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Autism & EMFs: From Silicon Valley to Health Advocacy with Peter Sullivan · Inchstones with Sarah | Autism Advocacy & Caregiver Stories

• 0:01
  Speaker A: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to my latest episode of the Inchtones podcast. I have Peter Sullivan here today. He is someone who is communicating the environmental hazards and toxins and variables that are deeply affecting our children with autism, but has lived this throughout his own life and has applied what he's learned to. And I got to meet him at an event recently in New York, and obviously our overlap was vast and quick. Peter, thank you so much for being here today.
• 0:35
  Speaker B: Thank you, Sarah. Thank you for communicating all this. That's my. That's. We need that. We need people to share like this.
• 0:43
  Speaker A: Environmental factors are eliciting a lot of reaction these days as we talk more and more and. And Autism Spectrum disorder is front and center of this national conversation. Talk to me about your journey and your history with this, as well as from a professional and personal angle.
• 1:06
  Speaker B: I would just say in. In Silicon Valley, about 20 years ago, I was. I was working too hard. I was running the front page of Excite.com I was in graduate school. I was running marathons and raising two kids, and it was too much. And I would get home sometimes and just have complete fatigue. And I started. I started looking at, like, food allergies, and I knew I had a yeast allergy, and I started looking at that. And Amazon kept sending me books, and they were sending me books on enzymes and food allergies and everything. And there was one book that came that really changed my life, and it was called Enzymes for Autism and Other Conditions, Sensory Integration and Fatigue, all these things. I looked down the thing. It's like, I have all these. And we know. You know, it's like. So I read the book, and it basically said that people were getting improvements in autism by taking enzymes and improving their digestion. And then they said, why would there be. At the end of the book, the last chapter, they said, why would there be low enzymes in the body? What's driving that? And they said that some people have been suspecting that mercury would be reducing the enzymatic activity. Well, I had several mercury fillings, mercury amalgams, which are half silver, half mercury at the time. And I was grinding my teeth, and I had a mouth guard, and I had the mouth guard in, but I had gray marks on the mouth guard where the silver teeth were. And all of a sudden, this giant light bulb went off in my head. I'm like, oh, my God, I am grinding my tend grind, and I'm. The mercury is going right into my body. And so I found a functional medicine doctor in my area who actually was also an autism Doctor and he was phenomenal. His name was Raj Patel and he was following this protocol called the Dan Protocol, which was called Defeat Autism Now. So he was biologically treating autism. And I was put on all the protocols as the kids, basically. So I went, I ended up doing chelation, get rid of. I had very high levels of mercury, and that was my focus for the longest time. And when I detoxed fully from mercury and I know some people were. I read the book evidence of harm 20 years ago about the New York Times author who wrote about potential issues with mercury and vaccines. You read the book, and I was kind of infuriated by it. And I realized I didn't feel like I was the type of person. I wasn't very conflict adverse. I wasn't very like, I'm gonna put my head in the can and whatever. And I said, I just thought to myself, strategically, I said, well, what if everyone knew? If everyone knew what was in their bodies, then they would actually take a look. And so I really decided. I quit my job. At the time, I was the principal user interface designer for Netflix. So I quit my job and decided to focus on environmental factors for autism. And I, and I said it was kind of interesting because I don't know whether this is. Mercury is related to autism or not, but. But if it's not, it doesn't matter. Mercury is known to be bad. Let's just focus on that. So I, I did spend 10 years we, we made some money at an IPO and so I could take time off, I could focus on my kids, do a little bit of this, and focus on recovering my own health as well. So I did focus on mercury and that was the step one. And I did that for about 10 years, but I detoxed. And then my health still kept going down. So I don't know. You can see me now. You've, you've met me in person. I'm 160 pounds right now. And in 2007 I got down to 131 pounds. So I will frequently show pictures of me because people, people think, oh, weight loss is great. But a lot of people, they see the picture and they're like. And they didn't realize. And I said, okay. So I'm doing everything. I know. I've detoxed from metal. I'm eating. I'm. I had dropped. I had stopped eating gluten and dairy, which were big factors for people. I was eating all organic. I was getting rid of any, like, toxins in the house. I was really Trying to live the best life I could. And I had the time, energy, resources, and access to experts. So I was funding autism research and I didn't know what to do. But what happened, which was kind of crazy, is I started, you know, I'm in tech, and I. And I love tech, I love personal technology. But I got to a point where I couldn't put a cell phone next to my head, right? When I put a cell phone next to my head, I could feel it. And so I, I'm just crazy what's going on here? And I thought somebody's, you know, my body is having strong reactions to this, and my brain is saying, this is safe and well tested. How could, you know, how could this be a issue? But my body is having these really strange reactions. So I, I tried to learn more about the electromagnetic field thing and eventually had some people come to my house and do measurements. And there were people, there were experts in this field, and there were individually trained experts. But then I found out there was a whole group of people called building biologists who follow a protocol that will measure these fields and mold and all these other things in your home. And there are also industrial hygienists that will go to work environments and measure these factors. So what happened is I'm funding research in autism, and one of my chief scientists said to me, peter, watch out for the calcium channels. A lot of the genes that are coming up are calcium channel genes, right? And there was one, there's one form of autism called Timothy syndrome that is just a single gene mutation in the calcium channel. And that's a very simplified genetic model for autism. So I ended up going to a talk at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco that had all these EMF researchers, and they started talking about a lot of the research. And I had never heard any of this stuff, right. I just assumed it was safe and well tested. And one of the researchers said, we have dysregulation of calcium ions and calcium channels. And all of a sudden I took this information I got from this senior scientist to