Episode 22 — You CAN Protect Your Child from EMFs
Guest: Peter Sullivan • Date: November 19, 2020
Episode Overview
This week, we spoke with Peter Sullivan about EMFs and how this toxin can have detrimental effects on our health and more specifically, our highly sensitive children.
About Peter Sullivan
Peter derives his expertise from his own experiences as a parent and his career in the tech industry. He is the founder of Clear Light Ventures, whose mission is to improve human health and performance by removing widespread environmental health threats.
You’ll Discover
Where Len and Cass met Peter Sullivan (02:00)
An easy way to determine EMF sensitivity (05:15)
Tips for creating a healing environment for your child (14:45)
Is RF really harmless? (20:10)
The social component of protecting children from EMFs (26:45)
Why we need to be more concerned about dirty electricity and wireless radiation (30:11)
Book list to learn more about EMFs
Full Transcript
Peter Sullivan 0:00
We'd love to blame, you know, X for being a problem, and it's usually something in the past that someone else did, and it's really hard to say, "Oh, wow, it's something that's currently happening, and I have complete control over it. That's a whole nother level, and it's sometimes it's hard for parents to take that on and think that they're, but you know, realize that no one is to blame, or we're not trying to make you feel bad, but we're actually trying to say is this is in your control, and you can do something not just for your child, but for your whole family.
Len Arcuri 0:32
How is it possible for a parent of a child with autism to become the superhero their child needs now? I'm Len,
Cass Arcuri 0:40
and I'm Cass. When our son was diagnosed with moderate to severe autism, we went all in. We spent over a decade learning everything we could on how we could transform to help our son thrive. And guess what, he's doing it this year. He ran for class president.
Len Arcuri 0:57
Each week on this podcast, we will be sharing the secrets needed for you to become the superhero your child needs.
Cass Arcuri 1:04
If you want to learn how to tap into your innate superpowers to help your child thrive, visit autismparentingsecrets.com
Len Arcuri 1:13
Hello, and welcome to Autism Parenting Secrets. Our guest today is Peter Sullivan, and Peter has a deep resume and the very high-level executive summary is that he's a parent who understands firsthand the role that toxins and especially EMF can play on our health and especially our kids. He's also spent decades in the tech industry and is now leading the charge towards an environment and a society where we are moving towards the use of safer technology, and his social venture that he founded in 2007 is Clear Light Ventures, and their mission is to improve human health and performance by removing widespread environmental health threats. And we met Peter at an autism conference a few years back, while most exhibitors are sitting there with tables handing out pamphlets or trying to sell products. Peter was the guy who had a gigantic, and I mean a massive tent that he set up in the middle of this conference facility to give people the gift of what it felt like to be in an environment with no wireless and no electromagnetic fields, and so he definitely stood out from the crowd, and he's been a friend ever since. So, he couldn't be more than, more than thrilled to have Peter here with us on the show. Welcome, Peter.
Peter Sullivan 2:30
Oh, it's fantastic to be here, and it's so good to see you guys again. Really missed you.
Cass Arcuri 2:34
I missed you too. I think the last time we were, what, feet in the Pacific together?
Peter Sullivan 2:39
Oh, in Taka in LA, exactly.
Cass Arcuri 2:42
Yeah.
Peter Sullivan 2:43
Oh, missed that conference, that was fantastic.
Cass Arcuri 2:46
I know it's funny now, just virtually connecting with people versus actually seeing people in person, you know.
Peter Sullivan 2:53
I really miss the in-person, you know, but it's good to see faces, even at this point.
Cass Arcuri 2:59
Exactly, we'll take it as we can
Peter Sullivan 3:01
take what we got,
Len Arcuri 3:02
but especially with everything that's happened since the last time we saw you, and with so many people now spending so much more time inside their houses and indoors, we think of you all the time because your message that you're promoting of how to have it be a safer environment inside couldn't be a more important one now that so many more hours are being spent indoors, so as you've been seeing what's happening all around, is there anything that you think is a real kind of like a key message for any parents to really be thinking about as their kids are home online with school much more, anything that that's top of mind for you?
Peter Sullivan 3:40
Yeah, definitely to start wiring your connections, and, and this is even if you don't care about the health effects, and you know nothing about it. I think a lot of parents and kids have realized that, oh, a wired Ethernet connection is faster and more stable, and so, yeah, you might be popping a long Ethernet cable through the house here and there, but you know, Ethernet speed is a really big deal, and, and you get the benefits of, you know, faster Ethernet, and then lower exposure, and so you won't feel so wired if you're, you know, on Zoom all day for school, or whatever, and for people who
Len Arcuri 4:15
are hearing that, you know, the idea of wiring it, like having a wired Ethernet connection, we're really only talking about maybe a $10 purchase on Amazon for that, that Ethernet cable, correct?
