Peter Sullivan, Parent Advocate

I recently spoke with Peter Sullivan, an Environmental Health advocate on autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with an MS in Computer Science from Stanford. A lot of what we talked about is at the leading edge of theorizing about chronic disease. Unlike some of the causal connections made with a high degree of certainty between pesticides and cancer, ASD, or IQ loss, the jury is still out on links between ASD and electromagnetic fields (EMF). There is some evidence of links to cancer, neurological effects, and reproductive effects, though most do not consider the evidence conclusive. But it was interesting to hear more about the possibility of EMF affecting cell membrane ion channels, blood-brain barrier permeability, intracellular calcium homeostasis, myelination, and other neurological effects, and Peter seems well-versed to me in cell biology, physiology, and quantum computing, though I would leave it to experts to say. People I have come to trust, like the Environmental Working Group and Linda Birnbaum, former Director of NIEHS, believe there is enough evidence of health effects that we should at least be applying the precautionary principle.

It is clear that multiple factors in modern life are causing true increases of pediatric cancer, ASD, autoimmune disease, and endocrine disruption, and Peter and I agree we should run this giant uncontrolled experiment backwards wherever possible to see if disease rates improve. At least that is the idea favored among parent advocates. Industry people would rather put an outrageously high burden of proof on scientists to show that the exposures we know children have – pesticides, endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), plastics – are indeed linked to disease. In other words, though everyone knows we should not do randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to see if toxic substances harm children, the problem is we are doing an experiment without controls on everyone, which means that many children will have to get sick or die in order to rise above the background contamination, just like lead levels of 38µg/dL were considered normal and natural in control groups in the 1970s when we first started tackling that problem.

You can read more about Sullivan’s work at https://www.clearlightventures.com/#/talks/

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Peter Sullivan of Clear Light Ventures

JMK: Hi! It’s nice to meet you. I was just cruising around your website a little bit. Thanks so much for making time for me. I really appreciate it.

So where are you located?

PS: I’m in Weston, Connecticut right now. But when I was with my kids, I was 30 years in Silicon Valley.

I was in a location that was probably a cancer cluster but not investigated. We had a lot of people dying. And I got really sick. But I made it, and I learned a lot, so I’m happy.

JMK: I was reading up on autism because I just finished my chapter on it. And it seems to me that what we're learning is that it's not one gene. It's over 200 different genes, right?

PS: Even more than that. Even the genetics is not the thing. There is a Standard professor I work with who did a study on twins, and he did the gold standard for figuring out environment versus genes. We took identical twins, and he found, comparing twins who were both sick to those where one was sick and one not, that about 42% of the risk was genetic.

JMK: Is that the Hallmayer article?

PS: Yes – all right! You are totally up on it.

JMK: I was just reviewing the literature again. It’s interesting. Another twin study that I looked at that was a little more recent looked at how far apart even identical twins were on the spectrum. They might both be on the spectrum, but one may have crossed the diagnostic threshold, and the other not, because of differing environmental exposures.

PS: Yes. I used to work with Martha Herbert a lot – she was at Harvard for a while – and she said it’s not something bad that happened in the past – it’s a state of overload. And if you do something that lessens the load – you can keep up.  

I was just at the MAPS (Medical Academy of Pediatrics and Special Needs) Conference. I don’t know if you have heard of this, but it’s the doctors who do pediatrics and special needs.

I talked to one doctor who had two, not just one, but two kids who were non-verbal autistic. He would call them Type 3. And then he got them to became savants, and they got picked up by Carnegie Mellon’s savant program. They not only talked again, but they were doing quantum mechanics at age 6 or something.

JMK: Wow!

PS: So we are finding a lot of these kids are actually amazingly smart, but they just can’t communicate it.

So lead me through what you need.

JMK: I saw you were linking symptoms to EMF (electromagnetic fields), which I haven't looked at a lot. I haven't, for instance, read Devra Davis's more recent book on cell phones and EMFs.

PS: A book you look at about these health effects is The Out-of-Sync Child by Carol Kranowitz. As an engineer, I’m thinking, well, if a computer or an orchestra is out of sync – how do you get it back? Now I have a better understanding of that.

A lot of people on the autism spectrum will do ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis), and they will do all this behavioral stuff. But a lack of ABA is not a root cause driving autism, right? It’s not. I was having food allergies. So I was searching for food allergy books, and I was getting sensory books. And then Amazon kept recommending books on autism. And then I got one book that said enzymes for sensory integration may be reduced in those with ASD. And then it talked about food allergies. So I got the book, and I ended up getting it the very first day it came out and read it.

It said – we’ve got all these people with all these conditions. They were talking about kids reacting and the sensory stuff. And I realized it was just a more extreme form of what I am going through. At the end, they said they don’t know why these kids are doing well with a gluten-free or dairy-free diet. But the enzymes are helping. So we are wondering why the enzymes are low – what is screwing this up? In the last chapter, they said it’s potentially toxic metals – and a giant lightbulb went off in my head.

I had been grinding my teeth, and I had these silver fillings. I had gray marks on my mouth guard. I realized, Oh my gosh! I’m grinding my fillings, which are half mercury, and swallowing that. I found a local doctor who was in the DAN protocol at the time – before MAPS. They were looking at all these factors – toxic metals – and it was controversial at the time. People didn’t want to hear about it.

