Electromagnetic fields (or EMFs) are fundamental to the physical world. They occur naturally in the body, but are also man-made and have the potential to affect your performance negatively. Josh del Sol’s award-winning documentary, Take Back Your Power, addresses the performance-robbing effects of certain EMFs and takes a journey into the 2013 NSA spying scandal to expose what he calls “vast programs to monitor your personal communications using ‘smart’ meters.” Josh comes on Bulletproof Radio to discuss his feature film about EMF and radiation standards in America, smart meters, and a possible connection between autism and EMF levels. Check out the shownotes and watch the film online.
Josh del Sol is the Director and Producer of Take Back Your Power, his first feature film. Born and raised near Vancouver BC, Josh is passionate about the growing movement of social awakening. He has a vision for a more equitable social structure, with decentralized energy production and foundational values which honor the sanctity of life and human rights. Josh finds inspiration in those of courage who speak truth to power, from a place of non-violence and vision, laying the foundation for necessary solutions. Follow @TBYPfilm on Twitter.
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What You’ll Hear
- 0:10 – Cool Fact of the Day!
- 2:28 – Trailer for “Take Back Your Power”
- 6:45 – Industry standard for radiation
- 8:16 – Russian’s using microwave radiation in Cold War
- 10:00 – Definition of smart meters
- 13:04 – Your body is a chemical-electrical-magnetic system
- 18:00 – Could we engineer positive EMFs?
- 20:09 – Smart Meters
- 23:10 – How to block installation of a Smart Meter in your home
- 29:35 – How to mitigate EMF’s
- 35:35 – Dr. Klinghardt’s connection between autism and EMF levels
- 39:50 – NSA and home surveillance
- 50:20 – Top three recommendations for kicking more ass and being Bulletproof!
Watch the Trailer
Featured
Take Back Your Power on Facebook
Resources
Electromagnetism and Life by Robert O. Becker and Andrew Marino
Bulletproof
Podcast #73 – SomaPulse and Electromagnetism with Dr. Bill Pawluk
Transcripts
Click here to download a PDF of the transcript
Dave: Today’s cool fact-of-the-day is that if you yelled for 1 year, 7 months, 26 days, 20 hours, 26 minutes, and 40 seconds to be exact, you could make just enough heat with the sounds waves to warm up a quarter liter of your favorite coffee.
Hey, everyone. It’s Dave Asprey, with the Bulletproof Executive Radio Show. On the show, we have Josh Del Sol, who is the director and producer of the movie called “Take Back Your Power.” This is cool because you don’t hear me talk about it much on the show, but my background is cloud computing and computer technology, and even computer security. “Take Back Your Power” is about smart grids. Smart grids are a biohacking technology. They are also a computer security risk. What we’re going to talk about today is the mix of what you should be concerned about as a biohacker, the downside of all of these biohacking technologies, from a privacy and a personal safety perspective and from a health perspective. Josh, welcome to the show.
Josh: Great. Thanks so much, Dave. It’s really a pleasure to be on your show and to speak with somebody with such a knowledge about these issues and a background, such as yourself. So, thanks for having me on.
Dave: It’s my pleasure. I was intrigued when I heard about your movie, because you’re looking at the NSA spy scandal and looking at what utility companies are doing, and I’ve been actually in a position to look at some of the backroom proposals from these companies in my career in Silicon Valley. Some of it’s kind of scary, especially when you consider what, in my case, is a known piece of information, that electrical fields have a definitive, definite impact on human health and human behavior and human sleep patterns. We just know this. It’s not up for discussion anymore. You can say, “What fields have what impacts?” I’d like to know that too. But, until we sort that out, I’d say there’s no reason a smart meter’s going on my house. There’s no upside in it for me.
So, Josh, you won the AwareGuide Transformational Film of the Year with this documentary, which is particularly, particularly cool. What made you want to make a film about this?
Josh: Well, to be honest, there are so many issues, and this is a truly bipartisan movement to the core, why so many people are realizing what’s going on with smart meters and smart grids, and saying “no,” and taking a stand, and exercising their right not to have one. But, the first issue that came across my path, when I first started hearing about these devices, was the health aspect. That was the summer of 2011. They had already been installed in Ontario, Canada and California and several other places. The reports that were coming back were “yes” the concerns about privacy and surveillance and hacking.
The main issue that we were hearing about is that people were getting sick, and not just a few people having functional impairments or illnesses of various sorts. But, this was hundreds, if not thousands, of people reporting to their utilities that the electric meter on their house, the upgraded meter, was making them sick. So, that really got me started in the production of “Take Back Your Power.” I set out to just simply interview a couple people who had sensitivities to this kind of irradiation, and I wanted to find out whether it was legitimate or not. So, that … Initially what was intended to be a 10-minute YouTube video has evolved into a full-length feature documentary, which has won now a couple of awards.
Dave: So, how do we know if this isn’t placebo? I mean, honestly, there are so many things that happen in your house all the time, how would you know that it was your smart meter that made you sick, especially with these chronic illnesses? I mean, could it be my favorite thing … Toxic mold, which seems to pop up more often than it should. Or, could it be mercury poisoning? Or, could it be that your mother was mean to you when you were a baby? How do we really draw the line here?