Peter Sullivan 4:28
Sure, I mean, you may also have to do a, an Ethernet adapter, like my laptop has, I've got a Mac laptop, and it's got a USB-C connection, and I have to have a special connector to go from USB-C to Ethernet, and then that plugs into the Ethernet cable, and I, you know, and I tend to do a sheet. I like, if you're really sensitive, you do a shielded Ethernet cable, but yeah, that makes a really big difference.
Len Arcuri 4:53
Yeah, I forgot to mention at the outset, from your standpoint as a person who firsthand knows. That EMFs, wireless, all that can actually physically be felt, like, so you're one of, let's just say, a minority, but I would even argue a growing number of people who are electromagnetic sensitive, would that be their accurate term to use?
Peter Sullivan 5:15
Yeah, so people have said EHS, or electric electro hypersensitive, or electrosensitive, some people like to use the term microwave sickness to focus on the fact that it's that problem and not the person being sensitive, but I think the most common term is electrosensitive. But we find that people who don't even.. well, here's the quick test that Dr. Magna Havis is doing. If you ask someone if they like fluorescent lights, if they say no, that's a good heuristic that they're fairly sensitive to electrical, and I think it's the people who are very sensitive that they were saying the older numbers, maybe from 10 years ago, were about 3% you know, we find that when we put the tent up and we do conferences, that we get maybe between very rough numbers, we're not trying to be scientific. We get maybe between 75% and 95% of people having some felt experience. So, even if you're not overly sensitive, I think what we're finding is the majority of people will have a felt experience when the exposure changes,
Len Arcuri 6:17
right?
Cass Arcuri 6:18
And I know personally, having been in that tent, like I didn't want to leave that tent, and I think I spent the weekend basically at that conference there. I know, because I know I am sensitive, and the fluorescent light is a really good thing, because that was actually my first way I realized how sensitive I was, because you'd sit in a conference room with these lights, and you know, two hours later, get these headaches, and you're like, or have a struggle to keep your eyes open.
Peter Sullivan 6:47
Yeah, yeah, and of course, all the kids on the spectrum here, the majority of kids have are sensitive, and the, you know, it's not just EMFs, obviously they're sensitive to noise and touch and all these different variables, but yeah, I don't know an autistic kid who likes fluorescent lights. I mean, that's a big trigger, and that's known, but it's not just it's not just the light flicker, it's not just the color temperature, it's not just the crazy buzzing noise, but there's an electrical component to that, that's usually dirty electricity or electric fields from those lights that make it rough on these kids, and it just really kind of, and what we do find is, and this is for kids on the spectrum and adults who are electrosensitive or have some sort of chronic illnesses, a lot of these folks have gotten their autonomic nervous, and they've been kind of traumatized environmentally or in other ways, and when their autonomic nervous system is in fight or flight mode, you become, you get into this precise mode, and you're not meant to be, you know, we get stuck, it's not a healing mode, it's not, you're not meant to be in that mode, so it's one of the first things we do when you start to heal, is to kind of drop, try to drop out of that mode, of course, it's very hard, but people can become sensitive to electrical, to light, to noise, and when you start becoming sensitive, chemicals as well, and so this is a big thing for everybody, not just the kids on the spectrum, but the parents, and you know, really everybody. A large percentage of the population is moving this direction,
Cass Arcuri 8:16
right?
Len Arcuri 8:17
Yep, and it seems like it's something that does impact everyone. Some people know it, so those are the ones who say yes. Fluorescent lights, absolutely. I hate those things. Then you have probably another category who's like, yeah, you know, fluorescent lights, yeah, I don't love them, don't hate them, they're not even really kind of tuned into the fact that they're probably that they're experiencing some health effects, you know. And I think I put myself in that category where I'm like, I'm not so in tuned, at least as in tuned with things as castes, so I'm just kind of oblivious to it. And then there might be another percent of the population that just is not affected at all, so I kind of look at it as there's those three camps, and I know I'm definitely in the second one, but most of our kids are in the first, where they clearly are affected, and demonstrate,
Cass Arcuri 9:03
and they might not have the words, or they might not have the skills to be able to tell you what's going on, and so they might act out, like with behaviors, or you know, things that are out of the norm, because they're being bombarded, but they don't even, they can't even explain
Peter Sullivan 9:20
it, no, exactly, and so I've got this crazy thing where I can kind of translate for these kids. I can go in and I've got a nervous system that's as sensitive as these kids, but I also was a Navy pilot, and I can be steely eyed and just kind of, you know, okay, walk into hip crazy environments and say, okay, we've got this going on, this, this going on, this going on, and help translate what the kids are feeling into, you know, what the parents are thinking and what they can do to really calm things down.
