O:H header
On this episode of Objective: Health, Elliot Overton and Doug DiPasquale are joined by Scott Ogrin of Scottie's Tech.Info for a discussion of the health implications of 5G wireless technology.

While wireless technology is progressing at a break-neck pace, with newer, better, faster innovations seemingly appearing every year, little attention is paid in the mainstream as to the possible negative repercussions.

It seems that technological progress is treated as of ultimate importance, with almost no attention paid to the health consequences. While many scientists (backed up by over 28,000 scientific studies) are sounding the alarm on the negative health effects of wireless communication, its infrastructure and devices; they are ignored by the regulatory bodies, industry and governments who continue to push things forward - beholden to the almighty dollar.

With promises of a 5G digital utopia just around the corner, is anyone listening to these very real concerns? Are we on the verge of a health apocalypse? Is 5G really that bad? Can anything be done on an individual level to mitigate the damage?

Join us as we talk to Scott Ogrin of Scottie's Tech.Info, who has done a deep dive on the research and helps us answer some of these questions and more.


Running Time: 01:21:29

Download: MP3 - 74.2 MB


Here's the transcript of the show:

Doug: Hello and welcome to Objective: Health. I am Doug and with me today is Elliot.

Elliot: Hello.

Doug: Today we have a special guest interview. We are going to be interviewing Scott Ogrin of ScottiesTech.info which is a very popular blog and YouTube channel. He's got close to 35,000 subscribers. We've had Scottie on the show before when we were just doing an audio show, talking about 5G, because he runs this techie blog and one of the things that kind of grinds his gears is the whole EMF/5G type thing and he's done a lot of research on it. So he's a very good resource. Everybody should go over to ScottiesTech.info and subscribe to that.

But we'll have plenty of time to talk about that. Let's bring Scottie on. Welcome Scottie.

Scottie: Hi there. Thanks for having me.

Doug: Yeah, thanks for being here. You just did a video recently that was kind of an update to another one you did almost a year ago at this point. The first one was called 5G Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg and the most recent one is called 5G is Hitting Roadblocks?

Scottie: 5G Rollout Runs Into Roadblocks.

Doug: Right. In those two video - because I just watched them back-to-back recently - you give a lot of really great information about 5G. I really like it because you get really into the studies that are actually out there. So it's not just hearsay. It's not just the rumours and things that are going on. It's like, "No, here are the studies. This is what's actually going on with it." So maybe to start off you can tell us, how did you get into looking into this kind of stuff?

Scottie: Oh boy, that's a long story. {laughter} Well, I think it probably started, obviously I went to school to become an engineer, electrical and computer engineering, and I stayed for my master's degree and when I was in grad school I did my masters project/thesis on CDMA (code-division multiple access) which is what they used to call Sprint PCS. It's a particular type of cell phone system that's used mostly in the US and a few other countries. When I was doing that, I didn't really think much of it.

Then it was probably a year or two later I came across my first study. I majored in this stuff basically and I always kind of wondered because I had read studies about lower frequencies and stuff but nothing about cell phone signals and I was one of those people who said, "Well the FCC has rules and regulations" - basically what we were taught - "the FCC has regulations for things like power levels so we're all perfectly safe as long as everyone follows the FCC rules", right?

Doug: Right.

Scottie: And then I came across my first study and started reading a little. I kind of understand where people are coming from when they say, even people on my videos come and post and say, "No, you're a moron because power levels are the only thing that matters and the FCC makes sure it's safe levels." I was there at one point so I did the same eye-rolling that everyone else does.

So I just came across, I don't even remember where, it might have been a forum somewhere or something and I read my first one and from that point on I just kept trying to dig up more and more information. I knew there were thousands but I didn't know how many thousands and in the 5GSpaceAppeal.org petition that I talk about in y most recent video, they mention that there are over 10,000 studies. I actually found a German resource. It's some kind of university teaching hospital where they actually have over 28,000 studies and it's not just for 5G and wifi, it's covering everything.

It goes back to the 1970s and even earlier where they were studying AM radio, FM radio, extremely low frequencies, even things like 50 and 60 Hertz capacitive coupling from power lines. People seem to have - some people anyway - seem to have harsh reactions to just this - I was going to call them evil rays {laughter}.

Doug: Technical term.

Scottie: The emissions from just electrical wiring running in your walls. And there are actually studies about that stuff too and all of these studies point in a general direction. So since the 1970s studies have been done and every time they say "Jeez, this doesn't look so good, that doesn't look so good" and then the frequencies get higher and higher, the modulation schemes change over time but people more and more keep doing more of these studies. And of course you have to ask yourself, "How could 28,000 studies have been done if there was nothing to it?" Because if you've ever worked in an engineering or a scientific field before as I have, you know that you don't really get funding for things unless there's a very good reason.

I was watching I think it was a video the other day with Joe Rogan interviewing some archaeologist guy. I forget his name. He's like a fringe archaeologist but many of the things he was talking about 10 or 20 years ago have now been shown to be true. He was talking about how in archaeology you have to say, "With the pyramids, here's the official story. You can't deviate." That kind of thing. It's pretty much the same in many fields, in physics, in chemistry and medicine even.

Actually just earlier today I got an email via my website from a guy who said that he has a study that the US navy did in 1970-something showing that even way back then, I think it was wildlife and people living around military bases where they were cataloguing and recording these effects and they weren't all good. I haven't actually taken a look at that yet.

So the more you look, the more you find and then people start sending me stuff and then there's even more to look at. Two things. First of all, none of it is terribly conclusive because it's very difficult. Out of these 28,000 studies you might have one study that's saying older - say 900 MHz cordless phones that were analogue had such and such an effect on a bacterial culture. And then you have another study that says that 2.4 GHz Bluetooth or cordless landline phones or whatever has a negative effect on, instead of a bacterial culture, it'll be some sort of reproductive cells in chickens or it causes early ovulation or just these crazy things.

Obviously I haven't read all 28,000 studies because that's a lot of reading, but the more I read the more you have all these arrows pointing in the same direction and basically the direction that this stuff is probably not good for us and nevertheless we have the new era of 5G which may not be coming now because of the pooh-poohing of Huawei and their 5G systems. Apparently there was a protest day in the US just Wednesday, May 15th and I had some people writing to me over the past couple of days saying, "Yeah, we had the protest in our city and there were a lot of people that showed up and people are fired up about it and they don't want it". Someone else told me there was a town in Switzerland - I don't remember the name of it - he said that they also successfully lobbied for putting the kibosh on the 5G deployment.

