Scottie
WiFi, Bluetooth, 3G, 4G and soon 5G - we are living in a time of complete saturation of wireless signals. We're literally bathed in these frequencies 24 hours a day, from cradle to grave. But is this exposure safe? Official government bodies say yes, it's perfectly safe, and they back these assurances with seemingly solid scientific studies. This perspective is widely propagated and anyone raising concerns about wireless exposures is usually dismissed as a nutcase. But what if the very standard of measurement used in these studies is completely wrong?

On this episode we're joined by Scottie of scottiestech.info who has gone through the scientific research to get to the bottom of the question: What the heck is this technology doing to us? It turns out there is a great deal of research showing the harmful effects of wireless exposure that goes well beyond the red herrings used in studies "proving" its safety.

Join us on this episode as Scottie helps break down the complexity of the subject to help us make informed decisions about wireless exposure.

And stay tuned for Zoya's Pet Health Segment where she discusses how humans from different cultures anthropomorphize different animals to represent the same human traits.

Running Time: 01:38:48

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript of the show:

Jonathan: Welcome everybody to the Health & Wellness Show. Today is Friday, July 20, 2018. My name is Jonathan. I'll be your host for today. Joining me in our virtual studio from all over the planet we have Erica, Doug and Elliot and our very special guest today is Scottie. Hey everybody.

All: Hellos.

Jonathan: So we have a really interesting topic for today and we're hoping to bring you some more detailed info than just our rambling musing about whatever we decide to talk about {laughter}. Today we're talking about wireless technology, how 5G is just the tip of the iceberg. We've talked about EMF pollution and things like that in the past and I think our listeners are probably generally aware that at least that you don't want to be saturating yourself with EMF. That's bad. But the extent of EMF pollution that is in our current society is pretty staggering and as they ramp up the bandwidth of these networks it's just going to become more and more problematic. So we're going to talk about all of that today.

Scottie who is with us, is the chief engineer, chief technology officer, chief everything tech for sott.net and he is also an author online and does commentary and blog posts at scottiestech.info. Did I get that right?

Scottie: Yeah.

Jonathan: Cool. So Scottie's going to lend his expertise to our discussion. He just released a video on this topic about 5G so we're hoping that that can provide some context. Just to start at the beginning, if people aren't aware, you've heard over the last number of years the 3G, 4G, 5G. That just means generation, the generation of the network, so third, fourth and now fifth. But as each of those generations are released the bandwidth is increased so we can send more and more data. But along with that comes this increasing saturation of waves all around us, and not just the waves. It sounds kind of harmless but it does many other things that we're going to talk about. Scottie, if you wouldn't mind, tell us what got you interested in this? What was the moment where you thought "I'm going to look into 5G and see what's really the issue here.

Scottie: First of all, I'm an electrical engineer, graduated a number of years ago, let's say {laugher}. I think it was probably about 10 years ago, people kept asking me about wifi or cell phones when they were becoming more popular. That was way before 2008 actually, but about 10 years ago when I decided I'm kind of supposed to know about this stuff so let me look at some studies and stuff. So I did and to say the least, they were a little bit concerning. There are various groups and organizations, some are industry funded, some are not. There are all these testing facilities and standards like the SAR - specific absorption rate - which is simply a measure of the heating effects of microwave signals, microwave EMF.

This gets kind of complicated because you've probably heard the term 'microwave' and also Terra Hertz and millimetre wave radiation and all that stuff. There are actually multiple definitions. To keep things simpler because microwave frequency radio waves is actually 300 megahertz to 300 gigahertz technically but engineers usually talk about microwaves as meaning 1-100 gigahertz and the industry has their own crazy things that they do so it gets all complicated.

Jonathan: For the lay person, microwaves are essentially micro. Is that too dumb to say that? That's why they're called microwaves?

Scottie: They're really, really small waves. The wavelength is really small but of course when you get into millimetre waves, that's actually 30 to 300 gigahertz and that's a really super high frequency. What I usually tell people is forget about all that. You've got your cell phones which are usually 1.7, 1.8, 1.9 gigahertz. You've got wifi which is commonly 2.4 gigahertz. Bluetooth is 2.4 and there are new flavours of wifi out now. One of them is 5 gigahertz and they're coming out with one that's 60 gigahertz and 60 gigahertz gets into millimetre wave. Millimetre wave is roughly 30 gigahertz up to 300 and blah, blah, blah.

All of that is actually unimportant because it turns out that in this study by Martin Paul, the one called Wifi is an Important Threat to Human Health that was published in the journal Environmental Research published by Elsevier - this is a paper that reviews other wifi studies and summarizes things - one of the core things that they're finding in a whole boatload of studies - I'm probably getting a little bit ahead of myself here but one of the things that they seem to have discovered is that the actual frequency itself is less important than the fact that it is some kind of digital modulation scheme. All of these different system like wifi, Bluetooth and cell phones all use different modulation schemes, modulation encoding.

The point of all these studies is that the frequency is not what's important. That's not what's actually doing the harm because very often the power levels are very, very low. A good way to think about it is if wifi and Bluetooth are 2.4 gigahertz, a microwave oven that you use to cook your food is 2.45 gigahertz. But a microwave oven is 10,000 times more powerful. So the common argument that people make is "Well, okay maybe it's 2.4 gigahertz and that's the same frequency roughly as a microwave oven but because the power levels are so low, we're not going to cook anybody's brain and no one's going to get cancer from it." That's basically what I've heard pretty much all my life.

So like I said, about 10 years ago I started reading some papers about it and it was interesting. But it's also very difficult because nobody really wants to listen. Obviously, once the industry releases all these technologies out there, they have a very large investment in not having to change all of their systems because somebody discovered that they're bad for your health. There was one guy commenting on my YouTube channel on the video before this last one on 5G that I published, in which I talked about how to make a simple little USB cable with a glowing USB light and you put a ping pong ball over it and you can plug that into the USB port on your wifi router so when you turn your wifi on you won't forget to turn it off because you'll have this glowing ball that you can position somewhere convenient so you can see it. That was a silly little thing because I occasionally turn my wifi on to update a tablet or something where you can't use an Ethernet dongle. It was a silly little thing. I thought it was kind of fun. I published it and there was a guy who's kind of a fan of my channel, or at least he was, and he said "You know, I was one of the people for the last 30 or 40 years who was developing all these cool wireless technologies and now I'm retired and I just want to play with these cool toys." I understand where he's coming from.

Anyway, I published this new video on 5G on these papers and I was pretty shocked when he came back again and more or less told me I was nuts and then he posted a second time and suggested that I take some kind of anti-anxiety medication. {laughter} Then somebody else posted and said "Clearly Scottie has obvious bias" and all this kind of stuff. I just replied and said "Look, I read the papers and I see that there are obvious concerns here and my actual recommendation is that there are further studies done with a very broad, multi-disciplinary look at this stuff" because what's happening is you have official industry organizations who are coming out with studies and then there's one paper I think by Foster and Moulder that's apparently used a lot.

Paul Martin in his paper here tears that study to shreds and that's actually a paper that quotes seven other wifi studies. It actually turns out, one of the things that Paul says point blank in his paper Wifi is an Important Threat to Human Health is that this Foster and Moulder study is actually quoting these seven other studies, supposedly on wifi and in addition to saying that they weren't actually testing the things about wifi that make it harmful, of the seven studies that they talk about in that Foster and Moulder paper, two of them were done by one group of researchers and five of them were done by another group of researchers and among those two groups they actually shared some researchers. So we're not talking about seven independent studies where two or three different groups did some studies and the other four groups were verifying their results. He doesn't actually say it point blank but it makes it pretty clear that it looks more like something that would be industry-funded to make everyone think that it's okay.