Cass Arcuri 9:46
Right? I remember Len and I were buying a new car, and it was funny. One car I felt great in, the other one I had a crazy headache, and we have our meters, and he went and tested it, and the one that was giving me a crazy head. Headache, the magnetic field was four times as high as the other one, and it was just interesting, because I was like, okay, if you had a child who doesn't, can't give you the words that they have a headache, and you put them in this car, and if they're sensitive, they might now have more behaviors, which you just think, oh, it's part of autism, or this is just how my kid is, versus hey, there's something external that's adding to this, you know, stress or trauma on their body.
Peter Sullivan 10:28
No, exactly. And I think there's this belief system that autism is something that happened in the past, like it's genetic, or maybe there was an environmental or biological injury, but I think Martha Herbert has been trying to lean people to think more that this is a total load and it's a continuous load on the kids and we want to lighten that up for them, lighten up this load. Our new tagline for our company is, you know, it's such a mouth of words, environmental health, and we just said creating space for life, and so our job is to really just create a little bit more breathing room for people, so they can kind of, okay, it feels better here, right? And what the meters that you guys were using, and that we've been playing with, help to translate between, you know, the sensitive people and create an objective, measurable standard, and that's what we, that's, you know, that's what we need for science, and to make this a little bit more real and safe for people to talk about.
Len Arcuri 11:25
People don't really think, okay, well, what am I doing now that might be continuing to cause harm, or at the very least not promote a healing environment. So it's that kind of concept that this is something that's an ongoing thing, and that diligence and taking some action without freaking yourself out is a real important step to take, and a lot of times just having the ability to measure is that first step, because otherwise, if you can't see numbers, if you can't see that there's an impact, it's really hard to muster up the energy and courage to do something about it.
Peter Sullivan 11:58
Now, yeah, we have all these invisible threats, right, and most people, you know, step one is you should be in a safe environment, and most people think that they're in a safe environment, but are not, and so, and their kids, and there you might see some variability, and you use the kids as the canary in the coal mine, so when you go into a place and you see your child freak out, you should say, what is it about this environment that is, you know, overwhelming my child, or whatever, and yeah, so I found, too, just as you're navigating this whole situation, a lot of times we go back and we think, okay, I started out doing thinking it was genetic, and there's nothing I could do, and then you don't feel like you're trying to, you just, you're doing coping mechanisms, maybe you'll do some behavioral therapy or some sensory therapy, but you're coping, and then we know from the Stanford study, though, that on twins that only 38% of the contribution of autism is genetic. So this is their situations where you even have identical twins, where one is autistic and one is not, they've got the same genes, and but something environmentally was different, whether in the womb or in, or after, so that got me kind of focused a bit more on, you know, I switched from being kind of coping mechanisms to doing behavioral interventions, and that's all that functional medicine work that you guys kind of talk about all the time, and a lot of them were cutting-edge parents too, working on the gut, and you know that sort of thing, but what I also learned was that, you know, yeah, there was a lot going on in the environment still. We'd love to blame, you know, X for being a problem, and it's usually something in the past that someone else did, and it's really hard to say, "Oh, wow, it's something that's currently happening, and I have complete control over
Len Arcuri 13:40
it, right?
Peter Sullivan 13:41
That's a whole nother level, and it's sometimes it's hard for parents to take that on and think that they're, but you know, realize that no one is to blame, and we're not trying to make you feel bad, but we're actually trying to say is this is in your control, and you, you could do something not just for your child, but for your whole family. So, what I've been recommending, you know, I spent a lot of time on environmental work, especially started with mercury, and moved into other toxins, but I, the thing that impacted me the most, and was the most immediate, was the EMF. So, what we've been telling parents to do is to start lowering that first, and there's a couple of reasons for that. Number one, you know, you want to be in a safe, how can you heal if you're not in a safe environment? So, you want to be in a safe environment, but also then your body has to be, if your body's in fight or flight mode, as a lot of these kids are, that's not a healing mode. It's like being in a car and not being in the right gear. So, this, what I tell people, my secret from basically doing everything exactly backwards, and, as you know, as dumb as possible, the only thing I did smart with, just keep going, was start with EMF and unplug all the things around your child that are, you know, that are close to them, so clock radio, create a little bit of space, move these things away, so no Fitbits or track, even the trackers that are on some of these kids are emitting a wireless. Signals, and so to focus first on the sleep environment at night, so they sleep really well, and you know, create some space around them, and so it's, you know, moving around, you know, no electric blankets, and just kind of like just walk around the room and start unplugging things, and or even if you can't unplug it, you really need it, have some create some space and distance, the field effects drop off dramatically every time you double the distance, you, the reduction in strength is 75% So, just keep doubling the distance, you know, on all these things, and you know, watching the exposures, and then you'll see what happens when you know when the kids start sleeping better. I find that if you, you know, just turning your Wi-Fi off at night, whether you pull the plug on it, you know, or put it on a timer. Just turning that off at night is a really good start, and you might see not just the, you know, not just your single child sleep better, but the entire family may start to calm down a little bit.