Stanford trained chief scientist at Cure Autism now and then this information from these people about calcium dysregulation? And I went, oh, my God. This giant light bulb went above my head. Is, is it possible that EMFs or, you know, wireless radiation, electromagnetic fields could be part of the autism? What's driving autism? Not just kind of the chemical stuff that I'd been focusing on. And so I sent email, I sent some of the research to an autism researcher I knew I had befriended at Harvard, who was just really fun, Martha Herbert. And she called me back, honestly, she called me back kind of like, like as shocked as I was. And she goes, I. I can't even believe what I'm reading here. She goes, I'm. I'm seeing blood, Brain. Blood brain barrier breaches. I'm seeing like incredible dysregulation here. And so she ended up writing a paper. She ended up teaming up with one of the, the emf. EMF researchers wrote a paper together called EMF and what's it called? EMF and Autism. I'm trying to get the exact title, but if you search for EMF and autism, Martha Herbert and Cindy Sage was the other author. And they basically went down and, you know, they basically, Martha said was very smart about this. She goes, you know, we don't want to overstate it and we don't want to say just because it's rising in the environment that it's, you know, that doesn't mean, you know, that's not causality. We need to focus mechanisms and we need to be understated. And she base. But she basically said, it is remarkable how many this is. She basically said, it's a plausible theory. It's remarkable how many symptoms, known symptoms of autism are also known symptoms of EMF exposure. So that, that really. And I thought as soon as she published that paper, we were going to get, you know, that we were going to be off to the races and everything's crickets. Nothing. Nobody's talking about anything. Then I, I find one more researcher, Caltech guy, Caltech PhD, who was at, I think, Washington University, and he was talking about EMF and autism and other factors. And I called, I said, will you, you know, do a paper on this or whatever? He says, peter, I'll. I will. He goes, he goes, I have a list of items. Autism is kind of a small percentage. This is impacting the whole population. There's major heart implications to it and major mental health in general, neurological things going on. I don't want to just focus on autism. I said, well, will you go to an autism talk and give a talk and just do some sloth? And so he came for two years and gave a couple talks. And I then started taking his information and just disseminating it to parents, but waiting for it to get published. Well, he finally published his paper and I had to wait eight years for this, but he finally published the paper in 2004. I was really excited because he had said, basically when he was doing his talks, he said, it's A combination of genetic factors, of course, and then electromagnetic fields and chemicals both all working together. And you know, because, because. Yeah, so, so what Martha Herbert would tell me, I would say, coming from a troubleshooting background in Silicon Valley and thinking like Occam's razor, I was thinking it's very statistically unlikely for multiple things to be driving the autism epidemic.
• 10:30
  Speaker A: Right.
• 10:31
  Speaker B: It just, you know, that's statistically unlikely. But being a computer troubleshooter, I'm used to have something, one thing breaks and then you see the symptoms. The problem with human biology is we're so resilient that we don't break down until you don't see symptoms, until you've had like 10 different things. Systems fail.
• 10:51
  Speaker A: Right.
• 10:52
  Speaker B: And even. And then when the body gets the.
• 10:55
  Speaker A: Lies and the confusion for the general population, I think you just hit on that, is that the general population and those that don't know what they don't know don't understand that the resiliency of the human body, it takes nine, ten systems to collapse before those symptoms really surface enough for most people to realize, oh, wow, this is happening.
• 11:17
  Speaker B: Yeah. And so I had to change my paradigm for being, you know, and I was a very good troubleshooter. I had to change my paradigm and adapt to the physiology. And Martha Herbert said, listen, it may not be, it's not one factor, but it's going to be probably one pathway, one key pathway. And so I think that what we're learning is the key pathway. There are multiple impacts in autism, but I think calcium, I think as Martha Herbert and, or I think as Martin Paul says, the calcium channel is the key thing. And we're, and let's talk about, so let's talk about that single pathway. And what Martha Herbert will say is another thing she trained me on is that this is not something bad that happened in the past, that you can't change that. It's a state of overload your body. Not only is it resilient, but it can fix these things. It can make new brain cells, it can recover. So it's a lot like a business that, that's got too many bills to pay or, you know, whatever. It's just, it's, there's too much going on. And so I feel like my role is to highlight for parents the key pathways to simplify the medical stuff so that, you know that it's easy. So we'll get in and we'll talk about that briefly.
• 12:26
  Speaker A: So can I ask you real quick, when you had that realization and then were funding and doing all these individual hypotheses and study, when you applied it to yourself, what was that. What was that turnaround for you? Because you had said you had. You had lost so much weight and that. But you were essentially had already been doing this research so deeply for your. Yourself and your children.
• 12:49
  Speaker B: So you're. That's a great question. So the. One of the. My strengths was that my body had. My body had become hypersensitive to electric. Electric, you know, emf, basically. So it's kind of like a dog that can smell mold or something. So my body became hypervigilant to these things and my body was giving me feedback. And what I learned from experience was I. I thought my body was wrong. My right. And so I was not sleeping well at all and went through a couple year period where I wasn't sleeping well. But when I finally found one element of dirty electricity is what it was called, then my body bounced back and I got my. I gained 10 pounds back in a month, and I started to become stronger and stronger, but I had to learn that the hard way. And it. And it took me a long time to keep working on that. So I had had a little bit of. I guess my advantage was I was a troubleshooter. I was very persistent. I had all the time and money and resources, but I also had this physical feedback system. My body would tell me when I was safe, not feel kind of edgy and off. And my sleep would go. And. And then when I would go out in nature without my cell phone, I felt I could regulate. I felt calm, I felt good. And so that was. That was a secret thing. And so. So here's. Yeah, I. I would learn that my experience, my personal experience of getting too much electrical exposure was I would feel kind of edgy, like I had had too much caffeine.