Josh: Well, according to industry’s version of the science and government agencies, according to their standards, there should be no problem with these smart meters or advanced meters. They’re within the microwave transmission range, the guidelines. But, what we’ve realized is that those standards are based on only a small, small percentage of the science, and almost all of it is funded by industry. It dates back to the 1950s, if not before. So, when you look at all of the evidence, there’s actually several thousand published scientific studies, well over 6,000 in fact, that show clearly there is a effect that happens with this kind of radiation.
Dave: The core assumption behind most of their research is that it’s a heating effect that damages the cells. Unfortunately, the cells are also using electrical signaling. So, if you interrupt signaling or you interrupt things that happen in the membrane of the cell, not through heating effects, the science and the standards don’t support that. My favorite story, and honestly one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show, was that in the book Electromagnetism and Life, by Robert C. Beck or Becker. You probably know …
Josh: Becker, yeah.
Dave: Becker, thank you. I always confuse him with Beck. He writes about what the Russians did, during the Cold War, to the U.S. Embassy. They aimed microwave radiation, the same stuff we use for cellphones, at the embassy. They turned it up to within allowable limits, by our own standards. Of course, the people there got sick all the time. They had weird cancers. They were on a rotation duty to come in and out.
When they finally figured out this was happening, they got really upset at the Russians, and the Russians just laughed and said, “No, no. We’re within the limits of your laws, so we’re not doing anything that you wouldn’t do to your own people, so hey.” These are the same Russians who also still reject U.S. meat because it’s not fit for human consumption, and I tend to agree with them. So, given that this is real. This goes back to the 80s. We’ve known about this. Other people, other countries have known about this, and there are thousands of studies. You have to have your head in the sand to not actually just accept that there’s something happening here, and that we might want to look into that more before we do a broad-scale deployment of this.
Josh: Yeah. There’s something happening. The World Health Organization even admitted, in 2011, that there … this type of radiofrequency or microwave radiation is a class to be a potential cancer causing carcinogen. So, rather than employ the precautionary principle, industry has steamrolled all legitimate arguments for just holding on these installations of these meters because of the power, and the control, and the economic benefits, and the surveillance, and the monitoring that are a part of this technology.
I just would like to back up for a moment, and just to give the viewer an understanding. If you haven’t heard of a smart meter or a smart grid or advanced meter, whatever the utilities term of the day is, utilities around the world, and this is happening all at the same time in all Western countries, are installing meters that have the ability … They’re actually 2-way transmission devices that pulse microwave radiation every few seconds, just at a several millisecond burst, and for 24/7.
So, this is a measurable dose of microwave energy that is up to 8,000 times higher than a cellphone, an active cellphone call from the same distance away. So, if you’re a foot away from the meter and you’re a foot away from the cellphone, despite the rhetoric from utilities, the science and the testing actually shows that the meter is hundreds, if not thousands, of times higher depending on model of the meter. So, this is significant. They also downgrade the quality of electricity in your home, producing something, a byproduct that’s known as “dirty electricity.” We can talk about that, perhaps, later.
But, just to give an overview, that is also responsible, the science is showing for a tremendous number of people having functional impairments and health issues as far as the meters. So, there’s rights and privacy going away from the people. The meters are allowing time-of-use billing, so the cost is going to be increasing. As we saw in the trailer, it’s part of a plan to skyrocket energy and utility costs to make it a privilege and not a right.
As a byproduct, as in our film “Take Back Your Power,” another Silicon Valley executive who we actually interviewed said he didn’t know at the time, when these discussions were happening, about controlling the home and extracting the data. What he didn’t know was the byproduct was radiation. So, this is a potential … Well, it already is a crisis, but it’s a potentially catastrophic one as far as rights go, but especially as far as the human biological being and all biological life, including insects and nature as well.
Dave: So, right now, the Bulletproof Executive Radio Show is the number one ranked health podcast on iTunes. This week, about 50,000 people are going to hear this. We tend to be a pretty well-educated, relatively skeptical audience where we ask questions about this. Most people are trained to be skeptical of the claim that electrical fields have any effect on human biology.
I don’t know, actually, really where that comes from, other than this division that happened in the late 1800s between the electrical medicine guys and the chemical medicine guys. We’ve been sort of on divergent paths ever since. The news that shouldn’t be news, but is news for most people is that your body is not a chemical system or an electrical system. It’s a chemical, electrical, magnetic system. All 3 of those modalities work at the same time in your tissues, depending on which tissue at what time and what type of signal.
The other thing that’s really scary is I had Dr. Bill Pawluck on, earlier, talking about a device called SomaPulse. This is a pulsed electromagnetic field generating device that you can use to increase your speed of healing, and it works really dramatically. If you listen to that podcast, P-A-W-L-U-C-K. I don’t remember the number offhand. We actually have a code for a discount code on this device. I use one, when I travel especially, because it increases resilience. It changes nitrox oxide levels. It uses one-third the power of a mobile phone, and you said these devices are up to 8,000 times? The smart meters are 8,000 times stronger than what a mobile phone does?
Josh: Depending on 2 factors, the brand of the meter and the make and model of the meter itself, the wattage of the meter. On the cellphone side, how many bars you have on your connection. So, cellphones are … If you have 1 or 2 bars, the output on the phone itself is going to be tremendously higher than if you have 4 or 5. But, we did a test with 4 bars, so not even an excellent connection, and a smart meter that was installed in KIUC on Kauai, and the difference was in the range of 550 times higher, more radiation coming from the smart meter, and that’s pulsed energy as well.