Len Arcuri 15:55
Yeah, and that's what we recommend to any clients we work with, is the first thing, just to put the router on a timer, but it's amazing. How even as simple as it is, it's still kind of a tough thing for people to take. We first learned that concept at a conference early on, and it was about two years before we actually said, "Okay, we're going to do it, and we find the same thing now, where people, it sounds simple, it's a five, you know, a $2 item they can buy just to buy like a Christmas light type timer, but for some reason people get stuck at taking that, and I'm not really sure why, but it couldn't be. It couldn't be as simpler stuff,
Cass Arcuri 16:30
like you know, I mean, like, hey, my router's on now, so I can use it whenever I want, versus, oh my god, if I have to add another step to turning on my computer, you've just kind of.. and that's where we encourage them, no, set it for 6am set it for 7am so you know it will be ready when you need it, but that ability to, you know, unplug, so everyone sleeps better is so powerful, because if the child sleeps better, the parent's going to sleep better, which is a huge thing with, you know, at least our clients,
Len Arcuri 17:00
you improve sleep, you improve everything.
Cass Arcuri 17:01
Yeah,
Peter Sullivan 17:02
exactly. You know, I was, you know, I was running the front page of excite.com when we merged with this company called At Home, who was doing cable modems. So that's when we kind of transitioned from, you know, logging in with a modem to having a cable and what we called always on internet. And of course, when it's always on, your barrier to getting on and using the product is a bigger thing, and so that we were, I was one of the people promoting that, and now I see, like, like, you know, it's not great to have it's like leaving the lights on, I tell people that think of wireless as light, invisible light that you can't see and it's on, and it does affect melatonin, just like visible light, so you should turn it off, just like when you turn off all your lights, turn that at least that off at night to give yourself a little bit of space and a little bit more melatonin, which is good for COVID and autism, everything.
Len Arcuri 17:53
And I don't think I've ever run into anyone who has done that and turned their router off at night who hasn't noticed a difference, who hasn't noticed an improvement.
Peter Sullivan 18:01
Yeah, no, it's actually quite dramatic. Actually, most people will have a some people feel it the next day, some people won't. Some of the kids will have a pretty dramatic change after, you know, a period of days or weeks, but there are some pretty dramatic overnight experiences that we've had. We've had one nonverbal boy speak after three days of doing that protocol, and that's, that's pretty, that's amazing,
Peter Sullivan 18:28
free, you know. So, I think that's what I tell people, it's worth a try, and, but I think it's just, you know, we were like fish and water with this situation, we, like me in the industry, I all assumed that this was well safety tested, and so forth, and unfortunately not, yeah,
Len Arcuri 18:44
right, and yeah, that safety testing, you assume it's there, but it really isn't. You worked in industry, you understand how things come to market and what's done, and it's far from a perfect system, correct?
Peter Sullivan 18:57
Oh, no, it's the.. I'll tell you straight up, I mean, when I worked for one company, Silicon Graphics, I was at one point in charge of taking one of the devices in to get the FCC testing, and you know, it's like the appearance of safety tests, just kind of like one of those science fair projects that kids do, it's not much more advanced than that, and there's a lot of assumptions in the industry from even really smart PhD people of saying, like, oh, of course, the screen reading on the screen is going to be just as good as this, and but then they don't actually do the testing, and so I think we're getting a little bit more grounded. It's a lot like people in the, you know, in the people doing, you know, coal and oil, and you know, denying climate change. There was a little bit of resistance to that, and tech moves very quickly. We don't want to add safety testing and slow things down because we're competing with other people and so forth, so you should assume that people are going really fast with their hair on fire and nothing is getting tested,
Len Arcuri 19:49
and so if we make that assumption that the testing is not really there, then the next argument would be, okay, well, Wi-Fi, which is radio frequencies, they're harmless. What's the big deal? So, can you talk a little bit about, you know, I think there's that sense that RF is harmless. What would you say to that?