Elliot: Just to clarify before we go further there Scottie, that website, the compilation of the 28,000 plus studies on EMF and its effect on living systems, is that EMF Portal?

Scottie: Yes.

Elliot: Yeah.

Scottie: Or EMFportal.org.

Elliot: Yeah. That's a cool website. I definitely recommend the listeners to check that one out. It's got a search function as well so if you want to know whether it's having an effect at a particular frequency or on a particular kind of living organism or something, like there's loads on bacteria, you can just type it into the search bar. It comes up with all the results so it's a really good resource, that one is.

Scottie: Yeah and you can go to EMFportal.org and you can just search for something or they have a few more recent studies listed at the top and you can just start reading. If you're interested in this stuff you'll start reading and you'll be busy for probably years {laugher} because that's a lot of stuff.

Doug: That's one of the things that is really amazing about this, is that there is so much information out there and so many studies that have been done and yet the mainstream perspective on this is that anybody who says it's harmful is a tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist or health nut. It's so amazing that there is so much information out there yet the common feeling on it is that's completely harmless. The same thing is happening with wifi. "Let's put it in all the classrooms" and then there's some push back from some people but those people are crazy. "Oh, that's not affecting your children. What are you talking about? You're insane."

So that's one of the things that really kind of blows me away about it. Still to this day if I put something on my Facebook about the dangers of 5G or wifi or something like that, I've got a number of people coming on there saying, "You're crazy. They've proven that there's no effect from it."

Elliot: I've even had that on so-called alternative health groups and stuff where you think that people who ascribe to certain alternative concepts and acknowledge that not is all that it seems, so to speak, but then when you broach the subject of EMF or wifi, they just shut down and all of a sudden you're a lunatic. It's really like a trigger point now I think.

Scottie: Yeah. That's actually why I mentioned just a little while ago in my introduction so-to-speak, about how I was originally on the bandwagon. Back then it's not so much that I didn't care. I think for most people you just trust authority. If the FCC has these regulations, they're the FCC. Of course they've done the research. They know what they're talking about. Obviously. Of course, right? And then you don't really think about lobbying by the industry. You don't really think about the fact that yes, it's according to 4G versus 5G. For 5G the power levels - according to the FCC rules - are allowed to be up to 19 times higher.

So you can say, "Oh, but 5G's okay because it's sticking to the FCC's rules" but then you have to go, "Well hang on a minute here. They're allowing power levels 19 times higher?!" That's like totally crazy. I try not to be sort of hostile because I was one of these people saying, "Ah, crazy people. Tinfoil hats!" I used to be one of them so I kind of understand where they're coming from most of the time. But it is rather difficult to get beyond that because we have this thing in our society where anything you hear that you don't like, we're very quick to say, "Oh that person's crazy" or "Oh you're a conspiracy theorist." We don't go and actually read the studies that they read and we don't actually do the research that they might have done. We just kind of write them off. I think that's actually one of the problems.

At the same time you can't really expect everyone to read these studies. In the first 5G video, 5G is the Tip of the Iceberg, I made that video and I came across this concept of VGCCs, the voltage gated calcium channels and it was actually on Elliot's channel EO Nutrition where he did an excellent video on VGCCs and it was like, "Oh!" Of course he goes off into all of the super technical stuff and then says, "Well basically what that means is...blah. The dog is brown." {laughter} It was very, very simple and easy to understand and I was like, "Yeah!"

So it's very, very technical and I think that's why I keep making videos on it because I know enough about the stuff that I can say something intelligent. I can read the studies and understand them. At the same time I'm not like a doctor or something. I'm not a biochemist. I'm not everything. I just feel like I should say something about it. I do actually have a few very good friends who are electro-sensitive. As far as I can tell, I'm not really. I don't really notice any horrible effects. I know people where if you turn the wifi on in the house, they get a headache almost instantly. It's also very difficult because yes, there's this electromagnetic pollution, but there are also many other factors. If you're eating at McDonald's every day most likely that's going to have a negative impact on your health, probably more so than the EMFs. {laughter}

It's difficult though sometimes because you want to share this stuff and you just kind of want to try and help people, try and explain things and as I said in my most recent video, I love technology. I don't want to get rid of it all and I firmly believe that it is possible to come up with a better scheme. First, we need a very thorough, independent, international, properly done extended study without any crazy influences from industry, without any pressure, without all that kind of stuff. That would actually, I think, allow us to discover exactly what it is about, especially these pulsed digital-type signals, that is causing the problem because we talk about pulsed signals. I talked about that more in my first 5G video, the Iceberg one and it appears that the pulsed nature of these digital signals is the problem. But what you kind of have to understand is that a pulse is kind of like this (fingers meet perpendicularly). But if you zoom in on the pulse realistically it's kind of doing something more like this (fingers meet in a curve), kind of more curved and you might have little jaggedly bits on there.

So how do we know that it's not the little jaggedly bits that are causing the problem? Or maybe the pulse nature has something to do with the particular modulation scheme that's being used. And of course with every flavour of wifi that comes out, they're changing the modulation little by little, sometimes drastically. So you can't even say wifi is good for you or wifi is bad for you because is it just the frequency? Is it the modulation scheme being used? What about if I transmit a pure sine wave instead of a pulsed signal, does that make a difference? All the studies show that it doesn't really seem to matter and that in fact all these various systems that we have, if they're transmitting at power levels that are upwards of a billion times weaker than what the FCC says is safe, they still have an effect.

But what you're talking about there is power levels that are so infinitesimally small it's actually absurd. So it's also kind of easy to understand if someone looked at that study and go "That's the craziest thing I've ever heard" and yet there it is. There's the study and they did it and in one of the ones they did I think it was reproduced again in Japan and then another US university did the study as well and they all came to the same conclusion. Even super, super tiny little power levels, you still have these negative health effects.

That's obviously kind of a problem because when you transmit a radio signal you have to have a certain power level otherwise the signal doesn't get anywhere. So of course then people might freak out because they're like, "No, I love my Wi-Fi. Don't take it from me."