So I got tested. I was really high in mercury, and it turned out I had a composite filling touching a gold one – and it has a conductive battery effect. The dentist who took if out said that the voltage with a regular amp meter measured between the two teeth is higher than your brain’s voltage. And sure enough, when the tooth was removed, the very next day I was doing yoga and I was so much calmer.

So besides the toxics, I had had an electrical corrosive noise going on. I started detoxing, doing IV chelation. I wasn’t sure what to do, but I ended up just trusting my doctor. I was kind of shortcutting the protocol. Then we looked at my kids. We started working on yeast allergies – toxics, mold…. We had mold, and there is definitely a mold mycotoxin thing that goes on.

There is some debate whether moving the metals around can cause more harm than good. I don’t know what I would do in retrospect. There are some safer ways to do it now. But at the time, I was scared.

Originally, it was thought that you would get permanent brain damage from this stuff. Now, we know the brain can grow back just like the rest of tissue. As a matter of fact, one of the doctors at this conference talked about people coming back – even from MS. I’ve got a couple of forms of plasmalogens that have been problematic in Alzheimer’s and dementia. They are using this for MS, regrowing myelin, which is great for Lyme as well.

JMK: Wow! That is crazy.

PS: Because myelin is basically intelligence.

JMK: Right.

PS: That’s the one thing that got me. I got really intense in that time period because I was like, “Oh my God! Permanent damage!” But even in that time period, they were starting to learn about neuroplasticity. This was in 2002 – so I was doing a little bit of funding to autism groups. They were saying, we have neuroplasticity, and they were trying to make things be positive. But then it was controversial, too. And then the real question is, you have high levels of mercury – where does this come from?

People were looking at mercury in vaccines at the time, and I did not want to get into the controversy of that. I ended up reading the book Evidence of Harm – but ended up thinking, God – it’s a mess. I’m not an activist, but I do think it’s important that we work on this issue.

Maybe some people don’t detox as well, and that is true. And then I had some genetic testing, and I didn’t have MTHFR (Methylenetetrahydrofolate Reductase) stuff. Maybe I had some post-traumatic stress from the military. If your body is stuck in fight or flight, it doesn’t detox or do DNA repair. I thought about the stuff I’d gone through in the military and in Silicon Valley. Whatever I and my wife were doing, we were all stuck in fight or flight mode – working full time, running five marathons, raising two kids, going to grad school at Stanford on the side – trying to compete with all these undergrads. It was just remarkable that I got through that while raising kids.

I had detoxed. I was gluten-free, dairy-free.  Right now, I’m about 158 lbs. But at the time I was 131 pounds. My head was forward, my eyes were bug-eyed – I did not look good and was not sleeping well.

During that time period, my body became very sensitive, and I became electro-hypersensitive. If I put a cell phone next to my head, I could feel it. I couldn’t sleep well – except in certain locations, and I had ear ringing – except in certain locations, where it felt calm.

Then I started to build an infrastructure for myself. I got people who could measure EMFs teach me about that, and I started having a regenerative sleep environment and more time in nature. I basically retired from software. My wife’s company had a good IPO. I realized this is ridiculous. We needed to focus on health for the kids and me. Full-time for basically the last twenty years, I have focused on what are the environmental factors impairing health, especially autism.

JMK: Wow!

PS: And it’s a set of things. It’s certainly not one. I’ve worked on multiple toxics. But the area that I think is pretty well studied is the EMF. It is pretty interesting and has a pretty clear pathway correlation to autism. It impacts the calcium channels – you know how the calcium channels work?

JMK: Yes – I remember learning it in pathophysiology.

PS: [Calcium channels] are voltage gated, and the voltage pulses from the electromagnetic fields can cause false opening of calcium channels, which can cause mostly calcium influx, because the gradient is so high on the outside compared to inside. But there is also efflux, so calcium ion dysregulation.

The autism scientist that I’ve been working with said, one of the pathways that is coming up is calcium channels. And then I hear that EMF scientist talking about calcium. Another lightbulb went off over my head. I thought, God – could it be possible that EMF is related to autism. So I called Martha Herbert, who was at Harvard, and I said, can you look at this? Because I am seeing calcium issues in autism and in this research. And I was having the personal experience of, I can’t get a phone next to my head or I can’t sleep.

She called me back because she said, I can’t even believe what I’m reading here. This is serious stuff. We have blood-brain barrier breaches. She ended up writing a hundred-page paper with 550 citations that eventually got published in 2 parts in 2013. And then later, another doctor, Martin Pall wrote another paper, but it took him eight years to write the paper. It came out last year.

I like his paper because he combines everything together in a nice way: genetic components, EMF, and the chemicals as well. Basically, he hypothesizes that the EMFs are causing calcium ions to come in through the calcium channels. The chemical exposures are really more impacting the glutamate and NMDA receptors. He was saying chemicals in general, and then in this new paper he basically said, twelve classes of excitotoxic chemicals, including glutamate, MSG, glyphosate. We’ve all been saying, “okay, something is going on here. We’ve had worse chemical problems in the past – what’s actually going up in the environment?”

