antioxidants. So it's driving it towards healthy function. It's doing the same thing for inflammation. So a lot of people say hydrogen is anti inflammatory. Now it usually is because most of the time people are in chronic inflammation. Now our physiology is quite complex. Look at something like we look at Interleukin 6 as the most damaging pro inflammatory cytokine there is. However, Interleukin 6 is released during exercise from skeletal tissue as a myokine role. And when it's released in these small amounts, it actually has anti inflammatory triggering effects. So it's a transient rise in interleukin 6 in a healthy manner that our system adapts to and gets stronger.
- [17:13]
A
By the way, the more cost effective regenerative or biological microneedling procedure, instead of using stem cells or prp, are going to use inflammatory cytokines, you know, introduced to the skin while microneedling. So to your point, like, you know, there is a, there is a, a Goldilocks zone or biphasic dose response to.
- [17:36]
D
Absolutely. Even like we were talking, like, I'm pretty stiff right now because I, I just got, you know, 170 million stem cells and they purposefully aggravate you and make the areas they're targeting worse to draw inflammation there. So the stem cells know where to go and heal. Right. Inflammation is not a bad thing. It is part of our immune system. It's part of our body's defense mechanisms. So we don't want to blunt inflammation completely. We want to regulate it. We want it to have a healthy inflammatory response, which is what hydrogen actually does. It regulates inflammatory response via nuclear factor. Caffeine. Yeah. So usually hydrogen leads to lower inflammation. Sometimes we're actually seeing transiently higher inflammation. Now this is really interesting. In certain models, like we know with hydrogen and exercise performance, there's studies on rats on like forced exercise, treadmill tests, where with or without hydrogen. With the hydrogen, they actually have acute higher stress responses. Their oxidative stress and such goes higher than exercise alone, but they recover to redox homeostasis faster. So it's as if they worked out harder and recovered quicker. Yeah, Right. And we've seen this with hydrogen in potentiating the benefits of other stressors like cold exposure and heat, while attenuating any physiological harm. We've seen that in multiple trials, which is also very interesting in the regulatory role hydrogen is playing in our body. And it goes on and on in the list. Hydrogen doesn't do anything that we've seen exactly in one direction all the time. It seems to be like a supervisor type thing in our cell regulatory nature. Even things like autophagy. In almost every instance, hydrogen has activated autophagy, but in a couple key instances, it has completely blunted autophagy when we don't want it. Such as in a model of like heart failure and drowning, resuscitation, you know, so.
- [19:38]
A
And I've even known. And if I recall correctly, it even interacts with mtor. Right. Which is. Yeah, again, pathway that we're trying to, we're trying to control with things like rapamycin. Yeah.
- [19:51]
B
So I think to answer your question, Amitai, from what everything that Alex just told us, it's, you know, it's because it is like a, like a good diet or exercise, like it would affect so broadly the body and then the skin benefits. If you eat well, it'll show up on your skin. If you sleep well, it'll show up on your skin. If you exercise, it'll show up on your skin.
- [20:14]
A
So, yeah, what I love, you know what I love from our conversation, the things that I'm looking for to introduce to listeners, to introduce to our lives, are habits and decision decisions that we can make that create a, a compounding effect over time.
- [20:34]
B
Absolutely.
- [20:34]
A
Rather than high highs and low lows, for example, like, you know, obviously like more aggressive procedures which are significantly less controllable, compatible, stackable, et cetera.
- [20:47]
D
Yeah, yeah. I read about this in my book Chess Act. I'm a big believer in small victories that we aim for. All these small wins that we stack on top of each other. And the more of these small wins going, the more momentum we have and we can start tackling bigger and bigger things because we have more motivation, we're more capable. And in this way, hydrogen, I want to be really clear to listeners, it is not a miracle, it's not magic, it's not going to fix everything. But it has shown throughout 3000 publications, couple hundred clinical trials to have quite significant clinically relevant effects in multiple domains and to use it as sort of like a hand up to get momentum going. But it's not the be all, end all. Don't stop there. You need to tackle all these different aspects of your healthy lifestyle to ensure your momentum keeps going forward.
