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Earthing Interview with Clint Ober
Watch this interesting interview with Clint Ober the father of Earthing. Learn how he found Earthing and where he is taking it.
This is a great interview with the Father of Earthing Clint Ober with James Colquhoun from Food Matters. You may learn a few new things from Clint about Earthing, from the lastest research to types of grounding shoes as well as hear about Clint's Earthing journey. Watch video or read full transcript below.
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TRANSCRIPT OF VIDEO
Hi, it's James here from Food Matters, and welcome to this special interview on stress relief through grounding, with one of the rediscoverers, or refounders of grounding, I would say, Clint Ober. Today we're gonna be talking about what is earthing and grounding, when and how it was discovered, and how it's been sort of rediscovered through Clint's personal story, some of the benefits of this fast-growing movement, and also how to incorporate grounding practises into you day-to-day life. My guest today, Clint Ober, was a cable TV executive, and had a bit of a wake-up moment in his life, and he discovered this ancient technique that's helped him recover and helped thousands of people around the world integrate this practise into their day-to-day lives through the continued research he's been doing on this important topic.
Clint, hello, welcome, great chatting with you. - Jamie, it's great to meet you and to be here, and be able to share this, appreciate it. - Excellent, excellent. So you know, this catalyst that you had in your sort of epiphany in, I guess, rediscovering this ancient technique, tell me a little bit about your journey and how you came to discover this.
Well, it's a long journey, but I'm gonna do a shorter version here. Basically, I grew up in kind of an agricultural environment, had a lot of Native American influence when I was young, and so I have a very earthy background. Meaning lived off the land, and then in the Native American culture, everything is connected, you learn a different way of looking at things and feeling things. And so I spent, after I left that environment, I spent about 30 years in the communications industry. Which was what we call low-power television, cable television, and then satellites and all kinds of, I was involved in almost every aspect of the early development of the cable industry. And it was a fun thing to do, when you live in the hinterlands of Montana, there's not a lot of TV and there's not a lot of people. So cable TV was quite an event to bring that along, or to work on it. But anyhow, I spent about 30 years in that industry, and when I was, just turned 50 I think, in that timeframe, I had a major health disorder. And that kind of, I mean I just retired from business, and kind of backed up. And it was a very serious situation, I had ended up with an abscess in the liver, and it was from a dental infection, and when they fixed the dental thing then it manifested about 30 days later into an abscess in the liver. Which, at that time, I was healthy enough I could get a liver transplant, get on the list, but I didn't have enough time. And at that time, this was 23 years ago, they didn't have a lot of experience in liver surgery. And they didn't know how much they could remove, whatever, and were it to materialise and grow back. The liver does grow back quite quickly if you have enough of it to sustain life in the process.
So my story begins somewhere about that time. I had no knowledge whatsoever about grounding during that experience. My knowledge of grounding came because in the cable industry, in order to have a good quality signal, or to have clean data, clean pictures, no static, no noise, no lines, you have to ground everything to the earth. And you do that in order to maintain a negative surface charge on the cables, and to prevent the build-up of any kind of a static charge. And it's really quite simple, but nobody would think anything about it, unless you were in that kind of an industry. But any time we would put up a cable system, we have to ground it to the earth at many points, and then whenever we entered the home, we had to ground the drop going into the home. The same with telephone, power and everything else. And that was to prevent lightning and whatever from entering the home. But the whole process is about maintaining the equipment at earth potential. Your computer, if it's got a three-pronged outlet on it, it's plugged in, the chassis of your computer is grounded to the earth. It's maintaining an earth charge. And that's to prevent noise, static electricity, discharge and harm to any of the chips or software and so on. So anyhow, that's where I learned about grounding. And before that I learned that the earth was alive, and full of energy, and it's all systemically connected, because I grew up on a ranch where we raised cattle. And I remember when I was very young, when my grandfather told me, he says, now you are a cowboy, and here's what cowboys do. They're not like those ones on the TV. What you do is you babysit the cows, and you watch them, and you make sure that they're all happy, and that they all look the same. But if you see one that's glassy-eyed, or if you see one that's not acting like all the rest of the cows, then there's something wrong with that cow. So we take it out of the herd, put it in a little pen, holding pen, then you go out and you ride the pasture, make sure there's no noxious weeds, make sure the drinking water is clean, make sure there's no dead animals upstream, make sure the grass is not too short. The whole concept was very simple. Keep the pasture pristine, and the animals will be healthy. And if the cows get sick, and we don't take care of them, then we have to call the vet, then we have to call the banker, and give 'em the keys and say, you guys figure this out, we're outta here. Because you can't get any money if the animals get sick. I can remember one time, my granddad told me, he says, if people were cows, we'd have to take 'em out and shoot 'em, because we couldn't afford the vet bill. Sorry. - That's all right. - So anyhow, that's kind of the background of the flavour. And then, as time went on, I mean when I recovered from the liver surgery, I went home. I was in the hospital for I think 20-some days. And I had lost a lot of weight. They didn't give me a lot of hope when I went into that surgery, but I did survive. And I spent about a year for the liver to grow back to its full size, or for my energy to come back, for sure. And it took me about six months to be able to walk a mile. And then all of a sudden it just kept coming back, coming back. But one day after I had come home, and I was, I was kind of successful in the cable industry, and computer things, so I had a little bit of money, so I had all the toys, I had all of the nice things that a 49, 50-year-old man shoots for, playing king of the mountain.