But what makes that tracking tricky is that it could be because of the blood-brain barriers breaches, which come from EMF and from chemical exposures as well. You could have a chemical that is in theory declining environmentally, but that now has more access to brain tissue than it had in the past because the blood-brain barriers are opening.

So that is a very complex, confounding factor. So my original mentality, coming in as a troubleshooter was, it’s very statistically unlikely that multiple factors are driving this – that it’s one pathway being impacted. Maybe it is not so much about the calcium channel; maybe it’s about the cell membranes and their integrity as well because there is a lot of oxidative stress. And when the body and infectious agents – as a net effect – is that people with Lyme and chronic Epstein Barr – immune factors are a big risk factor for autism as well. When you look at how cell danger mode works, with Bob Naviaux’s work at the cellular level. He talks about how if a toxic or infection comes by and steals electrons from the outer membrane, the cell will go into cell danger mode, which is like fight or flight mode.

So EMF – polarized manmade fields are not so evenly distributed as natural fields, and they come through like an ionic blade with some pluses or minuses in different location – it redistributes the ions, having an effect very similar to an infection. I was just talking to a scientist who thinks one of the issues is that with EMF – the body is trying to respond as if it has a chronic infection. It’s using a lot of the immune response – inflammation – there is a lot of oxidative stress that the body uses to kill infections – but it doesn’t work with EMF. So it’s just depleting all the resources and frying things out, especially the cell membranes. Certainly, glyphosate is a factor as well. And then the one thing that has come up recently is microplastics. I’ve not even been measured for microplastics, but I’ve been looking at it.

I used to speak at autism conferences because we didn’t have anyone talking about autism and EMF. So I came up with a handout about environmental factors and autism. Antibiotic use comes up as a big factor in autism and ADHD. Apparently, our gut flora is really key for detoxification as well. There are multiple factors. Gut flora stimulate oxytocin, which is calming, and keeping that excitatory / inhibition ratio more in line for brain development is important.

I’m working with Patty Lemer, who wrote Outsmarting Autism, to include this in her next book.

JMK: I was going to ask you about microbiome, because it is interesting. You know, the fecal microbiome transplants being used therapeutically with severely autistic kids are sometimes showing results where they become non-symptomatic. It’s just incredible. I haven't looked at that for a couple of years, but the last time I did look at it, the studies were very promising.

PS: I’m blown away by what’s going on. There is a group called Documenting Hope that Martha Herbert was working with. They looked at 24 plausible environmental factors – chemicals, EMF, lifestyle, antibiotic use, vaccination status, Tylenol. There is a theory around Tylenol use depleting glutathione, which is an interesting theory – that it’s not something bad being added but something good being depleted. It’s complex. The Documenting Hope study, I’ve heard, needs to be tightened up for its dependent variables, but they found that the number one risk factor among the 24 was antibiotic use by both the mom and the kid. And number two was EMF. Number three was chemical exposures.

JMK: So you mentioned glyphosate. Do you know Stephanie Seneff’s work?

PS: Yes. She is a friend of Martha Herbert’s – we would speak at the same conference and end up coming to each other’s talks. Early on at the autism conference, people were fighting, “I think it’s this; I think it’s that.” And later, it became more like, “yes and – there is a common pathway impacted by multiple things, and here’s how these all work together.” Another person was talking about an overload of the endoplasmic reticulum as a driver for autism. The endoplasmic reticulum absorbs the intracellular Ca, or gives it off when you drink coffee. That’s where the excitement comes in. But also, apparently, the endoplasmic reticulum makes plasmalogens. It’s so complex.

JMK: I've seen autism research that wonders about mitochondrial function as a causal mechanism.

PS: Yes – that’s a huge one. In so many diseases, mitochondrial function is important – then the body can outpower things. The oxidative stress causes damage to the mitochondria, the cell membranes.

JMK: It's so interesting. The thing I remember from Seneff's work is that industry thought maybe glyphosate was fine, because it was not toxic to mammalian (eukaryotic) cells. But it's quite toxic to our gut bacteria.

PS: Exactly. And as a matter of fact, glyphosate is registered as an antibiotic. So you wipe out the gut flora, which makes a lot of our neurotransmitters too. And it affects the cell membrane – it’s so complicated how many layers this is working on.

JMK: Yes – there is so much more to know about the whole gut-brain axis – we really just understand the tip of the iceberg.

PS: We are harming our kids’ brains and lives – but if we do all of this backwards, then we could engineer more intelligence if not savant intelligence. It’s like learning how farming works – making sure you’ve got all the right nutrients in place. Just like you grow cabbage, if you want to grow myelin, it’s a combination of lowering toxics, adding in these raw materials, and then having these experiences to build the brain, to exercise the brain.

JMK: So interesting. It seems like I've heard you talking around this a little bit. But the epithelial barrier hypothesis also, it seems, is related to some of the things you've been talking about: leaky gut – gut flora problems caused by our toxic food and the other toxics that we're exposed to. But then also, not just that epithelial barrier, but a lot of our epithelial barriers are affected.