Dave: That is a little bit scary because this isn’t necessarily an issue of the power of the signal, although that appears to matter. It’s an issue of the frequency of the signal and what it does to your body’s own subtle signaling in a cell and intracellularly, intercellularly. So, there’s a definite health concern. As a biohacker, someone who understands you can get a signal off the body, you also should understand that you can measure changes in heart rate variability when you’re exposed to electromagnetic fields like this. They affect sympathetic, parasympathetic response. There’s no debate. There’s no need for further studies on this. We know this, and we have known it for a very long time. We just don’t like to pay attention to it.
Open your iPhone manual and it says, “Warning. Do not operate this device while it’s touching your skin.” What? Anyway, that’s not to pick on Apple because mobile phones are mobile phones. By the way, I have 3 or 4 of them floating around here. Josh, I have an iPad, but it’s in airplane mode. Most of my devices are in airplane mode, so I’m not getting constant broadcasting. When I want to download a movie, I plug in my Wi-Fi router, and I download a movie, and then I unplug it. This stuff isn’t going to kill you. But, if you’re around it all the time, it’s going to make you weak, and that sucks.
Josh: Yeah. So many people are having … whether it’s problems sleeping, or arrhythmia, or headaches, or just kind of feeling general fatigue and memory loss. All of these issues, including the increases in cancer, all of these issues were identified by 1972 in a U.S. Navy document, which we bring out in the film, had 2,300 studies with the observed health effects from this kind of energy, from this kind of radiation. We’re seeing all of the symptoms from people, from a certain percentage of people who have these meters installed. Now, it’s not just the meters. This is a point, which if you haven’t had enough already with this, being overwhelmed that it’s the radiation from the meters.
But, it’s the infrastructure, the towers and the routers and the collectors and all of this additional infrastructure, the high-powered YMax. Everything is going Wi-Fi in our cities, and that is to communicate with everything else, this internet of things that we’re hearing about, and communicate with the … all of the data that will be transmitted, every few seconds, by the meter. So, that’s outside of your house, and it’s also inside of your house with the, what’s called the home area network, what utilities are calling the HAN. That’s where all of the appliances will be transmitting wirelessly, and there won’t be an off switch.
So, this is something … We’re literally talking about being bathed in electromagnetic radiation soup, against our will, in the face of all of this scientific evidence. Not only that, but tens of thousands of people reporting that they’re getting sick after having these meters installed. Not only that, but the utilities and government haven’t done a single study to show that these meters are safe. If they did one, it would undoubtedly be biased to produce the result that they wanted.
Dave: Well, I’m maybe a minority here. I understand that pulsed electromagnetic fields have an effect on the human body. There is no reason that industry could not engineer these fields to enhance human resilience. We can make a Wi-Fi device that works very well to not harm you, at a minimum, and to help you in a good case. It’s interesting, one of the guys with the first patent on 802.11 Wi-Fi, the very first Wi-Fi we had, I met with him about 3 years ago for coffee in Mountain View, California, at Red Rock Coffee. Yes, I did go for a Single Estate coffee there, and I had a good result from it, for those of you who are questioning it, and it was roasted by 4 Barrel.
Anyway, what we talked about there was that he was taking these sensitive electromagnetic devices used for troubleshooting Wi-Fi networks, like million-dollar equipment, and turning it back on the human body to get a signal off of the human. That’s remarkable. He was saying, “Well, we’re pretty sure we can get this data and correlate it, using cloud computing and big data, with different things happening in the human body.” So, we know that … even that we transmit these things. It’s kind of funny because I’m a biohacker.
This is a device called “The Mind.” If you’re looking on video, you can see it. It’s a 3D printed prototype from an engineer out of, I believe, the Czech Republic. If memory serves, I met him at the Quantified Self Conference. This thing picks up very subtle changes in your magnetic field, and it changes based on when you’re around devices. You want to see if you pick up a static charge more around devices? Yeah, we’ve got meters for that too. This is a meter that shows what earthing does for you or doesn’t do for you, depending on where you are and what’s in the ground electricity.
So, wow, this isn’t any kind of conspiracy theory stuff. This is just hard science at this point. Why does everyone still think it’s nutty, out-there stuff if there’s 2,300 studies about this, if there are no studies showing that these smart meters are safe, and if I know in my own claims that Wi-Fi devices affect sleep and that electrical filters that make for less dirty electricity also affect sleep? What’s the secret? Why … Is this an organized conspiracy or something? I don’t know.
Josh: Well, you got to ask yourself, “Who benefits?” or, “Where does money go?” When you look at the mobile phone industry and the utility industries put together … I mean, we outline in the film, look at the top 7 companies, according to revenue generation, on the planet, and 6 of them are in oil and gas. If you look at the top 20, there’s a whole bunch more that are in communications, wireless communications, and utilities coming together to have a huge vested interest in trying to float the idea that this technology is safe and not only is it safe, but it’s needed. It’s going to reduce energy. It’s going to help the environment. It actually does the opposite. It uses more energy. It’s been measured. The pilot program … The pilot program …
Dave: I didn’t know that.
Josh: Each one of these meters has a switching mode power supply, and it’s so cheaply made, and it has no filters …
Dave: Wow.
Josh: … and it’s just made for pennies in China, for the most part. It’s not UL certified. That’s another thing that most people are blown away by. But, it produces a dirty electricity field that piggybacks the 60 Hertz cycle in your house. So, it basically chops up the signal approximately 40,000 times per second, and it produces this field of an infinite range of frequencies that’s riding on the wiring in your house and creating a magnetic field around the wiring. So, that’s in addition to the microwave radiation that’s causing a lot of people to have functional impairments and illness, especially in cases where their house wiring isn’t perfectly grounded.