Peter Sullivan 20:07
So, you know, we've had wireless signals since the early, you know, like late 1800s 1900s so we've had these radio signals, and you haven't had any major health effects, but when we switch to digital signals, also the light from the sun background microwave radiation, so we've had these natural electromagnetic fields in the background, and people say, well, this is a really small amount, so it shouldn't be a big deal. Well, it turns out it's actually quite different than the natural stuff. So, number one, it's not a nice smooth sine wave, or like the wave in an ocean, it's this choppy, these choppy pulses. If you saw again, if you could see this, it would look like a very harsh flicker, and the signal is not - it doesn't just bounce all over, it's not diffuse light, it's polarized. And so, like, it's very similar to when you walk out and you look at the ocean, and there's glare coming off the ocean, so that normal solar radiation is bouncing all over the place and diffuse, but when it hits the flat ocean, it starts coming in a straight plane, and that's what happens with these antennas. You have a vertical antenna, and it shoots out a signal in a very thin blade, so from a physics perspective, instead of all these charged particles hitting from all sides, you have something like, you know, that would be like squeezing a balloon with all your hands, and you could squeeze it pretty hard with both hands all around, but if you took a blade and put it right into the balloon, you'd see kind of a harsh, the balloon would pop, and that's what's going on with the ion channels is that it's coming from a certain direction, it's not natural. Our bodies have gotten used to natural, diffuse things like that, and so the cell membrane may go into cell danger mode, which Bob Navio has talked about, and the calcium channels, which are a big factor in autism, may allow calcium to enter the cell. Now that you may say, okay, well, you know, the calcium channels excite the cell, and what that means is, you know, just like when you're going to edit this podcast, or whatever, you know, or you're editing a movie down, there's only certain parts of life that are kind of exciting and important, right? And those are the ones, if you edited a movie, you'd include those, so the calcium channels help us highlight those important things when there's a threat or there's some important reward to say, you know, don't miss a thing, be very precise, use a little more energy, and so if we're getting false signals to get overexcited, get into that precise mode, that's really first of all, that gets us really high strung, and it wastes a lot of energy. We're not meant to be in that all the time. It's not, you know, if you think everything in life is important, it's really stressful, and you can even become excitotoxic, so you can have too much calcium inside the cell. And I think people who've played around with MSG with their kids and seen the effects of that, that's also allowing calcium to get inside the cell from a different receptor, the same effect of overexcitation and causing too much damage, including DNA damage,
Len Arcuri 23:08
and that excess calcium, ultimately, in layman's terms, if that's getting into the cell, ultimately the effect is oxidative stress, correct? There's stress in the body that can manifest in a number of different ways,
Peter Sullivan 23:19
exactly, so it, the calcium comes in, and I think it, it comes in and binds with nitric oxide, and becomes this very intense free radical called peroxy nitrite, that's very short lab, and that can damage DNA, damage mitochondria, damage the cell membrane. It's pretty harsh, it's oxidative stress and inflammation, you know,
Len Arcuri 23:38
right, which is basically at the root of everything, right. It's that chronic inflammation, and the goal Cass and I took on as a parent, that we would suggest to any parent, it's really about your goalie, and you're trying to prevent those causes of chronic inflammation within your child's body, as well as your own, and just minimizing exposure to EMF and Wi-Fi is one piece of that game of defense,
Cass Arcuri 24:02
right, that's it's like that's part of it as well as food can play a role in that, and so it's just how do you minimize the toxins ones you can't see and the other ones you know you might be able to see, so
Len Arcuri 24:14
I think the first time I heard you speak, Peter, the aha that you gave me was the idea that if you're playing defense like that, and you're trying to do your best as a parent, that most people think, okay, well, I know I shouldn't live next to a cell tower, because that doesn't seem like that would be a good thing, but you really turned the light on in my head about how most of the sources of stress and that of harm are coming from within, inside the house, correct,
Peter Sullivan 24:39
exactly, they've done some studies that you know we always like to look at something outside and blame that - it's heck of a lot funner, but then your locus of control goes outside of you,
Len Arcuri 24:49
right?
Peter Sullivan 24:49
And it turns out that again, the closest sources - every time you always said every time you double the distance, the radiation level goes down 75% but every time you have the distance it increases. Is 400% or quadruples, so if you have a phone, if I have a phone right here, you know, four inches from my ear, and then I move it to two inches, that's quadrupling the exposure. So now we have a lot of people with a, like, a Fitbit right on their body, or a cell phone in the pocket, or have a AirPods in their ears, or whatever, and so we're, we're buying these things, and it makes it harder psychologically. The more time and money you've spent on things, the more you will kind of deny their effects. And so it takes a lot of courage and a little bit of resolve to start weaning yourself away from these things that you've really bought and brought that being brought into the house,
Cass Arcuri 25:38
right? And also, you have the other element of, especially as your kids get older, peer pressure, so like you know, we have our kids' laptops corded because with the ethernet, and you know, my daughter's like, but I'm the only kid who has that, I'm like, yeah, because you have parents who are actually truly paying attention to this, and she's like, oh, but you know, and I'm like, one, they can't see the cord, and two, like, it's we're doing this for your health and well-being. Yeah, you know, and you think about, like, those AirPods, I mean, it's like I'm like just waiting this generation I'm so scared for of these kids who are using AirPods at such a young age.