PS: Apparently, the gut-brain, blood-brain barriers are the same situation – if the gut is off, the blood-brain barrier is off. EMF opens the blood-brain barrier. So it’s this combination of multiple exposures – if you don’t have proper boundaries…. If you have a battery, you have to have a separation between the pluses and the minuses. And again, we’ve got boundary issues at the system level – with the gut and the brain – but also at the cellular level as well. And then blood circulation issues: we have blood clumping from EMF, which is a very credible and immediate factor – and sperm damage from EMF. De novo mutations, or uninherited mutations are more likely in autism. If we only stopped one thing, it should be the accidental genetic manipulation.

JMK: Yes – that’s very interesting about ASD, that it is usually from de novo mutations from exposures, not inherited, hence the older father’s greater risk.

PS: Certainly, multiple generations have had chemical exposures. But now, more recently, there is a cell phone in the pocket. That’s been talked about at Cleveland Clinic since 2008. It’s rather well known.

JMK: I tell my students about that one. I think the jury's still out a little bit. I assume a lot of this is cited on your website.

PS: It’s not always current. I’m not a scientist where I have to be rigorously thorough, but I try to make sure that everything that I’m talking about has at least a credible reference.

JMK: The people I am talking to about the epithelial barrier include Mary Margaret Johnson at Harvard. She's in Kari Nadeau’s lab, and they're looking at epithelial barrier effects with microplastics and other kinds of exposures.

PS: I’m not an expert at microplastics, but what I have learned recently is that the food and beverage industry have been embedding antibiotics in the plastics as a method of food preservation. My friend, who is now the Dean of Food and Beverage industry consortium out of University of Michigan – I need to talk to him about this.

JMK: That is interesting. Laura Schmidt at UCSF is focused on ultra-processed and hyper-palatable foods. With Tracey Woodruff, also at UCSF, they have started the Center to End Corporate Harms. I appreciate how they are going after industry in such a bold way.

PS: Well apparently, last week RFK invited all the food people in. They were all trying to be cooperative – maybe they will be. Why not? You can only harm your customers so long before people figure it out. If you're killing your customers, you're probably going to have a lower market share.

JMK: Right? I say to my students, the end of civilization is bad for business.

PS: Exactly. It’s just insane. It’s nutty. But even in the software computer world, we all thought all the personal technology stuff was great. We wanted to create objects of desire – and now we’ve got screen addiction too.

JMK: It’s really bad. Do your kids have cell phones?

PS: Yes. They are adults now in their twenties. But they know to put it in airplane mode, and they turn it off at night. And then they slept in an environment – even if you start by turning it off at night, you at least bring back some sort of restoration, a self-regulatory environment at night, and regeneration and detox. That might be enough to get you to the tipping point where your body can keep up with things.

JMK: I used to be so strict with Wi-fi and refused to let my husband get it, but since my kids got older, I gave up the fight, and we have Wi-fi on all the time.

PS: There are a lot of ways to do it. You can turn it off at night. There is an Eco Wi-Fi that has a lower beaconing frequency. Most people have overpowered Wifi, and it doesn’t need to be. That lower-powered Wi-fi should be as far from bedroom as possible. There are ways of putting it on schedule to go to sleep at night automatically.  

My main job right now is to figure that out because I’m not a tech hater; I’m not anti-corporate, and I don’t like to demonize people. I just like to solve problems. My tagline has been, I want to make technology safe for neurology. We need to make sure that field effects in devices don’t interfere with cell function, especially neurological function. So I am working on that. It’s just like music and noise. There are natural fields that are harmonizing and synchronizing for our body, and they are in the same wavelengths as the brain waves.

So going out in nature is regulating. If you’re not getting that environment, if you are in a building with a lot of metal and you don’t have that supportive regulation from nature….

JMK: That is so interesting. Do you think that is one reason forest bathing has had fairly positive results?

PS: Yes. That was one of the things I learned the hard way. If I was really wrecked and not sleeping – if I drove out into nature, left my cell phone in the car, and went for a hike, after about an hour, I could feel it and then go back. In Silicon Valley, even my very conventional doctor was like, “I go for a hike, and then I come back, and I feel the building and all the appliances, and everything feels jittery – we’re like a fish in water in these field effects.

No one wants to read the research – but if you can give someone a felt experience…. So I have a canopy, a wireless-free tent – like a little tent from a farmer’s market with clear sides, and it’s got wireless shielding. If you go into the tent, we can zip it up, and the majority of people, like 95%, can feel something. The most commonly reported thing, is, I feel calmer. For a lot of people, their body is going into cell danger mode, or fight or flight mode – is because of these agitating signals. Dr. Pall said we have had worse chemical exposures in the past and not had these outcomes, so something else is going on. I think one of the big components is that the body is always in cell danger mode; it’s not detoxing and adapting as much.

JMK: Yes. It's so hard because we're doing an uncontrolled experiment on ourselves – everything all at the same time – so it’s very difficult to work out. But I agree with the idea that we could do this backwards. Right? Take away these exposures and see what makes the difference.

PS: Exactly. One of the most functional things is, in software, when we really screwed things up, we would roll it back. And you've seen that happen on your cell phone. Somebody does a bad thing, and they roll back. We said, Let's go back to a known good state. That’s what the essence of the Paleo movement is. Do let’s go back to known, traditional, regenerative basics. Let’s only do those things we know are safe.

I was Mr. Do Everything First and Fast – and the bad news was I broke myself that way. The good news is I figured it out fast too. Rolling things back and being more cautious involves key choices like going back to glass instead of plastic.