Elliot: So in basic terms, what is the difference between what we've currently got, 3G, 4G, that kind of stuff, what's the difference between that and 5G? Is it just one step up or is it significantly different in many different ways, this new system that they're proposing? What's the difference?

Scottie: Oh boy! You've opened a can of worms. {laughter} The first thing to remember is that it's - oh boy! To start off with, it is a different modulation scheme, yes. The antennas are different. Whereas instead of having normal cell towers for 3G and 4G you kind of have these vertical antennas and they're targeted towards individual sectors of space around the tower. In 5G it's going to be kind of similar except they have these phased array antennas where it's basically a grid of little tiny antennas so you can have steerable beams. That's because eventually the signals that they're going to be using for 5G are going to get upwards of 60 GHz and higher which about 30 times higher than what they use now.

Those signals are easily blocked by things like the leaves on a tree. There's one demo video on YouTube where a guy has got a little antenna inside a little closet or something and there's a transmitter outside and he just slides a door closed, just a thin little crappy door and it blocks the signal because at those very high frequencies, the millimeter wave frequencies, the waves don't propagate the same way as they do at 1.7 or 1.8 GHz or something.

So then apparently what they want to do is have these highly directional beams and they want to do that because you're going to have your tower up here and your little dude with the smartphone down here and they want to be able to shoot the beam directly and that's partly because of the difference in frequency and partly because they want to, instead of having a bunch of overlapping waves, they want to have highly targeted waves. So it's almost like having a wireless point-to-point connection and then of course you can get things like improved reception and higher band width, that sort of thing.

Apparently they can also use steerable beams to bounce signals off of certain objects in order to maintain connectivity. But that will be true it seems, mostly in large cities. If you're in a rural area, the farther you get away from a big city, the less practical 5G becomes. Because the signals don't travel in quite the same way, they're talking about installing 200 times more antennas everywhere. You're going to have these little antennas on every street light going down the street you live on and things like that.

So instead of having one or two big towers in your area, there are going to be 200 of them. Maybe there'll be a big tower here and a bunch of smaller ones everywhere so that everyone can have connectivity because of course we all are supposed to love this idea of the internet of things where once we have the 5G we can have everything connected to the internet including not just your phone or your tablet or computer, but your car and your washing machine and lawn mower and the grass in your front yard will be 5G internet enabled {laughter} and everything's 5G enabled. Never mind that no one actually really wants this and we're all sitting here going, "Are you going to buy all this crap? Because I'm not going to buy all this stuff." {laughter}

So that's probably kind of the short version and the studies that were done on these millimeter waves are particularly disturbing because, as I talk about in my first video, there were various studies and you can hop on YouTube and search for Dr. Martin L. Pall. He's kind of like "the man" and there are a couple of interviews with him and presentations he has given that are quite good. But it seems that he and others have done studies showing that the 5G so-called millimeter wave frequencies up in 60 GHz or something, that would be especially bad because the helical sweat ducts in our skin act as antennae.

Then there's this whole debate about "Yeah, but it only penetrates in your skin a certain distance" but no one is actually thinking about, "Well hang on a minute. If it penetrates into your skin and you've got a helical sweat duct in your skin acting as an antenna, where does that energy go?" So then some are saying it's actually kind of conducted into the deeper tissues of your body and if that's the case then we're in even bigger trouble.

So that's pretty much it. The frequency obviously is new and different and apparently slightly more horrifying than the old one, but that's actually why I entitled my first video "5G is Just the Tip of the Iceberg" because I also talk about 2G, 3G, 4G and even just simple Wi-Fi which has changed over time. I think Wi-Fi first went on sale commercially in 2001 or so. So you think about it and you go, "Well okay, when was Wi-Fi everywhere?" Well let's say 2008/2009. That's when, if you had an internet connection your box had Wi-Fi on it. They started putting Wi-Fi in schools and all that kind of stuff.

So it's very young children right who are literally saturated in the stuff since birth. And then you have the epidemic of smartphones and tablets and where children don't even go outside and play with toys anymore or play in the dirt. They've got an iPhone in their hand when they're two years old. So they're exposed to this stuff non-stop and what effect is that going to have? There are studies that show that it increases rates of autism and ADHD in children especially. Then of course you have this idea that vaccines may also cause autism.

So none of this is really happening in a vacuum. We actually need more thorough studies because we need to narrow it down and in some cases it could be a combination of factors. As far as I knew, nobody ever thought about that or mentioned it. "Well, if I'm getting all these vaccinations maybe the vaccines are not the problem. Maybe the vaccines combined with the fact that I'm saturated in Wi-Fi is. And then how the heck do you study that because it's not easy.

Yeah. So it's kind of complicated but hopefully we'll get there someday soon.

Elliot: Just to ask a question about that Scottie actually, because I find that concept really interesting. You're referring to the metal kind of adjuvants that they add like aluminum or there's mercury in some of them, the really small particles of metal. I always try to think of it and it probably doesn't work like this, but this is the way I conceptualize it. If you take a metal fork and you put it in a microwave and then it sparks, yeah?

Scottie: Yeah.

Elliot: That's like the radiation interacting with the metal, on a really, really low level, is that what's happening? We are exposing ourselves to this radiation. Say you get a bit of aluminum in the brain or something from a vaccine and it's almost like interacting with the radiation in some way. Do you think that's possible?

Scottie: I have absolutely no idea. {laughter} But to me, that's the question and it's a good question because typically what we do is say, "Well I don't like this whole 5G thing. I'm against our whole wireless wonderland so I'm going to protest against that and try and push back against it." Okay, let's say we succeed. Well then what about everything else? What about the fact that the traditional western diet is horrible? I think it was the American Medical Association came out not too long ago and said, "Oh, by the way, all that stuff about how saturated fat is bad for you and butter, yeah, we got that wrong." It's like well, how many synergistic effects are there? Is it purely the wireless stuff or is it actually wireless plus vaccines plus diet?

