The Dylan Gemelli Podcast
Episode #86 Featuring Alex Tarnava! The inventor of the world’s only open-cup molecular hydrogen tablet! EVERYTHING you need to know about HYDROGEN!!
30 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the significance of molecular hydrogen in health?
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I always have initial phone calls with all of my guests. I require it because I want to get to know them and find out just what they're passionate about so that I have the opportunity to then go research them and really dig in and learn. But it's always nice to learn what each individual is passionate about. A lot of people don't do that.
So I tell you this because my guest today, I always block off about a 15 or 20 minute call. And I don't know how long we talked. And I told him, dude, I better let you go now or I'm going to talk to you all damn night because I'm so fascinated and intrigued. And they said, well, I normally do 60 minute recordings, but there's no way that you and I are going to get this done in 60 minutes.
So we're going to have a little bit longer episode today because my friend here is beyond brilliant. And he's done a multitudes of things that I think most of you are probably going to be aware of. But there's some new things, too, that I want to get into. He's a self-taught scientist, but I find you to be far more brilliant than anybody that I know with 30 letters after their name.
And that's why I was so intrigued talking with you. Now, he's the inventor of the world's only open cup molecular hydrogen tablet. We're going to get into all of that. You can see his book here. This is one of the most innovative books that I've ever seen because it's got two covers and two sides of the way that it flows. You've got the new unit that we were just talking about.
That's inhalation hydrogen unit. I can't wait to talk about that because it is fascinating. You've got the new App that's coming out that's talking about foods. And that was the other thing where I was like, OK, we're going to need a lot of time to go over that because that's talking about what foods have seed oils and really intense things that nobody does.
And then just the testing we're doing to like, you know, because. We know, like, all these contaminants in. We don't know how much is in. Even, like, a lot of these certificates companies get saying that it's free of this or free of that. And then you do the testing, and you see it's not. Right.
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Chapter 2: How do hydrogen tablets compare to hydrogen water?
They would have never known. He made me do that. And I always go back to that because that's when I say that's when I really became like a man in terms of,
now every time something comes up i'm the one like my wife my mom my kids ever i'll handle it don't worry about it because i'm always i've always been ready ever since then to go handle whatever because i that made me fearless yeah i i mean and we need to learn these lessons yeah and
We've talked, I mean, and I read about some of these in my book. My dad never made me do something like that, but he'd do other things like he'd drag me to his shop and I'd have to help him work until two, three in the morning, high school. And then I'd get home, I'd be so tired. And then as soon as I hit snooze on my alarm to not get up to school, dump ice water.
on and say you know i'd be like i'm tired you kept me up to three and he's a man needs to know that the world doesn't stop turning just because he's tired you have to get to school well said well said my dad used to come in and you know i lived in iowa so the winter's brutal you know what he'd do what to wake me up if i wouldn't get up just jerk the whole everything right off
instead of go wake up son wake up and walk away no all the covers came off the whole thing just jerk it off man and imagine back then it's not like my parents had a lot of money so even with the heaters on and they weren't jacked up and it was freezing but you know what that type of stuff people now would go oh that's so bad and it's so bad not really
It is or it isn't. And like, you know, I tell some of the stories, even what some of my football coaches did, you know, to us and people like, oh, they go to jail today. And I'm like, that is why we have problems, right? We need to learn how to overcome adversity. That's how we get stronger. That is why I wrote this book.
We've known since the Greeks, probably before that, but Aristotle wrote it down. Even his ideas like eudaimonia have been perverted into saying it's about happiness and happiness is comfort. No, it's about a life of purpose, of productive struggle that builds your spirit, that builds your soul.
That's right. So one of the things that I've really come to understand that's not an easy concept, I don't care how faithful you are, how much you believe, it's not easy. And that is that these times of struggle and the obstacles that we've given are such a
huge blessing because in reality what it's doing is showing us and teaching us perseverance and once we get through it and the strength that we build and then what happens from it is priceless it's priceless
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Chapter 3: What are the safety concerns associated with hydrogen inhalation?
Yeah. But not so much that we harm everyone else around it, you know, that it's bleeding so much for a certain cause, but also that it doesn't harden into like cold steel utilitarianism. That's it. Because we are both logical and empathetic and we need to strike that balance.