• 14:18
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 14:20
  Speaker B: All right. So this gets us into the calcium channels. So I had heard about the calcium channels for years, but I didn't know what they did. I didn't know, like, what was the purpose of the calcium channel and what it is. It's basically the calcium channels are like the tuning peg on a guitar that tighten or loosen. So you go out and you're gonna. Human performance. You don't want to be too tight and you don't want to be too loose. You don't want to be the swing and the miss guy. And you also don't want to be rigidly whatever. You want to be in this perfect flow state. So the calcium channels help us do that, and they basically Are like the highlighter that says, hey, this is important. You know, there's either there's an animal chasing you and you're going to die or you're going to get married soon. You know, who knows what's going on. You're on a podcast and you've got. So that's what kind of gets. That's what gives you basically those, these pre performance jitters is your body is kind of getting you releasing energy. So the calcium channels basically. So actually the calcium ion gradient. So if you think of just. Here's a little picture I do for parents and I'll try to describe. So imagine a neuron and I'm just doing it as a simple circle here. Outside the circle there's. It's basically a 10,000 to 1 ratio of calcium ions outside to inside. It's the largest ion gradient in the body. And so when a calcium. So the inside of the cell is supposed to be pretty void of calcium. And when one or two, you know, when the calcium channel opens up, it lets calcium ions in and it's like a little spark. And that kind of says, hey, fire up, you know, tighten up, get ready for activity. What's interesting is the way these voltage channels or the way these calcium channels open is based on voltage. It's electrical, which, which makes a lot of sense. You're like, oh, that's why the electrical stuff kind of has an impact. And there are some people who have genetic issues with their calcium channels. So it's almost like a spring door on a, on a, on a door and it pops back. And the people who have genetic issues, their spring door kind of maybe opens easier and closes slower. Right, right. So some people will be more impacted by the environmental factor. Okay, so now this calcium gets in here and it kind of lights things up and excites things. But the problem is too much of that. Well, number one, it's a false excite signal. It's kind of like telling you something's important because you. Just because you're in WI fi doesn't mean something important is going on.
• 16:54
  Speaker A: Right. I just read an example in an article yesterday. Exactly. Describing that the state of being in fight or flight in an excited state is the major feeling if the interoception of your body you start to understand is that you are in a constant state of fight or flight.
• 17:14
  Speaker B: So yeah. So there's a doctor that Martha Herbert introduced me to, Dr. Bob Navio, who wrote this book called or multiple papers on cell danger response, basically fight or flight mode at the cellular Level. So this can be one of these triggers. These man made waveforms are very different than, than natural emf. So sunlight is electromagnetic fields and we love sunlight. It's great. It can maybe a little, you know, sunburn here and there, but it's generally natural and good for us, regulating for us. But the way the ions, the way the, these man made fields are kind of come in like a blade and they screw up the distribution of the ions. And that's kind of one of the reasons that it's forcing, it's coming in and it's pulsing. So it's kind of like battering, it's like a battering ram and almost like a blade. Like a blade instead of like an even distribution of force.
• 18:06
  Speaker A: Right. And you're saying at those channels, if that plug is not operating as it should, that it's going to swing back lower and allow much more of that inside the cellular to the cell.
• 18:18
  Speaker B: Correct, exactly. Now too much calcium inside the cell, who starts getting into free radical damage basically. And damage, it gets into what's called actually excitotoxicity. Imagine, you know, imagine drinking caffeine constantly. And you know where that would go. And you know, there's a reason we don't give, you know, and this impacts synapse development, there's a reason we don't give kids caffeine. This exposure and some chemicals, so that's the EMF route, but there are chemicals that are also letting in calcium. And those are called the, the other portal on the other side of this is the NMDA receptor. And this is another friend from California, a friend of Jill Escher's to Katie Reed. This woman proposed that glutamates were a big factor. And well, she ended up, she found that when she restricted glutamates from her daughter's diet that her daughter got better. So you know, instead of us fighting and going back and forth like oh, I think it's this, I think it's that it's yes and always yes and it's always yes and. And so Katie was right. Well, Katie's right. Cause she's getting results. And so it's really about what's getting results. And so so these glutamates, but also chemical exposures. So I guess we can get into now and then. So you can get into now also. You can get into, you get this excitotoxicity going on. You can get cell membrane damage, you can get damage to the mitochondria, then you can get DAM DNA as well. And that's one of the concerns with autism is there are genetic components. Some of the genetic components are de novo mutations.
• 19:50
  Speaker A: Right.
• 19:51
  Speaker B: They're uninherited mutations. And one of the risk factors we're very concerned about is cell phone in the pocket for the dads.
• 19:58
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 20:00
  Speaker B: So that's a concerning risk factor.
• 20:02
  Speaker A: As someone who comes from a family of what now is being seen as more higher functioning autism on both sides of my children's genetics, it is incredible to me that we are not discussing this EMF exposure and that DNA being changed through the generational experiences because it's compounding. And once you see it, Peter, I mean, you know this. You can't unsee it. You can't unsee it. And it is specific to each family. And what that gonna look like in terms of the neuroplasticity and the ability to heal.
• 20:37
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think what's the issue is that we're. It's really hard to share situations, information that has no solution. Yeah. And so people really don't know what to do. They love their phones, they're addicted to their phones and they don't know what to do. The good news is no one loved tech more than me. Right. So I was, I'm that guy. I had the certain phones, phones, PDAs. Two of, two of the cell phone designers were friends.
• 21:01
  Speaker A: Right.
• 21:01
  Speaker B: This is like, I know all these people, I love all this stuff. But we didn't, we didn't want it to have. We wanted these tools to be empowering and so, and so we didn't want them to be addicting and disempowering. So let's get into. So now that we've got a basic understanding of the mechanisms, look at what, what Martin Paul did originally is he said, okay, we've got EMF impacting the calcium channels, intracellular calcium, and we've got chemical exposures impacting the NMDA receptors. And that's the net effect with the genetics. And of course there's. There's genetics and then there's the timing. Right. So if you, if you formed, if you haven't formed your synapses or whatever you're. As a child, you know, depends on when these things hit you. If you're an adult and these things hit you, you become like electrically sensitive, but you still, you are still like. I was. I became electrically sensitive, but I could generally still have a social conversation and.