But anyhow, I came home, and I was laying in bed, in recovery. My kids were all gone, they were out, they were on their own, they're married and off. And I was single. And I was pretty much alone. And one morning I looked up out the window, and everything was more vibrant than I had ever recalled seeing it before. It was more, if I could use the word, energetic. It just had vibrance, you know, the tree leaves had vibrance. The blue in the sky and the clouds, everything had vibrance to it. You know, like energy, I mean it was alive. And I didn't think too much about all of that. But I took, shortly after that I kind of realised that I'd spent my whole life accumulating all of these assets, or toys, cars, houses, you name it. And I had a huge collection of Native American art, probably one of the largest around. But I looked at all of it one day, and I said, you know I never owned any of this, all I ever did was adopt it, and then I spent the rest of my life taking care of it. And if I would have died, then what would've happened, the kids would've taken a few things, and the rest of it would've become meaningless. So shortly after that, I just called up the kids, and I said, you know whatever you would've taken had I not survived, I want you to come and get it now, and take it away. Because I'm gonna sell the house, I'm getting rid of everything. And they thought I was nuts, because I was still going to the doc. So they had me visit a shrink to make sure I was okay. But anyhow, what I realised was, I had almost died, and I had made my life about things that I thought were important. You know, I helped, I was one of the first people to put data over a satellite and feed it to a personal computer. One of the first cable modems that was ever created, we had to create to do that. And we looked at the computer as a TV set without a signal, and so this whole new world evolved. And then the internet came along, and then wow, we have what we have today, it's just unbelievable what happened in those short years. But anyhow, I knew that when I was going through that few nights before my surgery, that I might not come out of it, that it's a pretty shocking thing for a 49, 50-year-old man to experience that. And so you start coming to terms with a lot of things in your life. One, I went back to my Native American roots, and that comforted me and helped me get to a certain point. But the rest of it, I looked around at the material world, and I just realised that I had made my life about things. And so now that I'm still alive, I cannot go and do that again. I cannot go back to the office, I cannot go back to the business world. I don't wanna do anything that's related to making money, or solely about making money. I wanted to do something that I felt, the next time I die, doesn't matter whether anyone else in the world knows about this, but I have to know, in my own mind, that I did something worthwhile, that my life was worth being here. And so I just remember saying that I need to make my life about something. And in that process, I disposed of almost literally everything I owned, I bought a small RV, and I had 2 1/2 suitcases. I still pretty much, 20-some years later, I live in a home now, but I still only have 2 1/2 suitcases of personal belongings. It's a freedom that I have to maintain. So anyhow, along the way, I bought the RV and I just took off for about four years. And I just travelled around, and I spent most of my time in national parks, because that's where I felt the most comfortable and the closest to nature. And then one time I was down in Key Largo, on the bay side, and I just had this urging, this intuitive thing calling me, and it was like the earth was talking to me. I needed to go back west, and there was something going on. And I didn't know what it was, but it was time to go.
