Learn True Health with Ashley James 445 Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity & Life, The Link Between Electromagnetic Pollution, Disease, & Infection, Improve Your Health By Decreasing Exposure To Electric Smog, Wireless Technology, 5G, & EM Radiation, Arthur Firstenberg
BOOK: Invisible Rainbow https://amzn.to/300Sn23
Cellular Phone Task Force, www.cellphonetaskforce.org International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space, www.5gSpaceAppeal.org
Check out IIN and get a free module: LearnTrueHealth.com/coach
The Invisible Rainbowhttps://www.learntruehealth.com/the-invisible-rainbow
Highlights:
- What is electrical pollution
- Illnesses caused by exposure to electrical pollution
- Ways to lessen exposure to electrical pollution
5G is here, and while many people are excited about this technology, Arthur Firstenberg describes it as the most urgent threat on earth today. In this episode, he explains why 5G is bad for us. He also enumerates different sources of electrical pollution and how we can lessen exposure to electrical pollution.
[00:00:00] Ashley James: Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James. This is episode 445. I am so excited for today’s guest. We have the author of The Invisible Rainbow, Arthur Firstenberg. Arthur, one of my best friends was freaking out when she read your book. Her husband read your book, and he just was blown away. And then I started getting requests from a few listeners saying that your book has been mind-blowing, and it’s the most important book people have read in the last 10 years or more. It really caught my attention, and I thought I have to have this man on the show. We have to let more people know about your work.
So I recently got your book, and I cannot put it down. I’m holding it right now. I could probably use it as an exercise device because of how thick it is. Based on the picture on Amazon, I was expecting a little paperback I could finish on the weekend, and it’s almost 400 pages. And then there’s what seems like about 75 to 100 pages of references. I mean, you really did your homework.
[00:01:23] Arthur Firstenberg: There’s actually 150 pages of footnotes and bibliography.
[00:01:30] Ashley James: Yes, I was guessing. I’m holding it. I showed my husband. I’m like, “Do you see the scientific references?” I’m quite impressed. But reading your book, it’s very, very interesting. The first thing that came to mind is that I would love to see your book become a documentary or some kind of movie because of how—
[00:01:50] Arthur Firstenberg: Somebody called me yesterday that wants to do exactly that.
[00:01:55] Ashley James: Yes, please do. I mean, as long as you have control of how it goes, but it is phenomenally well-written. Well-researched. If everyone knew what you lay out so well in this book it would change the world. I want to dive into understanding—for those who’ve never heard of you or your work—I want to dive into it a bit. But first, I’d like to know a bit about you. What happened in your life that made you want to write this book?
[00:02:31] Arthur Firstenberg: I went to medical school, and midway through school—at the end of my second year—I had some dental work and a whole lot of dental x-rays in the course of a summer. The last series of x-rays did something to my head, and I felt something give way in the back of my skull. I felt an electric current travel from head to toes and out into the floor. The next morning, when I went around in the hospital, I could feel electric currents emanating from every piece of electrical equipment in the hospital. My life has not been the same since then.
I found out that I couldn’t finish school, essentially. I attempted to stick it out and get my MD. One day, on the inpatient pediatrics, I collapsed with all the symptoms of a heart attack. I had a year to go for my MD, and I left school. Before I had done that, I did a trade with my plastic surgery professor because being in the operating room was no longer possible. Every time I assisted a surgery I would have crippling pains in my hips so that I couldn’t walk for three days. He excused me from the OR in exchange for writing a research paper on a topic of my choice. I chose the effects of radiant energy on living organisms.
[00:04:33] Ashley James: Wow.
[00:04:33] Arthur Firstenberg: This was in December of 1981. In doing research for the chapter, I went to the medical school’s library—this was the University of California Irvine—and lo and behold, there were many shelves full of books on the effects of electromagnetic radiation, electromagnetic fields on biology and on health. We were not being taught this in medical school, and this seemed very strange to me. So I started doing research. That’s been my life, partially, since 1981, and full time since 1996 is researching being an advocate, being a support person, and being an activist. Trying to educate the world to this biological and environmental factor that nobody’s aware of.
[00:05:43] Ashley James: Did your professors believe you when you explained that being near electronics gave you excruciating pain?
[00:05:52] Arthur Firstenberg: I never asked him that question that way.
[00:06:00] Ashley James: Do you feel like they treated you as if they believed you? If they believed you, wouldn’t they have wanted to help?
[00:06:12] Arthur Firstenberg: I didn’t get any feedback because I submitted the paper in December, and I collapsed at the end of February. So it was only a couple of months before I quit school, and I never got any feedback from him.
[00:06:26] Ashley James: Do you still experience pain when you’re near electronics?
[00:06:32] Arthur Firstenberg: Not to the degree that I did then, but yes. A lot of people do. In fact, I would venture to say that most everybody does, but they’re not educated as to what the cause is. So a lot of people are on various pain medications. It causes sleep disorders, and the people are on sleeping medications. It causes anxiety, so people are on anxiety medications and antidepressants. They keep their cell phone in their hip pocket, and that causes excruciating pain, but they don’t connect the cause. So they end up going to the doctor, and the doctor tells them their hips are worn out. Let’s give you a hip replacement, and the nerves are cut, so it doesn’t hurt anymore. This is not confined to a few people. This is affecting the entire population of the globe.
[00:07:36] Ashley James: My husband and I both noticed—he has an iPhone, I have an android—our hands hurt when we hold our cell phones. That we can feel something. There’s something there. I mean, if you weren’t really paying attention, you could ignore it, but we’re very in tune with our bodies, and we can feel it. His hurts his hand more than mine does, I noticed.
[00:08:00] Arthur Firstenberg: Right. And that is the sign that you should stop using it because you can get cancer of your hand.
[00:08:10] Ashley James: Jeez. I was going to say, what damage is being done by being exposed to—and there are so many different forms of electricity like you say in your book. The cell phone is like the microwave, right? But we have electricity going throughout our house, our laptops, the Wi-Fi, the cell signals, and the radio waves.