• 21:59
  Speaker A: Right.
• 21:59
  Speaker B: Didn't. I had some sensory issues. But I. You wouldn't call me autistic, would you?
• 22:04
  Speaker A: Would you though think that once one channel of Your own healing became something that you recognize so deeply. I, I, I love the book on interoception that you're able to then think, what are the next things that I am able to heal? Because that was first and foremost debilitating for me.
• 22:25
  Speaker B: So I would say, yeah. So with Martha, she would talk about the state of overload. So what I tried to get tell people to do is I would explain this and then I would explain also this total load theory that Patty Lemur. Patty Lemur, who wrote Outsmarting Autism. I came up with this theory of like to represent total load. Basically. Patti came up with the concept. Martha Herbert espoused it. And anything with chronic illness, I guess it's not being seen.
• 22:51
  Speaker A: There we go.
• 22:52
  Speaker B: But it's like you've got a balloon, basically. So here you've got this balloon and there are these positive good factors that lift us up and there are these negative loads that we want to let go of. And some of them are in the environment and some of them are in the body. And also there's the, we talked about the autonomic nervous system is kind of in between. So you could take somebody, let's say you take some of these kids, you take them out of the hard environment, but they're still stressed. They're like soldiers. You took them off the battlefield, but they're still in the fight or flight mode. So to me, I say generally, step one is you create a safe environment, which honestly most people aren't in. And then step two is you get them out of fight or flight mode, then you can do the medical interventions, then you can do all whatever. So let's talk about the loads to reduce because Martin Paul did something great in this last talk is he said instead of all chemicals, he focused it down and he said there were like 15 classes of ex or 12, 15 classes of excitotoxic chemicals. And then I've been for the last year thinking, how do I. That's still a lot, you know, that's, it's not, it's not 80,000, you know, chemicals in commerce, but it's still a lot to manage. How do we get it down to a group? So here's, here's what I'm thinking. So number one. Well, let's, yeah, start with, we'll start with the emf. So we have a lot of different field effects. So we have magnets, we have magnetic fields. So like a magnet, we have electric fields, like a lightning bolt. And those are. So the magnetic fields would be from things like motors and power box like the breaker panel. Electric fields would be like even just a light next to your bed. The cord, even when it's not turned on, can give off a big electric field. Your computer you're using when it's plugged in the wiring in the wall next to your bed. Then there's wireless signals or really the information carrying waves, which are really the ones that are problematic. The wireless signals that we keep using more. Even though simple ones like Bluetooth and the headsets are things that like, oh, those are low power. When you feel this stuff, the Bluetooth is actually really bad. That one is called dirty electricity. And it's really. It's called. It's the noise in your electrical system.
• 25:06
  Speaker A: Right.
• 25:06
  Speaker B: Theory. There's this beautiful 60 hertz pure sine wave. But in reality it's a mess. If you've ever walked into these buildings where the refrigerators sound harsh and the lights are flickering and buzzing and it just feels anxiety provoking and stressful, that's likely a location where there's a lot of dirty electricity.
• 25:26
  Speaker A: I'm someone that really notices that in environments.
• 25:29
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 25:30
  Speaker A: So like to the point where.
• 25:32
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's.
• 25:33
  Speaker A: It. I probably sit very near you in terms of what I perceive with my electrical.
• 25:38
  Speaker B: The fields you do. So the one heuristic that they came up with, I think this scientist Magna Havas came up. She was doing all these surveys. Then she just realized this easiest thing to do is say, ask someone how much they like fluorescent lights. And if they're like, I, you know, they go berserk. They're like, yeah, that person's electrosensible.
• 25:56
  Speaker A: You know, I gave a talk at Turner Construction about neurodiversity and adaptive workspaces.
• 26:02
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 26:02
  Speaker A: That when I tell you the number of comments from people in this virtual talk going, thank you so much for discussing fluorescent lights and my inability to be my best version of his employee.
• 26:12
  Speaker B: Yeah. A lot of times people come in and they think that they're anxious. They don't realize the building is anxious.
• 26:17
  Speaker A: Building is anxious.
• 26:18
  Speaker B: Building is anxious. It's not you. If you go out to nature, you'll be fine.
• 26:22
  Speaker A: That might be the next title of your book. Because that's. That would. That would get a lot of people feeling really validated in what they're thinking.
• 26:28
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 26:28
  Speaker A: Because I feel like that is huge.
• 26:30
  Speaker B: So I feel like we're getting a lot of people blaming themselves for this and blaming themselves also. And they don't realize that or they think they're anxious. They can't write whatever it's the environment is totally screwed up. So. And what will happen is while I go to conferences and I, and I, I built all that, like, this house is low. EMF came here. You would be very chill. And then I, so I realized I need to take the show on the road. So I made a tent that I can bring to events and conferences. Yes. And people go in and all of a sudden they, they sit down, they're like. And they say, I feel calmer. I'm like, yes, because you're not. You don't have as much intracellular calcium now. You're not getting, you know, over excitation. So, so that's the electrical side of this. And now. And, and so that's my primary focus. But I want to talk about also the rest of it. And then we'll get to metabolic issues, too. So we'll talk about what just came out. So I've taken all these categories, and one of them, we'll start with the one that just came out in the media lately, which is drugs and medication. We had this big thing come out about a Acetaminophen, Tylenol. Tylenol's in a lot. Acetaminophen is in a lot more than just Tylenol. It's all over the place. But I'm going to give. I'm going to do like a high level of overview. So there's multiple antibiotics, too. There's neomycin. I don't even know how to pronounce that. Kanamycin, aminoglycine and valoproic acid, I think. I don't know. I can't remember what those are. So there's five of these items. I, I texted you this, and we can give this to parents, and this is in the paper as well. So. And then also some of these is a little, A lot of these drugs. Some of these drugs also have some aluminum and mercury in. So, you know, mercury was one of the original vaccine concerns that they. The. And mercury in the flu shot and so forth. That is kind of going away now, which is great. But now a lot of the focus has been on aluminum ions. Both mercury and aluminum can raise intracellular calcium. So, and so you go down to this other category. I'm calling this just toxic chemicals in general. But some of the key ones are glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in Roundup, which has also been quite dramatically. Stephanie Senoff has been talking about that as one of the key autism drivers. If you look at causality, I mean, glyphosate, emf, and maybe antibiotic use are some of the key ones for things that are going up. But this kind of explains the mechanism, why and why they can all work together.