So I went. And I ended up, of all places, in a place called Sedona, Arizona. It was between Flagstaff and Phoenix, I was on my way to Flagstaff, it was late at night, pulled in, went to Sedona, woke up in the morning and looked around, and I said, I'm not leaving here. This is amazing, I'm gonna stay. It's like living in a park and you have all the other things. So I stayed there for about a year and a half. And one day I was playing on the computer, and it kept crashing. In the old days, back in, this would've been, I don't know a long time ago. So if you had static electricity, and the computer wasn't properly grounded, it would lock up. They don't have so much of that today. Anyhow, so I figured out what it was, and I took a piece of metal tape, and I laid it across my desk, so that I could touch it before I touched the computer, just playing with it to get rid of this problem, because the computers back then weren't grounded. This particular type wasn't. So what I did, in the process of grounding the tape, I realised that the electrical outlet wasn't grounded and so on, so I started playing with the ground. Cleaned that up, fixed it, made it work. Then I went outdoors, and I was just sitting there on a bench, and I saw this tour bus pull up, and it was full of tourists, and it looked like they had just been at one of the discount malls, and everybody had bought a brand new pair of big white shoes, tennis shoes. And these were all, I think they were a Japanese tourist group, and they were a little shorter than most of us. And these white shoes just looked so out of place. Because when they were walking, all you could see was the shoes. And so, it was kind of an intuitive thing, and I just asked, I wonder if wearing these rubber-soled shoes can have a consequence. Because, from my background, I grew up, we were barefoot until 1960, 1959. The only time we wore shoes, were leather shoes, leather-soled, and we only wore them during school, or to church, or to a special event. And if it rained we had to take 'em off and hold 'em in our hand and walk, so the shoes didn't get wet and we didn't ruin them. So between 1950 and 1960, there was this big transition.
And in 1960 is when it really took off. Today, 95% of all people wear rubber-soled, synthetic-soled shoes. 1960, less than 5%. - Wow. - So that was the question, that was the question that I asked 18 years go. And you can interrupt any time you want here. - Well I wanna know, like from that introspective moment in your life, when you looked at these Japanese tourists wearing all these shoes in Sedona, and asking that question, and you've since done an extraordinary, and helped to facilitate an extraordinary amount of research around EMF, EMR. Tell me a little bit about how some of this dirty electricity can accumulate in the body, and how some studies that show that getting rid of this dirty electricity, how powerful that can be for sort of de-stressing the body, and even healing from chronic pain, and chronic degenerative disease. - Okay, well I hear the word dirty electricity, and EMFs and so on, it takes a long time to explain. Very few people really understand electromagnetism, let's use that term. But in 1960, what happened was, we began the rise of autoimmune disease. And even to this day, autism, lupus, MS, diabetes, these are all autoimmune. So there's been this growth. - Exponential. - Yeah, exponential growth. And then when you look at the growth of the shoe industry, you see the same growth. Now, in the beginning, because of my electrical background, I thought that EMFs and everything were the major problem. So what I did is, and I didn't know. And we did our first study. We grounded 60 people, 30 of them were grounded, 30 of them were placebo ground. And I remember going to, and all we had was a little pad that was 24 inches by 12 inches, and it was conductive. And we would have people sleep on it under their sheet. - And that was connected, that was connected to a cable that ran outside to the ground, right? - Yes, it was either connected to the electrical ground, or to a pipe, or to a ground rod that was driven into the earth specifically for that cable. - So you're earthed, grounded the test group to the earth, so they're connected to the earth when they sleep. - Yes. The other people were still connected, but they had a splice in it and they wouldn't have known that it was not a conductive wire. So anyhow, what happened was, I went to one person's house. And we also took an EMF measurement in the bedroom prior to doing this. And then we would actually measure any voltages, any charges that were on their body. And then we would ground them, make sure it was working, whatever, whatever. But anyhow, I went to this one lady, who had all kinds of arthritis, all kinds of health issues, her arms were swollen up and everything. And she had, when we grounded her, she had about 10, I mean a significant amount of EMF voltage, or what you called dirty electricity, or whatever, on her body. So then there's another gentleman across town, over in Santa Barbara area that had the same kind of health disorders. But in his bedroom, he was on, there was no electrical appliances in the bedroom. There was a metal frame on the bed. And when we measured him, he millivolts of charge, no charge of all. And I said in the back of my mind, well this is gonna be a waste of time. This is really gonna be bad for our study. Too bad we can't have somebody who has more EMF, but whatever. So anyhow, 60 days later, when the nurse that was collecting all the, in her final interview, came in and she showed the results. Both of these people had the results, one had no electricity to speak of, dirty electricity or anything, the other one had a significant amount. So then I looked at everything, and I said wait a minute, there's something wrong here, something else is contributing to what's happening here. Because no matter, when you ground somebody, you're gonna reduce any inflammation they have in their body. You're gonna reduce the pain, the chronic pain. And the only way you can do that, we didn't know that back then, no one did. But yeah, reduce the inflammation, that reduces pain. Pain is a byproduct of inflammation. If you have pain in your body, then you have chronic inflammation manifesting it.