- [21:41]
A
Yeah, I want to have, I have one last, like, you know, I really want to go in more into like a deep dive around, you know, skin health, etc. But maybe one thing that I do want to ask which is significant also for skin, skin health is the molecular properties. Because one of the kind of hero phrases or one of the biggest points that are mentioned around hydrogen, to the extent that I feel like a lot of people that don't know exactly the mechanisms of action, just like parrots are, basically the physical nature of hydrogen, how small the molecule is and how rapidly it diffuses throughout the body, like how it can reach every, every small nook and cranny in the body, etc. And how it allows it to behave differently in the body compared to other supplements or molecules. Yeah. So maybe go over a little bit about, about that. Yeah.
- [22:36]
D
There's some interesting things with hydrogen here. We know when drinking hydrogen water and inhaling hydrogen gas, drinking hydrogen water is going to peak in your system within 15 minutes or so and it's going to be completely out of your system within an hour. But the protective effects seem to last at least 24 hours beyond when it's out of your system. It is the smallest molecule in the universe. Right. It's the first molecule to form in the universe as well. It is as ancient as the universe, and it's been with us since the very beginning of evolution. Like something we know is our last universal common ancestor. The single celled organism that spawned all life, fed off of volcanic vents, and hydrogen was its fuel source. And then the eukaryotes which became our mitochondria actually evolved from a symbiotic relationship between organelle, which expelled H2. So it's been with us since the very beginning. And we produce it endogenously too, which signals to why we carried it through us. So our bacteria, when we're healthy, ferments fiber and releases hydrogen gas into our system. The problem is, when we're hunter gatherers, up to maybe 10,000 years ago, we would have been consuming 100 to 150 grams of dietary fiber a day.
- [23:59]
A
Yeah.
- [24:00]
D
Today we're consuming 10 to 15 on average. But anyone on a standard American diet is getting zero to three right now.
- [24:07]
A
Hydrogen depends if you, if you have a Big Mac that has three buns or a normal burger that has two.
- [24:16]
D
But what happens with the bacteria that produce various bacterias that produce H2 through fermenting the fiber? They're like any living thing. If you don't feed them, they die.
- [24:26]
A
Right.
- [24:27]
D
And then methanogens start taking over. Bacteria that actually consumes hydrogen gas and produces methane. Now, methane is linked with basically every chronic disease. All cause mortality. It rises as we age. We know that actually when we've studied centenarians like Okinawa, that they have higher breath hydrogen than the average young person even.
- [24:50]
B
Yeah, they do eat a lot of fiber based on the documentaries we watched. Lots of fiber.
- [24:56]
D
Exactly.
- [24:57]
B
Eat your fiber.
- [24:59]
A
Netflix claims that they so.
- [25:02]
D
Exactly. And that's lifestyle based. Right. But it's difficult to restore this if you've killed these bacteria. You can't just start eating fiber. You're gonna get sick. This is where diets like carnivore have come into play. Cause a lot of people have killed their guts so bad that eating fruits and vegetables actually does make them ill. Yeah, Right. Because they're not processing them properly. Now, I think the solution is to slowly reintroduce things, eat fermented foods, you know, get things to get the bacteria back. Right. But we have to be cognizant that some people have done real damage, you know, to their, their system. Now this is why when we talk kind of like mechanistically, and I'm going in a long meandering route back here, we look at something like skin health. And there, there could be a couple of reasons why hydrogen helps. One, the direct effect from something like bathing in it and topically, where it is actually stressing out the mitochondria in the skin cells and leading to positive adaptations. But two, we know that a lot of skin issues are gut driven.
- [26:07]
A
Right.
- [26:07]
D
And metabolic driven. And that's why drinking hydrogen water can still have effects on a lot of skin outcomes, even when it's not meaningfully getting to your skin. And again, this is why I say the different methods of administering hydrogen, like from drinking water to inhalation to topical, it's like an apple, an orange and a banana, you know, they're all good in different ways. They have different nutrients that you want to get with the hydrogen. They're working in different manners, often complimentary and synergistically, to help get our desired outcome.
- [26:47]
A
Yeah.
- [26:47]
D
So some of the ways that it's going to be working is going to be secondary effects, you know, from driving things like, you know, gut homeostasis, improving the microbiome. It can potentially be doing this by, by correcting partial pressure of the gases in our gut. We know that hydrogen plays a role in say like gut motility. Right. Which can play a role in our microbial biome health as well. So when our partial pressure is wrong, this can cause gut disturbances. So by drinking hydrogen water, we can be restoring that partial pressure we evolved to anticipate, which can help slowly correct things.