Where I grew up near Chicago quite a few years ago I stumbled upon an EPA study that claimed that in the time when I was still fairly young, the levels of mercury in rainwater were over twice as high as the recommended safe level. I went, "Well Jesus!" And of course forever we've had mercury in mercury fillings. Fortunately I never did. But there are all these different factors and we tend to focus on one at the exclusion of all the others. But part of the problem is how to you begin to even study something like that because I would think if you have some sort of - aluminum for example is a conductive metal - if you have some small particles of it and you're injecting it into your body, what does that mean? Like Elliot mentioned, if it's in your brain and then these signals are going in, is that doing anything?

That's actually a very difficult question to answer as far as I know. If you design a circuit board or a gizmo at a company, you do EMI testing and you want to know whether that gizmo is immune to incoming interference and is it actually not generating all sorts of interference with other devices around it. Usually you have the EMI guy or guys and they're the ones who are responsible for this and testing and modeling that sort of thing is insanely complicated.

Now imagine trying to model a biological three dimensional like your noggin, right? How on earth are you going to model that? I'm sure there are ways to do it but it would require a lot of smarts and time and money. But in the end I think some people campaign for this, some for that. My thing is sort of like, "Well do we really want to be bathed in all these evil rays?" As you read the studies you realize that there are actually crossover problems where it does actually get into the biochemistry of the body or certain medications might be referenced or certain structures in the body that might be affected by this medication and as you're reading you can kind of stop and go, "Oooh, that's interesting. ADHD, everyone's being prescribed these drugs for all these kids. Why are there so many kids with ADHD? Is it because they're being over-diagnosed? Is it because they're just regular kids and we are obsessed with diagnosing and drugging everyone? Or is their actually something related to the wireless thing or is it related to something in vaccines?" It's very difficult to say one way or the other.

Doug: It's kind of a tangled mess and unfortunately it seems like the push behind increasing all these different wireless technologies with 5G being the latest, the push is just beyond "Let's do this. Let's get it done. New technology is good so move it forward." There's nobody other than people who are on the fringes and the scientists who are actually sounding the alarm. In the mainstream it seems like nobody is really saying anything about this. They aren't saying anything. One of the things that blows me away is the momentum behind this push.

They're talking about millions of 5G base stations, 20,000 satellites and what is it? Two hundred billion different gizmos that they're expecting to have actually hooked up to this 5G internet of things. The momentum is just so strong and the push is so strong. Then you've got a few scientists going "Wait! Hold on a second! We're not ready. We need to do more studies." And they're like, "No! Forget it! We're already there. Let's just go. Go, go, go." (laughter) That's one of the things I find really disturbing about it. It's like you can't stop this tidal wave of "progress". I don't know.

Scottie: Well to me, that's kind of the other interesting part. I published my most recent video the 5G Rollout Runs Into Roadblocks and literally I recorded it and then I posted it two or three days later and in the interim there was another city or something that said, "No we don't want it." And then it was I think a day or two after I posted the video then Trump came out and said, "We're going to prevent US companies from doing business with Huawei." That's actually kind of interesting because I think a lot of this is driven by making money because when you look at the tech industry as a whole, smartphones were the thing and everyone is buying a smartphone. Well, smartphone sales are not exactly flying off the shelves because everyone has a smartphone. It does everything they need it to do. You don't need to go out and buy the latest and greatest one.

So at the same time we have all these privacy concerns where Mark Zuckerberg is meeting with the President of France and "Oh let's talk about privacy" and everyone is hostile to Facebook because of the privacy leaks and all the shenanigans going on. So it's almost like the companies are saying, "Well we need to get 5G. We need to have this internet of things so we can sell people lots of crap."

Doug: Yeah.

Scottie: The FCC says, "Ah don't worry. We won't regulate you too much. If you have power levels 19 times higher, whatever, just get out there and sell it." So they're trying to rush ahead with this while all the different companies are developing their systems. Then suddenly you have China which not very many years ago was a very large, very poor population and suddenly they've become or are becoming an economic powerhouse and also a technological powerhouse where suddenly the best smartphones by the money are made by Huawei and they're cheaper. I don't have one, I've never tested one or anything but everyone I know who has one goes "Oh my god! This is the greatest thing ever and it costs me so much less money."

So suddenly you have China selling us stuff instead of just manufacturing things and copying as they did in the past, they are actually innovating and they're innovating at such a rapid pace that their 5G systems are apparently better and half the price of all the companies in the west. So naturally the companies in the west are not happy because they want their systems to be running the whole 5G network. So then you have all this political/economic nonsense in the background and it's like they're all running as fast as they can but it's really actually based on nothing except money because like I said in my latest video, who actually wants this stuff? Who really needs it?

Doug: Yeah.

Scottie: Do you really need a 1 Gigabit connection on your smartphone? Even on the existing 4G systems in some areas you can have that. It's very strange. I'm not surprised at the pooh-poohing of Huawei because just purely economically - forget about politics and types of government and all that stuff - just purely economically, if American telecom companies can't sell their equipment to the whole rest of the world, that's a giant disaster, purely economically speaking. And if China steps in and replaces all of them for these 200 times more antennas everywhere and all that kind of stuff, they win and the rest of us lose, from a purely economic point of view.

So is that why they're running so fast? Probably a large part of it. Other people have suggested that there are more nefarious uses for a 5G network and I have to say that it doesn't take much imagination to think about what might be done with a ginormous network of literally millions and millions and millions of highly directional 60 GHz radio beams. You could imagine some pretty interesting scenarios and that's apart from the fact that if you have this internet of things and everything's connected to the internet.

Right now people are posting on social media going, "Oh my god! My phone was asleep, the screen was off but it was just sitting on the table at the restaurant and my friends and I were talking about llamas and I get home and I hop on the internet and suddenly I'm being offered llama socks, a llama saddle," you know, whatever. Obviously that sort of harvesting of data for economic and other reasons would be a really big plus for some people. So I'm guessing that's probably the other reason. So it's like having massive quantities of data for various purposes plus having massive quantities of money and you put the two of those together and no one cares about health and they don't even check.

Elliot: Just one question. The 60 GHz radio beams, I just have in my mind beaming that at a crowd of people. I don't know, say if you had some kind of protest or something, do you know if that kind of frequency or power level or whatever, is that enough to cause noticeable physiological changes in anyone? Have there been any research because I'm sure I remember a professor of mine talking about causing burns on the skin, that you could actually cause burns on the skin and cause arrhythmia and itching and stuff? I wasn't sure about the frequencies or the power. Do you think that that would be enough to have noticeable effects on people or is it just way too low?