This is all provable. This is all … We know that this is happening. There’s electrical engineers talking about this. The utilities, they’re just not even responding. I couldn’t even get a single utility executive to go on film for “Take Back Your Power.” I could not get the official story to anyone with a face and voice to go on the film. I literally had to take pieces of other interviews that were either from news, television, or different sources to piece together their perspective on this.
So, they are hoping that the people don’t figure out what’s going on here. They’re hoping that the people don’t figure out that this not only is going to make people sick, but it’s going to make all of your appliances in your house totally hackable. Vanity Fair did an article on how easy it was to hack into your house and shut down your appliances in your house, and shut down even the energy to your house altogether.
Dave: The hackers over there …
Josh: Surveillances just mindboggling from there, as you’ll see in the film. But, just really quickly, before we go on any further, Dave, I just wanted to give the viewer an understanding. These devices are not mandatory. There is no legal requirement to have one. But, unless you said … Unless you say “no” to them, they just come and install them on your house or your apartment.
Dave: It is a good piece of advice to weld some heavy pieces of steel in front of your existing meter so that when someone might accidentally try and upgrade the meter when you’re not home, they can’t do it. I know a few people who’ve actually done that. It does happen where you come home, and there’s a new meter, and they say, “Oh, we thought we had your permission.” Because, honestly, rolling a truck and having someone walk into your backyard to read your meter all the time is a very expensive thing to do, and there’s dogs and everything else.
I’m absolutely certain that you could engineer a wired Ethernet solution or a safe way to get power consumption data that doesn’t require a wireless device. I think the wireless thing is just there for convenience and cost of putting it in. But, we haven’t thought through the biological implications not just for ourselves, but for animals and for the whole planet. This is not anything like what’s ever happened.
Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dave: I can also tell you, we see lights, and we see darkness, and we experience heat fields. But, we don’t see infrared, but it’s there and it has a biological effect. It’s not difficult to understand that the changes we make to our exposome, the set of all the things we’re … our body, our biology experiences include fields we can’t see because, well, we can measure them. We know they’re there. This is science. Just making willy-nilly changes to things that are hard to see isn’t really a good idea, from a systems thinking perspective. Make a change. Measure the results. We have not done that well enough. When we did do it with those 2,300 studies, we didn’t like what we found.
So, there’s a case that says, “The precautionary principle for your own home, where you live, ought to be in place.” The way to do that is don’t install one of these things until there’s more studies that show they’re safe. Like you, Josh, I don’t believe that those studies would show these are safe. So, I’m not planning to have a smart meter.
Josh: Right. Well, the industry versions of the studies could show anything that they want. We have whistleblowers in the film who show and talk about their experience as working as researchers for companies like Motorola, and how they started showing biological harm being done from this radiation. Motorola came back to them and said, “You can’t publish that. Well, it’s just that it’s not ready for publication. We’re not sure on your methods,” and all of this stuff. So, there is this intentional skewing of the science that has been going back on other issues, like asbestos and smoking and DDT and thalidomide and all of this stuff. The industry will just … They’ll just keep going.
There’s a psychopathic element that lacks empathy and compassion, and because it’s not connected to a feeling of life and caring for other people, if it’s only connected to the bottomline, this consciousness of these … behind these corporations, evidently it’s just going to keep going unless and until people wake up and take a stand against it. That’s pretty much obvious that all of our overseeing watchdog agencies have been corporately owned and become corporately controlled, or owned, or lobbied, or what have you. So, it’s pretty much up to us to speak up at this point.
Dave: It is up to us. I just want to say, I’ve been really fortunate in my career. I worked with senior executives, and I still do, at very, very large companies; guys who control billions and billions of dollars.
Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dave: Mostly … In fact, the vast majority of those people are conscientious. They have kids. They care about the world, and they’re not evil puppet masters with satanic rites on their walls and …
Josh: Right.
Dave: … in their living rooms. What happens, when you’re an executive at a company like that, is you have 5,000 employees; still kind of small by Walmart’s scales or whatever. There’s no way that the CEO can get all of that knowledge into his head so it comes down to he sets a culture. Or, she sets a culture in many cases now, which is a good thing. This culture goes out into the company. The problem is that the sum of hundreds of millions of decisions that are made every day by individuals at big companies, towards the companies’ best interests, when you add all that together in a complex system, what emerges is a giant psychopath.
Josh: Yes. That’s … Thank you.
Dave: But, these are not bad people.
Josh: Thank you, yes.
Dave: I’ve worked as the VP at a couple of big security companies and like, “Ah, you know, it’s all in your best interest.” No, people genuinely want to help other people. It’s just that when lots of people want to help other people and their company’s interests, that little tiny tweak that you made over here ends up coming back and generating this hiding of science behavior. That’s something that’s happened here.
Josh: There are … There are several gatekeepers or people at positions of influence, within this discussion and within the scientific community over the past decades, that seem to be … Just, they don’t want to know the truth.
Dave: Oh, yeah.
Josh: So, they’ll just block it out, and they’ll just kind of go … take the big paycheck and just steamroll forward. But, I totally agree, Dave, and I appreciate that insight and that distinction, that it’s not the people that we’re fighting against because they don’t, for the most part, have the right information. Or, their perspective is off, or they’ve been skewed a little bit from having a clear view of things. But, it’s the energy and that, like you say, that coming together of this obsession to … Based upon competition, based upon getting more and more control that it becomes … It’s like a snowballing machine that eventually would seek to preserve itself over everything else in existence.
