The Science Behind Grounding | Clint Ober

Darin: You are listening to the Darin Olien Show. I’m Darin. I spent the last 15 years exploring the planet looking for healthy foods, superfoods, environmental solutions, and I’ve had my mind blown along the way by the people, the far off places I have been, and the life-altering events that have changed my life forever. My goal is to help you dive deep into some of the issues of our modern-day life, society’s fatal conveniences. The things that we do that we’re indoctrinated into thinking we have to, even though those things are negatively affecting us, and in some cases, slowly destroying us and even killing us. Every week, I have honest conversations with people that inspire me. My hope is through their knowledge and unique perspectives they’ll inspire you too. Together, we’ll explore how you can make small tweaks in your life that amount to big changes for you, the people around you and the planet, so let’s do this. This is my show, the Darin Olien Show.

Darin: Hey, everybody, welcome to the show. Thanks for tuning in to The Darin Olien Show. Guess who I am? I am Darin Olien. I am your navigator today. This is a cool one. If all of you have seen in our France episode in Down To Earth, you know that I took Zach out of the ground once we got to France, take him out on the ground, put his feet on the ground, take his shoes off, and get grounded. And there is a massive, a lot of science around the electric pollution that’s going on around us, the unseen electrical detriment that’s going on with Wi-Fi, with cell phones, with all of this electrical chatter we have in our bodies. Our body is trying to harmonize all of that. And there’s an easy way for you to take out the trash of that electrical stress, and that’s put your feet on the ground. And my great guest here, Clint Ober, you know, he was installing cable TV systems in Billings, Montana, good old boy, just doing work. And he realized that everything needs to be grounded or else you blow out your TV sets. So if you know that every building, every home, everything that is plugging anything in has a copper rod, grounded into the earth. It’s like code, you actually have to have it or else you blow circuits and then blow up all your computers and TVs and all of that stuff and your house would catch on fire. So the very nature of this electrical storm and electromagnetic fields and static exists in our nature, frequencies. And what happens with us, we created all these other electric storms that we have, these biological unassimilated frequencies that are causing us system stress. So Clint realized that, woke up, we get into a story. He has now became the CEO of Earth FX, Earthing & Grounding Pads were living 92% to 93% of our lives indoors, and we’re not grounding ourselves and taking away some of this pollution that we’re getting from all over the place. We need it. It’s good for our bodies that harmonizes our bodies. Our bodies are voltage. We need to be connected to the earth. You got it. You know what I’m saying. So we get into that with Clinton and his whole story, very easy to apply. I’m sitting right now in quarantine, in a room and guess what I have with me, I have a grounding pad that I just plug into the wall because I know that it’s grounded. The electricity has to be grounded in this hotel. So now by plugging that in, it’s grounded and this pad then that I sit on, that I lay on, that put my feet on, I’m grounded to the earth, and it helps me balance my voltage regulating body in a much better way. It is powerful. It has affected millions of people’s lives. Clint’s doing incredible work. At the end of the day, get your ass outside, take your shoes off, put your feet on the ground, and you will be a better human because of it. Enjoy my cool awesome conversation with Clint Ober.

Darin: Stoked to have you here Clint. You know your background is so interesting because you’re dealing with literally electronics and then realized that your body is an electrical voltage regulator and it’s kind of your journey to this stage is really interesting. So why don’t you unpack that a little bit for everyone listening?

Clint: Well, I think, first of all, in my early days, I was raised on ranching and farming egg environment. And in that it, you know, I was put on a horse when I was very young and told to go babysit cows and you know, I’m being a cowboy, but not like the cowboys on TV. But anyhow, so what I was taught was, you sit there and you watch the animals all day long. And then if you see one in the herd, we have about 800 cattle at the time. So if you see one in the herd and it’s not acting like the rest is balling or you know, it’s not okay, then you take it out of the herd, you put it in a pin. Because you didn’t have a cell phone, you put it in the pin, and then you go ride the pasture, make sure the grass is not too short. There are no obnoxious weeds, no new weeds growing in the pasture, then you go check the water in the tanks. You have a little kit to do that with. And then you go ride the stream to make sure there’s not a dead animal upstream. The concept being that if that cow gets sick in the pasture, then there’s something in the environment that’s affecting that cow. So prevention was what that life was all about. So my whole life I’ve been taught to look at everything from what caused it, how do you prevent that from happening. So I have that in my background. And then not only that, I spent growing up a lot of my close friends were Native American and so everything is very earthy and very connected, so you know, a blade of grass is your cousin.