So, that's when I went back to the drawing board, and I began to understand that when we ground something we're putting a negative charge on the body, on the device, whether it's an amplifier, or cable. We're holding it in a negatively charged state, so if a positive charge comes by it can be absorbed without harming or creating an electrical event. So then I had to re-change all my thinking. So what I would do, is I would put a capacitor in my, I don't know, this may be too technical, but on some people, and not on the others, who had pain. The people who didn't have a capacitor had free-flow wire, electron flow, their pain reduced in five or 10 minutes. People who had the capacitor wouldn't reduce in 24 hours. So then, personally, what I did at that time, I said okay there is something going on here bigger and much differently than what we all thought. Because it's not just, you can remove the EMFs, but that doesn't remove the inflammation. That doesn't remove these other issues. It's like food. You can eat 2,000 of these calories or 2,000 of these kind of calories. One of them is gonna create inflammation, one of them is gonna help keep inflammation at bay. So something like that. And again, I'm getting too technical. I'm trying to answer your question, but I have to give a little foundation here. So anyhow, that's when I realised, and started doing my homework, and realised that when we ground the human body, the earth is about, let's say 20 millivolts negative.
That means there's a sea of electrons laying on the earth. So when you touch it, I have a picture here that I made just in case this issue came up. - Okay. - Yeah, I don't know if you can see, I can't see it myself. - A little bit higher, a little bit higher there. Yeah, perfect. - So, what you have here is what we call Mr Barefoot and Mr Shoes. - Yeah, okay, got it. - Mr Red and Mr Blue. So when you're wearing shoes, then you lose this negative surface charge. It goes away. When you ground yourself, your body equalises with the earth and maintains this natural surface charge. And what I know now after 18 years of pursuing the research, and going out, and working with people, thousands of people. At like some of the events we did with David Wolfe, we would ground 1500 people at a time.
But anyhow, so now I can say honestly, that inflammation as we know it, the modern plethora of these modern inflammation-related health disorders, they started in the 60s, and that's when they took off. And every time we ground somebody, I don't care how much you have in your body, if we put patches on you, or whatever, grounding, grounding would be the equivalent of you being stuck, or standing on your, or having your bare feet and your hands on nice moist dirt. I know now that you can't have inflammation in a grounded body. You can't have inflammation in a grounded cable system, you can't have charge in a grounded cable system. A grounded computer, a grounded refrigerator, a grounded anything. That's why everything in the electrical world is grounded, is to prevent charge. The body is the most electrical mechanism in our environment. And all throughout history, all throughout time, all throughout evolution, however you wanna look at it, we were always grounded. Our bodies evolved and developed in a negative state. You can't have inflammation when your body's negative. So that led everything on a different path. So I spent about four years playing around with the EMF and everything. But once I met a gentleman by the name of Steven Sinatra, who was a cardiologist, he said Clint, you need to be looking at, if you're reducing pain, you've gotta be looking at inflammation. Because inflammation is the cause of pain. And so I started looking at inflammation. To me that was, you're playing tennis and you trip, and your ankle swells up or whatever, that was inflammation to me. But about that same time, Ridker and those fellows back at Boston Mass came out with the statement that you don't have cancer, you don't have indigestion, you don't have all these health disorders, what you have is chronic inflammation. And I manifests differently in different people, based on their living lifestyle, environment, and their genetics. And then I said to myself, well if inflammation is the cause of all these problems, then we know that grounding reduces and prevents inflammation, that's when we started doing more studies and started pushing this thing forward. So here's what I found out about EMF and dirty electricity. The typical person who is electrically sensitive, who is really seriously affected by EMF, they're also affected by wind, by temperature, by touch, by everything. And what it is, is they're suffering from adrenal burnout, meaning they have exhausted their adrenals. I mean the sympathetic nervous system is sitting over here sensing everything in the environment, whether it's heat, light wind, cold, whatever it is. And the parasympathetic inside is trying to modulate, or dampen the effect of the sympathetic. And in that process it's using, it's hormones, it's releasing hormones, it's adrenal-based. Well the adrenals have a limited supply at any given time. So if you live in chronically-elevated sympathetic state, you're going to exhaust your adrenals, then the sympathetic nervous system is gonna push further and further, more cortisol, cortisol's gonna create inflammation, the inflammation's gonna create pain, the pain is gonna create more stress, which is going to create more cortisol, so it's a vicious cycle, and the adrenals never get to recover. So rather than trying to eliminate all the EMFs, and I think everybody should, because they're noisy, you don't need, it's not natural, you need to remove them from your environment if at all possible.