Dave: There are a few willingly unaware, unethical people who make very big decisions that don’t serve humanity. I give you that. Just the vilification of executives at these companies isn’t warranted … except in a few cases where we probably know who they are, and we can point our fingers and be like, “We know.”
Josh: Right.
Dave: But, it’s not a … There’s no meetings in board rooms, or at least none where I’ve ever been invited, where there’s a cabal of people rubbing their hands together and doing evil stuff. It’s just not like that. They’re all just people trying to do things that are generally going to make some money, yeah, make paychecks, and help other people, and deliver a useful service because that’s actually how you make money. So …
Josh: Right.
Dave: It’s a funny thing. Well, let’s talk a bit more about what other effects and what we can do to mitigate EMF fields. If you accept the supposition … and if you don’t believe this, there’s plenty of info on the internet right now. I’m sure you can point us to some resources we’ll put in the show notes. But, if you accept our assumptions here, just for the sake of the rest of this podcast, that there is a biological effect of EMF, what should people potentially do? Reflective paints, those metal mesh screens. Should I live in a Faraday cage? Should I paint something in my bedroom? What have you seen is effective?
Josh: With regards to EMF and electromagnetic radiation in general, yeah, use Wi-Fi, your Wi-Fi router as little as possible, if at all. Used wired. The same thing with your computers themself, on your laptop, turn off the Wi-Fi when you’re using the computer, if you can, and just plug it in. There’s been studies that show when you have a computer on your lap, the sperm count literally … It tangibly and measurably goes down. That’s scientific knowledge based upon science.
Dave: Here’s my Wi-Fi router in case anyone wants to see. It’s not plugged in, but I have a little Ethernet cable over here, for when I need it, and a power cable. But, that’s how to live. You don’t need Wi-Fi most of the time.
Josh: Yeah.
Dave: Go ahead. Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you there, but …
Josh: No, you don’t. But, it’s basically recognizing the sources of the radiation and also the magnetic fields. In addition to the high frequency Wi-Fi or microwave fields, the magnetic fields that come from things like clock radios and various devices, which you don’t really want to have close … next to your head when you’re sleeping. So, it’s unplugging. Rather, not using the wireless, and turning off the wireless, and plugging in using an Ethernet cable wherever you can. Use your phone if you can. Get a good headset or use it on hands-free.
But, as far as smart meters go, the number one thing you need to do, if you don’t want to be exposed to the health effects and the loss of rights and the increased costs associated with them, is to write your utility a letter to say, “Under no circumstances will you accept one of these meters, one of these upgraded devices on your home.” If you already have one, if you find out that they’ve already installed one without your permission, then you have the right to demand that it be taken off your home.
Now, there’s resources on our site, takebackyourpower.net. If you go to the “Take Action” page and also enter in your email because if you want solutions, they’re being developed as we speak. We’re accessing a higher level of authority and jurisdiction, you can say, in the solutions that we are making available and helping to bring forward that others are developing through our website. So, after you watch the film, “Take Back Your Power,” you can enter in your email address, and the solutions will be coming to you over time, in addition to our “Take Action” page.
But, I just want to mention this, that we have to do it in writing because that’s how they do business. If they try to call you or if they come to your house and say they want to meet with you to educate you about the meters, just have them put it in writing. You need to do so in writing, as well, with a registered mail. It’s the best way to do it to make it very clear.
Dave: There’s another trick. If they want to talk to you in person, just set up a video camera.
Josh: Right.
Dave: See what they say. The odds are, nothing because they’d step in something, and they’ve been trained that way. So, the other thing is, the guy coming to your house to install the wireless thing, he’s actually not a dark imperial overlord. He’s just a guy whose job is to install meters. I don’t … Just don’t be a dick. You can say “no” firmly and nicely, and the world can continue being a somewhat happy place. Versus, dumping on the guy and telling him, “I’ve got a shotgun, and you’re a jerk.” No, he’s not a jerk. He’s just getting a paycheck for doing something that he doesn’t believe is harmful. So, differences in assumptions, but we’re all human beings here and we can act like that.
Josh: Yeah.
Dave: So, I’ve heard horrible stories from meter people, where they’re just chewed on and just treated like absolute crap. The bottomline is, they’re humans too, and they just don’t think what they’re doing is a bad thing. They’re helping people. So, they’re just wrong.
Josh: Yeah.
Dave: Not bad.
Josh: Yeah.
Dave: Now …
Josh: Don’t shoot the messenger, nor the delivery of the technology. But, you need to go above them so you’re not … you don’t find yourself negotiating with somebody at the door. There actually have been cases where police have enforced installation, so it is getting a little bit draconian in some cases and some areas. But, yeah, just make it clear in writing, peaceful. Take the high road, absolutely.
Dave: Now, it seems to me that there is an unshielded power supply in these meters, and it seems to be that sometimes boring insects and other weird biological substances end up inside smart meters on a regular basis in some homes, not others. Have cases of this been reported?
Josh: That’s interesting. I had never heard of that. I suppose it’s possible.
Dave: I’m just saying if there was such a meter at my house, I would just wonder how it kept breaking over and over and over. I don’t understand it. But, maybe we should go back to the other one.
Josh: Right. Well, the old meters actually run for 50 years without any maintenance. They just go and go and go. These new ones are designed to be replaced in 5 or 7 years.