Jonathan: Yeah. Isn't it reasonable to think - again from a lay person's perspective - that as the demand for data transfer increases they're going to have to add power to the system? So as we add power the signals will become more intense and then we approach that level where people who are sceptics now might start to think "Yeah, we probably shouldn't do this"? Do you see a point like that happening at all?

Scottie: What's happened so far is back in the early days of cell phones, back in the days of amps, which was the old analogue phone network back in the day with what I used to call the Motorola battle phone - it was those big honking things that you had to hold two hands. It looked like something from an old war movie. Those were analogue and they were 800 or 900 megahertz. Then of course a digital version came out and then this whole mobile internet thing started slowly over time. Typically what they do, and it gets a little complicated because the transmit power levels of a cell phone tower, the power level itself doesn't necessarily go up but in order to send more data they have to use higher and higher frequencies. That's one of the reasons why current 4G is 1.7 to 1.9 gigahertz. Using even fancier modulation schemes, there's a limit to the amount of data that you can send because of the actual frequency that they're using.

So one of the things that they're doing with 5G is saying "Okay we're going to use these much higher frequencies". In the EU they said somewhere around 24 to 27 gigahertz. In the US it's supposed to be 28 or 39. Then in still other countries they're saying "Well, we're going to have 5G but we're going to use lower frequencies like 3.5 or 5 gigahertz instead of 20 or 30". With those systems at the lower frequencies, you're going to have much slower data rates. But typically what they do is bump the frequency up higher and higher. The problem there is it's not only a question of frequency and low power levels because the more users you have the more capacity you need. So the more users you have, the more low power antennae you're mounting on towers and buildings and in subway stations because everyone wants connectivity all the time.

So actually the power levels are going up because you have more transmitter receiving antennas so everyone can connect to the network and basically everywhere is totally saturated.

Elliot: Scottie, just to bring it back down to basics I've just got a question to ask. If I'm understanding correctly, and just for the listeners, one of the arguments is that if you were to compare a microwave oven and a cell phone, a microwave oven is typically much higher power. So if you put something in a microwave oven, the energy that is emitted actually exerts a thermal effect. It excites the atoms in the food that you want to cook and it heats it up, yeah?

Scottie: Yeah.

Elliot: The argument is that because cell phones are much lower power and they don't exert those thermal effects, that they are safe because of that. Is that what you were alluding to earlier?

Scottie: Yeah, that's the official story and what this Foster and Moulder study was claiming; because it's so much lower power there are no heating effects therefore there's nothing to be concerned about. That's actually kind of problematic because as Paul talks about in his paper, it's actually the non-heating effects that they found to be causing the problem. It gets a little bit hairy, but let me see if I can find my section here. Just from memory, these various studies that have been done - and I should note here that this Foster and Moulder study was actually released in 2013, the one that says "Oh no, there's nothing wrong" and the other seven studies that they quote are fairly recent. They're all done within the past 10 years. But there are studies going back as far as 1972 where we didn't have digital cell phone networks back then but we were actually starting to use microwave signals for various things. Even back then when these studies were done and people were concerned, that was ignored.

So now fast forward to today and we have these various studies saying that it's not the power levels that matter, it's not the so-called microwave oven effect that no one can use that argument and say "Oh, well it's 10,000 times less powerful than a microwave oven so it's not cooking your brain. That means it's perfectly safe." What Paul is actually saying in his article and in all these studies that he's talking about is that it's actually other characteristics of the radio waves at these frequencies that matters.

Like I said earlier, it's even the specific frequency itself that can have effects but in short what he's saying is that the pulsed nature of signals - because it's not like in the old days where you had a CB radio and it's a modulated analogue wave form. It's these crazy digital systems that use pulsed waves, so to say, and those waves are also polarized. Polarization means the orientation of the antenna. If the antenna is vertical then it transmits in one way and if it's horizontal it transmits in another and polarization is basically if you have two antennas and they're both vertical and then you have another pair of antennas that are both horizontal or at a 45 degree angle or something, you can send twice the data, even at the same frequency and because the physical orientation of the antennas is different, you can send more data.

But apparently according to several studies that were done recently, that actual polarization can have a very distinct effect on specific structures in the body, which kind of makes sense when you think about it because we have structures in our body and they're oriented in certain ways, right? Your arms and legs are generally vertical with respect to the ground. Of course you can sit down and that sort of thing. They're talking about microstructures in the body and that gets all kind of complicated.

The other thing that Paul was saying was that these wifi studies that defend wifi and say there's nothing wrong with it, they expose their test animals to a continuous low level amount of wifi or what they claim is wifi and what they found in all these studies that have been done is that for the effects on the human body are worse, there are certain windows, as they call them, of exposure where because your exposure is not actually constant, it's peaking and waning and there are also even particular times of day. If you're a young child versus an adult, the non-linear exposure actually enhances the negative effects of things like wifi and 4G and 5G whereas when they do these studies to show that wifi is perfectly safe, they're saying "We're going to expose this little mouse to two hours or five hours of a low-level signal and it's relatively constant." What they found is that's actually - intentionally or unintentionally - mischievous because that makes it seem better than it actually is, if that makes any sense.

Doug: Yeah.

Jonathan: It kind of makes sense. I think of it as like having a piece of food that's stuck to a plate. If you just run water on it, it's probably not going to go anywhere but if you pulse it with a jet it'll wash off. The pulsing of the signal is actually having more of an effect even if it's a similar power range.

Scottie: Yeah. He goes into the mechanism. This is actually the thing that I found the most fascinating about the study. He actually goes into why these pulsed signals have such an effect. He goes into this thing about voltage gated calcium channels, which as I understand it, have all kinds of crazy effects. The list of effects that these studies are claiming that wifi has on the body and also other microwave frequency digital signals, are nuts; just simple oxidative stress, sperm testicular damage, male infertility, neuropsychiatric changes-it literally screws with your head, cellular DNA damage. He goes into detail about how these waves actually can literally rip DNA apart and cause problems and mutations and all kinds of crazy stuff. It screws with your melatonin which messes up your sleep. It goes on and on; abnormal post-natal development. It disrupts the development of teeth. It can cause changes in your heart and circulatory system. One of my favourites, he writes "Growth stimulation of adipose stem cells" and then in parentheses puts "role in obesity". Wow! Wifi can make you fat?!

Erica: Your phone is making you fat.

Scottie: He's got a list of all the studies here that looked at these specific things. You look at those studies and you go "Well jeez!" It should be fairly concerning to pretty much anyone but especially the fact that it appears that wifi is so common in schools. You can understand why this is the case. I suppose you could argue that 5 and 6-year-old children sitting in a classroom don't actually need a wifi-connected tablet to learn. "Back in my day we used books." {laughter} "We used books and we had to fashion our own pencils out of tree limbs" or something.

But you can understand why they use wifi in schools because if you have a classroom that has 30 desks in it, what are you going to do? Run Ethernet cables to every desk? So in terms of the cost effectiveness, they don't even need a wifi box in every classroom. They can put a few down the hallway and boom, everybody's covered. So economically you can understand why they do it. But then parents come forward and say "I'm concerned about this wifi and it's affecting my child's health" and people look at them like they're crazy.