- [27:25]
A
Yeah. Which is, which is interesting because there seems to be a divergence of, in the strength of evidence or in different. Anyway, depending on how hydrogen is applied. And you did a good job walking us through the different ones. But I think off air Anastasia and I discussed, it seems to. It seems that when you talk about skin benefits that are more along the, the, the line of anti aging hyperpigmentation, which we haven't talked about, but there seems to be like a really positive correlation.
- [27:59]
D
Skin patches, right?
- [28:00]
A
Yeah, Skin patches. This seems to have, have significantly stronger evidence from topical application and things that are driven through systemic, you know, systemic causes like, you know, dermatitis or, or eczema are, seem to be, they seem to be really benefited from oral admin. Oral administration. Oral consumption.
- [28:23]
C
Yeah. Let's take a second to talk about why your skin looks less firm than it used to, even though you're doing everything right. And the collagen may not Be the problem. Elastin is what allows skin to stretch, move and return without leaving lines or laxity behind.
- [28:43]
A
And once elastin signaling breaks down, you cannot hydrate or peptide your way out of it.
- [28:49]
C
The issue is that elastin degradation is silent. By the time skin starts to look lax or or less responsive, the damage has already compounded under the surface.
- [28:59]
A
Most routines never acknowledge elastin at all. So we built one that does.
- [29:05]
C
The elastin action protocol is the system we use to protect elastin function before visible laxity sets in. It focuses on reducing oxidative stress, supporting fibroblast signaling and targeting the areas where elastin breaks down shows first, including the jawline, neck and under the eye area.
- [29:24]
A
Inside the protocol you will find structured morning and evening routines, red light timing for elastin preservation and recovery guidance for post treatment periods when elastin is most vulnerable.
- [29:40]
C
This is not a firming product. It is a structural intervention. If you want a full elastin product protocol, you can download it. We will send it straight to your email. The link is in the episode description.
- [29:52]
A
If your routine only focuses on collagen, it is missing the real issue.
- [30:03]
B
I know we wanted to talk about the antioxidant selective antioxidant theory where we already did and you already talked about Hermesis as well with us. So maybe we'll move into the pigment and protection part.
- [30:16]
A
Sure. I actually tried. We'll skip it and go.
- [30:20]
B
You want to skip it?
- [30:21]
C
Sure, sure.
- [30:22]
B
I want it to be okay.
- [30:24]
A
Sure, sure.
- [30:24]
B
So we can. No, we can move to the next.
- [30:26]
D
I can answer on the. Why the evidence is different in different areas too. You know, if you guys want to hear. This is a kind of a philosophy of mine. If we look at the two ways that we do research and accumulate evidence that there's the one pathway which is corporate driven, you know, where they own all the results and they drive down a straight pathway.
- [30:49]
A
This exists also in university. Universities are the new corporations. So.
- [30:53]
D
Yeah, well. And a lot of times they have direct deals with.
- [30:56]
A
Exactly. Yes.
- [30:57]
D
You know, both the natural industry and the pharmaceutical industry. You know, by the way, this is not a pharma versus natural because the natural industry behaves the exact same way that the pharmaceutical industry. They just don't have the same funding. Yeah, right. But.
- [31:10]
A
But it benefits the university to. To deal with things that then can. The university has the ability to benefit of it off of its own research. So. Yeah.
- [31:19]
D
Yeah. So it's often a win win for the university and the corporation. But maybe not necessarily A win for the general public.
- [31:26]
A
Yes.
- [31:26]
D
Because if the corporation owns a results, if they're not favorable, they never see the light of day. Right. And we really need laws to protect against this.
- [31:34]
A
Yes.