JMK: Something I'm going to talk about in the book in my chapter on Solutions – my son introduced me to it – is this whole concept of the Lindy Effect, popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

In my first book, I was combining my humanities interests with my science interests and asking this main question: if we know we are poisoning our children, and we know we are destroying the climate on which all life in the universe depends, and we know there are solutions, but we're not taking them, why is that? I won't go into it too much, but I argued that we have changed our scientific paradigms such that we think that we are on a line instead of a circle based on our cosmology, and that in some ways, traditional cultures, and even the Western past, are very different in their whole way of seeing the relationship between humans and nature.

And so this going back to the paradigms of the past. We maybe could use some of that stuff – the notion that the thing that has been around the longest is going to stay around the longest. Glass has been around and has been used for thousands of years. So why don't we try the old solution? One hopes you might appeal to Conservatives in that way.

PS: Yes. I think it's a bridge. I think that's a shared thing. There's so much polarity. Of course, I think a lot of the polarity comes from the fact that people are in fight or flight mode – from multiple factors, but especially EMF. Health should be a shared value. In the past, I thought, old stuff = bad; new stuff = good; we are so much smarter. But we were over-validated and did not test all of this beforehand.

This is a great toxic story. Andy Groves – who used to run Intel, one of the biggest companies – Time magazine man of the year – ended up getting Parkinson’s disease. Here was a man who could build a clean room to get rid of toxics to make sure that microchips were better and uncontaminated. And he wrote a book called Only the Paranoid Survive. Yet when he got Parkinson’s, he did not change his diet or look at environmental toxins at all. I was just gob smacked talking to him. He was angry, and he also gave up his power talking to doctors. It’s almost like, the laws of physics are not different between chip making and biology – the laws of physics are the same.

I tried to bring it up. How do you tell a guy like that – someone who has been over-validated by having too much money or a degree from Harvard or whatever? We have a hard time saying they are wrong. And with the corporate group too – no one wants to be responsible for autism or ADHD or a rise in mental health problems --- they would be sued into oblivion. How do we make it safe for people to make mistakes and move on? It’s like software.

I don’t know what the best solutions are, but I tell everyone it’s like bowling. We don’t want all the people to die and all the life to die, but we also don’t want all the businesses to go out of business either. In wireless, we really want safe technology. We want to be like automotive safety – we want the technology people competing on safety and coming up with new protocols to test that.

JMK: You know. That's almost exactly what I heard from Terry Collins at Carnegie Mellon. He's a chemist who has practically become a biologist. I did this 2-week seminar at Woods Hole on endocrine disrupting chemicals. In my next chapter, I'm going to really zero in on the complexities of endocrine-disrupting chemicals and autoimmune disease. I'm really looking for a poster child on autoimmune disease.

PS: So there are a million. I should connect you with the MAPs doctors and people with autoimmune. There are so many people with Lyme. That’s actually one of the things. If you had told me 20 years ago that infectious disease was part of autism, I would have laughed at you blatantly, told you you were stupid. But here we are.

There are so many chronic diseases that have been under-diagnosed and reported: Epstein-Barr, Lyme, and PANS and PANDAS. That’s a really big component that I have to add in to my diagram. I need to add infectious agents. Would you call that an environmental toxic? I don’t think you would.

JMK: I certainly have not classified it that way at all. We’ve always had infectious agents. And so when you are looking at something like autism, which has seen such a huge, true increase, you know you’re looking for what has changed.

PS: Right.

JMK: You know, I'm using an ethnographic approach, which includes embodied experience. It is very much in keeping with ethnographers and anthropologists who want to explain what it means to be someone, or to have an experience. When my daughter was exposed, I was also exposed and suffered symptoms. I still have ill health.

PS: I can't remember what was your daughter exposed to.

JMK: Chlorpyrifos.

PS: Oh, God! And I forgot – you lost a child.

JMK: Yes – we have very good reason to believe that was a major factor in her cancer and relapses. And we did not realize our city was spraying for mosquitoes.

PS: How old was she at that time?

JMK: She was diagnosed at four, had two bone marrow transplants, and died at 8.

PS: Oh! And so many parents – I just met up with another friend whose child died from fentanyl. It's a lot, and I appreciate you hanging in there, not totally…and doing something instructive and not despairing.

JMK: I appreciate that. I had a surviving child, and we subsequently adopted two additional children, so I did not consider despair an option, not an ethical one anyway.

PS: Well, it can still…. Yes – that’s a lot. One of the kids on our street – it was a cancer cluster – and one of the kids died at age eight.

JMK: Yes. It’s terrible.

PS: Cross out cancer and say inflammatory disease. People are going to get cancer or inflammatory disease or Hashimoto’s. It depends on your genes.

JMK: Yes – I got Hashimoto’s.

PS: Yes – the thyroid situation. Wow!

JMK: Yes. My son suffers from ADHD symptoms. I think it’s rare to know what your exposures are. You can never prove causation fully, but even to have a plausible story and link identified is rare.

PS: And usually the sad thing is, there is not one cause. A lot of people say this – this did that. I say, if you had mercury exposure, you do not have a get-out-of-jail-free card for lead exposure or mold.

JMK: Sure.

