B (41:52)
And so I started buying. The publications are usually 40 bucks, 50 bucks, 60 bucks. And reading the full material and method, I found that none of the studies were using an alkaline water ionizer machine to make hydrogen like I'd bought. And so then I bought a reagent to test for it, and it was undetectable. So then I thought to myself, well, I haven't tried hydrogen. So then I started looking. A lot of them were using magnesium. Others were bubbling gas, you know, into water and then pressurizing it. Getting gas tanks through commercial residents wasn't possible. So I started looking for magnesium. It's controlled, like by the DOD in the US So I wasn't able to get that, but I was able to find sources in like, Eastern Europe and China. I'm extremely obsessive person. You know, when I get my mind on something and, you know, I'm getting this magnesium powder and it would come through custom saying, like, silver paint, coloring. So I already was like, okay, this is a little sketchy, right? I remember those days. And then like, I started making powders, but the powder floats. And I'm like, okay, right? So I started compressing it and playing around and was making these, you know, tablets, hand pressing, you know, and bought a kit, like, hand pressing things. I think the kid I bought was for drugs, you know, like illegal drugs. But, you know, I was making was. It was China, the kit you bought? No, it was someone in British Columbia. Oh, that was, you know, I got you selling them in a less than legal way, I think, and like fabricated for me. But so I was making these and they were getting like 3 milligrams a liter or 3 parts per million. And I was drinking like 4 liters of it a day, like pressurizing it, you know, in my fridge, drinking them the next day, making them, let them build up, saturate, and like within a few days, some of my joints started loosening. Within, like 10 days all started loosening. I'm like, holy shit. Like, there's something here. But then I had a sober second thought. I'm like, you know, I know enough of the chemistry to get this to work. But I'm not a chemist. I don't want to win a Darwin Award. I don't want to poison myself. I don't want to. I'm dealing with elemental magnesium that burns out like 6,000 degrees. It's the white and fireworks. It's a munitions grade powder and it's making hydrogen gas. I feel like the Hindenburg. So I'm like, I better make. And I'm doing it in my kitchen. I don't want to blow myself up either. So I found my founding partner. He's a PhD chemist from the pharmaceutical industry. Designs molecules, synthesizes them for drugs. And at first he called it the worst pseudoscience he'd ever heard in his life. And gave me all these reasons why hydrogen has no physiological role. And even if it did, why you'd want to inhale it rather than drink it. And we can get into that later. They have different. Different distribution of the body. But I had read every publication on the therapeutic potential of hydrogen at the time. I was able to rebut him, give him answers to all his objections. And he said, well, okay, this is. I did not expect there to be a single study on this. I still don't buy it, but, okay, I'll take a look at what you're doing. And I just. I was so excited that someone was gonna help me out with what I'm doing. Cause it was working. I just kept sending the paper every day a new paper. And serendipitously, I sent him one on a certain disease model that it was a phase two trial with like 60 participants that had really strong results. Uh, I didn't know it, but he was designing small molecules for that disease at the time, really. And he called me and said, hey, I wanna meet you for lunch. And he had printed off the paper, and he said, this paper, he's like the others. I was just having to look at the methodology and the conclusions. But I'm a subject matter expert. I'm designing molecules on this disease. So I've had to learn about it. And unless this is fraud, this stuff works, right? Are you sure you want to do this just as a do it Yourself project and that you don't want to commercialize it? And I thought long and hard I didn't want to go into the supplement industry. I still had all my reservations about, you know, evidence and trustworthiness and, yeah, everything. And I'm like, okay, like, what are the regulations in being a drug? Could I raise money? And then so I started looking into raising money and I started learning about shareholder primacy, you know, and all the evil that happens from that. And then started looking at the regulations. I'm like, well, I don't even think this fits the definition of a drug. It, you know, seems to be playing more of a regulatory role. Right. Has pleiotropic benefits. So back to the supplement avenue. But I started thinking, how can I do this ethically, you know, so that I can sleep at night and look at myself in the mirror. And this whole time I'm going down and I'm still trying to make it, you know, because at the end of the day I still want it for myself. Well, yeah, because we, we'd figured out how to. He'd optimize my formula from mortar and pestle to make like 20 at a time within like a few weeks. I wasn't that far off. But then to make them on actual production equipment, like millions at a time at high speed, that was 16 months, 3,000 of iterative adjustments and 15 failed scale up attempts. But again, I'm extremely obsessive and I don't stop until I solve the problem or a challenge. You know, as I think of them, we got there, we made our first production batch and I thought to myself, I don't have a plan to sell these. I don't know what I'm going to do. I just wanted to keep moving forward. And that's how a lot of my life has been. I move forward and then make the plan after I figure something out. So I decided I didn't want to sell this unless I had a plan to see if it was effective or not. And even though I was getting the same concentration that a lot of these studies were, I could use those. What if there's something different? What if there's a different side reaction or if something's going on that I don't know I want to damage? And I wanted to advance the research. So I emailed every first and every corresponding author on every study on hydrogen at the time, offered them free product, free placebo donations to strengthen their studies, and no ownership over the data, you know, meaning that they can publish the results whether it works or it doesn't. Because I only want to sell it if it works. I don't think anyone is trustworthy enough to have that power because what ends up happening, say I have a contract that I get to decide if it published, and now I've spent hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and years of my life doing something I could justify. Well, this trial was bullshit, they did it wrong. I don't want to publish it. And it's very easy to fool ourselves and trick ourselves in this way. So because I have that conflict, I don't want that power to do it. And this philosophy is why I have what would probably be valued in the research in the nine figure range if it had been through contract research organizations, but it's been primarily government grants and investigator initiated trials that they've gotten funding from their universities and grants in the government to do this research because they own the data and usually industry won't do this. But because of the compromise I made with myself when I entered, I committed myself to doing it this way. And I'm just lucky and fortunate that it has panned out and that the results have been good.