- [31:35]
D
On the flip side you get. Which is what? Hydrogen has largely been directionless research that is investigator initiated. Usually funding is an issue. That's why you see some of these small, poorly powered, poorly controlled trials, because that's the only funding that the researchers could get to do their study. And often when it's public research like this, it's directionless and they have no collaboration with industry. Industry just makes shit up. To be blunt. They go, oh, okay, I see a study on here, I'm going to make a product. And they don't ensure that there's any similarity between the product they're marketing and how the researchers did, which creates an adversarial relationship, you know, between industry and academia. So you have like the kind of like semi symbiotic but clear control on the corporate side in the one pathway and sort of the adversarial in the other pathway, which leads to a lot of like general confusion, you know, from the public and people not involved. I really am trying to advocate that industry and academia should be friends, that there shouldn't be an ownership structure, that we need more honest research where industry collaborates with academia. But there needs to be laws and protections so that academia owns the right to publish the results no matter if it works or it doesn't. And this is what I've tried to do with my research on the hydrogen tablets. Every agreement we have, and I can only do this because I'm a private company. If I had a single red cent in an investor that didn't sign my ethics contract saying that we're going to do it this way, I'd be bound by my fiduciary duty towards shareholder primacy and I would not be able to do this.
- [33:26]
A
We did a whole episode, did an entire episode like a year ago on why we don't take investment. And that was basically a big part of it.
- [33:35]
D
Yeah, yeah, 100% like. And it's any of my businesses that are related to health, I have turned down at least 100, if not more VCs, because every single one I said, will you sign a ethics and morality contract that, that excludes your right to shareholder primacy? And no VC ever says yes to that. I'm like, okay, I'm going to do things my way. So we need this friendship between industry and academia because at the end of the day, we Want the same thing. We want to know what's true. We want to know what works, what helps us become healthy. Right? And it's our systems or our lack of systems that is stopping us from getting to this goal. So what we really need is we need more education, so more researchers are interested to be investigator initiated and more businesses that willingly engage in ethical collaboration with industry. We need more people to be aware of the problems, you know, of shareholder primacy and taking on money. We are taught to believe that the only way to make a business, build a business is by taking in investors. And then I think a lot of good people have good intentions. They start their business, they find investors, take on money and now their hands are tied. If they want to do the right thing, they no longer are able, you know, under threat of lawsuit and punishment.
- [35:02]
A
And you know, I agree, but I think, Alex, it's. There is there, there are many layers to that. And you know, I really want to keep the conversation around hydrogen, however. I got it. I got it. No, I got it. I got to like kind of not only agree and I think you see it very clearly and I think you're, you're explaining this very clearly and I think what we are seeing in our industry is businesses and innovations that are built around that model. It's not only the decision making, it's definitely a large part of it is decision making and routes taken post innovation. But I think product, you know, in our field. And again, we're not going to throw any company under the bus here because I believe everyone at the end of the day, you know, they have a baby that they're trying to, you know, create a successful life for, if you would. But we see company after company after company. Even if they have an amazing innovation, at the end of the day what they are doing is they're saying, hey, I have to make my innovation a panacea. I have to basically create a story where my innovation, whatever that is, it can be, it's called a villa in the jungle. It could be this one. Problem solving molecules, as you said in the beginning, you said about since the 50s were educated mechanistically to target a specific mechanism and to convince you that following this path will solve all your problems. And when you look at a mechanism, because most problems are super high convergence of mechanisms, what we're ending up is a probable explanation why if I change one mechanism with one molecule, I'm gonna affect something that's happening that you're worried about, especially around skin health. And we see it with anything from zombie cells. We see it with mitochondrial dysfunction, we see it with cell to cell communication, stem cell exhaustion. We see it with even the ability of your skin to use calories and, and create energy. And if we think of 10 or 20 years back, we can think even about telomeres, like really, we can look at any.
- [37:12]
D
It's all followed the same path.
- [37:14]
A
Yes.