PS: Whatever other toxics are in you, it’s a pile-up – it weakens your body, and then it is a gang tackle, and especially the infectious agents can come in because the body’s immune system not as strong.

JMK: It's all very complex. My daughter also had an X-ray at about the “right” time that could have had an effect as well.

PS: X-rays – ionizing radiation.

JMK: I do think telling stories may be second-best to experiencing yourself. You and I both have had experiences where, when once you have that experience, you do believe it.

PS: You can’t not.

JMK: It’s nice to talk to someone who already knows so much of this research. The number one thing that you could help me with is finding parents of kids who believe that their kids’ asthma or autoimmune disease were cause by environmental factors.

PS: One of the factors that we should look at is…. When started doing Model Healthy Home work, we would seal the building up and the VOCs and a lot of the particulates in the walls, like the pink fiberglass got sealed in the walls, but the house was so sealed up that the CO2 level would rise.

There is a Harvard study saying that if the CO2 level is above 600, there is cognitive impairment. This is happening now at Stanford and some other places – you should have a CO2 meter in the classrooms.

So a lot of the times when people start getting groggy, it’s frequently a room with too much CO2.

JMK: That is very interesting. I had heard about that, because, of course, we are above 420 ppm in the atmosphere now.

PS: Most people don’t know those numbers, right?

Sealing the house up – as a lot of green people are trying to do – is the right thing for the climate. But they do two things that screw things up. They get solar, and they over-seal their buildings.

When they over-seal the buildings, CO2. rises and internal VOCs go up.

When you get solar, the inverters create a lot of electrical noise called dirty electricity – and that was the main thing that screwed my sleep up.

There is a book on that by Sam Milham called Dirty Electricity.

JMK: Well, I did get the solar, but I put it on my garage, so I guess I’m in luck.

PS: No – because the electricity from the solar goes into the inverter. Now that electricity goes through your whole house, so ideally, you should have a building biologist come out and measure your dirty electricity levels. And there’s a filtration system you can get called perfect power box for about a thousand dollars or so.

If you want to just test in a cheaper way, you can turn the circuit breaker for your bedroom off at night and see if you sleep better. We usually tell people turn everything off at night – baby monitor, cordless phone, Wi-fi – and then turn the circuit breaker for the bedroom, and try it for a couple of nights and see how you sleep. Then you can lean into doing more – you can pay money.

JMK: I had an EMF device – a gaussmeter – at one point because we were worried about the transformer across the street. And we had just background from that, but we found out that we had one circuit in the house that was mis-wired, and it had a really high EMF.

PS: Exactly. Now, that's just the very first level, like, I always thought I started being sensitive to magnetic fields. But then I realized I was sensitive to the dirty electricity and electric fields that there's really four things you need to measure. So it's magnetic fields, electric fields, wireless radiation, and dirty electricity. And even ground currents too. There are other things for grounding and everything, but minimally, those four – and most people just do one. And they think they’re good.

This is even technical people like in Silicon Valley. I had a lot of electrical engineering in undergrad. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

JMK:  You were talking earlier about how you can be very expert in one field and overestimate expertise in other fields – almost like a Dunning-Krueger effect, but in one field. So you might know all about the laws of physics and forget to apply them to biology. I summarize the Dunning-Krueger effect to my students as, stupid people don’t realize how stupid they are; smart people don’t realize how smart they are. We tend to expect people to have similar bodies of knowledge to ours. People don’t always know where their gaps are. That goes back to Socrates – that the beginning of wisdom is to know what we do not know.

Terry Collins said, we don’t want to put business out of business, but we need business to assess the health value of all these products as well. What you said was almost exactly what he articulated.

PS: Yes. We need simple ways of proving safety that aren’t a 10-year mouse study, right?

JMK: Right.

PS: We need some really simple things. And I'm looking at things like biological condensates .There was a marine biologist, Edith Witter, who got a MacArthur genius award. Witter got bioluminous plankton, and then she measured the light level coming off the plankton. Then she dropped in water samples from different locations. If the lumination went down, she assumed that lumination was a general test for toxicity. I need something like that for wireless radiation.

JMK: That’s really interesting. It seems to me that you are the meter. You were sensitive to it – you are a kind of test subject or wireless meter.

PS: Yes. Martha Herbert used to say, Peter you are the meter. There are some really sensitive people – we just need meters as sensitive as them.

There’s some new quantum biology stuff coming up. I think some of these are really quantum effects going on. It’s trending along with quantum computing and quantum communication. So that’s becoming more credible.

JMK: I don’t know anything about that – I will have to look into that.

PS: You know Circadian rhythms. You go outside, you look at the sun. I would argue that you’re creating quantum coherence with the sun. Right now, in quantum computing, you have quantum entanglement – two particles that are entangled and linked together, so that when one spins, the other spins, no matter the distance. So you can have faster than speed of light communication and computing. The only tricky thing is once in a while, the entanglement gets broken. The most common thing breaking the entanglement is electromagnetic interference.

So I think what we would call Circadian rhythms is really quantum entanglement with the resonant frequencies of hydrogen in the background of hydrogen radiation in the sun. You get set into the rhythm of that. Then you go into a chamber, and you lose your rhythmicity, your timing. And it’s like being jet-lagged. So we need to get back to our environment. You were talking about forest bathing. The environment is regulating us. As a matter of fact, I would say that technology is the great dysregulator, and nature is the great regulator. Nature and sleep are regulating for us, and tech is not currently, but it will be.