• 29:06
  Speaker A: Well, you know, I think about, you know, I'm 42 and a half, and as a child of the early 80s, when things were seemingly all right and good in the world, from a. Versus now. But now the people like me are now the parents. And when I hear Roundup and antibiotics, we were. That's all we were. I mean, I can't. I don't. I never remember flinching when anyone was on antibiotics or their lawn was being treated.
• 29:36
  Speaker B: I worked on a golf course and sprayed roundups.
• 29:38
  Speaker A: Yes, exactly.
• 29:39
  Speaker B: So. But you're in the sweet spot, actually, and I'm going to tell you why. Any. Any. Anyone who was born after 1980.
• 29:46
  Speaker A: Mm.
• 29:46
  Speaker B: And lead was. Lead was removed from. So if you were born after 1980, you have five extra IQ points.
• 29:52
  Speaker A: Interesting.
• 29:54
  Speaker B: Because of the removal of lead. And also if you were born before Roundup started being used extensively, like in the late 80s, you know, autism started going up kind of in the late 80s. So if you were born in the early 80s after lead and before glyphosate. Mm. You've got more IQ points than the rest of us. And so, yeah, I mean, that's.
• 30:17
  Speaker A: I, I've. I actually have done this, like, you know, this microgenerational research on that. It's very interesting. And then you also can incorporate that. We weren't even exposed to those extra electromagnetic field.
• 30:30
  Speaker B: Exactly. Because we. And that's in the 80s. That's also when we shipped from analog phones to digital technology. And analog is. Analog was more natural and the digital is all these square waves and that's kind of harsher on the nervous system. So. So we'll get. I'll get back to the. We'll get back to the toxic chemicals. So we did. We talked about glyphosate, PC, PCBs. Now PCBs, I think are lowering in the environment, but because EMF and I think glyphosate, too, opens up the blood brain barrier. Some of these chemicals can get into the. Can get access to nervous system tissue that they didn't have before. Wow. So that makes it really confounding and confusing. So you can't just look at what's rising in the environment. You have to really look at everything. The other one that's really big is VOCs and the smells of all the plastics and the. All. You know, and then they've been. They found Even in la that there's been, you know, some pollution levels are going down, but the VOCs are really going up. And so the volatile organic chemicals are also driving up the intracellular calcium. So there's another class of these factors that drive what he would call excitotoxins basically that drive up intracellular calcium. And they're pesticides basically. So there's four different types of pesticides that are, that are excitotoxic basically. And I can't even read the. There's organo, let's see, organophosphates. I need to work on the contrast of these nanochlorides or glanophosphates. Pet. I don't know how to pronounce half of these things. But we'll send, we'll send you this so you can look at it. So just watch out for your pesticide use and spraying. So we used to have, you know, these people come and they'd spray, you know, or you'd walk around with the Raid cans. And I, you know, I had former wives that would, would use nuclear weapons against insects if they could. So the, all those things were coming out. But you know, there's a long term effect to some of these.
• 32:23
  Speaker A: Realize though now this the most simplest organic thing to use for little tiny ants is the, what is it, the sodium bora borax or something that really good natural solution. Really, really better than anything I've ever used.
• 32:41
  Speaker B: I just got another spray from Fence. So, so yeah, so step one is we need to communicate what all these things are, right? And then the next level you start saying, okay, where are all these things? What are your alternatives and stuff. So this is how we start to empower parents. So the pesticides and then finally this other category we're calling plastics and packaging and boy have we done. You know, that's one of my regrets looking back is how much plastic exposure and I still don't think we have enough research on nanoplastics in autism. But we do know that phthalates and we know BPA raises is an excitotoxin and phthalates but also pfas. So the tem, the Teflon chemicals. So you can see the movie. I've actually done two movies. I've helped with two movies. One was called the Devil we Know and it's about Teflon pollution and that's pretty well done. And then the other one I helped with is called Generation Zapped and that's about electromagnetic fields.
• 33:34
  Speaker A: My mother's a environmental engineer by trade and So I remember in the 90s, her losing her mind when Teflon pans were just all the rage. And everyone was like, but it's wonderful.
• 33:47
  Speaker B: She was like, oh, I mean, yeah, it got to be. Yeah, that movie is quite the Devil we know is quite interesting and will make you angry. So the final one is these. This final category are metabolic factors. So there are risk factors for autism. We know that elevated homocysteine is a risk factor for will drive up intracellular calcium. And a lot of that is related to low B6 and low B12, which are, you know, things that are very commonly used in autism before we understood all the mechanisms that was going on. Also, low magnesium. So magnesium is actually a natural calcium channel blocker. So doing the Epsom salt baths that have been very successful is really key. You can also have elevated inflammatory cytokines. And I think Martin says four of the five cytokines are related to intracellular calcium, so not all of them. And also the other one is BH for depletion, which I'm not a big expert at on that one. Yeah, exactly. But I think these are the most. And these aren't all the metabolic factors discussed in the paper, but I think, you know, obviously for the metabolic stuff, to talk to a. You know, I guess now it's a MAPS doctor. So MAPS doctors are the ones who kind of carried forward the DAN protocols and practices.
• 35:03
  Speaker A: Do you. Do you find that the first line protocol when. When the overwhelm for the population that I serve of what is the next right thing to do? Right. What is always the next right thing to do? And there's so much information coming. And I personally love. I'm someone come from a family of scientists, so this. This is natural for me to desire and inquire when those aren't. What do you feel like is the right directive? You know, going to the map, Going to a MAPS doctor, but also just, what's the next right thing for them to do?