The Dangers of 5G and How To Reduce Exposure to Electrical Pollution
[00:08:32] Arthur Firstenberg: Okay, so now you’re talking about two different types of electrical pollution. The electricity going through your wires creates an electric field. That electric field is not intentional. That’s not part of the product, and it can be shielded with proper engineering. You can twist the wires. You can put it in a conduit. You can eliminate the electric fields to a great extent. They’re not necessary. The difference with wireless technology is that radiation is the product. That cell phone and Wi-Fi will not work unless you’re getting irradiated, so it’s a different idea.
It’s actually the first form of pollutant in history that is intentionally being spread over every square inch of the planet. In other words, pesticides are designed to kill pests. They escape into the general environment, but that’s not deliberate. With wireless technology, the pollutant is the product, and that’s a big difference.
[00:09:57] Ashley James: You know what scares me is hearing that Elon Musk is launching satellites so that he can bathe every square mile in the entire earth with 5G waves, basically. There’ll be no escaping this electric pollution, as you put it.
[00:10:19] Arthur Firstenberg: That scares me more than anything else that’s going on right now on the planet. I am scared of climate change, pesticides, deforestation, and everything else that’s destroying our beautiful earth. But he’s putting thousands, in fact, he plans to put tens of thousands of satellites in low orbit around the earth. And I am less concerned about the direct radiation reaching the earth from a few hundred miles up than I am how they’re going to alter the electromagnetic environment of the earth itself in which we evolved and which we are dependent on for life and health.
In other words, atmospheric physicists study what they call the global electrical circuit, and people are not aware of our electrical environment. We’re not taught this in school. Electricity is thought of as something useful that can accomplish things for us. That can turn on our lights, power motors, and so forth. But we actually live in an electric field—a natural electric field of 130 volts per meter on average in fair weather. And it’s a complex electric field.
In thunderstorms, the direction of the field reverses, and lightning actually completes the circuit. So you actually have a complete circuit traveling horizontally through the ionosphere, then vertically down to the earth in fair weather, beneath our feet horizontally through the earth, and then back up to the sky during thunderstorms. This circulates all the time, and it goes through the bodies of every living thing. It actually goes through our bodies, circulates through our acupuncture meridians. Doctors of oriental medicine study a little piece of this science, but basically, it’s little specializations and nobody’s looking at the whole picture.
If you put 12,000 or more or 42,0000 or 100,000 satellites, there are a lot of players in this game. Space-X is the first entrant, but there are others waiting in the wings and starting to launch satellites. If you put tens of thousands of satellites up there, each one emitting thousands of different frequencies because you’re serving thousands of different users from each satellite, you’re going to pollute this circuit that travels through our bodies, keeps us healthy, and gives us life. This is what I’m frightened of, and this is imminent. This is much more imminent and life-threatening than any of these other environmental threats.
[00:13:50] Ashley James: I love studying astronomy. Why is it that earth has a perfect environment than any other planet in our solar system for life? And we have this beautiful electromagnetic field that you just described that allows us to have life. That allows the earth to prevent solar radiation from fully hitting us. It’s a shield. It protects us, but it also is what we’ve evolved from. Something you brought up in the book that we evolved from wherever we came from. Whether you believe we came from Adam and Eve, or whether you believe we came from single cells in a swamp, we have been here—for as long as we’ve been here—living with this natural electricity that is moving, that we are part of.
[00:14:51] Arthur Firstenberg: And in the 18th century, when people were beginning to study electricity in depth and when they were beginning to find ways of storing it and using it, it was initially used in medicine before it was used for any other technologies as kind of a panacea for a lot of illnesses. Isaac Newton also believed that electricity was the life force. That this is what gave us life. And my conclusion after studying this field for the last 40 years is that probably that’s right.
Electricity is either closely related to or identical with the life force, with this substance that travels, that acupuncturists work on, and travels through our acupuncture meridians. It’s modulated in complex ways. There’s what a lot of people have heard of, the Schumann resonances, which are the resonant frequencies of the biosphere—8, 14, 20, 26, and 32 hertz. That’s part of what circulates to our bodies. But it’s all controlled by the ionosphere. The ionosphere is a source of high voltage. It’s the earth’s source of high voltage. It’s charged to an average of 300,000 volts, and this is what powers and regulates the electricity that circulates in the biosphere and goes through every living thing.
[00:16:33] Ashley James: So what are the dangers of our modern electricity, of our modern devices? I love that in your book, you show very clearly that at each point in our history when we had a new introduction to the widespread use of electricity, that there was an uptick in disease. Could you go over some of that?
[00:17:05] Arthur Firstenberg: Yeah. The first major use of electricity was for telegraphy. Millions of miles of telegraph wires were strung all around the earth, and there was a new disease described during the 1860s called neurasthenia. And nobody knew where it came from. Its sufferers were tired all the time and couldn’t sleep. Had aches and pains all over their bodies. A lot of things that people who call themselves electrically sensitive complain about today. I don’t use that term by the way—electrical sensitivity—because it gives the wrong impression that people who realize what’s making them sick are not normal. We’re just like everybody else. We just have figured it out. This is what’s making us sick.
Like every other toxin in the environment, there’s a range of vulnerability in the population. If you poison the population with anything—with arsenic, not everybody will get sick at the same time. But if you expose people to high enough levels of electromagnetic fields, as we are doing today, eventually, everybody gets sick. Everybody gets affected. But in the 1860s, there was this epidemic, actually pandemic, of what they called neurasthenia. And for 40 years, it was in the literature. Nobody could figure it out, and along came Sigmund Freud in about 1895. He said this is a psychological disorder, and he called it anxiety neurosis, and that has stuck.
So today, we have this thing called anxiety disorder, and 1/6 or 1/5 of the population is being diagnosed with it. And everybody’s being put on anti-anxiety meds, but still, the cause is not being realized. Telegraph operators suffered from it to a large degree. In the coming decades, in the 19th century, telephone operators suffered from it to a large degree. And then in 1889, when AC current essentially spread all over the world, and it spread extraordinarily rapidly. Basically, 1889 was in the space of a year the earth became wrapped in electric wires with alternating currents in them. And that was the year when the first modern influenza epidemic broke out all over the world.