And so what are the mechanisms from nature? There are some rhythmic and conventional electromagnetic field effects and a lot of conventional light stuff. But I think some it is going to be quantum.

JMK: That is super interesting. I actually think our conversation may be more pertinent for my next book. Johns Hopkins are keeping me to 90,000 words, and so I have to stay on task. But these interviews have been extraordinary, with so many amazing people. I realize I need a full, very solutions-focused book to capture all the insights.

PS: There was a book called Slow Death by Rubber Duck. It was all about toxins. It's a great book. Those guys toured the country, and they said, everybody read about the toxins and freaked out. And now they want to know, what can I do about it?

I like how you've got the stories to get people engaged. But then the next story is, what did you do to get rid of it? The next book had different names, but they called it ToxIn, ToxOut.

And in one of the chapters in that book, the guy interviewed me. “Peter, you've spent I don't know how many years doing all this detox stuff. We don’t know anyone who’s done this.” I had them come out, and we spent a day talking about all kinds of stuff – and spent a couple of days going through all the different protocols.

So that book is worth reading, and it's inspiring, too. He promoted a very conventional thing – sauna use….

JMK: That’s very Lindy.

PS: Exactly. Old school, right?

JMK: It’s interesting what you said about the technology. I wrote about this in the first book. Frank, Walker, and Grinspoon argue that we need a balance among the biosphere, noosphere, and technosphere. If you are doing futurism, how are we going to solve this? Where are we going? We need to get

A technosphere that is not antagonistic to and killing our biosphere.

And how do we do that? If you consider the noosphere as the brain of the planet, can we collectively be smart enough to get to a stage where we can get an equilibrium among these different spheres – it’s Gaia theory.

PS: Basically, we have to be humble. We have to assume, until we get better results, that we are idiots. We’re wrong about stuff. And there is nothing wrong with being wrong. That’s part of the learning process. We will figure it out. But it’s a bummer because we really need our IQs to be on, and these factors are lowering our intelligence.

JMK: I agree. That is true. We're losing all these IQ points from the exposures. Are we are lowering the population-wide IQ so much that we can't solve these problems. Bruce Lanphear is someone I had talked to….

PS: Bruce did lead stuff.

JMK: Yes. He’s brilliant. He’s wonderful.

PS: I haven’t talked to him in a while. Twenty years ago, I was trying to do a non-invasive measurement of lead, mercury, and arsenic via fingertips with near infrared light. It should be very simple – basically a

pulse oximeter, technology that has been around since the sixties, and which is actually a quantum technology.

JMK: Yes!

PS:  It’s a quantum technology because the quantum pulses in the light. In the lab, I got a company that was working on trying to do non-invasive glucose measurement to take their near infrared light spectroscopy device, and we got lead, mercury, and arsenic correlated to blood level, and then the company went out of business.

This is back in 2007. But at some point, I’m focused on EMF now. No one is on it. When that is under control, I may loop back to spectroscopy for the non-invasive testing. There was a good guy for testing at Duquesne – Skip Kingston. He used to work at the National Institute of Standards, and he does a teeny blood prick, and he can measure at 1 ppb much more accurately than anybody. Charles of England is trying to bring him in right now.

JMK: Wow!

PS: Skip is amazing. He was at Duquesne, but he moved universities. I don’t know where he is, but I was just meeting with one of his other doctor friends. When I was spending years looking at all the lead stuff, I started with Bruce Lanphear and all these people.

JMK: Okay, we only have so much time. Here's a question I really want to ask you, because you are not demonizing business, unlike me, probably. I'm going for it. But you were part of that world.

PS: I still have friends in it. How do you talk to them? No one has the intention of trying to be evil. They're just going fast and competing and trying. You know, they're just not focused on safety. When you are doing software and tech, you just think, whatever…

JMK: My former husband is a chemical engineer.

PS: Exactly, which is both good and bad, right?

JMK: I see how we were both science nerds, and then we ended up in very different places. And he never denied it when I mentioned that he was working for the industry that killed our child. But he is very invested in it.

PS: It’s hard. I remember thinking at one point when we started looking at EMF, well, I don't want to be like these oil and gas people blind to climate change. I want to be sure to look at everything, including stuff that I have done.

JMK: I address this in the current book. Ultimately, parents are responsible for everything for our kids.

But the question I really want to ask you is this: you were nodding along when I stated my central question, which is, if we know we are poisoning our children and destroying the only climate on which life depends, and we have solutions but are not adopting those, why so? And so, the sociological, the political, the why – you know this human question that we're really just talking about. How does this happen….?

PS: Ah, yes. Willful ignorance. Some of my background was in persuasion and psychology – a lot of these problems are really people problems, not science problems. We have a lot of inertia. The more time and energy we invest in something, the more we defend it. If your paycheck depends on it, you’re not going to look into it. It’s amazing the blinders people can put on – even when their lives are at stake. The guy at Intel couldn’t look at it and was unaware.

We lack growth mentality. It’s not safe to fail or harm people – we need to make it safer to make mistakes and move on. If you kill one brain cell, it’s permanent brain damage. I don’t want to see the words “permanent brain damage” associated with lead anymore because the research was done in the 70s before we knew about brain plasticity.