Peter Sullivan 26:17
Yeah, no, they're right in the ear, and there's also a meg, not only wireless, but a magnetic field that connects the two of them. But let's talk a little bit about the social component, because that's a big one. I mean, especially with these kids, we're really concerned about them socially, because some of them are socially a little bit feeling out of it already, and we want them - the goal is for them to have friends, and so forth, and we don't want to put any barriers there. So I was just talking to a 11 year old last week, and he was saying that he tells his friends that they wire the ethernet like that, the wire the computer to make it faster. No one disagrees with that. Now, the other tech technique that is not only between kids but between parents is, you know, you know, you might not want to have an ethernet cable going through your house when your guests are over, whatever. So, if you do do this protocol, we, the first protocol we, we did was Dr. Torre Yeltser's calming protocol. It's written up on the internet, and that what's interesting is, you just do it at night, so no one's watching you at night. There's no social implications at night, and you make sure that there's no baby monitor in the room, or that it's not on at night, no Wi-Fi, no cordless phone base stations. So, if you have a landline still, the main base station, the one that has the voicemail on it, usually is like a little mini cell tower in your home, and you turn that off. You can also do circuit breaker for the bedroom as well, and certainly no phones in the bedroom or no Fitbits, but you want to go one step farther, you could even turn off the circuit breaker in the bedroom, that's a quick free way to minimize exposure to the magnetic fields, electric fields, or dirty electricity, kind of more advanced concepts, but that's that's the free protocol that everybody can try at night, so there's no cost, there's no social friction, and if that improves your sleep, great.
Cass Arcuri 28:06
And that one thing that we've noticed when we were looking, you know, taking meters around our house and looking for sources to protect our family is also making sure your light switches are all in the off position, because even if something might be unplugged if there is a switch that's up, that outlet is still there's a lot still coming off of that from an electric reading perspective.
Peter Sullivan 28:30
Oh, sure. So, it looks sounds like you're talking about a light switch that's meant to have like a light in it, like a lamp. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And that's what's funny, is that let's talk about electric fields a little bit from that, like if very frequently people have a lamp next to their bed, and it's usually a reading. I thought my mom was so big on, "We want your reading, we're going to put a reading lamp right next to your bed. I thought it was a great idea, but it turns out it's quite a big hazard, even when the light is off. So an electric field is a lot like it's like electrons trying to go to ground, and your body's ground, so, and it's like invisible lightning, basically. You should think of it that way, and you'll feel kind of wired. So, what you'll have to do with lights like that is you can unplug the light, or you can even get these little remote switches that they are like a plug, it's like a little remote control, it'll send a mini burst of RF out once, but then it'll turn the switch off, so you could put that, and you can either manually unplug the light or put it in one of these little switches, and then turn it off, so that the electric cord doesn't come right up around your head, or you know, near your child.
Len Arcuri 29:38
And what do you say, Lane? I know we've mentioned magnetic fields, we mentioned electric fields, and we talked about RF and Wi-Fi. If you had to talk about those three, plus dirty electricity, what is the bigger concern? Because I know when it comes to measuring, having a meter to be able to show you, to show you the levels, and maybe even to hear it, really is what can be. Very convincing for people, but in terms of those four types, is any one like if you're saying to start with EMF, which of the four would you start with as being the bigger concern?