Jonathan: I think it's a curse of convenience, that even the people who may know about the information that you're talking about, like the man who was on your YouTube. "Hey, I just want to play with this stuff." Maybe if you pressed him a little bit he would admit that he doesn't really want to think about how it might be dangerous because it's super convenient and fun. I think that's where a lot of people are at unfortunately. It's kind of like if you're going to ride your motorbike down the road a mile and don't put your helmet on because you think "I'm only going a mile". It's that kind of attitude.

Scottie: Yeah.

Elliot: The thing is, when you put it in schools, and Dr. Paul even said in the paper that Scottie's been talking about, children's brains, their nervous system is still developing and the size of the skull and the thickness of the skull is much smaller and much thinner than an adult. This essentially makes a child much more susceptible to the effects of these frequencies. There's something really interesting that you said in the video Scottie. Let me try and remember it. Sorry I've lost it.

He was talking in the paper about how because a child's stem cells - sorry, what did you say about the stem cells? It basically breaks down the stem cells. It attacks the stem cells and you only have a certain amount of stem cells in your entire lifetime and if your parents have been exposed to this, they pass them down onto their children. So the children probably have screwed stem cells to begin with and then they're being attacked from the wifi at school.

Scottie: What he actually writes - I had it and now I just lost it. He talks about the skull thing, like you just said. And then says "However, there are other arguments to be made. EMFs have shown to be particularly active in producing effects on embryonic stem cells." Then he goes on to say "Look, children have much more of these stem cells and these are the cells that turn into any other cells and basically you're possibly ruining your child's development".

But in another part of the paper he even goes into the possibility that the damage that wifi is causing is a possible explanation for the rise in autism, which is something that a lot of people are talking about; where does autism come from and is it chemicals? Is it toxic food? Is it GMOs? They found at least a tentative link between the effects of being saturated in wifi, including and especially when the mother is pregnant and the foetus is developing. If it's slathered in wifi all the time, that could be a problem. As rabbit holes go, it's pretty deep and it's pretty shocking actually. I totally understand why people want to play with their toys and everything, but my take on it is, "Look, we've got enough studies now and it's been going on for decades now where now would be the time to actually really take a hard look at it and for people to actually be concerned and band together and do something about it."

The something that should be done is these studies should be looked at more seriously, doctors should be aware of the studies because I'm sure there are doctors out there who are doing other studies on various things or they're wondering 'why do I have so many patients with autism all of a sudden?. Here's a possible link.' Then they have something to contribute to the discussion and everybody gets together. That doesn't necessarily mean we have to get rid of wifi. It doesn't mean we have to get rid of all pulsed radio signals because if everybody actually worked together - physics, chemistry, biochemistry, doctors, engineers, everybody, it's entirely possible that there is a specific characteristic of pulsed radio waves that could be mitigated, possibly even with just a software update that wouldn't cost a whole lot of money. But of course no one's going to do it unless tons of people start dying, tons of people start getting sick, the industry is brought to heel.

That's actually another thing that Paul talks about in his study. How do you do a thorough study now? I don't use wifi in the house except for very rarely if I absolutely have to. I don't use wireless keyboards and mice with Bluetooth. There's just no reason to. I use my cell phone as little as possible. I get very bad cell reception inside the house so I'm happy with that. I live in a rural area. So I try to minimize my exposure, but there are two cell towers two or three kilometres away. There are satellites whizzing overhead transmitting these high frequency digital signals. And of course again, the power level is very low and that's the argument. "But the power level of the satellite is so low it doesn't matter." Again, what the studies are showing is yeah, the power level itself doesn't actually matter. It's all the other effects, all the other characteristics of these pulsed signals that are causing the problem, the polarization, that kind of thing.

So how would you do a thorough controlled study because how would you have a control group? Somebody who's 20 years old today, they could be blasted by it their whole lives and if it's having neurological effects - look at the state of the world and certain social movements and this kind of thing and you go, well does that have an effect? Are there interactions? There are so many people in America in particular, who are on prescription drugs. Well, if wifi is having these neurological effects the studies have shown, are they playing some role in the need for all this medication? Are there interactive effects between wifi and taking medication x, y or z? There is actually a hint in one of these studies that that may very well be the case.

This is kind of a bad example, but there were these VGGCs, these voltage gated calcium channels, which are apparently implicated in tinnitus, the ringing in the ears. So they say yeah all those people who say 'my ears are ringing when I'm near the wifi', may not be crazy after all because there is actually a physical mechanism by which that could occur. But enough people have to care.

Jonathan: Yeah. There are so many variables. It's like trying to pick a spice out of a soup. Obviously it would do us good to do these measures that you're talking about but I wonder how much of a difference it would make when you combine it with everything else, with all the prescriptions and with the state of our diet and industrial pollution and all that. I don't mean to be dismissive. This is something we need to look at. I think like you're saying, people need to see the damage and see that it outweighs what they see as the benefits. I live in a fairly rural area too and there are still quite a few places here where you can go away from cell service, but long story short, but there's a bunch of trails that are very popular. So they put up some cell towers there and there was kind of a stink in the community but the argument was that people needed to have that service in case they had an emergency in the woods.

Doug: They never needed it before.

Jonathan: Yeah, but people have been having emergencies in our woods for many years. But it's hard when somebody argues safety for the community to then say "Nah". That discussion doesn't go very well. So I think people haven't seen the negative effects of this yet. And people who are talking about feeling wifi or being damaged by it are still, unfortunately I think, in the tinfoil hat sector in most people's eyes.

Doug: Exactly. That's encouraged too. Getting ready for this show I was just looking at some mainstream stuff and seeing what people are saying. It's not just 'those people don't know what they're talking about', there's a lot of derision in it as well. It's really like 'these people are insane, they're crazy, they're nut cases. We have studies showing that this stuff is safe.' So dismissive. I think that's probably been on purpose, whether it's been driven by industry or not or it's just like you said, people who want to play with their toys. But it's so divisive. If I was to post anything on my Facebook talking about the dangers of wifi, I would be flooded with comments talking about how retarded I was.

Elliot: The problem with this is it's so insidious because the effects can go under the radar and that's the thing. Someone on the chat just said "A friend of mine gets a headache from using a cell phone". It's almost like to some extent, these people are kind of lucky because their body is in some way acutely aware or sensitive to the detrimental effects that these frequencies are having on the body whereas the vast majority of people don't have that sense and we can't feel the effects that it's having.

When you change your diet, you clean up your diet and then you go out and eat something bad, you know about it. But the problem with this is you don't feel it and yet the effects may be even more substantial than eating a poor diet because there's no way for the body to detoxify this stuff, essentially. It's not like a chemical. In biochemistry you can conjugate some toxin and clear it out by the urine or the faeces. That's natural. Even man-made chemicals you can bind and you've got detoxification systems designed to do that. But you don't have detoxification systems designed to deal with this altered electromagnetic environment, or at least that we know of. So this is why it's really disturbing.

Jonathan: For sure. I've been in some offices in Palo Alto where you can feel {buzzing sound} a background signal, my point being all I can personally attest to if I really search my memory for it, is this sense of somebody standing behind me, a sense that something is slightly off. But I personally can't say that I actually felt that. I didn't feel anything from that. But I know that people do and I think that's what you're saying is so insidious; even in a place where you know that it's just completely saturated, every corner of the place is totally drenched with signals, to me that's a scary thing that I can't sense a feeling about that.

But I was going to ask Erica, you said you've had some experiences with that. What kind of sensations do you get and what do you notice?