Darin: Yeah, for sure. Well, and that’s the beautiful thing about those indigenous cultures, and that’s how they survived for hundreds of thousands of years being not isolating or reducing themselves to something over here, but really saying like we are a symbiosis with this and there’s an alchemical process that goes along with a balanced environment, which is such a strange concept for most of the people in the world going, oh, that’s woowoo stuff. But the further you get away from nature, the more you put us in seats and off of the ground and out of the sun, the more disjointed dysregulated we get, which is why I love this kind of conversation because it’s infinitely more than earthing or grounding. It’s about this very, very basic way of living, just like breathing, but breathing properly, just like sleeping, but sleeping properly, just like being connected, but cannot actually actively connecting. So I love that.

Clint: Yep. And then the other side of it, too, is we were always in sunshine. We lived outdoors. Half the time, we would sleep out there with the cattle. And then until TV came along, you couldn’t get us in the house. There’s no way you’re going to get us in the house. I’m 76. So, TV didn’t come along till I was around 8, 9, 10 years old, something like that. But even then you only had an hour a day or something. But anyhow, the main thing is, when I left that environment, I went to work in the communications industry in the development of the cable TV, cable television systems, and the low power television. And in that industry, you have to ground everything into Earth in order to get a nice clean signal, you know, your audio, your data, your video, your analog. And if there’s any noise, then it’s usually from statical on the line or interference from somewhere, you know, something’s going on. So, the rule is if there’s any noise or any grounded in there, there is more noise than grounded more, more ground was always the concept.

Darin: Yeah, so, unpack that just a little bit. So, in terms of just so we have this cool concept of grounding. So, what is, from an electronic standpoint from the old age of cable television when that came about, what was actually occurring? It took out the static but from an electron point of view, what was going on that created such an importance of grounding in that industry?

Clint: Okay, well, you have two words one is called positive and one is called negative charge. And to me it’s simple, you know, negative means no charge. Positive means there is a charge. Well, anytime you have static electricity, it creates charge. It builds up charges on the line and then you have to ground it. So the only way you can ground it is you have to have electrons come up the ground, up the wire, down the cable because a lot of is created by static electricity by wind and dust and just environmental things. And then you also have lightning. And lightning, you know, you have your lightning strikes, but you also have the rise in electrical potential of the earth anytime there’s a lightning event occurring and even in the clouds. So there’s a lot of electrical changes in the environment going up and down. I mean, it’s pretty crazy how the grid works and how they maintain everything level, but the constant in all of it just is ground, but even ground potential will come up and down based on atmospheric and celestial type electrical phenomena. There’s just noise. I mean, it’s just static. I means, it’s like in the old days, there was a lot of static electricity, you would have glitches with the electronics. If they weren’t grounded properly, then it would drop a fuse or it would blow a fuse or something would happen. You’re forever resetting everything because of static glitches. So but the main thing with cable was is you didn’t want any of this lightning or anything hitting getting into the home because you’re running hundreds of miles of wire in the air along with the telephone and the power. They’re all totally grounded to Earth also. And so you have to put a ground rod just for the cable that enters the home so that it’s grounded out right there. So nothing can get into the home except the signal. And if you don’t do that, then you know, lightning can just go right on in and [00:11:38] TV set and start a fire.

Darin: So that grounding and the earth doing that grounding is literally balancing out all of the unstable electrical potential going on in the atmosphere all the time. And if you don’t let that discharge into the ground and then it’s kind of free-flowing, it would potentially cause a lot of harm.

Clint: It’s like static electricity, you have to reduce it. And the only way you can reduce it is that it’s grounded or it has more electrons than you do, and then you are the charger. So it’s about reducing charge and maintaining electrical stability. So then you can run signals and maintain audio or video, data, whatever. I guess you have to backup and then grounding, I mean, the Earth is ground in the electrical world in the communications world. And the reason it’s ground is because the surface of the earth has a surface charge, a negative surface charge. It has excess amount of electrons that are free, and they’re able to move and reduce charge. That’s all they do is they move and reduce charge to maintain no charge. So in the old days, you didn’t have a problem. We were always grounded, we were barefoot, we were living on the earth. I couldn’t get off of the earth like 60 or 70 years ago. Now we can’t get back to the earth. But anyhow, so with the modern environments, when we started to leave the earth, then we started wearing rubber soled shoes in 1960. Before then we were either barefoot if you’re younger, and if you’re working you wore leather-soled shoes, or you wore the rubber-soled shoes, there was an electrical from it. But the people, the common people didn’t have– I mean, they had leather and they had barefoot, and we’re always barefoot, it was natural. We went to school when I was a kid barefoot. But anyhow, so what happened was is before 1960, as a human, we are in the electrical conductor. Our body is the most electrical thing in the environment. There’s no computer or anything else that’s more electrical than the body itself. Because every thought, every cellular communication, heartbeat, muscles, I mean, trillions and trillions of electrical phenomena going on in your body every second. And so like before 1960, we were all generally grounded because leather-soled shoes are semiconductors. So we were negative, we had no charge. We had the same electrical potential as the earth, meaning we had an abundance of free electrons that could reduce charge. Now, the only charge that most of us were aware of, until I started messing around with all this is you have static electricity on your body from walking across the floor, lifting your feet up or doing something and you touch something and you’ll get a shock and electrical shock. Those are electrons either coming from a doorknob to your finger, generally, or your finger going into the doorknob and so that you’re equaling out the electrical potential between the doorknob and your finger. So that’s a form of grounding. And so anyhow, that’s what grounding is. I mean, it’s just about holding things at Earth potential, reducing the possibility to reduce and prevent charge to reduce and prevent fire.