Peter Sullivan 30:11
Okay, well, I'll just start to saying that I'm knowing the different types of fields is kind of like a technical conceptual barrier to getting into this, so I try to tell people now, you know just electronics and electrical stuff, just move that away, and then yeah, each of these exhibit different fields. So, there's a magnetic field, is like a magnet. So, basically, when you have current that's accelerating, decelerating, like AC current, it creates a magnetic field. The most commonly, you'll see things with motors will do that, like a fan or something, or a transformer as a big magnetic field. An electric field is usually like electrons escaping from the wire and just kind of going out, and that's an electric light is a great example of that. You know, wireless radiation, of course. You know, a cell phone or a Wi-Fi is a great example of that, dirty electricity is a little bit more complex. It's basically your normal AC power, your 120 volt power. Normally, it's this nice smooth sine wave, like a little roller coaster, but when things go turn on and off very rapidly, they can create these little spikes and micro surges, and those are biologically quite active, and so what I'll say is, you know, we've had electricity for 100 years or so, more than 100 years, and we've had electric fields and magnetic fields, and without a ton of problems, right, and again, we even had wireless signals, radio frequencies that were analog, so things didn't get weird until we started going into, I think, the mid 80s, when we started making things digital, so creating these square waves, which are easier for computers to read very clear on off signals, but biologically they're harsher, so I think that when we went to digital frequencies, so the things that were new are basically digital wireless signals and dirty electricity. Those things kind of go hand in hand. The more you're starting and stopping, so like let's say when you, when you turn a hose on and you hear the pipes going ba ba ba, those are these kind of transient currents. So if you're turning signals on and off really quickly, you get a lot of these little transient noisy signals, you would know this most by, I think, if you have an AM radio on and you drive by power lines and you hear your radio signal go out,
Len Arcuri 32:31
sure,
Peter Sullivan 32:31
right. So that's interference to your radio, but that is also biological interference for your body as well. And you may notice sensitive people may notice that their body responds like that, and you can take an old radio. So, what I'd say is be careful of the ones I'm most concerned of are dirty electricity and wireless. I think are the newer factors, but certainly magnetic fields and electric fields can be harmful as well,
Len Arcuri 32:57
right? But, but at least those, it's pretty simple to just as you said, move away, just like look at the environment, and just by making simple changes with what's in the room and how close things are to, particularly where you sleep, where your head is resting on the pillow, the changes that can really make a big difference are pretty straightforward and don't cost anything.
Peter Sullivan 33:18
Well, I would hopefully a lot of times I would say do all the easy, cheap, free things first. So, again, if you can't, but you might get stuck sometimes. You can't move something, and I would say in that situation, let's say you're in a room and the power box, the electrical circuit breaker box, is in the room right near your child's head of the bed. Well, you can't move that, but you can move the child right, you move the bed around, and, matter of fact, even just creating a little distance between the wall, you know, even just from the wire, normal wiring in the wall, pulling the bed out six inches from the wall gives you a little bit more space. I've had, I'm in a hotel room tonight, today, and in some eight cases, if I'm not sleeping well, I will put my head away from the wall, and put my feet towards the wall, because my head is more sensitive than my feet, so I'll just do kind of awkward, strange things like that. Look, that look weird, but I will sleep dramatically better.
Cass Arcuri 34:11
Yeah, we actually pulled our son's bed, you know, four inches from the wall, and the difference on the readings were definitely significant. So, yeah, so a pillow falls back kind of often, but that's okay, we can stuff it with other things,
Peter Sullivan 34:25
better, better sleep, but yeah, that's start with the easy free stuff, and then the choices, you can either you can try to buy a meter, like a cheap meter, you were talking about the Trifield two meter, which is a nice start, and then you could buy a book, like the non-tinfoil hat guide to EMFs, or Joe Mercola's new book on EMF, that'll give you some basic guidance about what to do. Another choice is you can have a building biologist come into the house and measure things professionally, even when you think you know what you're doing, you know, obviously a professional can take things to another level, and sometimes you get stuck in. Certain situations, something that you can't move, like you're in your power line, and there's a big magnetic field, and you can't figure out what to do, and some professionals can help with that.
Len Arcuri 35:09
Yep, no, that makes sense. Again, if you have a problem that you can't fix, then get to bring in a building biologist might be something that's required. We were actually looking to relocate, we were looking at houses, and I bring my meters when we go look at houses, and we found one that had a huge magnetic reading throughout the entire house, and you would just never know that unless you had the meter. So, generally speaking, most houses don't have that issue, but some absolutely do, and unless you can measure it, you really have no idea
Peter Sullivan 35:37
exactly. It comes mostly, those big magnetic fields are usually wiring errors,
Len Arcuri 35:42
so
Peter Sullivan 35:42
you know, long story, I won't get into it, but it's very common that about 50% of homes have wiring errors. There's no way that people don't really check them, you know, intensely like a building biologist would. So one of the tricks you can do in those situations, like let's say you went into that house and you said, "Wow, there's a really big magnetic field, and magnetic fields are very hard to shield and deal with, and they go right through your body like an MRI machine saw. We were saying before, don't be - I'm less concerned about those, but actually the magnetic fields are pretty intense. So, what we will do, and they can carry dirty electricity, right? So, they can carry these - they become noisier and noisier. So, frequently, what you can do in that situation is you can go to the power box, and then turn off all the power, and then see, does that, does everything drop, and you know it's either going to drop down or it won't. If it doesn't drop down, you've got actually a problem in the neighborhood, you've got something going on on a transformer, something that you might not be able to control at
Len Arcuri 36:41
all,
Peter Sullivan 36:42
and sometimes even current going through the soil, a lot of times dirty electricity is going through the soil. So it's really smart to do those sort of things, and if you are moving homes, matter of fact, frequently a building biologist will tell people we're having pretty chronic health conditions that if the best thing for them to do is move, which you know, which, if you think turning off the Wi-Fi is hard, you know, not a lot do that. So I'm trying to work on different solutions. It's, we're looking at different, you know, flows for what to do in different situations. I'm looking for different technologies that can help mitigate some of these situations where people would, where building biologists would say, "move. I think there's a couple steps we can take before that to give people, you know, a little peace of mind, so you hate to move in, and then they move houses, and then two seconds later that somebody puts a g tower in front of that house, it gets it, just it makes it getting too hard.