Erica: Well for one, the ringing in the ear for sure. It doesn't happen all the time. I don't constantly have tinnitus. But I was at the Google campus a few years ago and I felt like I could actually see it. I know that's going to sound super out there, but it looked almost like a fog. And then not being able to think clearly. I've shared this before on the show, being in an airport and you just feel like your brain is a little bit discombobulated. It's hard to really put into words. But I've been reading about the studies for 10 years because I had young kids that wanted cell phones and we were really adamant about not allowing that. You read the studies about brain tumours and this and that but what Scottie recently shared, it really sent home the message that the whole brain tumour thing is just a distraction. "Oh well they don't cause brain tumours so they're safe" and they don't bring up any of the stuff that Scottie just mentioned; the behaviour issues, even the getting fat thing. You see more and more people lethargic and not moving around and they've constantly got a device. So what does that mean? Am I going too tinfoil hat there? I don't know.

But I've always been really concerned about it and even in schools, the fact that all these children are basically guinea pigs and we don't really know what's going to happen. Maybe it'll take 10 or 20 years. It's like the GMO food thing. Maybe in 20 years they'll go "Oh, we maybe shouldn't have done that."

Scottie: That's exactly what the studies are saying. The effects of wifi cell phone signals, the upcoming 5G, all that kind of stuff, are cumulative and one of the problems that they very clearly point out is that because the effects are cumulative, right now we may be on the verge of seeing all the real problems start. There are some people who are more sensitive to it than others and of course we don't actually know the reasons why that might be because as a society we're not actually banding together to study it. We're just taking the easy out and saying "But there are these seven studies and they showed that there's no heating effects. It doesn't give you brain cancer. It doesn't cook your brain. Perfectly safe."

Jonathan: Yeah.

Scottie: But the effects are cumulative. There's the thing about damaging sperm cells in men, possibly even leading to infertility. There was a study they did where they took two pairs of mice and they put them in what they call antenna parks. So I imagine in the middle of a cell phone towers, a little fenced in area where they've got a bunch of towers with antennas on it and stuff, and they did a study and they said "Okay, let's put a male and a female mouse in a cage and let them breed there". They had other locations where there were no antennas and they found that I think by the fifth generation of mice, they could no longer reproduce. It's easy to say "Ah well, fifth generation, I'll be dead by then." Yeah, but your kids won't and your children's children.

Erica: It's funny you mention that.

Scottie: You have to care about it! How could you not care about it?! Even if it's your children's children's children's children, whatever. And then the sperm damage is not just the fact that you could become sterile. It's the fact that it's actually causing DNA damage and that damage is passed on to your children. So the father could have damaged DNA which he passes on to the mother. They have a baby then the foetus is developing and it's actually being bombarded, which is causing further damage and then the child is born and right off the bat, even before conception, the damage had been done and then from birth on it's saturated all the time. The theory is that we're going to start seeing more and more of this type of this problem. Of course everyone is looking in other directions. Some of those other directions like environmental toxins and poor food most likely play a role but not enough people, I think, are actually looking at the effect that this EMF smog has.

I also just wanted to say that I myself am not actually sensitive to these things. I've never had a problem but what first got me interested in it 10 years ago was that I had a very good friend who was sick and there was wifi in the house at that time. The idea came up, "Well maybe it's the wifi" from reading some studies and stuff. And the minute the wifi was gone she started to improve. I've known may people who are sensitive to it. They claim they get headaches, they have tinnitus, they have all these effects. I personally am not sensitive to it. Yes in certain ways my life would be more convenient if I could have all these wonderful wireless things but for me personally, I looked at all this and I thought, "Okay. All these people can't be crazy." Then I read the studies and I think "Okay yeah, they're not crazy." And there you have it.

Jonathan: I hate to say it, but I don't think it's going anywhere. I think we're locked into this path of progress until something goes horribly wrong. It seems that way. I know we always end up in kind of a defeatist opinion. {laughter} But I think what can people do about it? It's the same thing with food, we say you can change your diet, but this you're talking about moving. So that's not available for a lot of people.

Scottie: To my way of thinking, it's essentially minimizing your exposure. Like I said, you can't escape multi-gigahertz digital signals raining down on your head from satellites. You can't escape cell phone towers. If you've got one 10 feet away from your house, that may actually be better, depending in what direction the antennae are aimed and various other factors. It gets kind of complicated but for me it's like with everything. I don't have to have wifi in the house. I can run Ethernet cables everywhere. In fact, that's even better because if you're ever updating the software on a tablet or a smart phone or something, very often the device will actually tell you "Oh, by the way, don't use wifi to update this device because if the connection drops out, the file that it's downloading could become corrupted and it'll break your device". So they'll often say 'make sure you're on a wired network'. Wired networks with Ethernet are 100% reliable unless you've got a cable or something. You don't have to have a smart phone with you at all times. You don't have to have your smart phone on next to your head while you're sleeping. What the hell for? You're sleeping! Right? {laughter}

Jonathan: Right.

Scottie: Other things you just can't avoid, for instance if you're in a hotel or even on public transportation. "Oh, free wifi on the airliner now" when you're flying to Zimbabwe or something. There are certain things you can't avoid but at the very least you can minimize your exposure and you can take steps to minimize your children's exposure. To me that's just good old fashioned common sense. If that's all you can do then that's what you can do. But it's the same with diet and health. It's like "I'm going to go paleo or keto or something. I'm going to lower my carb intake." Or some people seem to do better on a vegetarian or vegan diets. Okay, where are you getting your meat from? Is it pumped full of hormones? If you're a vegetarian, where are you getting your produce from? Even when you go to health food stores that doesn't necessarily mean that the food is safe. If I grow apples in my yard, I know what pesticides have been put on them-probably none. And you know the variety of apple and blah, blah, blah. But you can never be 100% safe but you can make efforts to minimize exposure, maximize the health of things that you eat and that sort of thing. All of those steps may seem fruitless but for me, I'm going to do all those things because I'm going to give my body as good a chance as possible to heal and repair itself.

We're learning crazy things. There was an article I read a couple of months ago where they said, "Yeah, you know that little chunk of weird looking stuff inside your gut somewhere?" They had a name for it. "Yeah, we think that might actually be a new organ." I read the article and I'm going "After hundreds of years of chopping people open, nobody ever looked at that thing and said 'This might actually do something'?" So even in terms of medical science, we don't know everything. Reading all this wifi stuff made me think of voltage gated calcium channels and all this kind of stuff. It made me think of two things. It made me think of Gerald Pollock and his concept of structured water. His book is absolutely fascinating. Everybody should read it. It's called The Fourth Phase of Water.

Elliot: Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life?

Scottie: Yeah, that one too. But the Fourth Phase of Water was the one that I read that kind of blew my mind. He talks about in modern science and medicine they say you may have a cell and the cell actually has all these little channels and gates and I forget what they call them. He says "Considering the size of a cell, how on earth would one tiny little cell have all these little doorways on it that are letting molecules in and out? Okay, if the water is structured water," - you have to read the book. It gets complicated. But it's basically things diffuse in and out based on the principle that he came up with. They're doing all these studies.

Then you go "Well jeez, that explains all kinds of stuff" and it really makes you wonder, "Well how much do we really know?" Then the other thing it made me think of was reading these papers made me think of Val Brown and the whole NeurOptimal thing. I think you guys did an interview with him. He seems to have this view that's not very popular in his field, that the brain is what I think they call holonomic or holographic and it's basically the idea that the brain doesn't have individual sections - 'this is my speech centre, this is my motor centre', blah, blah, blah, that the brain is holographic in nature so one part can take over for the other and that essentially there's this idea that the whole brain doesn't actually work the way that we think it does.