- [37:15]
D
What my plea to anyone starting a business would be is what is going on here and what people think are going on, business is going on, is think of a concept of you're in a movie theater and someone in the front row in the center decides they want to watch the movie standing, and then everyone behind them stands to watch the movie. Now everyone's forced to stand. So when unethical companies or companies that just actually don't understand science say that what they're doing is a cure all, panacea, magic, all these things, other companies feel like they have to do the same to compete. Now what I'll say and what I've noticed is I decided not to do things that way. And everyone will tell you, you're crazy, you have to do this. This is what consumers respond to. But we tend to be as a species, that's the way things are done around here. And we assume because it's done that way, it's the only way to do it. And what I have noticed is there is a massive audience of people who appreciate honesty, are sick of being told everything is a cure all. And actually when trying to sell them that there's not good enough evidence for what they want, that it actually convinces them that they want to buy more. Now that has to be honest, right? Because it means they trust you and they want to give it a try anyways. Because people want hope. But when you try and convince them with false hope, their resistance actually goes up and then they get burned and they try less things. We have to be honest with people and we have to say, listen, this is where the evidence is. You know, it's early and this is what the cost is. There's a premise in medicine that something has to be safe and effective. Now, I mostly agree with that. It absolutely has to be safe. We have to have very good evidence that it's safe. Now, for effective, that is a subjective analysis. Everyone has a different threshold of evidence, right? And we need to separate scientific debate from regulatory standards of where lines are drawn. Something has to be safe and potentially effective, meaning it has to have evidence that it could work right, mechanistically and actually empirically. Now, from there we have to tell people where the evidence sits and what its shortcomings are and what the cost is, because everyone is going to have a different valuation of that numerical figure of the currency they're exchanging for the potential therapy. And we would be presumptuous to suggest that everyone has the exact same threshold. Of course they don't.
- [40:02]
A
You know, someone I so agree with
- [40:03]
D
you with more means might go, okay, this is pretty affordable for me and it might work. I want to give it a try. It's safe. The next person might go, I can't afford this unless I know it works. And we need to empower people with the knowledge so that they can make that kind of important consent.
- [40:21]
A
Yeah, Alex, you said it so well. It connects to a few. First of all, you know, it connects to one thing that I was trying to tell our users from the beginning, where it's like, hey, you want to see better products, you want to see more innovation, you like what we're doing and you would like even more of what we're doing. You have to buy our products now because at the end of the day we're going to have more money to reinvest. That's number one. Number two, we always are trying to. So we just launched Vampire exosomes. A big part of our investment wasn't to develop a product. Yes, that was, I mean, that was most of what the money came kind of went towards. But tens of thousands of dollars, I mean, even hundreds of thousands of dollars went into understanding how can we affordably analyze the makeup of the exosomes and show you, basically show you proof of dose or proof of viability. I was like, you know, we got quoted over a million dollars retainer a year when we started that kind of process. And when, you know, the reason we did this is not. It's actually to be that standing person in the theater. It was not because anyone asked us for that or thought it as a consumer thought it's needed. But we knew people are being sold crap as far and labeled exosomes and no one was really telling consumers what is inside the exosome that it would actually work or not. Yeah, you know, so and, and actually exomes can be harmful, some of them. If we don't analyze them, we see what's there. It could be actually inflammatory, like it could be heavy in Interleukin 6 as an example. So yeah, we did it to change something in the industry and hope that something's going to kind of stem out of it and create more options for people and that's a small example, but I agree with you. I love the way that you've described exactly.
- [42:12]
D
What you're saying is, I was trying to think about how to loop this back in when we were talking about why different levels of evidence involved. If you look right now, my hydrogen tablets, I think we have like 25 clinical trials. We have more clinical trials underway than we have published. The clinical research is exploding on it. Well, that is largely driven because of the demand. People are buying it to drink the water. I have more money to fund research with it, and there are more researchers interested in it because of the popularity. A lot of these researchers start as customers.
- [42:45]
A
Yeah.
- [42:45]
D
You know, and they're. They're interested in health. Like, yeah, I can't count how many of the clinical trials started because a researcher contacted me because they heard a podcast or bought the product and noticed health benefits. And they're like, I'm really interested in this. You know, I just launched the hydrogen inhalation unit with Dr. Tyler LeBaron. That took us seven and a half years of R and D to get the engineering right to make sure that we're mimicking human minute ventilation.
- [43:09]
A
You know, I want to buy this after this podcast. I want to talk to Alex.
- [43:13]
D
But that was seven figures and seven and a half years. Right now we're starting to collaborate with a lot of universities to start trials on that, but we had to develop the product first to now start doing that. And that funding is coming out of my pocket in the original. I won't be able to continue that funding unless people continue buying. I hope people like the machine and, you know, like, we put a lot of work to make sure that, you know, it is doing what these clinical trials do. Because the big clinical trials haven't used any commercial devices. They set up mixed gas tanks in hospitals. It's extremely expensive and cumbersome. We hope that our solution is easier for researchers. Also, I know we've talked offline that I have pending patents and I've developed prototypes of, like, gels and creams that are hydrogen rich. You know, that I can do. Well, the next step is we're trying to figure out how to package it and make it stable. These are big questions that you have to deal with in manufacturing to make sure that it's a good product for people. You know, this, this. I've been working on this in the back of my mind for 10 years. And we've been looking at it more heavily for six to 12 months now. It's probably another year until we really
- [44:18]
A
are able to do that.