Following that, the Spanish influenza of 1918—according to my research—was triggered by the United States’ entry into World War I with the latest in radio technology. The most powerful radio stations in the world. The first radio stations in the world that broadcast voices that could be heard over most of the earth. These were extraordinarily low frequency, enormously powerful radio stations that were turned on in September of 1918. The one in New Brunswick, New Jersey. And that month was when Spanish influenza became deadly all over the world. I traced the epidemics of influenza throughout the 20th century. 1957, the advent of radar for civil defense especially by the United States 1968. The Hong Kong flu coincided with the launch of the first fleet of military satellites into space.
That’s a brief summary. The advent of the wireless revolution in 1996 in this country a couple of years earlier in Europe and some of the rest of the world, the illness that was caused by that was also caused influenza, but it was not simultaneous all over the world because antennas and cell towers were not coordinated quite as well throughout the world as some of these earlier technologies. For example, where I was living in New York City, the first digital cell towers were turned on citywide commercially on November 14, 1996. A so-called influenza epidemic locally to New York City began essentially on that date and lasted officially until the following May. As a previously injured person living in New York City, I escaped one week later. It felt like I barely survived, I barely escaped with my life.
That’s when I started the Cellular Phone Task Force and put an ad in the New York City newspaper saying if you have been sick since November 15, 1996 with the following symptoms, please contact us. And we heard from people all over the city who thought they were having a heart attack, a stroke, or a nervous breakdown on approximately that date. And that was the foundation for my nonprofit, which I have been running ever since then, since 24 years ago. And I got mortality rates. I downloaded mortality rates from the CDC’s website.
[00:24:07] Ashley James: Really?
[00:24:09] Arthur Firstenberg: Yeah. I called up the doctor—what was his name in Israel? His name escapes me. Anyway, he directed me to the CDC’s website and said there’s where you can find mortality statistics. Indeed, there was a spike in mortality in New York City that lasted two to three months. I think it was three to four months in New York City. It was particularly devastating. I did this later. There was an increase in mortality between 10% and 25% lasting on average two to three months in every city that deployed what we now call 2G technology that began on the date in that city when the first 2G system went commercial. And I documented this for dozens of cities.
[00:25:11] Ashley James: Going back in the late 1800s when they had the major influenza outbreak after the modern world basically had electricity, had the wires everywhere, and the homes had access to electricity for the first time ever. Had there ever been a documented case of influenza to that extent, or was this the largest we’d ever seen?
[00:25:45] Arthur Firstenberg: Sure. Influenza is an ancient disease. It’s been known forever, but it was never an annual disease. When the worldwide influenza hit in 1889, a lot of doctors had never seen a case of it before. The previous influenza epidemic in the United Kingdom, I believe, had happened in 1854 or 1856.
[00:26:20] Ashley James: That skipped like 20 years?
[00:26:24] Arthur Firstenberg: Forty, forty-five years.
[00:26:25] Ashley James: Oh, huge difference.
[00:26:26] Arthur Firstenberg: Forty, forty-five years previously. And the last influenza epidemic in the United States had been in the 1870s, more than 20 years previously. Suddenly, in 1889, there was influenza throughout the world, and it returned every single year worldwide after that. In 1890, there was in the winter—every year.
[00:26:54] Ashley James: Every year until now.
[00:26:56] Arthur Firstenberg: Yeah. It was never an annual disease before. It was never a seasonal disease before. It had something to do with solar radiation. There has been any number of studies correlating historical influenza epidemics with sunspots. So it seemed to come with the maximum solar activity until modern times.
[00:27:22] Ashley James: It would disrupt our electromagnetic field or disrupt our cells in a negative way, and that would leave us susceptible or weakened?
[00:27:32] Arthur Firstenberg: Something like that. And I also explored the Maunder Minimum in the 16th and 17th centuries when there were no sunspots for a period of 75 years, something like that. And during that time, there were no influenza pandemics. That’s consistent with influenza being—as I propose—an electrical disease, and not a viral disease, although it is associated with a virus.
[00:28:10] Ashley James: Well, the viruses live dormant in our body and are opportunistic, many of them, right? Chickenpox becomes shingles when someone’s immune system is compromised, and warts—herpes outbreaks. I mean, that’s one thing that could be hypothesized is that we have the influenza virus dormant in our body, and then when we are in a weakened state, it comes out as opposed to being caught by people.
[00:28:37] Arthur Firstenberg: That is what a number of influenza specialists have proposed in the past.
[00:28:43] Ashley James: And that’s radical.
[00:28:45] Arthur Firstenberg: Exactly what they proposed.
[00:28:46] Ashley James: I mean, what a radical concept because the pharmaceutical companies would not want us to believe this because they want us to take a flu shot every year. And now they’re saying we should take two flu shots because of COVID. I just thought it was really funny. I saw this video yesterday that Dr. Oz was saying that those who get flu shots have, I think he said, 36% more chance of developing COVID and they cut him off. I don’t know if it was CNN, but it was some interview and they cut him off.
[00:29:16] Arthur Firstenberg: That is actually based on a peer-reviewed published study that says that. Back in 1918 actually, doctors attempted to prove the infectious nature of influenza. These were doctors in Boston, and they published their research in public health reports in The New England Journal of Medicine and prestigious publications. They failed.
This was during the height of Spanish influenza. They tried to infect 100 healthy individuals with secretions from sick influenza patients by having sick influenza patients cough several times into their faces, by injecting blood from sick influenza patients into healthy people. Not one of the 100 healthy people got sick, and they ended up saying we don’t know how influenza is spread. There were veterinarians because horses got influenza. They caught the epidemic about a month before people did. They tried to transfer influenza via secretions from horses into healthy horses, and the healthy horses didn’t get sick. So there was a resounding failure to infect healthy people with sick people by influenza.