Then you put that together with the idea that these studies that have shown that wifi is not so good and it's having these negative effects neurologically and you go "Well Jeez! Is there something there?" For me I know it's kind of hopeless in a sense, right? Because you can't actually get out of the soup. We're stuck in the soup. You're going to be bombarded. All you can do is minimize your exposure. But I'm an engineer and engineers like to solve problems. So I look at all this and I go "Oh look! What a fascinating problem to solve." And the solution to that problem, like I said before, doesn't mean we have to get rid of everything that we love in terms of playing Pokemon Go and walking off the cliff because you're not looking where you're going. {laughter} If people want to walk off cliffs while playing Pokemon Go, that's totally okay. We can still have that but maybe we could have it with something that's a little bit safer for our children, for ourselves, for long-term health.

Doug: That's the problem with the industry completely denying that there's any issue whatsoever. As long as they take that position then nobody's trying to solve it because everybody's like "Oh well, I guess it's okay. I guess we're fine." And there's not public demand for these problems to be solved. So I think that they do a lot more damage by taking the hard line.

Elliot: In response to the question about what can we do about it, I was looking at some of the mechanics, the biochemistry of how this is said to work and I think there's some things that we can hypothesize might be beneficial in protecting ourselves against it but I think in order to understand why is important to delve just a little bit deeper in the whole VGCC thing. Basically the voltage gated calcium channels, they've got this really cool sounding name, but per my understanding, they're like flood gates. Inside the cell you store calcium ions. You store lots of different mineral ions but calcium is stored and these voltage gate calcium channels are like sensors. It's like a gate and it's very sensitive to fluctuations in the electromagnetic environment.

So when something triggers this gate to open, you get a flood of calcium ions. These travel inside the cell and they exert lots of different effects. But generally in biology what calcium ions do inside is cell is they activate things. So they activate specific functions. It's all about action. You just have to associate calcium with action. So the way that a neuron fires depends on calcium. For enzymes to work and different substances to be released and for mitochondria to produce energy you need flows of calcium to activate that process.

A lot of the studies which link back wifi to things like neuropsychiatric conditions, if you look at a neuropsychiatric condition like, let's say, obsessive/compulsive disorder or schizophrenia, very often what they find is that there is excessive activity in the nervous system. It's like constant action, constant firing of neurons and when neurons fire faster than they should you get lots of what are called free radicals. These damage the neurons. They damage the DNA. They damage various parts of the brain. If we look at wifi's effects and electromagnetic frequencies in general, the non-native ones that we've created over the past couple of years, they activate these floodgates, you might call them. They cause calcium to be released into the cells and they cause this excessive neuronal activity.

So this burns out the nervous system. The cells die and you get lots of damage to the brain. You think of a developing foetus and a child who's born autistic, there's a very clear mechanistic link here between the use of wifi, excessive neuronal activity and cell death in the nervous system and then a child being born autistic because autism is essentially brain damage, okay? So that's an interesting link there. One thing I would just like to add to that to give some context is that when you get excessive calcium in the nervous system, it also activates the release of a chemical called nitric oxide which is very useful. It's used throughout the body and its general function is to dilate blood vessels, so we need it in the right amounts. But when it's produced in excess, which is what these electromagnetic frequencies actually do, they cause your brain to produce too much nitric oxide, this in and of itself can go on to produce lots of free radicals and this produces damage in the brain but it also binds to the part of the cell which makes energy, which is the mitochondria.

If anyone's looked into the effects of photobiomodulation or red light therapy or infrared light therapy, one of the reasons it's actually so beneficial is because it neutralizes nitric oxide. So in various conditions where they found that nitric oxide is produced in excess and it's causing a problem for the brain and for the energy production, by shining red light directly onto the skin, it penetrates into the cell and it can actually help to neutralize the nitric oxide.

So based on this, I would imagine - I'm not sure if there are any studies that have been done on it - but I would imagine that using some form of infrared light therapy, preferably near infrared light therapy, preferably directly into the brain by the nasal passage or shine it directly on the head but I'm not sure if it gets through the skull. I'll have to recheck that one. But there are ways to get it into the brain. I would imagine that by using red light therapy or photobiomodulation that you may be able to mitigate some of the toxic effects of the nitric oxide produced from the wifi. I'm not sure if that's 100% but that would mechanistically be possible.

Scottie: Okay, can I just say thank for that explanation of VGCCs because that's kind of what I understood but you just fleshed it out perfectly for me because I was a little bit confused there. So that was super awesome. And second, I just wanted to say that I swear by near infrared therapy because I actually have a near infrared bed. I think it's a 850 nanometre infrabed I call it. It's really good! If I do a crazy workout or I have some aches and pains I just lie on the thing for 15 minutes. That's probably a whole other show.

Jonathan: That's really cool. Is that something you put together yourself?

Scottie: Not just me. I did all the electrical, the wiring stuff. I was kind of sceptical at first. There's all kinds of information out there on it and studies. In fact they use infrared light as this new-fangled therapy in many places. In the country wherever you are that may not be the case. The Russians apparently are using millimetre waves. These evil rays we're talking about, they're using them in a therapeutic way. They did some experiments and they found that you can actually use these waves to heal. But unfortunately there were side effects. These evil millimetre waves, yes you can use them to heal. We're talking Star Trek stuff here. Dr. Beverly Crusher waves her little glowing magic wand over your arm and magically heals it. But then they also discovered, oops, it actually also causes damage so we're going to have to rethink that one. That's actually in one of these studies that I found.

But it also kind of illustrates that anything can be bad if it's used too much or used in the wrong way. That just got me thinking. I know I'm kind of a dreamer here, but what if we could change all this stuff, use a different kind of modulation, change this, change that, modify the pulsing nature and do something that's actually helpful or even healing to the body? Of course it probably wouldn't be helpful to everybody. I know that's really far out.

Jonathan: I think we need to start some kind of a consortium or a movement of engineers, like the engineers for 911 truth or something like that, engineers for wifi awareness.

Elliot: I think they've already started. I think they created this system called lifi. I'm not sure about the safety of that but I think they use visible light. I don't know if it's visible but on the website, I think you spell it L-I-F-I. So just lifi, and I think that they were trying to use a completely different system, like what you were talking about Scottie. I don't know if that's up and running yet or not.

Scottie: Yeah, I saw that a little while ago. I think they're basically just trying to use non-visible light pulses. So if you have an office area, instead of having wifi you just have an optical transmitter receiver in the ceiling and that would be aimed at little receiving modules at each person's desk. The only problem is of course you have to have line of sight and if you break the beam they'd have to have some sort of software mechanism to compensate for temporarily broken beams and stuff.

The thing there is that that's not necessarily a horrible idea despite that limitation because when you start getting into these millimetre waves and 60 gigahertz wifi and 20 or 30 gigahertz cell phone signals, each frequency acts differently. So as they bump the frequencies up higher and higher one of the problems, like with 5G, is that the frequencies that they're going to be using in those countries are going to be so high that the waves actually propagate differently, which means that they're going to have to install up to 200 times more antennas everywhere. So they're actually talking about putting a 5G antenna on every electrical pole along roads.

Jonathan: Whoa!

Scottie: So you're going to have this phenomenal number. You just stop and think about that for a minute. Who's going to pay for all that? That's an insane amount. The first thing you think is "Oh god, it's going to get horrible". All this stuff costs money and no one's going to pay $3,000 for a smart phone to help fund the installation of 200 times more antennas everywhere.