• 35:35
  Speaker B: Well, I think it's. It's this. So I remember fighting in my own family, just fighting over treating all these things or whatever, and I got kind of boxed out of treatment. You know, one of my kids had a milk allergy, and my wife kept giving him milk.
• 35:49
  Speaker A: Right.
• 35:49
  Speaker B: And I was like, this is not. This is not. Yeah, this is. And then he kept getting ear infections. Well, that's the inflammation. Just like. It was just crazy town. So I think what I got forced into is people. People have a hard time changing their behaviors and their perspective was I grew up on Eating milk and so. And so. And I'm fine. Right, okay. But, you know, genes are different. Everything. And the milk that you grew up on is very different. Everything's goes through plastics now and everything. So I actually. And this is going to sound quite biased, but I actually think that you start with EMF reduction.
• 36:26
  Speaker A: I was thinking the same thing. I mean.
• 36:28
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 36:28
  Speaker A: And also knowing too, the driving force behind what a lot of autistic kids feel safe in their devices and what they like to see over and over again, those. The looping behaviors needs to be cut. And I will say I've seen that for my own children and the benefits of it. It's very hard to change, but it's worth it.
• 36:51
  Speaker B: So. Okay, so I've spent a ton of time on this and what I. I also have spoken with Victoria Dunkley, who wrote Reset your child's brain, and she's probably has more experience on screen time than anybody. There's a lot of people have come into the field recently and I've started speaking more about screen time. But the. So there is. There are all these factors, these addictions and so forth. What I advise is that when you start dealing with foods and screen stuff that are both addictions and some people's behaviors, so those. Those can create these power dynamics and they become very stressful. So what I actually recommend is start with EMF and start with it at night. So just at night, turn off your. What we've telling people we've had a protocol called the. The calming protocol. I think it's been around for more than 12 years. And at the time. So we turn off your wifi if you have a baby monitor. Actually, we think that's actually one of the big risk factors for autism, especially if it's a video baby monitor. So turn your baby monitor off if you can, or minimally change the distance with it. But ideally, turn all this stuff off at night. Yeah. So the. So it's. The key elements are baby monitor, anything that's on the body, fitness trackers, Right. Monitoring system, Bluetooth diapers. Any of that nutty stuff goes away, is off and away basically from the body at night.
• 38:14
  Speaker A: Mm.
• 38:15
  Speaker B: Then it was, let's see, baby monitors, cordless phone, base stations. A lot of people don't have those now. But then get your cell phones away from the kids and everything. Or turn them, ideally turn them off at night. You can get these little. So cell phone so and so. And then turn your WI fi off at night. Actually, yeah. You can put it on a timer. You can pull the plug for a couple days. If it's working for you, you can put it on a timer or. Yeah, there's remote switches you can use. There's all these ways of turning it on and off. It was never supposed to be on. I mean, it's easiest if it's on all the time. But sleep and WI fi is, that's, that's the biggest disruption, the biggest known, the, the most reported symptom of EMF exposure is sleep disruption. And I have extreme forms of that.
• 38:57
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 38:57
  Speaker B: And I had wifi before everybody else. The good news is I broke myself earlier than everybody else and I did all. I, I brought all this stuff into the house.
• 39:06
  Speaker A: Right.
• 39:07
  Speaker B: So. And some people will say, why should I turn my WI fi off when my neighbors is right next door? Well, because the things that are closest to you have the most impact.
• 39:15
  Speaker A: Right. I'm just going to say, living outside of New York City and these bedroom communities, we're not, we're not far apart from our neighbors and that's okay.
• 39:24
  Speaker B: Yeah. And so, but what I will say is that you do have control over the things that are in your environment. You do have control over your phones and so forth. And I think that recently they've come out with these little boxes on Amazon. They're little Faraday boxes.
• 39:38
  Speaker A: Little Faraday boxes, yeah.
• 39:39
  Speaker B: And so what you do is you tell people. Actually what I've been doing recently, a lot of people have been recommending a digital bedtime. So let's say your bedtime is 10 o' clock or 10:30. Maybe you have a digital bedtime at like 9 or 9:30 or 8, whatever. You come up with a digital bedtime and all your phones and all your screens and everything kind of go away. And so you're not getting the blue light and you're not getting the wireless exposures. And it is, it, it is a bit of a pain to turn on, turn off the WI fi and the so and so and all this stuff. But if you just throw it in the box, then if it's out of sight, out of mind and there's no invisible exposure, you know, the path of.
• 40:16
  Speaker A: Least resistance, just throw it all in. And it's all about energy. Maneuverability theory. We need to use the least amount of energy to get the, the goal.
• 40:26
  Speaker B: Well, because when you're in a state of overload, you need lowest amount of energy, greatest mental simplicity and you need to kind of just, you kind of go with, so this is emergency mode. This is getting people out of fight, or this is almost like like talking to someone who's on suicide watch like you do. You know, this is the similar situation. You know, the level of intensity.
• 40:46
  Speaker A: Well, you know, not to use that word, but the panic and the behaviors of children that like mine, and I know there's tens of thousands of others in this country, the fear of the parents is that these changes are going to create behavior behaviors that are just so disruptive to your child. And I, I'm a real believer that you need to destroy the, the environment in order to create one that's new drastically.
• 41:12
  Speaker B: Exactly. So I've done all these model healthy homes and the key element is to get the sleep environment dialed down. So get the kids bedroom dialed down with all the electrical and the blue lights. And honestly, the other one that gets people hyper vigilant is the smells. So a lot of the fake scents and candles and all the scented detergents and all that crazy town.
• 41:36
  Speaker A: What, what goes into the air then? I mean, all these plastics and these, you know, fake oil or the pet.