Scottie: Well, that's actually a good question because I'm pretty sure I read the same thing that Dr. Martin L. Pall was talking about and I thought it was actually kind of curious because from a purely power level point of view, I don't really know actually, but just from the FCC rules, thinking about maximum transmitted power and that kind of thing, the power levels should not really be high enough even if multiple beams were targeted, say your arm or something. As far as I know, that should not be high enough to burn.

Then you have the problem that all these other studies are showing, that even a lower power levels, it is actually having physical effects. Some people say 60 GHz is the same as this crazy crowd control weapon that the US military has. The power levels of those things are way, way higher. But if you do actually get biological effects at low power levels, then you might not be able to burn your arm or something but if it's causing all sorts of other negative things well then it's still probably not good. I've read similar things where people post on my videos and say, "They're going to use it for this, that and the other thing." It's difficult to say. {chuckles} It's kind of funny actually because my knee jerk response to it is "nah, but the power levels aren't nearly high enough to do that". And then I have to go, "Oh right! That's what I said before when I didn't know as much as I do now so..."

Elliot: {laughter}

Scottie: I've read all the studies and it showed that even low power levels cause - so then I have to ask myself the question, "Well jeez, could they actually do that? Is there some mechanism that I don't know about? Obviously there are a lot of things that I don't know about because the more studies I read the more surprised I am. So I can't say for sure one way or the other but I would - I don't know, maybe I can find the particular study or see if I can find more information about it. And in the end, even if it doesn't actually cause burns or something, we tend to be worried about things like that. It's like, "Oh my god, they're going to use them as death rays from War of the Worlds!" {makes death ray noise} {laughter} They're going to cook all of us, you know.

The problems that it does cause, even at very low power levels for even lower wifi and Bluetooth frequencies and 2G and all that, the problems that they're talking about are glioma. Ten or twenty years of exposure and your risk having tumours in your brain or spine are increased, sometimes hugely. That's actually just as scary as being vaporized by a War of the Worlds death beam. And it's not just cancer, it's all kinds of crazy stuff like decreased sperm motility. There are all sorts of things.

So I think sometimes we tend to focus maybe a little too much on the more Hollywood aspects of how these things could be used, maybe, but when we do that we ignore some of the other things like getting brain cancer and stuff like that.

Doug: Yeah, yeah. The slower things. But isn't this all just a small price to pay to have a toaster that can talk to the internet? {laughter} I thought you brought up an interesting point earlier when you were talking about that, when you asked "Who actually wants this?" Because it just seems like all the stuff that I see, the little news pieces and stuff like that where they're talking about "5G! Blah-blah-blah." All they're really talking about is faster, faster internet and stuff like that. They'll mention the internet of things and stuff but they never really seem to say why that's actually good. At least from what I've seen. I don't know. They'll say weird things like, "Oh yeah, your refrigerator will know when you're out of milk and it will place an order for you" or something like that. And it's like, does anybody actually want that? Does anybody actually want to not have to go buy milk anymore? Is that really something that the public is demanding? I don't know.

Scottie: Actually it's even worse than that. Does anybody actually not want to have to go out and buy milk? Well you don't even have to go out and buy milk. You can go, "Ah jeez, we're out of milk!" And then what do people do? Well you whip out your smartphone or you get on your computer and you go tappy-tappy-tap. You can get everything delivered by the internet these days. You never even have to set foot out of your house anymore.

Doug: But you won't have to think about it anymore.

Scottie: But it's gotten to the point where it's literally absurd. I'm not really complaining because it's awfully convenient. {laughter} I needed a new starter motor for a lawn tractor, a riding mower and years ago I had to buy one and so I was like, "Oh god, what was the name of that place, the website? I think I probably got the password saved in my encrypted password safe" and I'm looking for it. Then I go, "You know, I wonder if you could buy a starter motor for a Kubota tractor on Amazon these days?" So what do I do? I hop on Amazon and I type Kubota, model number, starter and poof! There it is at a lower price.

And of course I sort of cringe every time I do that. At the same time that's another one of those economic things. Why do you keep buying stuff from Amazon? Well because it's very convenient. You're never hassled that "Oh, we rejected your card from your bank because you have the verify the payment" because they have special agreements with all the credit card companies and processors so that everything just goes right through. And furthermore, everything is cheaper.

I used to buy computer hardware from not necessarily local French stores, but from online French retailers in Paris or something. They're all out of business, or most of them, because Amazon started selling everything and it's way less money when you get it from Amazon. So what are you going to do? Especially in a time of economic hardship, you're going to go for the cheaper option. You get it faster. It's super easy to exchange things. It's easy to return things. Everything's super easy. But of course our desire for this convenience has created this giant Amazon empire that we then say is evil.

Well okay. Everybody stop buying stuff from them. Well no, that's not going to happen. {laughter}

Doug: No.

Scottie: And of course with the internet of things, they're talking about over a trillion devices and they're all internet connected. Nobody actually wants it! Part of what I think they're going to do or what they want to do, is first of all they want the 5G network so they can have all this crap and they know that not everyone is going to go out and buy 5G connected microwave and toaster and 5G connected underwear and all that kind of stuff.

So what I think they might be planning on doing is first they get us to fork over more money to pay for that 200 times more antennas and everything to get the whole system set up and then they do what Amazon did with their Alexa microwave. If you need a new microwave oven, you might pay $80 or $100 for a low level one at least in the recent past. Well they're going to sell their for $60. Well how are they going to sell it for 60 bucks? Well they're selling it for 60 bucks because it's all integrated with your Alexa and of course they're hoovering up all kinds of data about everything you like and dislike and blah, blah, blah and that's valuable marketing data so they can sell you more stuff. So during the life of the microwave they can afford to sell it at a loss because they're hoovering up all this data which they can use to sell you more crap.

So for some of these things, like the internet of things, I'm guessing they're just going to almost give them away for free because this is actually the Chinese model because when China's tech revolution happened in the past 10 years and everyone started to get a smartphone, one of the things they realized was you had all these start-up companies and they're like, "Okay, we want to have bikes that you can take them from point A in this city, leave it in point B and we want to do this and we want people to use these things. How are we going to do it? Well we're going to have to spend a whole lot of money because if we charge people for it at first, nobody's going to use it."