Dave: Plus, I think the neighbor kids were playing baseball, and the baseball was thrown really hard right at the meter, and it just broke. I don’t know what happened. I imagine that’s happening on a regular basis.
Josh: Well, we interviewed Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt. He’s …
Dave: Oh, he’s a friend. I’ve shared a hotel room with Dr. Klinghardt. He’s cool.
Josh: Okay. Okay, yeah. He actually said in the interview … You can watch the full interview of him, 44 minutes, on YouTube via our website. But, he said something in the interview that in Germany, they have been taking axes to meters … and some people. We’re not advocating to do this.
Dave: No, me either. I’m just saying that someone would do it. I would never do that because that would be wrong.
Josh: Yeah.
Dave: Dr. Klinghardt’s work around the fact that he claims, and he’s not … He’s out there a little bit on some of his theories. But, he claims that with statistics and all, he can tell you, with pretty good accuracy, whether a child is likely to have autism or ADD based on the level of EMF in the pregnant mother’s bedroom.
Josh: Yes. We actually investigate that in the film, in the … I should say, in the director’s cut of our film, which is the full-length version. It turned out to be that he worked with 10 mothers with autistic kids and 10 mothers with non-autistic children; went back to the sleeping locations; measured the microwave radiation. It turns out, the ones with autistic kids, the Wi-Fi or the radiation was 20.7 times higher than the ones that had healthy children. So, and there’s hundreds of other studies that seem to indicate a link. The research is not yet what we could call conclusive, but …
Dave: Let’s be even more clear. I do not believe electromagnetic fields cause autism. I don’t believe vaccines cause autism. I don’t believe mercury causes it. I don’t believe toxic mold causes it. I believe chronic neurological inflammation, from the environmental impact of what surround you, causes autism.
Josh: Just in general, right.
Dave: It’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. I just won’t let a straw in my house, and EMF is a straw.
Josh: Yeah.
Dave: This is one of the things behind the Better Baby Book, my book about epigenetics and how to have healthier offspring is when you’re pregnant, reduce stress. Reduce toxins. Reduce EMF. Reduce all of the things that are likely to cause trouble here. So, this is just one of those things. Not to sound like one thing is the cause of autism, it’s pretty clear it’s multi-cause.
Josh: Yeah, I would agree.
Dave: Now, let’s see here. Should I … So, I’m about to move, finally, here on Vancouver Island. I’m certainly putting Wi-Fi … Or, sorry, I’m not putting Wi-Fi. I’ll have a Wi-Fi antenna, but I’m not relying on Wi-Fi. I’m putting Ethernet into all of the rooms. I’m debating whether I should put steel shielding around the electrical wires in my house. But, I mean, should I actually go off grid? If people can do that if they don’t live in a big city, should they start thinking about it for their health and wellness or for their civil liberties? What’s your take on that?
Josh: Well, that is an option that a lot of people, more and more people are doing and taking advantage of. The cost of solar is coming down exponentially over the past 10 or 10-plus years. There are tariffs that governments are applying to solar technologies to bring the cost back up. Since most of them are made in China, it’s being done in the name of protecting at-home jobs and so forth. But, still, the cost of solar is going down.
Now, with respect to health, by producing solar and feeding back into the grid, and you’re using an inverter that is, in many cases, also producing a dirty electricity and a magnetic field. So, some people who are on the more sensitive side to electromagnetic radiation are actually negatively impacted by the inverter, which is basically like a switching mode supply. It switches the mode similar to the device in the smart meter. But …
Dave: You’re talking about like one of these, right? Like, a power supply?
Josh: In essence.
Dave: Yeah.
Josh: But, just think of any time you’re switching from DC to AC or AC to DC without proper shielding or without the proper filtering like is available in … Especially Europe, it’s more known there.
Dave: This device, by the way, will measure the ions produced. You can look at the field. You can look at changes in ion currents that come off of a poorly built power supply versus a good one. So, the quality of those little wall warts that are powering your devices affects the electromagnetism in your home. So, buying the cheapest crap you can get, from some random supplier, will affect your electromagnetic environment more than buying a quality device that costs 20% more.
Josh: Right. But, by … Yes, by going off grid, you completely … If you’re off grid completely, then you don’t have to worry about having an inverter issue or having a dirty electricity issue if it’s just DC in your home and if you store the energy. But, as far as civil liberties, yeah, I mean, we haven’t really touched on the in-home surveillance aspect.
Dave: Let’s talk about that. Let’s get out the NSA Edward Snowden whole angle on this because that’s my computer security background. Like, we know the NSA did bad things. Guys, we’re watching you almost as much as you’re watching us. Hi, there. Anyway …
Josh: So, basically, with the meters, the U.S. Government Congressional Research Service, in their reports on smart meters and cybersecurity, it states very clearly that with smart meters, police will have access to what’s going on in your home, what you’re watching on television, when you’re home, what appliances you’re using, what you’re making for dinner, all of this stuff. That’s just kind of the tip of the iceberg. There has been patents put forward … patent applications by Verizon that want to … Now, this application didn’t go through, but it’s interesting that it was put forward. They applied for it, which shows their intention of wanting to harvest the data of everything that goes on in your living room, so what’s being said …
Dave: Well, Josh, hold on a second. I’ve been a CTO in Silicon Valley companies. Especially at a big company like Verizon, you cannot say that was their intention. What happened is they have an army of 1,000 attorneys. One of the attorneys who does patents, who’s one of 40 of them who do that, talked to an engineer, and his job with the attorney was to find some patents, and the engineer was like, “I’ll get like a bonus of 1,000 bucks if I assign a patent.” They’re like, “Well, we could do this. We don’t want someone else to do it. Let’s just do this.” So, a little bit of skepticism there that this is their intent. Yeah, that’s an evil idea and someone patented it, but it’s not like they did it. A guy did it, and I guarantee you the CEO of Verizon didn’t go, “Wow! Check this out! Let’s do it!” That’s not how patents work in big companies.