• 41:42
  Speaker B: The petroleum based products, they're all petroleum based. Right. So what's interesting about the nose is that the olfactory system is the only one that goes right to the limbic brain. So it has the most impact on kind of the fight or flight mode.
• 41:55
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 41:56
  Speaker B: You want to be able to smell. You want to feel safe and smell safe.
• 42:01
  Speaker A: Mm.
• 42:02
  Speaker B: Which may be not just pristine air, but you may want to bring in some essential oils from like nature. Because there are, I think, Eva, I can't remember the one who did this at Harvard Dr. Who did all this work on stress and nature. There are certain chemicals that when you go out in nature that they're regulating. And when I was on Len's podcast, his summary of my podcast was tech is the great dysregulator. And nature is the great regulator.
• 42:29
  Speaker A: It is.
• 42:30
  Speaker B: And we need to, and so we need to create safe environments. And then the parents need to feel safe and regulated as well. And Len's. One of Len's basic premises that, that mom and dad need to feel safe or mom and dad need to kind of like put their oxygen masks on first. Your child will look to you, especially to the mom. If mom is not feeling stressed, then it's not a safe environment.
• 42:55
  Speaker A: Yeah, there's, I mean, modeling all of this is so scientifically based. And I, I, I speak a lot about just the maternal instinct and the primal nature of mothers and the, what that imprinting does to their children. And as I reflect more and more back on my own life, my, my parents were Very conscious, my mom specifically on her health and exercise and intake and my, my dad as well. But, but being, you know, mother and father and as a woman obviously leaning more towards watching my mom, it does have a significant impact on my ability to change even more now than I see other counterparts of mine.
• 43:32
  Speaker B: Yeah, no, exactly. So what I tell. I think the most common mistake is people jump into a lot of the biological stuff or even the behavioral treatments before they create a safe environment and before they regulate their own nervous systems and then just hyper vigilant running around and it's kind of crazy town and it's exhausting and well, it's like, it's like trying to rebuild the, you know, rebuild the city before the war's over. So and so what I do find is if you, once the sleep environment's dialed in and it's actually safe and you might even want to measure it with meters or have a building biologist come to the house and I'm coming up with, I'm doing different protocols for that. I have some of those on my website and I'm doing more now especially for doctors. So the environment is safe and everyone's sleeping better, they calm down, they're more, they have more ability to regulate. And then when they can kind of self regulate more then you can start leaning back in, you can start trying to take things away and move things. There's a new computer called the DC one that has less blue light. Start using the computers also if the computer doesn't need, if you don't need Bluetooth, you don't need wifi. If you can hardwire the computer to Ethernet, you'll get a better network connection, a better faster network connection. And then all that exposure, you know, will kind of, the wireless exposure will kind of chill out. So it's all about lowering those exposures. And so you know, you can use an iPad still for limited times and whatever, just turn off the Bluetooth, turn off the WI fi and then plug it into an ethernet adapter and and then they can watch a show or they could do whatever even like the television you watch. Make sure that you're not streaming with WI fi.
• 45:11
  Speaker A: Mm.
• 45:12
  Speaker B: Try to take desktop things that are in a cert fixed location like a television or a office computer and plug those in and plug those in and so start with your bedroom environment and then usually it will take sometimes some parents might see dramatic overnight changes. In general though, we've had some like non verbal kids speak and we've had some major changes overnight from minority wireless interactions. But in general, you'll see in about a six week time period. So what you could do is you could do your Atex score score and then you can do your EMF interventions and then remeasure your Atex score in about six weeks.
• 45:53
  Speaker A: I think I. And also all of this, I hear you saying the removal of this and doing it in a way that doesn't overload the parents in terms of you have to do this now and you're going to see this result. I think there has to be a. I hope to be a voice in this. You have to keep trying it and you have to know that those incremental things are going to eventually really produce dramatic results for you. But you have to be. You have to harness your ability to stay calm in the transition phases of this.
• 46:23
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 46:24
  Speaker A: I've had to do myself. But I think in speaking to this more and more, we cannot expect. And even with everything that's going on, even from the national government level to what they're saying, it's all always yes and yes, this is going to be dramatic and it's going to take a lot of patience and resilience at first to get to this point.
• 46:44
  Speaker B: Yeah, well, you're creating space for yourself. You're creating space. And I've had some situations where I've literally pulled out one baby monitor, unplugged a baby monitor which took about one calorie and one second. And I've changed the trajectory of a kid's life. I went back four or six weeks later and the kid walked up to me and hugged me and I said, have you. And I told the parent, I said, have you seen any improvement in your child? Or so. And so since then, he goes, no, everything is still. It's clueless there. I was like, you know what, you might have missed something there.
• 47:15
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 47:16
  Speaker B: So, yeah. And then there are different. And then there's all this different technologies. I'm going to be doing a talk. My next MAPS talk for doctors is going to be talking about all the different technology for using technology safely with lower exposures. There are WI FI systems and there are ways of lowering the power and lowering the beaconing frequency on your wi fi. So love technology, but we're going to make it safe. So in the future, my job is to make technology safe for neurology. Yes. And the future, it could be not only safe, it could even be beneficial. It could be. Help you be regulating like music, right? Yes, yes, we're going.
• 47:52
  Speaker A: And to know that the complexities within every family and those genetics are. And what you're. I hear you're saying is from the environment to the drug interactions to the mercury, to the calcium channels, to stay calm in the knowledge as you reorient to all these different things that are causing your child to be the child that you see and actually live with and that you can harness those things. But also be really truthful about what your path is in terms of trying and trial and error and the time that it takes. I think here's mothers so much, they're so wanting an immediate answer and an immediate cure. And we think we need to just take a collective deep breath of specifically parents with the. With children that are profound, like mine are, to stay the course on this, because this is why the reorientation of their bodies can happen and that neuroplasticity can rebound.