Jonathan: As a normal user - and of course I'm taking on a persona here - but "I better be able to get my goddamn Netflix without waiting a second and it should be free or maybe cost me ten bucks a month". That's the prevailing attitude for all of this stuff. Cost is not going to be a problem for people until they realize that they can't get it because it costs too much.

Doug: Does anybody know how soon this 5G is supposed to be coming out because it seems like they've been talking about this since 2015 or so? And it's always 'right around the corner'.

Scottie: That's one of the strange things about it. It's good that people are concerned about it. It would probably be better if everyone understood that they probably should have been concerned about 4G and 3G and wifi and Bluetooth and all these things a long time ago. But we'll take what we can get. It's not like it's coming next month. I actually just looked online earlier today and some companies in the US like cellular providers have already decided "We're tentatively going to use these frequencies for our 5G networks." Apparently they're actually designing systems to test and say "Will this work at this distance? What's the maximum data rate we're going to get?" As far as I can tell it's still in a very experimental stage and nothing has really been finalized. In many countries around the world they're talking about "Yeah, yeah, we want 5G." They're jumping on the bandwagon but as far as I can tell they haven't actually done anything about it yet. They're probably waiting to buy equipment from some other country or something. So it's not like it's coming next month. I think it was Verizon or some companies in the US were slated to have their first test 5G networks rolled out in a few cities around the US in the second half of 2018 but we're kind of there right now. Maybe they have, but I haven't actually seen any news about it.

Erica: I was just reading about how the FTC recently voted to exclude base stations for new 5G wireless networks from review under federal environmental and historic preservation laws. They're saying almost two dozen states have passed laws that were pushed by wireless lobby groups to override local ordinances that would regulate the signing of these base stations. So the FTC is involved. Obviously they're discussing putting it on every telephone pole in the United States. Even with neighbourhoods saying "We don't want the technology" they're just going to bypass that. That's what it sounds like.

Jonathan: There are a lot of environmental implications too, not just marring the landscape visually, but harming bees with the increased frequency. The thing that came up here with the cell phone towers that I was referring to earlier, part of the stink about that was they're right in a bird migration corridor and it's a big thing. Birds come up from South America and they fly right through this specific spot. So everybody's concerned that that might interrupt the patterns. There's a whole bunch of things. I'm sure there are many, many that we have no idea about yet.

Elliot: What's really interesting about the natural aspect of things like migrating birds, I was reading a book a couple of years ago. It was called The Coming Age of Quantum Biology and it was talking about how they never really understood how birds could find their direction, how they could have such precision in their migration and everything like that. A couple of quantum physicists - they call themselves quantum biologists - and they were talking about magneto-reception. So there's a certain amount of magnetite in the cells that line a part of the birds' heads, I think it is. I can't remember the details. It was basically talking about how it was picking up on the natural EMF present in the local environment and it was the electromagnetic fields which it was detecting and allowing it to sort of align itself with those fields and then fly in the direction toward where it needed to go.

So they were positing that it's like a quantum physics mechanism. It's not just that they see and follow the other birds. Then you take into consideration how you've got all of this non-native, artificial electro-smog and it's like what is that doing to these birds' natural navigation system? It's completely throwing it out. And then you get 5G and potentially it's going to get a lot worse. It's not just affecting human beings. It's affecting every single aspect of the planet.

Jonathan: I can see it in a lot of natural forms too. The salmon run gets less and less every year. You hear stories about back in the day when you couldn't even see the bottom of the river because there were so many fish. We have a migrating fish called smelt that's kind of like a small herring and they have decreased vastly over the last number of years. So who knows? I imagine that also has to do with pollution and a bunch of other factors but I'm sure that this plays a role in it, especially in any kind of large pattern migration like that.

I can't help but think about the bees too. I know people have talked about that for a number of years now, that the bee problem is very real and what could be causing it. I know pesticides have been pointed to as a major factor. But I have to imagine that this plays a role.

Scottie: Actually bees are mentioned in one of these studies related to the VGCCs and the magnetite that Elliot was talking about. They didn't really directly say it, if I remember correctly but they just tossed it out there, that wifi could be having an effect on bees as well, in isolation from pesticides and other environmental factors. Who knows? But that's apparently another possibility for the bee die-offs and the strange behaviour and all that kind of stuff.

Jonathan: I had meant to ask this earlier. Have you ever looked into grounding as a way of dealing with EMF saturation?

Scottie: Well I did. I have a couple of different things. My smart phone, which I don't use anymore except as a camera to make YouTube videos, as well as my dumb phone, I store in my very own stylish Faraday box that I made. That was actually kind of interesting because that's something that people ask me a lot. They say "If I sleep with a grounded metal mesh under my mattress, will that reduce my exposure to cell phone signals and that kind of thing?" The answer to that is as far as I know, no. I actually did that for a while. There was a period of time where I was having odd headaches so I made a little steel mesh and put it underneath my mattress and grounded it. For a while it actually helped a lot. I slept really well, headaches went down. But then I had to unplug it because it seemed they came back.

So that experiment was sort of inconclusive. People ask me "Can I put up copper mesh curtains?" It's very difficult to actually shield yourself completely. The higher the frequency, the smaller the waves. In order to have a proper Faraday cage, which is one continuous metal box, if it's not continuous and had gaps in it - doors are an especially big problem - because anywhere you have a gap where it's not one solid metal shell around you or your house or whatever, it leaks.

Jonathan: It can't be a Faraday cage. It can also be a screen. So how does that work with the holes? Would a really fine metal screen not work?

Scottie: Yeah it will, but it depends on the frequency because the higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength and the shorter the wavelength the smaller the holes have to be. That's the easy way to think about it. If it's solid metal then it should block most frequencies. But the other thing to keep in mind is that it depends on the transmitting and receiving power. They don't actually block signals. They attenuate them. Faraday cages are an entire science in and of themselves so it's not quite as simple as 'just throw up some copper mesh curtains and you're done. It's really a darn complicated subject. So just experiment. See if you feel better. You need something thorough.

Jonathan: Not like in the spy movies where they go into the big cage in the warehouse and it's 4 inch diameter fencing and that's their Faraday cage.

Scottie: Yeah, that wouldn't work nowadays. That's another thing. People always say "Why would I build my own little Faraday box when I could just put my cell phone in the microwave because that's what Ed Snowden did?" Well, yeah that's what Ed Snowden did but he obviously didn't understand because all you have to do is take your cell phone, turn it on, put it inside your microwave oven and then go to a land line and call it. It'll ring 9 times out of 10. It's not the right frequency. The door isn't sealed perfectly for those specific frequencies, blah, blah, blah. For 2.45 gigahertz, which is the frequency microwave ovens use, it's very good but if you diverge from that frequency then certainly it'll help attenuate the signal a little bit but in most cases it's not a very good Faraday cage for a cell phone.

Jonathan: I have one of these for travelling, the RFID-blocker wallets, probably a scam. I guess I might as well use it.

Scottie: Some of those are actually very good. They're just usually fairly pricey. You can buy what they call the FBI Faraday Bag 9000 or something. Some of them are up to almost $100. And all it is, is a bag with a foil lining and they usually have some sort of patented seal because wherever it opens, that's where you need to make sure you have full contact between the two metal sides. Also little RFID blockers, those are far more likely to work because RFID is relatively low power. It gets kind of hairy. I could make a Faraday box and it will work perfectly for me. I actually made two Faraday box videos because I made the first one and I tested it here where I live but I didn't think about the fact that I'm so far away from the cell towers that of course it blocked the signals for me. But someone who lives in the middle of a city, the intensity of the cell phone network signals there is going to be much higher. So then I went 'oops' and I had to do second box where I did super-thorough tests with a wifi router sitting literally five inches from my Faraday box and it blocked all the signals. So it gets complicated.