- [44:20]
D
And then, then I'll need demand from companies and consumer bases. And then only then can I convince researchers that people are actually interested in it. Because at the end of the day, scientists don't want to study something unless they know the population is using it.
- [44:34]
A
Yes.
- [44:35]
D
So you need all of these factors at the same time.
- [44:37]
A
They want their name said. That's what they want. They want their name repeated. Other, you know, researchers referring to them, et cetera.
- [44:45]
D
Exactly.
- [44:46]
A
Citing them. If this is not. And that is, it's. It's exactly like likes and shares on Instagram, you know, that's how they get their funding. They want a viral post.
- [44:57]
C
Post.
- [44:57]
D
Exactly. They get researchers get their funding by publishing in high impact factor journals that get some citations that brings attention to their team and their institution. So researchers often, unless something is revolutionary and they maybe might win a Nobel prize for it, or it's going to transform something, they tend to want to go for things that are emerging and trending or are already well established. So all of this work has to come in play. And this is again why we need more ethical business people who understand this and then can understand how science works to treat academia and researchers and scientists as friends, that we collaborate and work together towards a shared vision of the future.
- [45:44]
A
Alex, I want to kind of segue here.
- [45:48]
B
Actually. We are at time and I think it was beautiful. I mean, I definitely understood why hydrogen is important and why I want to give it a try and understood that like apple, orange and banana, all forms of all delivery methods, I use foam.
- [46:06]
A
So I have one last question and that's it.
- [46:07]
C
Okay.
- [46:08]
A
Really a summary of best practices. If you had to categorize the best applications based on current evidence, would it be fair to say that topical treatments, like for example, taking, you know, I'm gonna give an example, like taking a cloth, submerging it in a hydrogen, dropping a couple of hydrogen tablets into like a bowl and submerging a cloth there. And I was even thinking maybe you know how people do like an ice bath morning, which I think is stupid, like morning ice bath, facial plunge, just dropping a few hydrogen tablets there and doing it together with it. Would you agree that that's the most efficacious application for skin anti aging? Facial skin anti aging?
- [46:51]
D
Yeah. Whenever I do something like I have really bad ADHD and one thing I like doing every day, it's almost like a form of meditation. One, I walk through the forest and two, I like cooking. And very intentional things like that are monotonous because it clears my mind. And then I often get revelations.
- [47:10]
A
Yeah. And burnt eggs though.
- [47:11]
D
Yeah. Or burnt hands, you know, because like.
- [47:16]
A
Oh, I got. Now I get the reference.
- [47:18]
D
Exactly. You know, like my mind is empty as I'm going through and then all of a sudden I have a revelation. But I realize like my steak is burning or something and I grab my cast iron pan and burn my hand or.
- [47:29]
A
Yes.
- [47:29]
D
I've done stuff like this so many times. And that is actually what I do is I, I drop a hydrogen tablet and you know, a little bowl of warm water, soak it in a tablet and just do a wrap and I just continue soaking it over and over all evening. And I don't know. And again, this is totally anecdotal. I cannot count how many times I've had a bad burn that is even bleeding because it's burning so bad that after a few hours. And then usually I'll even go to bed, you know, with a tensor bandage wrapped around like a saturated hydrogen water.
- [48:04]
A
Wow.
- [48:05]
D
And wake up and it started scabbing over.
- [48:08]
A
Wow.
- [48:08]
D
And looks like a one, two week.
- [48:10]
A
Yeah. My idea, my, my idea is so you could basically buy the same sheet masks that people have. You know, you see on the Internet, like in whatever. You can actually buy them empty. Like they actually, they look like little tablets are pre rolled and. And you submerge them in water, they kind of open up. So my idea is to do that with like a hydrogen water tablet. Yep. And I think it's like I should have done it now. I just had micro needling then I
- [48:36]
D
had a brand that did that eight years ago and they were too early.
- [48:40]
A
Wow.