But the number one thing that people who are really electrically sensitive need, is they need to understand that it is adrenal-based, and they need to restore their adrenals with diet, and grounding, and all these other good things, and removing things. But they also need, I hate to say this sometimes, gonna get myself in trouble, but mental grounding. They need to know what they can and cannot do with their lives and address it accordingly and get happy. And if they're in a toxic environment, move. Toxic relationship, toxic whatever. Get rid of stress, get rid of cortisol. So anyhow, that's my take on, dirty electricity, I don't like the word, I don't like the term. Because it's just a misnomer. People who promote it primarily are selling black boxes. And I just know that-- - So what you're saying is that, look, we have electricity that's in our environment everywhere, I mean it's on the computers we're on, it's in the phones we're on, it's the microwaves we've got in our house, it's the TV. But the secret is not focusing on how do we sort of tune that out. Sure, we should try to limit that in our lives, but grounding is the ultimate practise to help really heal the body, reduce the inflammation. But also, what you're saying, which is really interesting, is that helping reduce and calm that sympathetic nervous system to reduce the cortisol and reduce the stress in our lives. And this is huge, because so many people, I think, are very unaware of this ancient, basic technique of grounding themselves. And the impacts it can have on stress, and their health, and their life. And so can we talk a little bit about some of the ancient connections to this technique. I know that you reference a lot of the indigenous Indian-Americans, and that they have a rich history of talking about the connection with Mother Earth, and grounding to Mother Earth. Was this a big area of influence to you when you were starting to do the research?
- Subliminally. I didn't knowingly, but it was having that in my background that gave me that foundational thing to ask these questions. It's like cable and grounding cable. I never thought about grounding, it was just something you had to do. I never thought about any of it related to the body or anything until long after all of this time. So it was the seasoning.
I wanna mention one thing before you go on. It's a study that was just published, and it's electrical grounding improves vagal tone in premies. This was just published last week. And in the incubators where they have the babies, you know there's a lot of EMF, and a lot of noise, a lot of static electricity and so on. So anyhow, the results of this study, and it's published in, you know it was done at the Hershey Clinic in Hershey, Pennsylvania, the University of Pennsylvania. And it was published in Neonatology. And it's a big problem. This is when babies get colic and all that kind of stuff. The sympathetic nervous system is stressed. And whether it's an adult, a child, or a baby. So you get stressed. so grounding instantly normalises vagal tone in premies in about 30 seconds.
But that's, there's something about, you know when you go into the woods, you go into the forest, or you're just in nature, or you're working in the fields, whatever it is. There's an energy, there's an energy. Everything that's alive. It's like every cell, everything is, there's consciousness, there's connectedness, there's this energy. And when you're barefoot, or in a moccasin or whatever, but even still you pretty much want barefoot, you can feel this energy, you can feel it pulsing, and it's a rhythm. I mean the earth, the tides of the ocean are creating this noise and it goes across the land masses and everything, and the tides and the moon, all of these rhythms that are in the earth, and when we touch the earth, then our bodies are an antenna, not an antenna for EMF, it's an antenna that we're radiating an antenna for earth signals. We're radiating the signals of the earth through, we take it up into our body and we radiate it into the environment around us. And there's a lot of science about all of this. But it's too technical to get into in a short interview. - So, I wanna talk really about the practicality of grounding. We've spoken a lot about the science, we've spoken a lot about the theories behind it, and the mechanisms and how it works. But if somebody is listening to this interview and they're stressed out, or they have inflammation in the body, or they have an autoimmune condition, or they can't sleep that well, what is the most practical way that people can introduce this concept of grounding into their day-to-day life? And how would you prescribe this to people? - Okay, what I try to convince everybody to do, first of all, if you have a back yard, or if you have a park close by. Go to the park, go outdoors, take a chair, set it on the yard, in the grass, and take your shoes off. You know, stay out of the sun, but take your shoes off, and just put your feet on the earth. And notice how much inflammation and pain, and notice your mood, notice everything in your body, how you feel. And then 15, 20, 30 minutes later, where did the pain go? And you have to start there. And then, most people, our lives are so full of the stuff that goes on in our daily lives. You know, work, kids, the family, the money, the groceries, just everything that goes on. And so we're overwhelmed at all times. When you're angry or you're upset, it's like a child. You know, they get out of hand, we ground them. What does grounding mean? - Oh that's interesting. - It means return to normal, calm down, return to normal. And so just go ahead and get grounded. If you put your bare feet and your bare hands on the ground, especially if there's a little moisture and green grass and so on. Or go to the beach and just bury your feet in the beach. And just see how long you can stay mad. You can't. Here's what so many people today are suffering from, living in a chronically elevated state.