When we do all the lead public health work, we give some people the test back, and we’ll say, your son has this much lead. Some people would go into the low hope option – there’s nothing I can do. Some people would go into the hypervigilant group and want to kill people and sue everybody. But there was a small group of parents who would calmly listen, see the problem in front of them, and take action. That’s what we want. A lot of that has to do with the autonomic nervous system. If you are in flight-or-fight mode, that is sympathetic. But there is also the dorsal-vagal mode – which causes people to go all floppy and give up. It’s like fainting. You really want people to be in flow state. So we need to lower the stakes – say life is incredibly resilient – and we can make new brain cells – we can rewire things – people recover from all kinds of devastating stories. That’s the inspiring thing – to find a lot of kids who have recovered so we know there is hope. We have to leave them with hope.

There’s a book called Igniting Inspiration – it’s a persuasive communication manual. You have to focus on what you want, not what you don’t want. So you are not fighting toxics; you are pro-health, pro-child. Let’s find the factors that are impacting the children, but not make it a doom-and-gloom thing. It always has to be positive and inspiring, like a game, like a business. You’re never going to be on the planet and not be impacted by some health effect. But if you have more revenue than you have expenses, then you can thrive on Earth. 

JMK: Laura Vandenberg at Amhurst has this great line: “I refuse to believe that we are not smart enough to solve this problem.”

PS: I used to say, any problem – any manmade problem – and I use the sexist form intentionally – any problems created by humans can be uncreated by humans….we can roll it back.

JMK: I hope that's true. I mean, some of these things seem irreversible. Climate change….

PS: We’re really worried about Teflon. I worked on the Teflon movie. But they are finding some probiotic that can eat Teflon – and so some of these things go away. Nature is good at adapting. Nature will probably fix it before we do.

JMK: Well, and eventually, we’re going to be a geological layer. Maybe if we fix things in a million years, these will be the toxic layers, but there will be other layers on top that are less toxic.

PS: The other thing is that a lot of people get overwhelmed with such a big system like climate change. I just roll back and say, be the change you want to see in the world. You want to see no toxics? Manage your exposure and create a toxic-free body and household as well as you can. Lower exposures as much as you can, and then bring in some of these positive elements to try to give yourself a stronger immune system or neurological support.

JMK: I do see that making connections with other people is very important. Dick Jackson, who started the CDC Biomonitoring Project with NHANES data, is a really wonderful person. He was talking about that resilience, and especially with lead and other things. Do you know the rat park research? Rats will eat morphine until they kill themselves. But that is when they are in a barren cage. If they live in rat park, with lots of rat friends and little adventures, then they don’t eat the morphine, and they can recover from lead exposures and be resilient in the way you are describing.

PS: Sometimes we think it is all genetic stuff – this woe is me attitude. At first, I thought I had a genetic thing where I didn’t detox as well. And then I thought that genetically, I had a calcium channel variation that was making me more susceptible to EMF. But I just saw the list of the five calcium channel variations, and that was not it. Some of these things are just a reflection of fixed mindset instead of growth mindset – it’s hard when you are in fight or flight mode not to be in fixed mindset.

We need to give ourselves more capacity. When we are neurologically limited, we have less capacity to change and make new wiring. That’s the problem. So if you have too many people in fixed mindset, and they don’t want to change or get out of the box that they are in. There are also some good YouTube videos on willful ignorance as well – people who don’t want to hear it, people who don’t have the capacity to change – because they are too overloaded to change.

As I said, we need to roll back and find a peaceful place where we can thrive and be resilient and re-regulate.

JMK: The last question I'd like to ask you is, is there anything else that you wanted to ask about my project or experience?

PS: Tell me about your federal advisory committee.

JMK: The Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee to the EPA – it’s very interesting. We’re working on a letter on plastics right now. We intend to at least mention microplastics and nanoplastics. Veena Singla of NRDC / Columbia University is heading that up.

PS: I was an NRDC funder.

JMK: They are wonderful. The industry has been pushing back so hard. And of course, the whole Advisory Committee could go away any time now.

PS: But there are two sides of this – it is going to be interesting with Robert Kennedy, Jr. and the industry stuff. At some point, they have to get results. So you know, a lot of stuff that I had done with NRDC got rolled back by Trump. We did some mercury reduction that was saving $6-14 billion in health effects a year. Good luck with that. There has got to be some kind of coming to the middle of having freedom for business, and yet people are not functioning, and their healthcare costs are going to go up.

JMK: These industry reps – talk about fixed mindset!

PS: They have their marching orders. They don't have the capacity to change. So the question I asked when I visited the FCC – I was meeting with the head of safety, and they had a lawyer next to them, and it was like this guy has no capacity to change.

JMK: I believe it. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you spending the time with me. And if you do come across people who believe their children’s autoimmune disease or diabetes may have been caused by environmental exposures….

PS: One who has birth defects caused by exposures is Bucky from the Teflon movie, Dark Waters – he has been pretty public about it. He has a kid – who is fine. It’s a positive story. All the kids from the Teflon thing have gone really well, and Bucky is the sweetest guy on Earth.

All right, I gotta run!

JMK: Thanks so much – bye!