Balance, balance, balance, balance. That's mind and body. If those aren't balanced, there is no way that you can really be healthy. It's impossible. I can sit here and fix all your hormones, all your food, your fitness, all of it. Strength train you into the ground. But if your mind is gone or it's off or it's struggling or it's stressed, you know this.
And the same thing, you can be as brilliant as you want, but if you're inflamed and, you know, out of redox and, you know, your neurotransmitters are all screwed up, what is your intellect doing?
Nothing.
Exactly. It's crumbling. Right. Right. And that's why we need them both because they're connected. Exactly.
When I was at my worst was when I was probably knowing my most because my diet was so far off because I've had battle and eating disorder and the fear of fats and eating so little and not eating any fats. And I couldn't stay focused longer than 20 minutes.
And vice versa, some of the times where I've been in my best condition and eating right and everything, I'm so screwed up mentally and so stressed and so gone and angry and this and that. It's just off.
Completely off. Yeah, I mean, when I gained 100 pounds, I was actually consuming less calories than before, but they were the wrong calories. Right. You know, I was... You know, so obsessed with figuring out the hydrogen tablets and I was so depressed about my physical state. I'd forget to eat all day long and then all of a sudden it would be 11 p.m.
at night and I'd order a pizza and open a bottle of wine. You know, and that would be my only sustenance. Right. And then I'd sleep three and a half hours and wake up and do it again.
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Chapter 4: How does Alex Tarnava's background influence his work?
And then I was thinking about how these various careers worked. worked and i am highly autonomous and i do not i have what probably would be diagnosed as oppositional defiance disorder i don't want to be told what to do and so i thought to myself my biggest interest is philosophy after that it's science
But how do you actually pursue truth in philosophy or science when you're beholden to financing and bureaucracy and all of these oversights and overseers who are going to tell you what to do? So I decided I was going to do things a different way. I was going to pursue knowledge in all these domains. As a hobby.
And I was going to look at finance separately and accrue wealth to give me the freedom to learn about the things I want to learn about. Yeah. That would always work for a time until it didn't or maybe because I didn't. Because these various careers and businesses I started, even though they were lucrative, I didn't care about them. Yeah. Yeah.
right um they didn't give me purpose they didn't bring me joy they didn't bring me fulfillment right so i'd eventually become disenfranchised and want to try something else of course um that just repeated that cycle repeated during those times whenever i'd become disenfranchised all of a sudden i'd
lose tens of thousands of dollars partying at the club you know like buying designer clothes living the high life to try and fill the hole in my soul right you know that was being carved bigger and bigger by all these career choices that weren't giving me meaning i understand that So then I turned to fitness, and I just read more, and I decided money wasn't that important.
I have enough to live the lifestyle I want anyways. But then my health crisis happened. How old were you when that happened? 29. Okay. So I caught a mystery virus. They don't know what it was, but it causes autoimmune-like response. My C-reactive proteins were 34 milligrams a liter, so more than 100 times abnormal. Okay. I had central nervous system fatigue.
I couldn't jump an inch off the ground or do any explosive movement. I had chronic fatigue. I was sleeping 16 to 18 hours a day. I had sudden onset narcolepsy. If I sat down for like a minute or so without stimulation, I'd fall asleep. The only time I actually felt okay was when I was exercising, but within an hour or so,
After exercising, even like lightly, I'd crash and just sleep for the rest of the day. What more do you think was that? It was, I caused a deep, deep depression. But when it started to clear, when the fog started to clear, I couldn't think properly, you know, with everything going on. I, you know, was seeing doctors and couldn't figure it out.
But then my C-reactive proteins dropped to like three, which is like what you might expect when you have the flu and a fever. Right. I was told to never exercise again because of the arthritis I'd developed, polyarthritis in 11 joints, you know, from this inflammatory attack. They put me on a thousand milligrams of naproxen a day. I'm sure.
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Chapter 5: What are the benefits of Alex's new food app?
Yeah.
They were on massive back order. They couldn't make the cars fast enough. I bet. Before he wanted to do these things. Mm-hmm. And the Dutch brothers said, well, no, we invested to make money. We don't care about your ethics and morality. Your job is to make us more money. You should be raising the cost. You're on back order and you should be looking for cheaper labor. I didn't know that.
And they went all the way to the Supreme Court of Michigan and the Dodge Brothers won. Really? And that set the precedent of shareholder primacy. Now, what that means is at the executive level, the fiduciary duty of any executive is to maximize profit for the shareholder. And they have a legal obligation to do that. If they don't do that, then they can be sued. They can be tried. terminated.