So they let people use it for free and they invest it and the company's run at a loss and then once it was popularized they would tack on some other thing. "Oh well if you rent one of our bikes and you're using our app to unlock the bike via Bluetooth or something, then they would pair up with somebody else and they would sell advertising data or sell whatever data they gathered and then they were actually able to monetize it. So maybe that's another part of the plan. I don't know, maybe not. But it seems like given Amazon's microwave - the one I saw was either $40 or $60 and I went, "Jeez, that's pretty cheap for what looks like a fairly nice microwave".

But in order to have that, someone's going to pay for 5G and considering the astronomical cost for it, especially now that you can't use Huawei stuff at half the price, you have to use stuff from western companies and there's going to be 200 times more antennas, who's going to pay for that? Well I guess you and I are because we're expected to pay instead of $20 or $30 a month, you're expected to pay $100 a month for your cell phone service?

So it'll be interesting to see how it all progresses, especially now with all the blowback against especially the rollout of 5G.

Doug: Yeah. Well one of the more disturbing aspects of it - I guess I've said that a number of times because there's a lot of disturbing aspects to it - but one of the things, just getting back to the health effects of it, is hearing about how it's not just humans that are going to be affected by it. There are a lot of scientists who are sounding the alarms about things in the natural world that these 5G millimeter waves actually affect like insects, like plants, birds, mammals. I don't imagine there's a living thing that won't be affected by this in some way. So that was one of the things that I found quite disturbing because we might end up in a situation where Amazon can deliver anything that we want but we don't have any food left because all the pollinators have been destroyed and now you can't grow any food.

Scottie: Well yeah, but that's okay because you can get Amazon to deliver more food to you. {laughter}

Doug: Oh yeah. I forgot about that.

Scottie: Wait! Where do they get the food from if no one can grow any food? Well, we haven't thought that far yet!

Doug: Yeah. Don't worry about it. The internet of things will just let them know that we don't have any food and then it'll just show up. {laughter}

Elliot: You can 3D print some food.

Doug: Ah, there you go!

Scottie: Yeah, there you go. With your Amazon 3D food printer.

Elliot: Yeah. Haven't there actually been experiments throughout various cities, trial runs for the 5G? And you have large swathes of birds and other animals kind of just dropping dead out of nowhere? With the 5G rollout? Wasn't there a place in the United States not long ago or was it somewhere in the UK where they tried it out for a couple of days and then a thousand pigeons died or something?

Scottie: I don't actually know. I was trying to find something conclusive either way because there were several stories like that that came out and I started looking into it. It seemed like 50/50 as to whether or not it actually happened. It wouldn't surprise me because there are actually studies talking about the effects on insects and they say that especially at millimeter waves like 60 GHz or so, at those frequencies insects will apparently be 100 times more affected. You may think, "Well great! I don't like bugs man! This is going to be awesome! The internet of things and no bug!" But the insect population on planet earth, if that's what you think, you have to watch David Attenborough's BBC Nature documentaries. Because insects do all kinds of stuff. It's called David Attenborough In Life In the Undergrowth, a BBC Nature documentary and it's totally fascinating, all about insects. Even if you don't like insects you can watch it because it's really cool. Even the spider episode is not creepy at all.

It reminded me of just a few years ago, they had this colony collapse disorder for bees. Honey bees were dropping dead. Entire colonies were collapsing and of course everyone was trying to figure out why and obviously that wasn't 5G because we didn't have 5G then. But we did have 2G and 3G and 4G and we started to have a preponderance of wifi literally everywhere. The amount of this stuff has just skyrocketed. Even if it's true that even little teeny tiny power levels have an effect, there are also studies that show that yeah, it is a cumulative effect kind of thing. So to me what that means is if you just have wifi on for an hour a day, that's a very low exposure level. If you have wifi and you live in an apartment complex and all of your neighbours have their wifi blasting 24 hours a day and you always keep your smartphone on 24 hours a day and at work it's this constant exposure, then even if tiny power levels have an effect, that is a greatly increased amount of exposure.

But then the question is, if other studies have been done that, for example, brain cancer risk has gone up, does that mean that in the near future we're going to see a rash of brain cancer? Like a steep climb? The interesting thing is, before I made my most recent video, I had an opportunity to go to my bank and I'm sitting there and I'm talking about my YouTube channel and my website and she says, "Oh, what do you talk about?" I said, "Well all kinds of techie things, kind of like a technical education type channel to try to sometimes help people figure things out, sometimes explain things." And I mentioned that I did a couple of videos on how wireless stuff is bad and she said, "Oh yeah, that's interesting. And it's also interesting because I've noticed that there are so many children getting really, really sick, like with cancer and stuff recently."

It was totally unprompted. I just gave a generic presentation like, "Yeah, I made these videos and maybe the new things like 5G, maybe it's not so good for us". So I wasn't even really priming her to say, "Oh yeah, and wifi is evil and blah, blah, blah." She just offered it spontaneously and said, "Yeah, why are all these kids getting so sick recently?" And then the following day someone on a different side of town, with a completely different person the same thing happened where someone else said, "Well jeez! Why are we having all these health problems all of a sudden? It's especially affecting kids."

Now it's anecdotal evidence and of course, like I said earlier, the EMF is not the only factor. There's all kinds of stuff and many questions about which ones of these things, when you guys on your show have talked about a lot of this stuff, There's all kinds of stuff. There's heavy metals and glyphosate in everything and there's all kinds of cancer causing stuff and there's genetically modified foods and there's horrible diets and all kinds of things so it's very difficult to say for sure. But one thing we can say for sure is that it does really seem like there's a sort of general trend, especially in children's health, a general downwards trend and people are noticing. So far this year that's actually been the most curious thing. This is something that I might have brought up as a topic of conversation in the past and now other people are bringing it up with me and I'm going, "Yeah, that is really concerning. Did you hear about this?" Yeah.

Doug: Well we're coming up to the end of our time. Elliot, did you have any other questions for Scottie?