And I'll try to make this quick, because I have to tell cowboy stories, because that's where I grew up. But I remember in the old days, some years there would be lots of rabbits and lots of coyotes. And when you see the rabbits and the coyotes and there's not a lot of people around, and rabbit's sitting there, eating away, everything's fine. And then all of sudden a coyote starts sneaking up, and he senses the coyote. The rabbit's ears go up, the coyote jumps. And the rabbit takes off and goes zig, zag, zig, zag, all over the pasture. And then eventually, the coyote lays down, he run out of energy. And the rabbit, he goes a little bit further and he stops. And he's sitting there shaking like this. And then all of a sudden he has this big shake, like that, he's lets go of everything, and he goes back to eating grass like nothing ever happened. Now, I feel that that's, you know he's discharging the cortisol, you know, to the earth, grounding. But in the modern world, we can go to the mailbox and get a bill, our cortisol shoots up. Our sympathetic, our fight-or-flight system is chronically elevated today. Every time we get in a car, the traffic, the noise, the work, the kids. Everything that goes on, there's fight-or-flight response tied to it. Somebody can drop a fork on the floor and our sympathetic nervous system's gonna shoot up. Every time that happens, cortisol starts rising and rising. And then eventually, that creates aches and pains, and it's just a vicious cycle. And then people get sick. But if people could go get grounded, even for 15, 20, 30 minutes a day, it's gonna change their life. You can't sleep at night, go outdoors before you go to bed, sit down on the earth, put your hands and feet on the earth. And just ground it out. Ground, you're grounding out the noise, grounding out the stress. What you're really doing, what you're doing more than anything else, technically, is you're absorbing the electrons from the earth, and they're reducing inflammation and charge in your body, neutralising charge, and then the nervous system calms and quiets down. And then you can breath easy, and then you can sleep. But it's about discharging, we have to get the shoes off long enough to discharge the body. - Wow, wow, what a profound concept. And how simple, really. It's like there's so much that I discuss with experts all around the world, about even the introduction of modern wheat. As we consumed more of that and changed wheat structure, we've seen an increase in chronic disease. We've never eaten that much wheat before. But like you said, we introduced the rubber-soled shoe, an innocuous invention, but it started that process of disconnecting us from the earth, of disconnecting us electrically to that sort of mother negative charge that helps to ground us. You know, one of the things that I found quite interesting, when you research was starting to come to light, and there was even some films made about it. There's a film called The Grounded, which we also have on our TV channel as well, and you've got a new short movie that's coming out or just released. And in the studies that you show, you use a grounding system, so that people can be grounded. Because there might be a lot of people that live in New York City who, if they wake up at nine o'clock at night, it's not very practical, in the middle of winter, for them to go outside and sit in Central Park, because they might lose their wallet, as opposed to losing their stress. But if we think about those types of people, there's techniques and there's technology now that can help do that. Tell me about some of this technology and how it works. - Well, when we started doing our studies, I knew a lot about grounding, and ground planes. A ground plane is anything that's conductive, you connect it to the earth with a wire, and hold it up, that's a ground plane. And if you put a person on the ground plane, then the person is conductive, so then they become a ground plane. And they're at earth potential, they're one and the same electrically with the earth. So in our processes, in order to do our original studies, we had to manufacture, or mock up, some ground planes. And I would use carbon fibres and silver fibres, and couldn't put copper, you have to be careful what you put against the body for extended periods. So it has to be silver or carbon, and things like that. So anyhow, we would make up these mats. Like I said, we started with three-inch wide metal duct tape, and just laid it across the bench. And then we went to felt pads-- - And the person's skin needs to touch that metal tape, or pad? - Yes, you have to have some kind of contact. So if it's gonna be small contact, or with clothing on and stuff, then you have to have larger ground plane, so that when you perspire, when the body perspires, it hydrates the clothing, and the hydration of the, the moisture, hydrates and that becomes the conductive path between the body and the pad. So anyhow, we started out with simple pads. And then as we kept doing studies, everybody wanted the samples. People that were in the studies, some of the researchers. And then it was the relatives, because the benefits started to show up. And my whole mission on this thing was, this is something that everybody needs to learn about, because if all these disease are inflammation, then there's a connection here. So this wasn't about marketing products, this is a message to the world. I mean, we have really got to stop and think about what we're doing with our environments. You're doing it with food, this is a different side of the coin. But it's a wake-up call, that if just a simple touching the earth affects our nervous system, our autonomic nervous system and inflammation, and the rhythms and the functioning of our body, then we have to stop and bring those in to our modern environments in some fashion. Or we gotta go back and sleep on the earth. - Yeah, well we used to sleep on the earth, I mean that changed. And so these pads, these pads are connected to either, either they go out a window and to a rod that goes in the ground, or they're connected to