Jonathan: So what you're concerned with there is the output of the phone, right? What the phone is receiving is a concern but you can't do anything about it because that's coming in from everywhere else. I don't know if I'm thinking about this correctly.

Scottie: If you put something inside a Faraday cage it can't transmit out and it can't receive in either.

Jonathan: I guess what I'm saying is that doesn't stop your body from getting those waves that are coming in but you are mitigating the transmission of the phone outward, for your own health is what I'm referring to.

Scottie: I'm not sure.

Jonathan: If I live in an area next to a cell phone tower and I put my phone in a Faraday box my body is still getting hit with everything from the tower. That's what I'm saying.

Scottie: Oh yes, of course.

Jonathan: But you're still mitigating the one factor.

Scottie: I made my first Faraday box after I did a video on all the wonderful ways that Google and everybody are spying on you and then I thought "Wouldn't it be cool" - of course they can turn many phones on remotely - I thought "Wouldn't it be cool if I kept my phone in my very own Faraday box!" So that's why I made it. That was also just for fun and I ended up learning all kinds of stuff about Faraday cages and how difficult it is. But for health purposes, you'd have to turn your entire house into a Faraday cage.

Jonathan: You'd have to make a metal house, right?

Scottie: It's very difficult to do and there's also a very common misconception that Faraday cages have to be grounded. Actually they do in certain instances for certain reasons but for the purposes of just blocking radio waves it's normally better if they're not grounded. So in short, it's not very easy to block all these evil rays, especially the higher the frequency gets it becomes more difficult. So you're not really going to be like Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State and sit inside your chain link fence in the middle of your living room and go "I'm perfectly safe from everyone!" No, that's not going to work.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Scottie: So your best option is to just minimize exposure as much as possible.

Doug: That brings up an interesting question though, related to what Jonathan was saying. I had heard before that if you're not using a device that's actually sending and receiving that you are, to a certain extent, mitigating some of those effects. So you could be in a wifi environment but if you're not actually using a wifi-connected device, it's going to be better in some way. Is that actually true?

Scottie: Well I would say yes for the simple reason that, if I have my laptop and I'm in the middle of an airport and of course there's wifi all around me, if I'm surrounded by 10 people who are all using the wifi there, all of their laptops are actually transmitting and all of the wifi antennae in the airport are also transmitting. But if I'm not using the wifi on my laptop and I get up and I walk 20 or 30 meters away to another part of the airport where no one is sitting there using the wifi, I'm still being hit by the wifi coming from the airport's antennae but I'm not getting the extra saturation from the wifi transmitter that's actually in my laptop.

The other thing I've said to people for a long time is if you have a cell phone, usually the antenna or antennas for your cell phone are on the back cover, which makes sense because you hold the phone up to your head. In order to get good reception you want the antennas on the back of the phone. Of course your hand is there holding it which causes problems so if you're going to keep it in your pocket, keep it with the screen facing your body, if you have to have it and have it on.

Another thing is, I live in France and this is problematic for driving if I want to have a cell phone on because it's illegal to actually have a cell phone in your hand when you're driving. They changed this a couple of years ago. So if you actually are expecting a call or something's going on, you have to actually use the Bluetooth hands-free thing in your car. That's the only way they'll let you use a phone. So there either you call people before you leave and then you turn off the Bluetooth in your car and you turn off your phone or you just have to sit there and be blasted by it. Get a horse and carriage instead? There are some things that you just can't escape. That's why I say my policy is just minimize as much as possible. I realize it's not very simple for people who live in the city or you live in an apartment block. If your neighbour has wifi, there you go.

But still at the same time, even if your neighbour has wifi, if you use Ethernet cables instead, you've just cut your exposure in half. And if you do have to use wifi - like I was saying earlier, I have a wifi router that's hooked up to my Ethernet network and when I need to do something with wifi with one of my gismos, I turn this box on. When I first got it I logged into the web interface because you can usually go into the configuration and there's a power level setting. It defaults to the highest power level because normally a person would buy this wifi router, put it in the centre of their house and go "Yay, I've got coverage all over my house!" First of all it makes it easier for someone trying to hack into your wifi because the transmit power is higher. So I log into the gismo and I configure it all, the security settings and all that kind of stuff, but I also go into the 2.4 and the 5G radio settings - there's a page in the Web UI for the router - and I actually say "turn the transmit power down as low as possible" which means that when I do have my wifi on, there again, I'm getting bombarded way the heck less than I would be if it was at full power.

Jonathan: That's a good idea.

Scottie: So there's all kinds of stuff you can do to minimize. You can't eliminate when they put 200 times more 5G antennas everywhere.

Jonathan: What about silk? I remember reading about that some time ago, that silk had some mitigating properties similar to, but not identical of course, to a Faraday cage.

Scottie: I know actually several people who swear by silk. They're electro-sensitive and they say when they wear silk they feel absolutely fabulous. I've noticed I have some silk longjohns and I actually feel fairly good when I wear them but I also sweat like a pig. I know pigs don't sweat but it's just an expression. I find it very hot. I've never actually found any explanation as to how that works, but it appears that it does. That's actually on my list of things to figure out because it seems to actually work but there's no reason I can see that it would. But of course that doesn't mean it doesn't!

Jonathan: There must be something about the nature of the fibres combined with the tightness of the weave that makes that. But it's got to be some kind of thing with the structure of the fibres themselves I would imagine. Maybe they're crystalline somehow. Who knows?

Scottie: Like I said about the discovery of a new organ and then this idea that structured water may play a role in our cells, there are so many things that we don't know. I think that's one of the things I find so irritating when people come on my channel and they get all hot and bothered. They say "Well you're trying to take my wifi away from me!" I'm just naturally a curious person I guess. There's so much that we don't know. We can't even agree on how the brain actually works. There's a lot of evidence to indicate that it is kind of this holographic way and this NeurOptimal really seems to work and it's based on a concept that most of the mainstream think is complete bunk and yet it really works well. So obviously there's something going on there. What is it? Why are more people not more curious about that? That's what I want to know.

So that's another reason why I found these studies so interesting, because for years and years after I read these first studies 10 years ago, I went "Jeez, there's something bad here" and I really had a hunch that the problem was not the frequency and it wasn't the heating effect, it was all these other aspects of the signal; specifically that they were digital. It seemed to make sense. Then I found these studies and I was excited because it was confirming my suspicion from years ago. So that was kind of fun.

Jonathan: Prophets always have the best time. {laughter}

Elliot: I completely agree Scottie. And that's just the nature of science isn't it?. We think that we have things figured out and then people find out new things and then it completely just flies in the face of everything that people thought that they understood and then they have to go back to the drawing board and then trial again. There's one thing that I recently found out that I wanted to briefly mention here because it's kind of related to the topic but it also is a good example of how we really don't know as much as we think that we know.

I was listening to another interview by a doctor who specializes in wifi and electromagnetic pollution and things like that. He was talking about how he treats a lot of people with chronic Lyme or chronic infections and gut issues and he says that one of the first things that he tells all of his patients to do is get rid of or minimize their exposure to the electromagnetic radiation, so the wifi and cell phones and things. And he says he has two kinds of patients. He has the ones who get better and the ones who don't get better and the only difference between the ones who get better and who don't get better is the ones who get better are the ones who take the precautions in terms of minimizing their exposure to wifi and stuff.