Elliot: In your videos, you touched on it briefly, but what do you think the chances are that we will go fully ahead as planned? You said that there's a couple of issues here and there, the logistics of basically setting up this project is going to be expensive. It's going to be really technically difficult. It's going to take a lot of manpower. Do you think it's possible or do you think that - I guess there's a couple of questions in one actually. Do you think it's going to go as planned? Two, do you think that there's any likelihood that people gathering together - because there's loads of petitions, there's loads of scientists coming out - do you think it's likely that there's going to be enough counter manpower or strong enough counter argument to prevent that?

Scottie: Well, I hope there's going to be enough push back against it. It seems that it's actually ramping up recently. Now how much blowback will there be? Well that remains to be seen. It does appear to be increasing. You could say, "Well, when Senator Blumenthal has a hearing and he's grilling these industry executives, was that related to the whole political China Huawei thing?" And of course it's a very good question because would he actually care? Is he doing that because normal Americans are actually concerned and they've conveyed their concerns to him and he's a good guy and so that's why he's doing that, or is he doing that because these particular industry executives and perhaps other companies were saying, "No, we're going to use Huawei stuff" and he had his political reasons why he didn't want that to happen.

In either case he brought up the fact that the FCC hasn't done any safety studies. The industry hasn't done any safety studies and what about our health? So it's like, regardless of his motivations for doing it, he actually kind of did us a favour as far as I'm concerned by even bringing up the health aspect.

So how much push back there is against it, that remains to be seen. I hope it keeps going and accelerates and that we actually do get to take a more serious, in-depth look at this stuff. I think that either way, it's probably not going to go as planned because already there are too many wild cards in there. The companies are going to want to save money and they've got to deploy 200 times as many antennas and it's costing it a lot of money, if they spend too much money it costs too much. If it costs to much, they have to pass the cost on to their consumers and many people are actually hurting economically these days. We're not all dancing around and swimming in piles of money. So there's that problem.

Then there's the pushback on the health front where people are saying, "Okay come on. This is enough. We don't really want this. Why are you doing this?" I think that basically at the end of the day, you had a bunch of people who got together and said, "Yeah, 5G! Internet of things! This is going to be totally awesome!" And in the end it's going to be the same thing as when smartphones came out there was this big push and suddenly everyone was saying, "Yeah, desktop and laptop computers are going to totally die. We're not going to have them anymore. Everything is mobile. Mobile first. Mobile, mobile, mobile, mobile." And of course here we are all these years later and what kind of a computing device do you use to do real work still? A desktop or a laptop computer.

Doug: Yeah.

Scottie: So I think there's a lot of tech evangelism where they get these people who go out and they talk it up and you can read things like Wired magazine where they're basically almost foaming at the mouth talking about how wonderful and magical everything's going to be. That's usually driven by profits and that sort of thing and all that kind of thing. I know that 5G has already rolled out in many places. Their vision of - "they", the industry's whatever - vision of what the future is going to look like, their visions is basically 200 times as many antennas, we're all going to have 5G, everything's going to be connected to the internet of things and it's going to be a glorious wonderland.

That future does not seem very likely to me. I think there will be kind of twists and turns going forward. But at the same time I think the more people who step up and say, "Yeah, I'm also concerned about this health thing. This is crazy" - because the general sentiment of a lot of people posted comments on my videos and stuff is "This has gone too far at this point. It's not just the 5G that's coming. It's everything and when does it ever stop?"

And of course people in general are a little bit upset with the leaders of their country. Here in France you have the gilet jaune protests and there's a lot of upset, we'll call it, where it's just another part of that where 'you've got to do things for the people and it's got to be healthy for us' and that sort of thing. I think they think it's going to go very well. I don't think it's going to go exactly the way they planned but I hope that there's enough push back and that more people share about this stuff and talk about it because the more that we all do, the more likely there will be actually not just push back but also possibly a real study or set of studies, something that is thorough and could actually discover something conclusive and very useful because I don't think that there's any reason why if there's something that's unhealthy about it and we understand what it is, then, then make something different.

We can do all kinds of crazy stuff. We can do micro surgery. We can land probes and people on the moon. We can do all this crazy stuff and yet we're killing ourselves with things like wifi and 4G and 5G potentially. I guess my final answer {laughter} is I am curious to see what will happen next because I don't think it's going to go the way they planned but how will it actually play out? I don't know. I make videos on a variety of topics and I'll make another video on 5G and this other stuff, when I discover something new, when the next thing comes along and shocks me and I have something interesting to say about it.

So I just try to kind of do my part and everyone else is also making videos. They're talking about it. They have protests, stays of action, petitions. One guy replied and said, "Don't bother signing a petition because no one ever listens". I understand what he's saying. I understand where he's coming from because I have signed petitions before with many more than 83,000 signatures and nobody listened. And that's annoying. But I think there's something to say for actually putting your name on something and if you find the 5Gspaceappeal.org, you sign that one, you sign this one, and the more people that do, at the very least, you're actually saying, "Look, I don't agree with this either". It's not like that petition has to be taken on a silver platter to the White House or whatever. {laughter}

It's like you putting your name to this and saying, "Yeah, this also concerns me" and I think the more people who do that, them more likely it is that maybe we actually will have some improvement in the situation. It may end up that we may get far less 5G but maybe we'll have some things a little bit safer and it'll end up being a compromise in which case well, then we'll do another 28,000 studies and we'll just keep on fighting. It's like everything else. It's like all health-related issues. It's like everything, vaccines, whatever you want to talk about, specific types of diets and all that kind of stuff.

Elliot: One more question Scottie, if you don't mind. Is there a magic bullet in terms of protecting ourselves from this stuff? Can we build a personal portable Faraday cage from which to walk around in or is it like we've got to try and limit it and is there anything that you know that we can do to maybe mitigate some of it? Other than the diet and stuff like you've just said, the typical stuff. Is there anything techie that you know that works?

Scottie: I don't actually know of any particular device or thing. I know that some people say, "I have a Q-link". There are various devices out there that are supposed to actually protect you. I don't actually have any of them. I've never purchased any of them because all of them, even if they use fancy-sounding technical terms, they'll say "This is backed by research" and then I'm like, "Okay, well I'm on your website. Where's the link to the paper you did that showed that maybe preferably someone else reproduced?" That kind of stuff is never available. So that kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I do know people who have some of these things and it seems to help them. I also know other people who have them and it does not seem to help them.