Cass Arcuri 37:30
Well, and it's also all these new neighborhoods too, you have so many more now smart houses being built, where they're all pre-wired to make it easy and convenient, so you have that factor going, and then most of those neighborhoods all have underground power lines.
Peter Sullivan 37:46
Yeah, so actually the underground power line. Oh, sorry, I'll comment on underground power lines are usually better than the above ground.
Cass Arcuri 37:53
Okay,
Peter Sullivan 37:54
and that's kind of everything is kind of shielded and grounded right in there, and you just don't have these things next to windows and so forth. So I like the underground, so that's good, but the smart home stuff, and even the solar and the smart meters, those tend to have all these little digital devices in them that are square waves that create a little bit of noise on the electricity, so your smart meter actually degrades the quality of the power that you had and creates dirty electricity, and that's a book, if you want to learn about that topic. A book by Dr. Sam Milham, he's an epidemiologist who helped with lead, remove lead in the country from gasoline from a lot of parts of our environment. Sam wrote this book and has been following up that topic, really brought that to the mainstream and made it credible.
Len Arcuri 38:36
Fantastic. Yeah, you mentioned a lot of great resources. We'll include links to all that in the show notes, including a link to Generation Zapped, which I know is a movie that you produced that we found extremely helpful, educational, and really kind of explained a lot of these concepts in a pretty powerful way.
Peter Sullivan 38:53
Yeah, yeah, they did. Sabine did a great job with Generation Zap, the director, and you know it's a great way to share. Just sharing the trailer helps add credibility to the topic, and if, and you can find that you can stream that from all the different, your common sources, but we try to make it, we try to make it not scary and hopeful, so that people feel like they can take action, they're not victims, and they, they can make a difference.
Len Arcuri 39:17
Yep, and that's one of the things, one of the many things we love about you is that you know the idea is there's a message here, it's important, but it doesn't have to come with panic, because there's a lot of people out there who are kind of seizing and kind of taking this important topic and really, you know, scaring people even more, which doesn't help their nervous system at all. So just love your very inspiring and practical messaging that you put out there.
Peter Sullivan 39:42
Well, I'm seeing the, I've, yeah, unfortunately, a lot of folks. I would have hoped this topic would have really become mainstream a long time ago, and I think some of the activists have been a little bit hyper vigilant about things, a little bit fear based, and I think we really need to be calm, clear, incredible on this topic, and and also I. Don't want people to get into fight or flight mode, that's one of the problems, right? So people getting too stressed to not healing well,
Len Arcuri 40:06
right? Yeah, having your nervous system be ramped up is never a recipe for success, whatever the topic.
Cass Arcuri 40:12
It's true, you can't be curious if you're fighting something.
Len Arcuri 40:15
No, this has all been incredibly helpful. Any final message, Peter, that you would have, particularly we like to have this podcast be one of the key messages that somebody early on in a journey might really, you know, what would be really important for them to know. Well, is there anything that you'd like to leave our listeners with?
Peter Sullivan 40:33
I guess the best resources I just did, I uploaded a video from our Taka conference about the 10th, so people can see that experience, and the 30 minute talk I did at Taka will definitely send a link to that. We talked about Dr. Mercola's book on EMF and the non-tinfoil hat book, Clear Light Ventures has got some resources on it. So, Clear Light ventures.com we actually have, and we find out there's a lot of questions about this topic, and so you know, I can talk for 10 minutes and have and answer questions for three hours. So, we have a Facebook group called Autism and EMF, and that's been helpful for a lot of back and forth questions. Finally, also, there's an EMF medical conference, so if your doctor does not know about this topic, they can get your doctor can get continuing medical education credits for following up on this conference, which I think is January-ish or something, and then the calming protocol that we talked about,
Len Arcuri 41:26
fantastic, armed with resources, parents can do amazing things, and this is such an important component that a lot of times is overlooked. So, again, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on this, and we definitely look forward to having you on again in the future.
Peter Sullivan 41:40
Well, thanks, Len. It's good to see both of you. Take care.