the earthing plug in the electrical plug system. - In the United States, homes built after 1970, they all have a modern ground system. A ground wire going from each outlet to a bar, to a ground rod driven in the earth. And then the homes built before we have to use a ground wire. You can drill a hole and put a wall plate in, make it a permanent installation, or you can just throw the wire out the window, stick the ground rod in the earth, and connect your pad to it. But there's pads, there's mats, I guess is what you call them. We've tried to experiment with the mattresses, and we have chairs that are coming along, that are becoming somewhat popular. - And you still have the sheets, as well, is that right? - Yeah, the sheets are, we still have them. And we're trying to perfect them and improve them. Again, I'm trying to finish up the studies. I have two, three studies left that we're doing. One's hypertension, one is on people who work with their hands, like body workers and those kinds of people, professional people. And a couple others. But then, really, it was never my real desire to go and create products and sell products. I thought somebody would do that. But nobody could do that, because nobody knows. It's like I worked a lot with Nike, and they said, we can't go tell people they need grounded shoes. You go tell them, and when they come into our store and they say I want grounded Nikes, then we'll make 'em. And that's kind of how it works. - So are there shoes that are, obviously people should walk barefoot for a period of time, they should ground themselves, if they've got a buildup of stress or tension, before they go to bed. But are there types of shoes now, I mean you see the strange-looking Vibrams, and all these types of shoes, these are grounded modern shoes, are there other types of shoes that are grounded? - There's one company that's called Plugs that makes kind of a ladies shoe that has some grounding in it. A couple or three other people have came along and made them and disappeared, because the market isn't rushing to their door. But anyhow, grounded shoes today are readily available, to the electrostatic discharge industry, ESD. Anybody who works in a clean room, who works in a mission-critical centre, 911. They have shoes that have enough carbon in them so that when you walk you don't create static charges. Which will otherwise blow the chips and so on. So the one that, not that any one's any better than the other one, but Reebok is, they have a nice soft hold, it's kind of a soft-toe athletic shoe, that's kinda nice. A lot of them have hard toes, because they're work environments and so on. And a lot of work in factories, there's a lot of static generated from motors and plastic contact and all that stuff. So it's a very common thing. People in the gasoline industry, the dynamite industry, they all have to wear grounded shoes. But the consumer market, there's not really a lot of choice. I mean you can go Google it and there's a few people out there doing hand-type things. But the world needs a grounded shoe. That's why, that last little 15-minute video we made, I was just showing, I said here's the problem folks, we need to fix these shoes. The people have to go to the shoe industry and say put another 10 cents worth of carbon in that rubber and ground that shoe, that's gonna help here. So what this is all about, is we have made products, and we have sold a lot of product. And like the sheets, they don't last as long as I would like them too. Some people sweat a lot, they have a lot of sulphur in their sweat, and they're gonna oxidise the silver. Some people, like the women are a little different, their sheets will last five years, a man's sheet will only last six, so those problems have to be solved. So there's great opportunity here. And it's like, it takes 40 years from the time, it's like what's the last innovation that we had in the you know, it was the advent of the computer and the cellphone, it's taken us 40 years to really take that 100% to the population in the world. But there's been no really new technology or innovation for 40 years. But every 40 years there is one that comes along that is accepted and incorporated into our living environments and into our societies that improves our lives in some way that it has to be implemented, so then whole new industries are created. So we need the shoe industry to reinvent shoes. We need the carpet industry to fix the carpets, any kind of flooring material needs to have a little bit of conductive in it of some kind. Anything you sit on, anything you sleep on, if you sit in an office chair, you need a conductive office chair. They're readily available in the ESD industry, but it's to protect the chips, not to protect the person. But the people who work on chips are healthier than their white-collar counterparts. - Interesting, interesting. I think, also probably, what we do need, Clint, is really more education around this topic. So that people can more consciously ground themselves in their day-to-day life. Like, did I walk barefoot today? It's something that I do, I fly a lot with my work and whenever I get to the first destination, I get barefoot. I like to get in the water, in the ocean, and just really clear off and just ground myself. And it's a fantastic ritual. - And also resets your clock, your biological clock to your time zone. Your cortisol syncs up to that, and then you don't have to have that feeling of acid, the jet lag running through your veins. - So tell me a little bit about, as we sort of come toward the end of the conversation today, a lot of people that are listening to this interview have stress, may have stress issues, it's quite common in the modern world, and we've spoken a little bit about some of the techniques for doing that, and how it works with the cortisol. But let's just talk a little bit about sleep now, as well if we could. I mean a lot of people suffer with insomnia, they struggle getting to sleep, or they get to sleep, and then they wake up, and they can't get back to sleep. What is your general theories or ideas