They'll be blacklisted from industry. And this is why I don't really believe in conspiracy. I believe in emergent behaviors based on the structure we are within. Because think, you live your life. Maybe you get into pharma because your parent is sick, one of your parents or your brother or your sister or your grandparent, and you want to find a cop.
and you work, and you work, and you really believe, and you rise up, and now you're the chief science officer, or you're the CEO of a company in the industry. Now you're privy to all the dirty, dark secrets that are going on. But you have layer after layer of confidentiality agreements. You have your fiduciary duty.
If you try and change things based on an ethical or moral stance, now there's real consequences. You can be sued. You can... You know, lose your shares, lose your income, lose your home. Your family is now in hardship, right? You are maybe middle-aged with children. You won't have any retirement. You lose everything.
And at that point, basically everyone makes the decision we know they're going to make that they prioritize themselves and their family over society. And it doesn't make them evil people. They've been put in a position where they're forced to do an evil thing. It's dangerous ground.
And like I said, I've been in the supplement industry. I was in the supplement industry, I don't know, 15, 20 years. And one of the main reasons I just got out of it for so long was because what I saw actually goes on back there. And it's not just the production. It's also the competition on what they do to each other. and what they do to get ahead.
And that's why I want to accentuate some of the things that you said, again, because it lends to a couple things. One, your overall credibility, but two, that there are actually some good people out there that do things the right way.
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Chapter 6: How does the hydrogen inhalation system work?
Sorry, I'm just curious. So a regulatory role. Okay. So actually, most people think of ghrelin, oh, that's a hunger hormone. Yeah. They don't want to raise ghrelin. Exactly. Right? That's actually not true, right? Ghrelin has a lot of purposes in our body. It's neuroprotective, right? It regulates our glucose homeostasis and our insulin response.
And actually what you see in healthy people, when you're hungry, you have quite high ghrelin. That's the hunger cycle. And then when you eat, it drops to nothing. But in chronically obese people, it's just kind of flatlined in between. That's right. Right. And something that similar happens with GLP-1 too. Actually, it's similar to actually how insulin works.
So hydrogen has shown to restore those peaks and valleys of grout.
Yeah.
Now with GLP-1, we showed in a rodent research where we induced obesity through a high fat diet. Yeah. That what we know with GLP-1 in early phases of obesity is it goes into hyperdrive, trying to overcorrect, but then the feedback mechanism breaks and then we don't get any GLP-1 secretion. It's just always chronically low. Yeah. Same thing with like insulin response going into diabetes.
So the hydrogen is Actually, and this is just in rats, right? So it's just in rodents, so not humans, but we actually attenuated the false rise in GLP-1 in inducing obesity, but yet the hydrogen group was the only one that resisted weight gain. Really? At the same time, right? Wow. So they ate less, right?
Now, we know that hydrogen is also affecting ghrelin, like I said, and it's also affecting some of the neurochemistry involved with satiety, you know, in the brain level. But then in humans, we looked at chronically obese people. Now, I was an author on this paper and helped design the study and write the paper. And it was on the tablets, of course, all the ones I talk about are...
But these were people who were chronically obese and middle-aged. Really? And we substantially increased their GLP-1. Well, also, you know, improving triglycerides and cholesterol. That's sweet. So we showed to attenuate the rise when you didn't want that overreaction rise and then restore function back to a healthy level in people with this metabolic stress. And something you
There, because you said it really quickly, but you improve triglycerides, you improve blood markers.
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Chapter 7: What insights does Alex provide about the supplement industry?
But anyways, they're ramping up the power on these machines. They're producing liters of hydrogen and oxygen. Well, that's an explosive mixture, right? 66% H2, 33%. O2. And we're already seeing the literature.