He was talking about gut health, for instance, about how we compartmentalize the human body and we think, "Okay, everything that has to do with gut health, so it's the nutrients, the toxins," all of the ordinary stuff that someone would look at if they were focusing on the gut. But what he was talking about recently is this very cutting edge research that's practically unknown but in the realm of biophysics and he was talking about the gut bacteria and how, in short, there was this biophysicist a couple of years ago, named Fritz-Albert Popp and he found that all living cells, whether they be bacteria or human or eukaryotic, release small bursts of light and he called them biophotons.

So there's been lots of work done on these biophotons over the years and basically the idea is that the cells release light, this very low-level light, and it's a way that they communicate with one another. It turns out that the cells that release the most light are the ones of bacterial origin. They're called prokaryotic cells. The gut bacteria in this context are responsible for producing massive amounts of light. That is proposed as one of the mechanisms by which the human body gets information from the gut bacteria and how they communicate with one another. And these bacteria are all over the body; they're not just in the gut. They're in the brain. They're in the nervous system. They're in all of our organs and they're constantly releasing these small bursts of light and communicating with the cells in lots of different ways.

One of the real detrimental effects in Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt's opinion, is he believes that potentially one of the main reason why this electromagnetic radiation is so detrimental is because it disrupts the electromagnetic communication between various cells in our body and the bacteria that occupies our body. He talks about how when you bombard the body with wifi it muddies the waters completely. Like I was saying before about how the birds sense the electromagnetic environment to be able to navigate, he's talking about research which is showing that our cells and the bacteria that occupy the human body also need to sense the electromagnetic environment and communicate with one another to make sure that things are working well and that when you introduce this artificial thing, then you're completely disrupting that whole system.

As he said, the only way that his patient got better is when they minimize their exposure because they could do everything else, they could take all the supplements, they could do all the diet and lifestyle changes but if they carried on with the electromagnetic frequencies, they stayed ill. I thought that was really amazing.

Scottie: That is interesting.

Jonathan: Well that has the faint smell of empirical data, {laughter} Well that's cool. We are coming up on our time here. We have a pet health segment today from Zoya, so let's go to that and then when we come back we'll have some closing remarks.

Zoya: Hello and welcome to the pet health segment of the Health and Wellness Show. Many of us are familiar with an old English phrase 'raining cats and dogs' or with 'casting pearls before swine'. Apparently every culture has its own unique phrases or idioms that involves animals, but more so, it appears that humans from different cultures anthropomorphize different animals to represent the same human traits. Listen to the following segment to learn more about it and have a great weekend.

Hi! This is Emily from Minute Earth. In Australia and the US, when it's bright and sunny outside and then it sudden starts raining people call it a sun shower which kind of makes sense. But in England and Japan people call that same thing a fox's wedding and in India it's called a jackal's wedding. In Syria and Lebanon it's a rat's wedding. In Iran and Armenia it's a wolf's wedding. You get the idea. The expression is super common, even if no one today remembers exactly what simultaneous rain and shine have to do with the nuptial rights of animals.

But the bigger question is why animals play such an elephantine role in our expressions in general. It's tempting to think that it's because animals have really well-defined features and behaviours that are easy to point to. Like, everyone knows that monkeys are silly and owls are wise, except those are just sayings in English-speaking countries. In China monkeys are considered regal and in India calling someone an owl means you think they're foolish.

But maybe the way we use animals in language can tell us something about ourselves. Take the old saying 'do not cast pearls before swine'. A different version of this expression exists in many cultures. In Spain it's 'don't give honey to donkeys'. In India, it's 'don't give ginger to monkeys'. And in Japan it's 'don't give coins to cats'.

Humans in general seem to agree that you shouldn't give a good thing to someone who won't appreciate it but the animal we use in that expression depends on which culture we come from. And this is true for all sorts of expressions. An American might say 'don't count your chickens before they hatch' to warn someone not to get ahead of themselves. But a French person might instead say 'don't sell the bear skin before it's been killed' and while an English person might say that you can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig, a Spanish-speaking person might say that a monkey in silk is still a monkey. And while someone from the US might say that kooky person has bats in the belfry, a French person might say they have spiders on the ceiling.

But even if we don't all use specific animals the same way in all our languages, humans around the world love our animal expressions. If you don't, you might be a black sheep or as the Russian would say, a white crow.

Jonathan: Is it raining goats? Goats and dogs. I don't have a better one for that. But that was really interesting. To our topic, I guess wrapping up, we talked about things you can do. Scottie I really appreciate you going over all of that. That's something that I have to remind myself of. It's just those little factors, even down to moving away from a crowd of people that have laptops if you're in the airport, that kind of thing. It's worth keeping in mind. The day-to-day "where's your phone? Is it on? Does it need to be on?" Those are things I struggle with reminding myself of all the time so it's really important to keep thinking about it.

Scottie: Well like I say, I wish I had a magic solution for all of it. Personally I find it kind of frustrating because in all these studies that I found there's obviously what appears to me, to be some very good science being done. And then on the other hand you have these other established groups, scientists, authorities, corporations and stuff, who are fighting back against it. Real science is exploratory and keeping an open mind. It's like me with the infrared bed. Maybe that goes along with the whole biophoton idea and VGCC's and wifi. Scientists come up with a hypothesis and then conduct an experiment. You have to have a control group and all of this kind of stuff. There should be very little room in there for emotional reactions to things because that's not really science. That's people going crazy.

So I hope that more people will become aware of this stuff and if nothing else, just take these simple steps to help protect themselves and minimize impact on health while at the same time considering all the other stuff that you guys talk about and that I'm interested in; health and diet, environmental toxins, all that kind of stuff. Maybe if we each do a little part and just try to minimize and stay as healthy as possible and also share things on Facebook and get some of this information out there and let people look at it and make up their own minds. We always want someone who will 'come in and save us all' and that's not really how it's going to work. I think it's going to be more of a collective thing.

I'm heartened to see that not only are many people interested in my video and thank you guys for having me on the show, but also 10 years ago, around here anyway, there were no gluten-free products in the shop, wheat-free. Now it's almost like a meme in and of itself. There's this whole trend. "Gluten-free and dairy-free!" Ten years ago I was one of those people that everyone looked at like I had seven heads because I said "You know, I'm not really sensitive to wheat but I think I'm going to cut it out." And when I did I felt so much better and I was trying to tell everybody about it and they said "You're nuts!!"

Here we are 10 years later and everybody's doing it. So I think we should never underestimate the effect that we have and just gently share and keep researching and keep pushing forward and maybe we'll have more of an effect than we think. We can be depressed about it. {laughter}

Jonathan: Yes, I reserve the right to stay depressed. But that's great. I don't know if we could say it any better than that. So I really think that that's great advice for people. So do your work. Do your research. Check into this stuff. How can people find your YouTube channel? They just search for Scottie's Tech.

Scottie: Yeah, you can search for Scottiestech.info on YouTube or just go to scottiestech.info.com. I couldn't get a better domain than that, even back in 2008 when I bought it. It was like "Everything's taken!"

Jonathan: Cool. So be sure to check out Scottiestech.info and listen to the SOTT radio shows coming up this weekend. So go to radio.sott.net and we will be back next week. Thanks everybody for listening and taking part in the chat. We'll see you in a week.

All: Good-byes.