around this, and what prescriptive ideas would you give someone who suffers from this type of condition? - Okay. I have a lot of experience with that. And I've done a lot of research, I've done a lot of experiments. And what I've learned is sleep is autonomic. It's like breathing, it's like the heart beating. In a 24-hour period, your body wants to sleep. It's autonomic, it's going to happen. If you are not sleeping, then something is interfering with your body's ability to sleep. And then go back to the coyote. If you're not sleeping, there's only one thing that can really interfere with sleep: elevated cortisol. Fight or flight. You've got something on your mind, something's eating at you. There's a coyote after you. Maybe it's how do I pay the bill, maybe it's this problem, or that problem, but something is actively on the mind interfering with your ability to go to sleep. Now if you have pain, from inflammation, you're not gonna be able to sleep. Because again, your sympathetic nervous system is chronically elevated. But you have these two different, you have a physical thing and you have the emotional thing. And if you ground yourself, you're gonna reduce the inflammation, that's gonna help you sleep. If you have an emotional charge that's interfering with your sleep, I think you have a couple options. We know that grounding calms the sympathetic nervous system. We know that, we have lots of studies on that. So just go outdoors, and let it go. But sometimes you can't, sometimes what you need to do, the mind is trying to hold on and take care of these things that, tomorrow you'll forget them anyway, but tonight you're worried about this and that. Somebody told me this a long time ago, and it works for me personally. Take a pencil and a paper, and write down whatever's on your mind that's really eating at you. And put it over on the nightstand so your brain knows that you don't have to worry about it, because in the morning when you wake up it's right there, you can get it and grab it and do it again. But grounding does quiet the autonomic nervous system, which we have lots of data. It's important. If your health is very compromised, then you do need to consider using these products, these sleep mats and chair mats and floor mats and so on. But to learn about grounding, I highly recommend, go outdoors. Pay attention to how you feel, what you're experiencing. Take your shoes off, and put your hands and your feet on the earth, bury them in the sand if you can at the beach, or go sit under a tree, sit on a rock. Feel the energy of the tree, feel the energy of the earth. And then feel how you body equalises and discharges and it's, I, it's so important. I've been doing this for 18 years, I'm 73 now. And I get up every morning, and I know exactly what I have to do. Educate, teach one more person. - Yeah. And get barefoot. Both. So Clint, it's been an incredible amount of knowledge you've shared with us today and a lot of great stories and personal stories, and it's been wonderful to chat with you. You know, to finish up here, I'd love if you could imagine that the world was your classroom and you had the stage for a minute or two, what would be your final sort of message for those listening today, and also for your legacy, and your final message you could pass? - Well that's interesting. I think that we need to, if I could say one thing that, and I learned it very young, we're all connected. Every living thing on the planet, we're all one thing, we're all connected. And as we remove ourselves from that connection, or nature, I mean the consciousness, the knowledge in nature, the thing that makes us who we are, the grass. You know, everything that's alive. That consciousness. We all need to back up and open up to it, and understand how there's a symphony here. It's not about grounding, or this or that, we need to reconnect in the earth and live in harmony with nature, and make this a better place. And the most important thing, and where I put most of my energy is, you gotta take care of the next generation. At all costs. You have to, you know the autism, all the children on the spectrum. You gotta get the shoes off, you gotta get them grounded, you gotta calm them down. It's about grounding. It's not grounding in a scientific sense like this, it's about reconnecting to the planet, reconnecting to nature, to consciousness, to the universe, because it's all one thing. And we think that we're separate but we're not. We're all a piece and a part, and we're all one. And that's all I can say is, let everything else go until you figure that out. - Well that's beautiful. That's an amazing finish there. And it makes me think. You're right, you're spot-on. We've spent 99 or more per cent of our evolution wild, connected, one, barefoot, grounded, and we've made this change, along with a number of other changes, like a lot more toxins, a lot more toxic food, chemicals, a lot more processed foods, a lot more refined grains, and we've disconnected ourselves from the earth at the same time. What a profound message you have, Clint. It's been an honour to speak with you today, I'm a fan of your work, and luckily I am a surfer, so I ground myself most days when I run into the ocean barefoot. - Perfect. - And I feel fantastic after I've been in the ocean and after I've been barefoot. I feel really connected and free and I don't have any worries or any stress. And now I know there's a scientific truth to it. And I applaud you and your work, and I hope that people can find out more about your book, called Earthing, I believe is the title of the book. - Yes. - And there's a film called The Grounded which we have on Food Matters TV as well, which is a fantastic film. And you've got a new short film out, so I'll make sure that people know about this. And thank you so much for you work. Keep it up and what a fantastic mission and legacy you're leaving. Well done. - Well I appreciate the opportunity, and I appreciate you and all that you do. And let's just keep on going. - Let's do it, thank so much Clint, have a fantastic day. - Take care, bye. - See you, bye.