- [48:41]
D
You know, because hydrogen drinking wasn't even popular yet. They had that idea. They were bringing in the mask and they were selling it, you know, separately. I really think they should do it. I'm working on some things too so that they can be single used in the space mask.
- [48:54]
A
Yes.
- [48:55]
D
There's the problem of the hydrogen can always separate.
- [48:59]
A
Yes.
- [48:59]
D
From the aqueous substrate. So we're working on solutions for that. That's part of the R and D that we're doing at our lab.
- [49:04]
A
Well, we're, as I said, off air. We're very interested in working with you on that. Anyway, Alex, this has been tremendous. Let's talk a little bit about how can people bring it into their homes? How can people kind of follow what you're doing? I know a lot of the stuff that you're doing you're making for other companies. So it's.
- [49:22]
D
Yeah. With the tablets, I Don't have a brand or anything. I actually had a brand and I divested out of it because I realized my impact was going to be better licensing my technology to other brands. And then I could focus on what I like doing more, which is working with the researchers and spearheading the clinical trials and overseeing the R and D and you know, all those business growth things. So there's 100 and something brands that utilize my technology. People need to beware though, because there are so many counterfeit products coming from China and India. Yeah. Right now half of Amazon is counterfeit at this point.
- [50:02]
B
And how would somebody try and understand what is counterfeit and what is not?
- [50:07]
D
It's difficult because there's two things. One, you have to make sure that the brand is sourcing from me. Now I have some of the top brands featured at hydrogenwatertablets.com, which is my licensing website. Some of the more recognizable names would be like Gary Brecke's H2 tab, Dr. Gundry, Dr. Mercola Brain, MD by Dr. Amen, Quicksilver Scientific. You know, there's a number of major brands.
- [50:34]
A
That's what I think. I take Quicksilver.
- [50:36]
D
But the secondary problem is a lot of these major brands, people will buy on places like AliExpress.
- [50:42]
A
Yeah.
- [50:43]
D
And they're fake. And even like I've had potential private labels out of the US buying like, hey, this product made no hydrogen and it didn't dissolve. They'll send me the bottle and it looks exactly like one of these brands I've mentioned, but there's no lot number or expiration date on it. And it came from China.
- [51:01]
A
Yeah.
- [51:02]
B
Right.
- [51:02]
D
So be careful. Make sure that you're getting it from one of the brands that, you know, came from my technology and through a source that you know is one of their distributors.
- [51:15]
A
Yeah.
- [51:15]
D
Either direct from their website or when you look on Amazon, make sure that it's that brand's store or if they're in a major retailer. So sometimes if a major brand is a lot cheaper than you see it everywhere, it is too good to be true. And you're going to be getting a counterfeit.
- [51:32]
A
What about the hydrogen generator?
- [51:34]
D
So inhale h2.com we are blown away at the interest Dr. LeBaron and I. And he's never endorsed a product in his 16 years in hydrogen and running the nonprofit, you know, like the Hydrogen Institute. After seven and a half years, he decided to come on board because, you know, he believes in my mission to science, but also believes in the product that he co invented. You know, with me. And if I'm going to be fair, he maybe could have found someone else to help him. You know, I had some ideas. He ran with them. I couldn't have done it. He had so much insight into that machine. I couldn't have done it alone. You know, his contributions were remarkable, really. So we brought in 500 machines for a pre sale. We almost sold out of them.
- [52:19]
A
We actually had to, hey, save one for us.
- [52:20]
D
Yeah, well, we have some because we had to turn down some of our European distributors and such like that and say, you have to get them on the next batch international. Because we're like, oh, man, we barely have enough for the US we sold more than we thought off of a couple podcasts and everything like that. We have another batch coming in at the end of January, early February. So really, the sky is the limit. We cannot believe the reception we've been getting. Especially because the fact, the way I treat my life is I'm a philosopher first, a scientist second to businessman third. And I was originally very deeply interested and terrified of finance when I was a teenager and I realized the inherent instability of everything we recognize as wealth and monetary funds. And that made me almost paranoid, but maybe in a good way, because I decided that if I wanted to live the life I want to live, I needed to have autonomy over my own finances and money first, so that I wouldn't be beholden to an overseer or a master to dictate how I have to do my thinking and do my work. So I already make good money with hydrogen tablets is the long and the short of it. And I have other businesses, too. Dr. LeBron is an academic. He's not money motivated at all. Professors do not make any money whatsoever. He's a scientist.