This is published in the literature, over 15 case reports of detonations when people are doing inside nasal pathways, blowing up, blowing people's nose apart, orbital bone fractures, burning people's lungs. So if this is reported in case reports like 15 times, how many times is it actually happening that people aren't reporting, right? Really? So the questions we need to ask in therapeutics-
The saying is safe and effective. It has to be safe and both effective, but that presupposes someone's financial intentions and valuation. Yeah. So what I say is something has to be safe and potentially effective, but it always has to be safe first, but it has to be potentially effective. And then we have a responsibility to
to give honest information to people so they can have informed consent and say, this is preliminary evidence. It might work, but we need more evidence. It costs this much. This is where the evidence is at. And now a person can decide if that amount of money is worth it for them, for the possibility. It's not proven. It's a chance. So we need that informed consent and we need to be
honest about what products are doing. Like hydrogen is not proven to do anything that has very promising evidence, but we need to know where the evidence stands to give people informed consent. Because this machine we have, it's like $5,000. By the way, that is less expensive than all the other machines that we're competing with on the market. And it costs us more to build our machine.
But, you know, myself and Dr. LeBaron, he's in academia. I have enough money. We want more people to have access to this. But $5,000 is still a tremendous amount of money for a lot of people. For me, it's nothing. I'm like, okay, great. I really like the science. I want one. Of course, I'm going to buy it. For the next person, maybe they go, no, that's too much money for me.
And I don't want to give that person that it's a lot of money false hope that it's going to cure their disease or do any of these things. They need to have informed consent. We are researching these things. There are studies. You know, there are emerging studies that are getting stronger every day, but it's not proven. And people need to understand that. A lot is not proven.
How much is this money worth to you? Do you want to take the risk with the money for the chance? Understand where the evidence is at. For the potential benefit that you could get out of this. But you may not. You may not. And you need to understand that going into it. Exactly. So we developed this machine. It took us seven and a half years because we had to figure out all these things.
We wanted to make sure that we were delivering a precise concentration to all people and that it was always safe. Right. And you're not blowing up noses and organ bones and anything else. So we know that hydrogen is not flammable or explosive below 4%. Right. We know that the research actually explores between 1% to 4% of the fraction of inspired H2O.
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Chapter 8: What are the future plans for hydrogen research and products?
And so I contacted them. I'm like, are you looking for investors? I would like to invest in this. And they're like, actually, we wanted to talk to you. Would you be willing to come on as a strategic advisor? And I'm like, absolutely. Right. So it's an app and they've been working on it. Like I think a couple of years before they contacted me. So it was getting ready to go.
And basically you can, you'll be able to go into your grocery store. We're actually, we've just started the testing now. Right. Scan, you know, food. Now it's only going to be maybe five, 10,000 products at the start. There's half a million, but they're high. Exactly. Every month we're going to be putting like a third of our budget towards food.
testing, but you'll be able to scan a food item and it'll come up. If it doesn't come up with the test results, it'll say if there's, you know, uh, seed oils or GMOs, if there's certain dyes or, you know, chemicals that are banned in the EU or Singapore, Hong Kong, you know, say what levels are in them and what the threshold is and other jurisdictions so that you can make informed consent.
But the thing we're doing that other apps aren't doing is we are doing testing. So we're testing for heavy metals. We're testing for pesticide residue. We are testing for microplastics at BPA. We're testing for PFAS. We're testing for all these things so that you can see what the actual levels are. And now we're sitting on some explosive data. I can't get too much into it. Big PR push.
But we tested a number of organic baby food products. I'm not going to name brands, but seven of them had more glyphosate than Froot Loops. Yes. Organic ones. Organic. I think there's going to be big class action lawsuits coming out from this testing we're doing. So I jumped on, I have been very passionate about this project and I don't even know what percentage I own it.
It's only a few percent, right? We have some big, big names on track, but I've been dedicating hours a week to this because it's just something I think needs to happen. And it's again, when we talk about weaponizing the rules against those harming us, this is one thing. There's some good things happening. Don't get me wrong.
There's some change that's occurring, you know, especially on like state levels, a little bit on the federal, but at the end of the day, It's one term and not as much is happening as it needs to be happening. No, it'll never go as far as that we need. Because the lobbying efforts to stop it are too big. Yeah. But they are all bound to that shareholder privacy we talked about. Yeah.
So if this app comes out and we're going to be scoring brands and corporations based on their total portfolio. I love you. Oh, yeah. So you'll be able to say, oh, you know, how's Kellogg doing against Nestle? You know, like in these scores. Well, that's going to affect their bottom line, their share prices. Yeah.
You know, especially when we have these various influencers that all have millions and millions of followers that are posting the results and showing what's going on here. Well, now people are going to change what they're buying, their buying habits based on this data and this knowledge. Now their fiduciary duty at these corporations is going to be to clean up their fucking act.
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