[00:30:46] Ashley James: I don’t want to call it a conspiracy theory, but there’s been a chatter that areas in the world where COVID has taken off are the same areas where they’ve been introducing 5G or testing 5G technology. Have you heard of this? Is there any basis for it? It sounds like it’d be up your alley.
[00:31:11] Arthur Firstenberg: I have investigated it personally. There is a basis for it. My hypothesis is that the COVID-19 virus causes hypoxia by preventing oxygen from binding to hemoglobin. That the radiation from 5G causes hypoxia by interfering with electron transport in your mitochondria. So the COVID-19 virus starves your blood vessels of oxygen. The 5G starves your cells of oxygen. And when you put the two together, they are deadly. At first, I didn’t believe this, but when I investigated it, 5G officially got turned on in Wuhan, China two weeks before the first known cases of COVID-19 broke out there. 5G officially was turned on in New York City about two weeks before a very bad COVID-19 epidemic broke out in New York City. 5G was on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship.
There seems to be a pattern here. Here where I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico—at least when I checked a week or two ago—there had been zero COVID-19 deaths in Santa Fe county to date. We don’t have 5G. Albuquerque does. They’ve got a bunch of COVID-19 deaths. As to why COVID-19 is rampant on the Navajo reservation could be due to other forms of pollution. It could be due to the fact that Native Americans have high rates of diabetes. There’s a lot of factors here. It’s not black and white simple, but there is a correlation with 5G.
I did a search last week because I was curious. The Gaza Strip has one of the highest densities of population in the world. I wanted to know if they have a problem with the coronavirus, and it turns out to date, out of 1.8 million people, they’ve had 10 deaths from COVID-19. Essentially, they don’t have the disease there even though they are more crowded than any place in the world.
So there seems to be a correlation, and as I said, I have a hypothesis as to why there is a virus. It is deadly. My opinion is that there was—for the first few months—a pretty bad pandemic, and that has more or less passed. People adjust to it, people have immune systems, and the world is pretending that nobody has an immune system. We have to continue locking down the world, wearing masks, and social distancing. From my research, it doesn’t make sense that the places that have the highest number of deaths and the highest rate of illnesses are the places that have the most radiation.
[00:35:14] Ashley James: Why is it that ever since we have electricity and radio waves—we have all this electric pollution. Why is it that influenza comes back every year in the winter? Is it because we’re indoors more? Because I think people are indoors and are exposed to this all the time, so why winter when a few hundred years ago, it was like once every 40 years?
[00:35:42] Arthur Firstenberg: We don’t know. It has something to do with either the amount of solar radiation, which goes down in the winter, or the amount of artificial electromagnetic fields, which goes way up in the winter because we’re indoors. But that’s just speculation. I certainly don’t know all the answers.
[00:36:04] Ashley James: Like you said, there are other factors. Perhaps vitamin D levels, which are already dangerously low. Many people don’t have their vitamin D tested. To a naturopathic physician, if you’re below 60, it’s unhealthy. You want your vitamin D levels to be between 60 and 100. I’ve had a doctor come on the show—very experienced doctors—say that he has never seen toxic vitamin D levels and he prescribes incredibly high amounts of vitamin D, and he’s never seen someone above 100. But he does see chronically low vitamin D, and chronically low vitamin D leads to and there’s a correlation to cancer and to lowered immune health—lowered immune function. And of course, the more we spend time indoors, the less vitamin D we have and the more exposure to electric pollution, right?
[00:36:57] Arthur Firstenberg: It could well be.
[00:37:00] Ashley James: Right. Very fascinating. What other illnesses are commonly seen with exposure to electric pollution? You yourself had it when you had that x-ray. Can you give us some more examples?
[00:37:20] Arthur Firstenberg: Well, the chronic diseases that we are all living within the 21st century, and I show this in my book. Not only I explained the mechanism, but I showed historically when it began the trend, I graphed it out, and I published all the data—cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. These three diseases were rare or virtually non-existent before electrification, which means before telegraphy began in the 1840s, was well underway by the 1860s. And there’s a good reason for it because electromagnetic fields interfere with the movement of electrons. So this means that it interferes with electron transport in your mitochondria. In the mitochondria of every cell of every living organism.
Electron transport is the last stage of metabolizing your food and utilizing the oxygen that you breathe. So when you metabolize your food, you’re producing electrons, which get transferred to the oxygen you breathe. It generates ATP, and this is how we live. If you interfere with electron transport, you are not efficiently metabolizing sugars, fats, and proteins. You don’t efficiently metabolize sugars at the rate at which you should be able to. Sugars back up into your bloodstream and excreted by your kidneys and you have diabetes.
You don’t efficiently metabolize, fats they back into your bloodstream, get deposited in your coronary arteries, and you get heart disease. Cancer thrives in anaerobic environments. That’s actually how it’s diagnosed. So you’re effectively starving your cells of oxygen forcing them into anaerobic metabolism and cancer cells love it. So these three diseases, in my opinion, are predominantly caused by the escalation of what in some parts of the world is called the electrosmog. It hasn’t caught on in this country, but electromagnetic pollution.
[00:40:01] Ashley James: The rates of those diseases back in 1870, for example, before the widespread use of electricity in our homes. What were the rates of those diseases then?
[00:40:18] Arthur Firstenberg: Cancer, before it started to rise, was the 25th most common cause of death. About as many people died of accidental drowning as died of cancer. Diabetes was almost non-existent. The first book in English that was ever written about diabetes in the 1780s, the doctor who wrote it had only ever seen two cases of diabetes in his life. Heart disease was a disease of old people and infants—people with heart defects. People in the prime of their life between infancy and old age never got heart disease. This started to change in the 1840s and 1850s with all those three diseases.
[00:41:21] Ashley James: But that was before electricity was in the homes though. Was there electric smog or electric pollution being developed back then?
[00:41:31] Arthur Firstenberg: It was not in the homes but there were telegraph wires in most populated places.