Josh: Okay. So, I mean, we can’t just say, “Okay. Well, the NSA’s bad, but companies are good.”
Dave: I’m not saying that.
Josh: There’s working together that’s going on. Now, they’re not doing it … They’re not setting out, perhaps, to come in and invade you and make you a drone slave. I’m not saying that. But, the reason why they want to harvest all of the data in the home, primarily from a business standpoint, is for marketing purposes.
Dave: Yes.
Josh: So, they’re talking about harvesting the information of what’s being said, and the mood of how it’s being said, and the products in and around you, and how you consume those products in your room through use of, again, a Wi-Fi device and a TV. Then, selling you or providing … pushing advertising to you in real time. So, depending on the conversation that you’re having or the argument that you’re having with your spouse, this was even said in that patent application, that they would then push marriage counseling on you.
Dave: Yeah. Or, like birth control solutions.
Josh: Or, birth control, right.
Dave: Depending on what you’re doing in the bedroom. I mean, hey, this sounds great. I mean, we can sell more. It’s evil obviously.
Josh: So, that information is not only being used for marketing purposes, it’s going and it’s being stored in government facilities. There’s evidence that we’ve uncovered that there’s … This is going on beyond … despite legislation like CISPA being shot down by the U.S. Senate. This is still sending the data of in your private home, from the corporations to the government, is actually happening. So, this is what … one of the reasons why we’re bringing this conversation forward, obviously.
Dave: Yeah, okay. I like that. I totally agree. What are some of the other privacy implications? Okay. So, Verizon has filed a patent for this that they were not awarded. We know Nielsen, forever, has been … This is a company that looks at television ratings, and it’s incredibly valuable and expensive for companies to learn, “How many people watch my TV show?” Because that’s advertisers and all this. The same thing with those loyalty cards in the grocery stores. Those are there so they can track who’s buying what, and they can be more predictive about how much to order and all that, and they can also know what to send to your house, what coupons are going to be most effective to get you to consume more.
Josh: Right.
Dave: So, it’s a logical. Of course, businesses want to know what you’re doing at home because that’s … That information is gold because if you’re the guy who cleans your house 4 times a day or 4 times a week, I should say, then you’re going to buy more cleaning solution and they should target their harassment campaigns on you more. That just makes sense. So, are you sort of thinking the motivation behind this is primarily that, and sort of the civil liberties sides of it are kind of a side effect? Or, is there more of a nefarious government thing going on here?
Josh: I don’t know. I have my thoughts about that, and I don’t know the, “It’s this percentage this, and it’s this percentage that.” I don’t know. But, what it seems to be is that it works for them, for these corporations and for marketing interests from a financial standpoint. They can then sell the data for billions and billions of dollars, what everyone’s doing in their home, and there’s already corporations set up to buy this information. The California Utilities Commission has actually admitted that it hopes that this selling of information opens up market opportunities. This is also in our film. They’ve actually admitted that they want to take the data and sell it.
On the other hand, there does seem to be this … Obviously, we know about the NSA spying scandal, and there is a governmental desire, or some would say obsession, to basically dragnet everything that’s going on through this smart grid and through the internet of things. So, Edward Snowden talked about why that’s a problem. They could paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer. Or, let’s say, for a political reason, if you voice your opinion about that you don’t support the current administration or whatever, that could lead to, without recourse, suffering austerity measures or having the energy cut off to your home or who knows what.
I’m not saying that this stuff is going to happen. I’m saying that the meter, and the research is showing that the meter gives them access to remotely control, and monitor, and extract information, and shut off power supply at the flick of a switch … or if a hacker gets in on a cellphone from China, as the former CIA director has said in our film. So, this is something that it’s just making everybody and everything vulnerable, whether it’s privacy and surveillance or hacking vulnerabilities, and it’s just … It’s not helping anybody, any consumer.
Dave: So, the basic idea is that there are known health effects that are not good, and there are unknown health effects probably too. There are privacy issues. There are government control issues like, I guess, commercial privacy and government privacy things. So, the big 3 reasons not to put a smart meter on your home. From my perspective, if somebody wants my data, whether it’s my quantified self, my biohacking data about the state of my brain, how many breaths a minute I take, how many steps I take, I would like that data to be anonymized with … actually anonymized, not just claimed to be anonymized.
Josh: Right.
Dave: I would like to be able to sell the data to the highest bidder if I want to, but they don’t have the rights to my data. The same thing goes for what happens inside my house. So, if you’re thinking about this, from any of those 3 fields, the most important one in my mind is health because … Sorry, that cat’s out of the bag, and you can claim you need more studies or whatever. That’s just not the case. That should be enough to put a complete stop to this.