If you lived inside a proper Faraday cage you would be perfectly safe. You also would probably have a very difficult time building a proper Faraday cage. It gets pretty complicated. I made a little Faraday box for my smartphone out of layers of copper foil and stuff and that was actually highly educational because I had read a bunch about it beforehand. It was just kind of a thing to do for fun and I discovered that it's actually very, very difficult to do well and also, if you want to block your signals to and from your phone, put it inside your microwave oven. That actually sometimes works, sometimes it doesn't and it depends on a variety of factors, not the least of which is are you in the middle of a city where you're right next to the giant cell phone tower or are you out in the boonies? Specifically, what kind of phone do you have? What kind of microwave do you have? It's better shielded/it's not better shielded.

I did a video on smart meters which actually wasn't about the health effects of smart meters but about how smart meters here in France were actually costing people more money and so I was saying it's basically worse than just the health problems. They're also screwing people over in a sense. Many retired couples are having to pay extra money that they don't have to have the same service that they had before just because of the stupid smart meter.

So of course people wrote and said, "Can I put this shield over the smart meter?" If you do it the wrong way you're actually creating a reflector that shoots the rays back through the wall into your house. But all of that is really hairy and complicated and it's very difficult to give any sort of recommendation because it's highly specific to that person and their house and their situation and as I mentioned before with EMI testing and stuff, in order to model all this stuff properly, it's super not easy and it's very complicated, depends on many, many factors. So what I usually tell people is just try and minimize your exposure as much as possible and don't be afraid to tell people that that's what you're doing and don't be afraid to tell people that, "Yeah, there are 28,000 studies out there and they show that all kinds of this stuff is bad. Yes, the IRC is going to look into 'does it cause cancer?' again" and just basically put this information out there and don't be afraid of the whole tinfoil hat conspiracy thing because it's absurd. Back in the day there was a dude who said that the earth rotates around the sun and not the other way around and he got in deep doo-doo for that. Turns out he was right.

I wish I could say "Oh just use this little gizmo and you'll be totally safe" and at this point anyway, I can't. If I find one, I will - heck, I'll make one. I'll get a loan and manufacture them and send one to everybody. {laughter} So far I haven't. I guess that's about it.

Elliot: So where can we find you Scottie? What sort of thing do you offer to the public?

Scottie: Well you can go to my website at scottiestech.info. My YouTube channel name is the same thing, Scottiestech.info. If you like my T-shirt, you can go to my website or my YouTube channel {laugher}, click on through the T spring where you can get your own glorious scottiestech.info merchandise. I have shirts like this but I have some other fun ones, sort of anti-wifi, anti-Bluetooth and some Stop 5G shirts which I tried to make sort of clever and fun. There is a discount code which you can get on my Facebook page. I am the page scottiestech.info on Facebook. There's a discount code and you get $5.00 off your first order until the end of May. So there you have it.

I'm always looking at the news because like I said, some people have a YouTube channel and people say, "Well why don't you make more videos about 5G and the evils of wireless?" The thing is that I didn't start my YouTube channel with the idea of being famous or anything. I'm certainly not getting rich from it. I talk about things that interest me, things that come up and people have said, "Why don't you make more videos?" and it's because I'm not going to make a video just to get clicks and views. I have to actually come across information that I think is important to get out to people.

In this case, it was the 5G Space Appeal. It was actually a viewer who sent it to me and I went, "Jeez, maybe I'll look at that later" and then "No, it looks interesting. Let me look at it now." Suddenly, kaboom, there was this whole new video because all the hyperlinks at their website lead to just tons and tons of different studies and websites and EMFportal.org, as Elliot mentioned. It's a huge number of resources. I spent a couple of days just reading and reading and reading and then I had something worth saying, I felt.

So I can't promise I'm going to talk more about it unless I discover something else that's new but given that there are tens of thousands of studies out there, I'm sure I'll probably find something to get fired up about in the near future. {laughter}

Doug: The thing is, a good deal of your channel technie tips. It's exactly that. There's actually a lot of really useful information on there. I go to your channel all the time to find techie tips.

Elliot: I do as well.

Scottie: I was laughing the other day because on my website, scottietech.info I actually had a written post. I forget what the heck it was. It was just two days ago. It was how to remove the date stamp from photos. You take a photo and then in red it has the date stamp and that's actually extremely easy to do with tools that are built into Windows but it's actually a specific tool, not the one you might think. I needed to do that and I went, awe jeez, I wish somebody would have figured this out already and then I searched and my own website came up. {laughter} I'm like, "Oh yeah! I thought I knew that!"

Doug: That's awesome.

Scottie: There's all kinds of good stuff on there.

Doug: Yeah. I liked your article about how to shuffle on one of those non-shuffling MP3 player things.

Scottie: Oh!

Doug: I utilized that tip and it actually worked really well.

Scottie: Oh I'm glad because I had one of those and I was practically swearing at the thing because it's a little sound thingy and it just plays in whatever order they're written to the SD card and I nearly wore the SD card out trying to figure out how to actually get the songs appropriately shuffled. My technique is a little bit insane but it's the only thing I found that actually works.

Doug: Great. Well everybody can check out Scottie at scottiestech.info or on YouTube which is the same title, YouTube channel, scottiestech.info. Scottie, thanks so much for joining us today.

Scottie: Thanks for having me.

Elliot: Thanks Scottie. It was great.

Scottie: Alright. Thank you guys because I watched several of your shows and I think they're pretty good and you talk about some important stuff, health-related stuff. Like I say, it's not just about evil rays. There's all kinds of stuff and there are many ways you can actually improve your health. One of them is turn off your wifi and turn off your smartphone. But there are many others. Also, Elliot, your YouTube channel, EO Nutrition, definitely everyone, if you want to understand what a VGCC thing is, go watch Elliot's video because I was watching it and he started going off and I was going "Oohhhh!" and then goes, "So basically what that means is..." and I went "Ahhh!" {laughter} It happened four or five times through the video so it was actually the best explanation that I had ever seen and I actually learned a lot from it.

Elliot: Thanks Scottie.

Scottie: So, good job!

Elliot: Thank you.

Doug: Awesome. So everybody, we will be back next week with another interesting health topic. Make sure to like and subscribe down below and we will see you next time. Have a good week.

Elliot: Bye-bye.