[00:41:40] Ashley James: That’s right.
[00:41:41] Arthur Firstenberg: And not only most populated places, but running around alongside railroad tracks and elsewhere in rural environments.
[00:41:48] Ashley James: Yeah. It’s absolutely fascinating that you go through in your book all of the electric pollution that we’ve experienced in the last few hundred years, and then the rates of these diseases going through the roof.
[00:42:01] Arthur Firstenberg: And back in those days, the return current for telegraphy did not go through a wire. The return was through the earth itself, and that meant that there were ground currents from—well, nowadays it’s the power grid. But then those days, it was the telegraph grid. All of the return currents went through the earth, and so people were exposed to it just by walking around.
[00:42:32] Ashley James: I have a friend who has fibromyalgia, and there was a thunderstorm. It was so violent that when I woke up in the middle of the night, I could see the lightning—the light of the lightning. There’s so much lightning that I could walk down the hallway in my house and I could see everything. After that, I think it was August 1996 in Muskoka, Canada. And after that day, she was in the hospital for six months unable to walk in excruciating pain.
That just stuck in the back of my mind that she had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Back then, it was really hard to get diagnosed with it, and doctors really don’t know what to do about it. But that anytime there were electrical storms, she was put out for days or weeks. And this one was so bad she was in excruciating pain for six months. That’s a natural phenomenon, right? So imagine what is happening to our bodies when we’re around this electric pollution.
I love to point out in the show that we really don’t focus enough on the fact that our body is energy. When you go to a hospital, if you’re having weird symptoms, they’ll put electrodes on you and they’ll read the energy coming from your heart, coming from your brain. They’re reading the energy our body is putting out there in order to diagnose. That every part of our body is using electricity in some way. So when we’re exposed to this electric smog, of course, it would have an effect on us. Why do we think that we’re immune? Why do we think we’re immune to microwaves, Wi-Fi, and 5G? Why do we think we’re immune? Is it all through marketing? I mean, why is it that we think we’re totally immune and then we get sick and we take meds. Why are so many people blind to the fact that our body is energy, and our body is disrupted by the artificial energy we have surrounded ourselves by?
[00:44:54] Arthur Firstenberg: I do discuss this in my book. We have been in denial since the year 1800 as a culture. That was the year that the electric battery was invented. There started to be uses invented for electricity stored in batteries, and then in the 1840s telegraphy was used with essentially electric generating technology which had been invented in the meantime. The fact that it can make our lives easier and take over the work, the animals—industrial society has grown up completely dependent on electricity since about the year 1800. It has to do not so much with marketing, It’s a societal addiction. It has to do with our self-concept of who we are as human beings.
It’s like if you took away electricity from us, who would we be? How would we live? People don’t want to think about it. There was a medical controversy in the year 1800 as to even the existence of what in the 18th century, the 1700s had been called animal electricity. As I said, people believed that electricity was a life force.
Along came Alessandro Volta with the electric battery, and he demonstrated that you could generate electricity without the use of animals. He said there’s no such thing as animal electricity. There were a big controversy and a debate between Volta and Galvani in the 1790s as to the source of electricity, and Volta’s pronouncement that electricity had nothing to do with biology was widely believed and became the standard teaching in medicine and in society and people forgot. But they didn’t totally forget because electricity was still used very widely for electrotherapy to cure a lot of different diseases basically until the end of the 19th century when it started to be used for lights and power.
Once it started to be used for lights and power, electrotherapy died out. People couldn’t continue to think that it was the life force if it could do all these wonderful things and be so powerful.
[00:48:21] Ashley James: I love the chapter where you gave the history of how they used electricity and medicine. That’s what made me really want this to be a movie, like a documentary or something. It’s so fascinating. That electricity can be harmful, but you also documented the thousands and thousands of cases where they saw healings from it. Many people who were deaf gained their hearing after using a specific electrode in and around their ear that physicians used, or back then, they called them electricians I think you said in the book.
[00:48:58] Arthur Firstenberg: They were called electricians, yes, in the 18th century.
[00:49:02] Ashley James: Quite fascinating.
[00:49:04] Arthur Firstenberg: Yeah, it cured quite a number of documented cases of deafness. It cured some cases of blindness. It was reputed to make the lame walk but at really low power levels and brief exposures. They would expose somebody’s ear to a few pulses of electricity for a few minutes and that was it. When they tried to use higher powers of electricity, it didn’t work. It just injured them.
[00:49:41] Ashley James: There are medical devices that I’ve used and that show great results. Ionic foot detox spas that use a platinum energy system, it’s called, that uses almost a rife frequency. The BEMER, which is a mat out of Europe and used as a medical device in the hospitals there, is documented to increase blood flow right at the capillary and also make red blood cells function in a better way, not stick together, and it stimulates mitochondria to function even better. So there are lots of devices out there that use very, very, very low frequencies—gentle, and they see that it stimulates health and healing.
[00:50:32] Arthur Firstenberg: Gentle and brief, it has to be.
[00:50:35] Ashley James: Right. Gentle and brief.
[00:50:36] Arthur Firstenberg: Not chronic, not for long periods of time. And in today’s world, when we’re all immersed in a sea of electromagnetic radiation, I tell people to exercise extreme caution before using any of these devices because it has some therapeutic effects, but you don’t know what else it’s doing to you.
[00:50:58] Ashley James: Exactly. And wouldn’t it be even healthier to take a break? I mean, I daydream now about going to a cabin in the mountains or somewhere far away from all of this and living like a pioneer by candlelight and just having a break, having a detox from electric pollution.
[00:51:20] Arthur Firstenberg: But you can’t do that anymore because it’s everywhere. It’s coming down from satellites. It’s going through the earth. It’s being broadcast from very powerful radar stations. For example, the entire Amazon Rainforest is being blasted by 28 super powerful radar stations so they can track anybody that moves through the forest. It’s unbelievable what’s going on on the planet.
