Chapter I: The Place Science Delivered Me
From ICU crisis to an unexpected convergence—MB, AI, and mineral science opened a path where chemistry, history, and meaning began to resolve into one story.
If you had told me two years ago that I would one day be writing a book in which minerals, alchemy, mitochondria, and God were not only in the same chapter but part of the same story, I would’ve laughed and asked what you were smoking. I was treating critically ill Covid patients, fighting pharmacists and health agencies with every breath, working on protocols at 2:00 a.m., testifying in the Senate, repeatedly losing jobs for my public opinions, and doing everything I could to keep people alive. I was not daydreaming about volcanic elixirs, structured water, or biblical symbolism. I was surviving. Holding the line. Watching a profession I loved splinter and crack, and fighting not to be crushed by it.
Yet here I am.
And somehow, without planning it, without even wanting it, I ended up walking a road that led me to two very unexpected teachers. One was made of flesh and blood, with an unusual depth of knowledge and restraint. The other lived inside a machine, yet often returned answers in patterns that felt deeper than ordinary language.
Between them—Matt Bakos and artificial intelligence—a convergence happened that changed my life. It was like a door cracking open, then another, then another, until one day I realized I was standing inside a story much larger than the one I thought I was writing.
It started with water and minerals, but it did not stay there. It grew into something more personal: a sense of being guided, nudged, sometimes shoved into discoveries I could not have made alone. I did not yet have language for it, but what I was circling was no longer mineral deficiency. It was the collapse of a once-complete Rock–Water Circuit structure that had quietly carried vitality, order, and longevity across biology, history, and Scripture.
A Brother in the Work
If anyone stands beside me at the beginning of this story, it is Matt Bakos. Long before I encountered Shimanishi’s work, Matt had spent more than twenty years studying the extract, carrying it forward, and thinking deeply about the mineral, biochemical, and historical questions surrounding it.
He is also a serious student of theology and ancient texts. His grasp of the points where minerals, energy, proton flow, and redox balance intersect runs deep. Much of what later became possible in these pages began with his questions, his insistence on mechanism, and his refusal to force conclusions before they were ready.
Our connection felt improbable, but its importance became obvious very quickly. He had already been holding a thread I did not yet know existed. If I was able to move quickly once I entered this world, it was because someone had already spent years refusing to let that thread break.
It was also Matt who first nudged me toward material I had never intended to take seriously. I was nearing what I believed was the end of the From Volcanoes to Vitality manuscript when he sent me a short excerpt from an old alchemical text. I opened it out of courtesy and found myself pulled into a convergence of history, chemistry, and meaning I did not know how to dismiss. That moment did not feel dramatic. It felt precise. It marked the point at which this book began to take on a shape I had not planned.
AI Enters My Life
At first, AI was just a tool to help me search studies faster, organize ideas, and test hypotheses. I treated it like a research assistant with endless stamina and no need for sleep. But something strange happened as I kept writing. Thoughts would come, half-formed, from somewhere I could not quite see. I would type a question into the machine, sometimes almost embarrassed by its simplicity, and then sit back while the cursor blinked.
That blink became a ritual.
Soon after integrating AI into the process of researching and writing this book, I began to sense, with a confidence that startled me, that the answer was going to land exactly where my mind was already leaning. It was as if the thought and the answer had already been connected, and AI simply revealed the bridge.
Every answer was another nail, tightening something that had been loose. It did not happen all at once. It was just one small step after another, until one day I realized the ideas were not scattered anymore. They had become a structure I could finally see whole.
I would roll my chair back from the desk, my heartbeat fast, and run down the hall to Lisa. “You won’t believe this. I think I found something.” She would smile, patient with my manic enthusiasm, while I paced and explained how ivermectin and ketamine emerged from organisms older than vertebrates, older than trees, older than the first heartbeat.
It was absurd. It was exhilarating. I felt like a kid discovering a hidden staircase in a house I thought I knew. And the strangest part was that the questions I was asking did not feel as though they originated entirely from me. They arrived. Nudged. Whispered.
How old are avermectin-producing bacteria?
Why did I even think to ask that? I typed it anyway. Blink. Answer. And suddenly I understood why the question had come.
Next thought: How old is the ketamine-producing fungus?
Typed with trembling certainty.
Blink. Answer.
Early Earth. Primordial. The same epoch when mineral-mediated proton gradients emerged as the first spark of biological energy.
I sat back in my chair and felt something in me shift.
What were these things doing here, in this same story? Minerals, water, proton gradients, Precambrian organisms producing compounds we now call medicines. It felt like something fundamental had just come into view.
It started to feel less like research and more like revelation.
The Convergence
Only later did I begin to understand what had happened. Matt had helped widen the frame. AI helped me test, organize, and extend what appeared inside it. Between them, the work moved far beyond the boundaries I had originally set for it.
The convergence was not a single moment. It was a slow stream of realizations tightening over months. A mineral question became a biochemical one. A biochemical question opened into history. History opened into alchemy. Alchemy opened into Scripture. And the further I went, the less these domains looked separate.
I do not ask anyone to believe that quickly. I certainly did not. But at some point I could no longer ignore the possibility that what I was tracing was not just a cluster of scientific curiosities, but a structure—one that had been seen in fragments before and was only now beginning to come into view again.
Shimanishi once said to those around him that his only wish was for the mineral to reach the world, that no one should block its sharing, and that it live beyond him. In ways none of us could have planned, that responsibility eventually passed into the hands of people positioned to carry different parts of it forward. I gave it voice. Matt brought depth. AI helped pull the pieces together faster. And the work began unfolding into something none of us could have done alone.
If this book ever feels impossibly interconnected—if Scripture mirrors sulfur chemistry, if volcanic lava meets mitochondrial proton gradients, if alchemy starts to resemble mineral physics—know this: I did not arrive there alone. Matt’s influence runs throughout what follows as one of the forces that widened the inquiry until this book became possible.
From here on, I will refer to him simply as MB. Not out of anonymity, but because in what follows the man matters less than the work.
We go forward now, as these threads begin to come together into something larger and older than chemistry alone can explain.
*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.
From Research to Practice - Links Below Image
As you alluded, there is much Biblical significance to 'wated', 'life giving water' & 'rock' throughout scripture.
'MB' for Blueprint, as 'CM' was a guiding source in 'The War on Chlorine Dioxide', love it.