- [53:47]
A
Not why they chose this route.
- [53:48]
D
Exactly. So we set our machine. It's still expensive. It's $5,000. Right. Like, don't get me wrong, I know this is expensive for a lot of people, but it's less expensive than all of our competitors. And it's the only machine that guarantees safety and precision dosing. So it is the only machine that mimics human breathing, that has no risk of exploding in your face. And it's cheaper.
- [54:12]
A
Yeah.
- [54:12]
D
And we did this on purpose because we don't want to have a machine that is going to buy us a yacht or a penthouse. We want a machine that families can buy for themselves, that, you know, when we've talked to various spas and clinics and they've heard the price and looked at what we've done. It's been a no brainer. Like we, we spoke for five minutes at this little private party for Top Doctors magazine around a 4M. There's like 40, 50 people in the room and we sold seven machines on the spot. Like them buying clinics, buying our machine from our website on their phone before they sold out. Cuz you're like this is a no brainer. I, you know I'm buying for like 100k. Exactly.
- [54:52]
A
No, but, but it's, it's.
- [54:53]
B
First of all I'm saying this is really worth it.
- [54:55]
A
It's worth it. We, I mean and we have to wrap this up but I'll tell you that we got quoted. We basically our water system in our house is kind of the same provider as the water system that the Paul brothers get and stuff like that. Logan and whatever the other guy's name is. Paul the prime.
- [55:16]
B
Don't look at me. I don't know.
- [55:17]
A
Fighters, names, YouTube people. But, but, but they were, they were saying hey, we've installed you know, this hydrogen enriching water whole house device for them. And the quote was like incredibly high and it might be worth for some but I, I believe like you know, $5,000 machine that you can you know, opt into to use daily, et cetera is like it's a no brainer. So yeah. Anyway Alex, you know it's important for us to have on people that we, we believe in them personally. We. I've known us for a while. You're an incredible human being. We, we are highly appreciative that you
- [55:59]
D
came here and yeah, I, I appreciate it because I was in even how I structure all these things. I do, I really rely on the inherent goodness of most people because we would not be able to market say this machine with the margins we keep for ourselves unless we have people who believe in what we're doing that are working with us and helping spread the message. And this is why all the other machines are a lot more expensive because they're taking the safer typical path of we need bigger margins so that we can pay people to say what we want them to say and pay for all this advertising. We didn't build that in because we trusted that enough good people in this industry would see what we're doing and trust what we're doing. That we had reputations good enough that we would be platformed and people would become aware.
- [56:54]
A
Yeah.
- [56:54]
D
Based on actions.
- [56:56]
A
Amazing. Okay, we're going to have all the links in the show notes, both the link to the recommended tablet list that you have I know it's not complete, but it's something that people can. Can kind of refer to the ones for the machines in general. Is there a link? How do people kind of get exposed to your books? Because you're also a prolific writer, so.
- [57:16]
D
AlexTarnava.com. right. And then my Instagram is LexTarnava.
- [57:21]
A
Fantastic.
- [57:21]
D
And so for my books, I'm doing something a little bit different with them too. There will be hardcovers. The hardcovers are going through a nonprofit. All proceeds will go to advertising, you know, the books and the work I'm doing with them. But all books always will remain free as a PDF and audio files on my website, because at the end of the day, I want more people to have access to my ideas.
- [57:44]
A
Yeah.
- [57:45]
D
And again, I am doing business so that I can pursue philosophy and science, so I'm not trying to pursue my philosophy as a business, if that makes sense.
- [57:56]
A
Amazing.
- [57:56]
B
It's beautiful.
- [57:57]
A
Okay, thank you very much.
- [58:00]
B
There will be more. More people like you in our industry, and we're really grateful.
- [58:04]
A
Thank you. We're very grateful. You're awesome. Thank you for doing what you're doing. And we. We hope to continue to hang out off air in random. Random conferences, conferences, and the airport terminals.
- [58:19]
D
Yeah, exactly.
- [58:21]
A
Okay. Thank you very much.
- [58:22]
B
Thank you.
- [58:23]
D
Thank you for. It.