[00:51:56] Ashley James: This episode wasn’t designed to be doom and gloom. I do want to wake people up, but we also want to give people tools. You do talk in your book about what we can do to protect ourselves given that there’s nowhere to run. Electric pollution is everywhere. I mean, I have friends that live out in the Okanagan Valley in a very remote area of Washington, and there’s no cell service. There are almost no radio waves, and they live off the grid, so they have solar. They heat the house with firewood.
You can lessen. You can decrease the amount of electric pollution. I mean, you have to really go out of your way. You can’t live in a city.
[00:52:42] Arthur Firstenberg: The most important thing that people have to do is get rid of their cell phones. That is the single most powerful source of radiation that everybody’s exposed to nowadays.
[00:52:52] Ashley James: Fascinating.
[00:52:54] Arthur Firstenberg: You’re getting more radiation from your phone than from all the cell towers and from the satellites, and people do not realize this because you’re holding it in your hand, holding it next to your head. The exposure level goes up exponentially with the proximity to the body.
[00:53:15] Ashley James: You had outlined that when 2G went live back in—I believe you said 1996.
[00:53:23] Arthur Firstenberg: Six and seven.
[00:53:24] Ashley James: 1996, 1997, which was right around that time my friend got sick for six months in the hospital after the electric storm. That’d be interesting to see when 2G went live in that part of Canada. So when it went live, you could document, you could pinpoint in the different cities the death rate going up and strange influenza outbreaks only in these specific cities during that time. Well, since then, we’ve had 3G and 4G. Have you been able to repeat this? Have you been able to see that once 3G and 4G went live that you could again see a spike in deaths and a spike in illnesses?
[00:54:04] Arthur Firstenberg: I have not tracked it in as much detail as I tracked it from zero radiation to 2G. That was very dramatic. Locally, I collected anecdotal reports here in Santa Fe when AT&T upgraded all its towers from 3G to 4G, there were lots of reports of illnesses around Santa Fe. I don’t have statistics to back that up. Those are only anecdotal reports, but it’s very consistent.
[00:54:42] Ashley James: It would be interesting to go back and look at because, of course, the biggest leap would be from zero to something. But then 2G to 3G to 4G, I mean, those just ramp up incredibly more powerful and more pervasive.
[00:54:59] Arthur Firstenberg: There are also so many more providers. There’s AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile. Each one does a different thing at a different time, and it’s just a kind of a gradual increase. Then you added Wi-Fi in about 2001. Yeah, it’s a gradual increase. 5G is no longer gradual. 5G is very dramatically different.
[00:55:29] Ashley James: Why is 5G so different than 4G?
[00:55:32] Arthur Firstenberg: Because it uses millimeter waves instead of centimeter waves—a very short wave, high frequency. It uses phased array technology, which is focused pencil-like beams where the cell tower tracks your user device and vice versa, or the satellite tracks you in a narrowly focused beam. And the power levels are very much greater. They’re 10 to 100 times greater than with 4G, 3G.
[00:56:08] Ashley James: If 5G comes in my area, I’m going to get rid of my cell phone. I mean, that is just it. What you just described was the final straw. I have a friend who doesn’t have a cell phone, and she’s a dear friend. I’m kind of just perplexed at how she survives in life, but she does. She gets around, and she has a home line, has a landline, and a computer and does just fine. I know it would definitely be an interesting experience.
[00:56:36] Arthur Firstenberg: There are a few of us that still live like that.
[00:56:41] Ashley James: It would definitely be an interesting experience, but I’m not willing to sacrifice my health to that extent. Either that or I’ll have to move to an area where 5G doesn’t exist anymore.
[00:56:52] Arthur Firstenberg: Well, I want people to wake up to the fact that they should not sacrifice their planet.
[00:56:57] Ashley James: I know.
[00:56:58] Arthur Firstenberg: For the convenience.
[00:57:01] Ashley James: I think there’s so much more to discuss about 5G, and I’ve had a few people come on the show and talk about it a little bit. It is so fascinating, and if there’s more for you to share, I’d love to do that. I also want to talk about Wi-Fi because we haven’t touched on it. Dr. Klinghardt, who I’ve had on the show, is an MD from Germany who is actually local to me, but people come from all around the world to see him at the Sophia Health Institute. He regularly helps children who are on the spectrum no longer be on the spectrum. Now, were they ever truly autistic in the first place? That’s debatable.
He says the first thing he does when the parents come, from all around the world, with their autistic child or autistic-like symptoms I should say—non-verbal, beating their head against the wall, looking like they’re in incredible agony, these children. He says to remove them from Wi-Fi. Zero Wi-Fi in the house. Have them be nowhere near Wi-Fi. In his clinic, there are no cell phones allowed. There’s no Wi-Fi allowed. Every computer is hardwired. And he says that heavy metals, which have accumulated in the brain, the Wi-Fi vibrates those heavy metals at 60 hertz, and it’s heating up the brain and causing the autism-like symptoms. And then he does a natural detox, a natural chelation of heavy metals. And these children become verbal, stop hitting their head, are able to communicate, are able to look their parents in the eye and say they love them, and give them hugs. It is miraculous what we see come out of his clinic, but he says the first thing is to stop with the Wi-Fi. It is basically cooking their brain.
[00:58:53] Arthur Firstenberg: I agree with him. People have to stop with the Wi-Fi, and schools have to stop with the Wi-Fi. Children have to start living in a non-irradiated environment. They’re growing up much more unhealthy than previous generations of children. Why? Because they go to school with Wi-Fi and they grew up with cell phones. If we want to have a healthy future and a healthy planet to live on, that’s the direction in which we have to go.
[00:59:27] Ashley James: Do you see any correlation between the use of cell phones, Wi-Fi, or electric pollution, and mental health issues? You did mention that anxiety, which was never previously documented, was widespread after we used the telegraph. We’re now seeing that the second leading cause of death in the ages between 10 and 24 is suicide or the second leading cause of death of suicide, and that is new. As of the last few years, suicide has now jumped up to the second leading cause of death in our youth right now, and all these children have cell phones in their hands and are constantly exposed to Wi-Fi. Now, of course, social media bullying is all a factor. Do you see that there is a direct correlation between the amount of electric pollution that our youth is exposed to and mental health issues?