• 48:45
  Speaker B: It's a marathon. It's a continuous. And for everybody, yes, this goes on for like older adults as well. And this is all these same mechanism we're talking about are, you know, preventing Alzheimer's, dementia, you know, all. All this stuff, inflammatory disease. It's actually a gift. It was a gift to have this come to me now. My dad just passed away, but I used a lot of this on him and we definitely extended his life and his functioning.
• 49:12
  Speaker A: Interesting.
• 49:13
  Speaker B: And I've learned so much and I. I made a lot of mistakes, but there were a lot of things that just straight up worked well.
• 49:20
  Speaker A: I think it's nice to hear you as well share the personal parts where you had to destroy one part and learn about and kind of your body reoriented and recalibrated and then you got to focus on the next thing, even within what you said, you know, losing all this weight and phases of your life that were probably bombarded in a lot of ways, but that we just kept doing that next right choice to understand better. And then honestly, like you say, the peace and the freedom of the calm is priceless. You want to talk about a luxury good in this world, it's that.
• 49:54
  Speaker B: Yeah. So that's what I've basically been doing. I've done about five different model healthy homes. And I'm kind of engineering peace and calm.
• 50:01
  Speaker A: Fantastic.
• 50:02
  Speaker B: Well, I remember what was interesting. I went to a talk at a biodynamic farm, and they said that the author, the book was. The speaker was. Wrote a book called no Child Left Inside. And he was basically saying outside good, inside bad. And I was a designer. And I'm like, well, that's a. You know, those are true statements. Yeah, but. But you know, that's kind of a design failure. I just at the time spent a ton of money remodeling my house and I'm basically saying okay, so basically what you're saying is the homeless guy living under the bridge is going to be better off than me. That's a design failure. You know. So what are the good elements about nature that need to come inside like the light and the air quality etc. And what are the bad elements that are inside that need to come go away or be monitored?
• 50:46
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 50:47
  Speaker B: So. And especially when they impact neurology and excitation. So I, you know this is. We're all going to figure this out.
• 50:54
  Speaker A: Well, I am so thankful for this conversation. I think it is bringing up not only the big ideas from a macro level but the tiny and smallest of wins that I think a lot of parents forget how much agency they do have within this at home environment to change and that it can be as simple as a taking one day and really being conscious about what those things that you are plugged in. I mean I'm just looking around right now thinking that's an easy change and to not hang such levity and maybe sadness over gosh, I can't believe I've never thought of this.
• 51:27
  Speaker B: I think there's a lot of it.
• 51:29
  Speaker A: And then moving forward because our bodies as you said at the beginning are very resilient and the resiliency is also going to benefit us in the long run because you said what was it a couple, you know, 10 years ago in, in middle age. The body can respond too.
• 51:46
  Speaker B: I'm smarter than I. I mean I've. Yeah. Well we didn't know that we could make new brain cells. Right.
• 51:51
  Speaker A: Exactly.
• 51:52
  Speaker B: Say like there's permanent damage from lead. And I'm like well wait, that's not true anymore.
• 51:56
  Speaker A: That's right.
• 51:58
  Speaker B: So lighten up. It's not so permanent and it's not so genetic. It's not like if the genes were really bad.
• 52:03
  Speaker A: Right.
• 52:04
  Speaker B: You're. They would have never made it this far. Mm. Child would have you know self aborted like the, the child would not have come to terms.
• 52:11
  Speaker A: Right, right.
• 52:12
  Speaker B: You know even the, the twin studies on genes and whatever they found that it's at Stanford. They found that it's about 42% genetics on average. There are certainly cases that are one gene that so and so. But there are certainly cases that are no bad genetics and all environmental. So that was just like on an.
• 52:30
  Speaker A: Average my dad is an identical twin and it's fascinating to watch. He and my uncle live exactly from a nerdy science point of view, because they have. They've made different choices and they've come back together to change things and to have that. I tell my dad all the time how lucky you are to literally have a living organism that has the exact same genetics that you watch the choices that he's made versus you and vice versa.
• 52:57
  Speaker B: Oh, my gosh. Which one is health? Which one is healthier?
• 52:59
  Speaker A: I don't want to throw my uncle under the bus.
• 53:02
  Speaker B: I don't even know exactly.
• 53:04
  Speaker A: Well, tell you that my dad and I'm sure my uncle Marcus.
• 53:06
  Speaker B: I think you just did.
• 53:08
  Speaker A: I know. And he's. He's the best. I will tell you this about a number of years ago, my dad, who's been a marathon runner his entire life, and my uncle was. Up until a certain point, my dad looked at him and said, mark, you got to get back into running. Like, look like you have got to do this. And. And you know what? They did. And now they're. Now they're running buddies again. And I think it's a wonderful thing of my uncle being able again. He was in fine. He wasn't unhealthy. He just saw a little bit more of the difference of someone who was actively.
• 53:35
  Speaker B: Right.
• 53:36
  Speaker A: Training for half marathons in their 60s still.
• 53:38
  Speaker B: I. Right. So I'm just getting back into running. So I'd done five. I did five marathons up until I was 40, and then I have not run in 21 years.
• 53:45
  Speaker A: There we go.
• 53:46
  Speaker B: I'm getting back into running. But I'd lost my exercise tolerance from EMF and mitochondria stuff going on.
• 53:53
  Speaker A: Totally.
• 53:54
  Speaker B: Just. It's just coming back and I'm really excited about it. Yeah.
• 54:00
  Speaker A: All of this is so phenomenal. I will put all this information for the listeners in the summary of the episode, as well as anything that you can provide to link to the slides that you were able to show us as well. Peter, thank you so much for this and thank you for the work that you chose to do and are giving back in such a huge way to the population that's currently affected so deeply right now.
• 54:21
  Speaker B: Well, thank you. Thanks for making a platform. Appreciate it.
• 54:23
  Speaker A: Of course. Well, until next time on the Inchtones podcast, thank you.