The other 2 things are like icing on the cake, from my perspective. Where, okay, do you want people to know what you’re doing in your house? No. Is there a constitutional reason that they’re not allowed to know, unless they have a warrant? Yeah, there’s a reason for that. It seems like those protections have been weakened recently. But, we’ll see how things end up over the next 10 and 20 years there. In the meantime, I think that’s a pretty compelling case that says, “Given that you have a choice of having a smart meter or not having a smart meter, why would you choose one?” Is there a benefit to a consumer of putting a smart meter in their home?
Josh: Well, utilities will say that it gives the customer more control and ability to see how energy is being used in their home, but there’s a couple problems with that. Number 1 is that the … Under the federal stimulus, which $11 billion of taxpayer money was funneled into utilities for smart grid in 2008, there was supposed to be devices that go along with the meter that directly allow a homeowner … empowering the homeowner to monitor and keep track of their own energy uses. Those devices were not included, so that was not fulfilled, that mandate of this allocation of funds.
Second of all, when you think about it, it really doesn’t give you any more control if you know how much energy is being used any more than you can buy a $30 device, like a TEDx device, and plug it in, and that would produce more information, in most cases, than if you were actually to take the time and to log into your smart meter and to see all of your appliance use and so forth. But, really, the benefit is not there, and in addition to we touched only a little bit on the cost aspect. What the meter does is it allows utilities to charge whatever they want during peak hours. We’re already seeing 8%, 10%, 15% per year increases in utility rates, and that’s not even counting the time-of-use that they want to charge people in the future.
So, the stated objectives, the getting people more control of their home, it’s not happening. People are not reducing their energy usage. It’s not saving energy on the whole. It’s kind of like being said that it’s necessary for modernization, but none of those benefits are going to the people in this case.
Dave: It doesn’t sound like there’s a clear case for putting one in my house, that’s for sure, and I’m going to come back to the health of my kids, and my own health, and my human performance, and those are going to be non-negotiable terms. Yeah, maybe I’d be willing to sell my data about how often I have dinner or something. By the way, food companies won’t like that either because I only eat 2 meals a day because you don’t need to eat more when you’re not eating crap. But, hey, that’s another discussion.
So, that brings us to the end of the interview, though, just because of the amount of time we’ve got. There’s a question that I’ve asked everyone in the podcast, and I want to ask you.
Josh: Hmm.
Dave: Given all of the things you’ve learned in both smart grids and not, what are the top 3 recommendations you have for people who want to perform better?
Josh: Hmm.
Dave: Like, everything from when you were born until now, what are the 3 most important ones?
Josh: Well, that’s kind of putting me on the spot, Dave.
Dave: Absolutely.
Josh: Well, the first one that’s coming to mind, right now, is be clear what it is you want and what it is you don’t want. Really, you could say we’re all thinking beings. We all can think for ourself. We all have the ability to make decisions for ourselves. So, we’re all, in that sense, sovereign beings. So, get clear on what you want and what it is you don’t want, and then you’ll be able to manifest and create that in your life. That’s something that I’m learning about.
With respect to the smart meter and smart grid issue, we need to start, as a society as a whole, really being clear with what it is we don’t want and realizing that there are no watchdog organizations anymore that are unbiased, for the most part. We just need to start taking responsibility. So, I guess that would be the first one.
The second one might be if there’s … This is helpful for me because sometimes, I’ve had to develop pretty thick skin when I’m talking to people about this issue, especially since the majority of people in society don’t understand the significance of the health effects of this kind of radiation. But, be open to other people’s points-of-view and information coming to you because that’s how the conversation moves forward.
I would say, the third one would be feeling … connecting with something or someone that you love, and just feeling that love on a daily basis is another thing that’s really been … helped me on my path of pushing through all of the barriers that we had to get through to get this film, “Take Back Your Power,” out. As of 6 months ago, it released, and it’s starting to get around the world.
But, it was a hugely difficult process, and I had to keep coming back to that feeling of love and that feeling like, “You know, we are all connected, and there is something that’s positive that’s happening in the world and in our lives.” We need to take steps, and to correct it, and to be involved, yes. But, we can … We don’t have to be in fear, and we can feel the love. From that love is where the positive solutions, I’ve felt, come from. So, that’s kind of rambling there, Dave, but that’s the best you’re going to get from me right now for those 3 things.
Dave: Those are perfectly, perfectly good answers. Josh Del Sol from takebackyourpower.net. Thank you for being on the show. Is there any other resource you’d like to send people to who want to learn more about this? We’ll list all of these in the show notes for people. But, just Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts, anything like that.
Josh: Yeah, facebook.com/takebackyourpower; twitter.com/tbypfilm. Yeah, just go on our website, takebackyourpower.net. It’s $2.99 to watch the film online. We have DVDs. Be sure to enter your email address if you want to be part of the greater solution that’s happening around the world on this issue.
Dave: Thank you. If you’re listening in your car or at home or watching the video on iTunes or on YouTube, thank you. If this was helpful to you or you’re concerned about dirty power in your home, check out the Greenwave Electrical Filters that are there on the UpgradedSelf site. I’ve used these with coaching clients who have hard time waking up in the middle night from electrical surges, and they always wake up at exactly the same time every night. This is a strange solution that seems to help a certain class of people stay asleep.
I have them in both of my kids’ bedrooms. There’s 2 of them in my office, and there’s 1 in every other room in my house. I believe in a precautionary principle, and these things appear to do more good than harm, and they’re certainly not going to do any harm that I can find. That’s a Greenwave Electrical Power Filter on the UpgradedSelf site. Just as a resource, you don’t have to buy it from me. But, if you like the show, please do.
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