[01:00:23] Arthur Firstenberg: I would say it’s a big factor. It’s not the only factor, but it’s a big factor.
[01:00:29] Ashley James: So, what can we do to protect ourselves? Okay, so we get rid of our cell phone, that’s one thing. If someone can’t because of work, they completely limit their exposure at all costs to the cell phone. What else can we do in our home?
[01:00:48] Arthur Firstenberg: Well, I’m on a campaign to save this planet, not just to have people individually be healthier because it’s becoming impossible. If you own a cell phone, if you’re dependent on your cell phone, which means you expect it to work wherever you go, then you are dependent on the wireless infrastructure. Your cell phone cannot work wherever you go unless the entire infrastructure of the planet is there. All the cell towers have to be there. People more and more, even when they go on an ocean cruise, they want their cell phone to work so all the satellites have to be there.
The demand has to stop. It’s an insatiable demand for connectivity that is driving a lot of this. Yes, there’s a desire to make money, but at the base, it’s an insatiable demand for connectivity. We’ve gotten so used to—as alive human beings—having the right to connect to anyone, anywhere, anytime, wherever we happen to be. That’s killing our planet. It’s got to stop.
[01:01:59] Ashley James: So my friend Sean, who loved your book has some questions, and I think these are fantastic for everyone. He says that it’s a logistical question that in your book, you talk about aluminum or copper mesh to block EMF. How would you do that? Line your roof, cover your walls? How can we live in a city with, for example, 5G? Or how can we live in a city with electric pollution and best protect ourselves within the walls of our house?
[01:02:30] Arthur Firstenberg: I live in the Southwest where a lot of the houses are made of adobe, which is mud, it’s earth. Earth blocks the radiation, and that’s partly how I survive in Santa Fe. If you do not live in that kind of a house, there’s a big problem with smart meters.
[01:02:55] Ashley James: Yes.
[01:02:56] Arthur Firstenberg: That is increasingly everywhere, and they put a meter that emits radiation on the outside of your wall, and there’s basically nothing you can do about it. But a lot of places have an opt-out. If you opt-out and your neighbors got it, you can line your wall. You can actually paint that wall with paint that contains metallic fibers that are usually silver fibers that you can buy from places like Less EMF and paint the wall. It’ll block radiation from that side of the house. If your neighbor’s Wi-Fi is bothering you, again you can block that. You can even do it cheaply. You can put a sheet of aluminum foil over your wall and it’ll do the same thing. The thicker the sheet or the more layers, the better the blockage.
The problem comes if the shielding material, if it’s metallic, becomes too large then it starts acting like an antenna. And it actually draws in and amplifies electromagnetic radiation from your environment. Then it depends on the size of it and what its resonant frequency is. But basically, I tell people that they do not want to live in a house with a metal roof because a metal roof is a huge antenna. Unless you want to live in a Faraday cage in complete metal structure. Not terribly healthy.
A lot of people sleep on their sleeping canopies, which shield them from everything in their environment, and it’s not terribly healthy, but it does block the radiation. The reason it’s not terribly healthy is it distorts your own body’s electromagnetic field, it reflects it back at you, it blocks (to some degree) some of the earth’s natural frequencies, which you depend on for health but unblock all of them. It’s not a terribly healthy thing to do. But sometimes it’s a tradeoff. If you want to survive, sometimes you’ve got to do it.
[01:05:22] Ashley James: How effective is it to turn the circuits off in the house, or at least to your bedroom when you sleep?
[01:05:29] Arthur Firstenberg: Somewhat effective. The problem is when you turn off the circuit breaker, it only disconnects the hotwires and not the neutral wire. The neutral wire is at the same potential as the earth, supposedly, and it’s the return current to the power plant. So when you turn off the circuit breaker, it disconnects the hotwire, leaves the neutral wire connected, and when there’s dirty electricity in the power grid it still gets into your house. So it’s somewhat effective and not completely effective.
What I’ve done in my house is I’ve installed a three-pole switch on the outside of my house, which allows me to disconnect all three wires at the same time.
[01:06:16] Ashley James: Oh, yes. I had a Ph.D. electrician—a really interesting guy. His whole life work is about helping people to get clean electricity and minimize electricity in the house. People will call him up with weird symptoms. He comes into their house, he tests, and he either sees that their entire neighborhood is dirty electricity from the transformer, or they’re sometimes an entire town has dirty electricity and the whole town is experiencing weird symptoms.
[01:06:53] Arthur Firstenberg: I’ll tell you a secret. Every wire in the world now has dirty electricity because there are computers connected to them. There are billions of computers connected to the power grid.
[01:07:08] Ashley James: Fascinating.
[01:07:09] Arthur Firstenberg: And that did to use to be the case 30 years ago
[01:07:13] Ashley James: Yes. This man, Sal La Duca, when I interviewed him, he talked about how after he helped people stop having dirty electricity, all of a sudden everyone in the house could sleep. The insomnia the whole house had, even the baby had it. The father who is an MD didn’t believe any of this. Everyone had insomnia. All of a sudden, the insomnia went away overnight. And I’ve said this many times. I live in a rural area 45 minutes outside of Seattle, and when we have storms in the winter, our power will go out—sometimes for two weeks because of the wind storms. And it’s the best sleep I ever have when the power is out because there’s no Wi-Fi, no electricity.
[01:08:04] Arthur Firstenberg: It used to be that when I would tell people when you go home tonight, turn off your cell phone, take the battery out of it—which mostly is not possible, but it used to be. Either that or put it in a metal pot is just as good. Unplug your computer, unplug your modem, unplug your television, and see how you feel in the morning.
[01:08:34] Ashley James: And leave the electricity on in the house?
[01:08:37] Arthur Firstenberg: Yes. Turn off your cell phone and all the wireless. Unplug your TV, computer, and modem, and they suddenly can sleep and feel better in the morning. It used to be. Nowadays, when everybody’s got a smart meter on their house, it might not make so much difference.
[01:09:00] Ashley James: When I was pregnant with my first pregnancy, I had a blanket that had lead in it. It was quite heavy. It was a lead blanket. And I would wear it over my belly when I was at the computer. I experimented with my cell phone to see that my cell phone lost all signals when it was in this blanket. There are videos of people using these meters to show that the blanket really does block. I’m just wondering, should we be wearing these blankets when we’re sitting at work or wearing clothing that has this lead or some kind of copper or aluminum mesh?
[01:09:38] Arthur Firstenberg: Copper is the best shield.
[01:09:39] Ashley James: Copper is the best shield, okay. We should be wearing synthetic clothing?
[01:09:43] Arthur Firstenberg: Copper and silver are the best. Well, there are companies that sell clothing like that. To some extent they work. To some extent it depends. They don’t surround you completely. They’re not complete barriers. If you’re wearing a shielding hat, for example, and radiation bounces off the floor ad up into your hear onto the hat, it can get amplified from the inside. It’s a two-edged sword shielding.
[01:10:18] Ashley James: Oh my God. I never thought of that. You’re right. Oh my gosh. For those who have to use computers to work—I mean, now, think about the education of these children.
[01:10:32] Arthur Firstenberg: If you have to use a computer, turn off the Wi-Fi. Use it wired only.
[01:10:38] Ashley James: Hardwire your computer. That’s what we do at our house. We hardwire everything.
[01:10:42] Arthur Firstenberg: Hardwire everything. Hardwire your computer. Hardwire your phones—simple answer.
[01:10:46] Ashley James: Yeah, that’s right. You can get an adapter to plug into your phone to hardwire it. And then keep it on airplane mode if you need to.
[01:10:55] Arthur Firstenberg: I do not recommend using the cell phone even that way because it still got the resonant circuit in it.
[01:11:00] Ashley James: Okay. So get a landline.
[01:11:04] Arthur Firstenberg: Get a landline. Use it only hardwired, not cordless, and use a wired computer.
[01:11:10] Ashley James: Got it.
[01:11:11] Arthur Firstenberg: And disable the Wi-Fi on your computer. Disable the Wi-Fi in your modem or your router.
[01:11:18] Ashley James: What about earthing or grounding as a way of helping the body with exposure to electric pollution? Have you looked into earthing and grounding as a form of mitigation?
[01:11:35] Arthur Firstenberg: It’s very popular. It used to be very effective. Nowadays, when the earth is polluted with dirty electricity, most places on the earth, when you plug yourself into the earth, you actually can draw up the dirty electricity into your body. So it no longer is as effective as it used to be.
[01:11:56] Ashley James: What do you do on a daily basis to clean yourself of electric pollution or mitigate electric pollution?
[01:12:08] Arthur Firstenberg: I feel well in my house in Santa Fe. Mostly, there’s nothing that I have to do. If I am overcharged, I fill up a bathtub full of water and put some sea salt in it, and that will draw out the electricity from your body, or a handful of clay.
[01:12:30] Ashley James: I love it. As we wrap up our interview, I’d love to talk about how we can help your movement. I think we’re all on board. We all want a healthier planet. You have laid out very well that there is a definite problem that we have, and we are rapidly getting worse and worse. I mean, I don’t want to be doomsday about it, but if we just run with this technology, we’re just going to get to the point where we kill ourselves and the planet. There needs to be checks and balances. We need to slow down and really take the precaution seriously. What can we do to prevent 5G, for example? What can we do to tell these companies that we don’t want this electric pollution anymore?
[01:13:26] Arthur Firstenberg: I think the single most powerful thing that anybody can do is get rid of their cell phone. Stop being part of the demand for it. That’s the single most important thing to do. They can also monitor my websites, which are cell phonetaskforce.org. I send out newsletters, and there are posted on the website—a number of languages. And my other website is 5gspaceappeal.org. That’s the international appeal to stop 5G on earth and in space. It’s got about 300,000 signatures to date. And they can make donations on either of those websites to support my work and to support legal action that we’re taking. We have a case before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals right now to declare laws that facilitate 5G unconstitutional.
[01:14:42] Ashley James: Yes. Arthur, that’s wonderful. I’m going to make sure the links to everything that Arthur Firstenberg does is in the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehealth.com. And the link to your book, which I want everyone to read. It’s a fascinating book. I really can’t put it down. I’m very excited to finish it. I’m in the middle of it.
[01:15:08] Arthur Firstenberg: Our third website, which is not so popular yet, is echoearth.org, and it stands for End Cellphones Here on Earth.
[01:15:20] Ashley James: Okay, echoearth.org. I’m going to make sure that that and all the other links are on the show notes of today’s podcast at learntruehalth.com, and a link to your book, The Invisible Rainbow, which is fantastic. I think everyone should read it. Arthur, is there anything you’d like to say to wrap up today’s interview?
[01:15:39] Arthur Firstenberg: We live in dangerous times. Our earth is under threat from many directions. Electromagnetic radiation is just one of them. We have the burning of fossil fuels, which has got to stop. We have deforestation. We have pesticides. We have a lot of threats, and to me, the single most urgent one—and the one that I have become an expert in—is the electromagnetic radiation. It’s more urgent because it’s escalating faster than the other, and society is in total denial that it even exists. This is what I’m working on.
[01:16:34] Ashley James: Arthur, thank you so much for your work. I really appreciate you coming on the show today and sharing this information. I can’t wait to see The Invisible Rainbow as a documentary. It’s going to be such a great movie. Please, feel free to come back to the show anytime you have more to share. We’d love to have you back.
[01:16:51] Arthur Firstenberg: Thank you, Ashley.
Get Connected With Arthur Firstenberg!
International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space Website
Book by Arthur Firstenberg Recommended Reading by Arthur Firstenberg
The Body Electric by Robert O. Becker