Darin: So basically, you know, we put on shoes, we got off of the ground, we’re mostly living off of the ground, and we are bioelectrical beings, we regulate everything, the electrical potential. So if we’re running around off of the ground without reducing that charge, what then is happening? Is it similar to this kind of crazy electrical energy that’s just kind of bombarding us without that grounded discharge? Or what’s building up inside of us from that– let’s unpack the ungroundedness? What’s going on with the ungrounded human?

Clint: Okay, so that goes back about 22 years ago, I was 54 and I had retired from the communications industry. And I spent about 4 years running around the United States looking for something to do, and I didn’t want to get back into the business world or all the doggy dog stuff that goes on out there. So anyhow, I was looking for something interesting to do. And then one day, I was playing with a computer and it kept crashing. Every time I would touch the keyboard, then it would lock up. And I knew that was from static electricity. And it was an old, you know, grounded Apple. And so what I did, in order to prevent that, I put a piece of copper tape across my desk and connected to the electrical ground. And before I would have touched a computer, I would always touch the tape first and then touch the computer and I had no problem. And it’s pretty simple. I mean, a lot of people, you remember those problems from the old days, constant glitches and having to restart your computer. So anyhow, that’s where I started with it. And that afternoon, after I had done that, I went outdoors. I was in Sedona, Arizona, of all places. And I was just passing through kind of, and then I got stuck there because I liked the color and the temperature. It’s just a fun place to hang out. But anyhow, so I was sitting on a bus stop and or where the tour buses pull up. And as people were getting off the bus, there were kind of shorter group of people like I think from Japan, and they had these big white Nike shoes on, tennis shoes. And for some reason I intuitively asked, I said, I wonder if there’s a consequence to humans no longer being naturally grounded. I did not know. It just came out of the blue, out of nowhere. And so that night, I went home, and I got a voltmeter and a ground rod, made up of wire stuff. And I started measuring the electrical charges on my body when I’m not grounded in the kitchen, in the living room, in the bedroom. Of course, there are all kinds of static electricity. There’s all kinds of RF frequency. I mean, it’s a sea of RF out there. And then you have the electric fields that are radiating from the appliances in the home, and the wiring in the walls and everything. When I was grounding myself and the minute I would walk close to something I’d see the voltage would rise on my body because I was measuring the electrical on my body. And the static electricity, that’s easy, you just pick your foot up off the floor and you can see the bell curve. Every time you have contact separation of dissimilar materials, there’s going to be a static separation. So anyhow, it’s a world that most people are totally [00:19:11] So anyhow, that night, I thought well, there’s a consequence here, but at that time, I was like 54. I had terrible amounts of pain because I grew up on a ranch and I skied most of my life, I played tennis, and I just did every dumb thing you could think of, from steer riding or whatever. And so anyhow, just this morning I remember one day I went out backyard prior to that. I looked at the sky and I said, God, why’d you make my body? There’s so much pain in it. So anyhow, I went to the hardware store and I bought a roll of two-inch wide metal duct tape, aluminum and I taped it up and down my bed and I grounded it to the earth. And I grounded the meter to the earth. And then when I would lay on the tape and touch the meter, I could tell that I was grounded, that I was at Earth potential. There was no voltage on my body, as long as I was grounded. So that’s where it started.

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Darin: So basically, especially now in our modern day world, we’re getting hit with all of these frequencies that we created with all of our electrics, with all of our EMFs, with all of this stuff and that’s bombarding our body invisibly all the time. And since we’re electric, the body doesn’t know what to do with all of that foreign electricity so there’s some sort of consequence to that, especially now that we’re not only getting all of that, but we’re not on the ground discharging that. So basically, could it be so much concluded in a way that’s basically we’re receiving electrical pollution? And because we’re not on the ground, the earth can’t– which is designed to kind of discharge that or take that away from us but it can happen instantly, if you’re able to ground yourself. So we’re basically running around with electrical pollution, wondering why we’re fatigued, wondering why we have pain, wondering why we’re not thinking correctly. And it could be part of the reason is that we’re not discharging all of this electrical pollution.

Clint: Definitely, there’s correlation there. And what it is, is these electric fields, what they do is they perturb electrons in your body, and then they create this voltage. And so there’s not adding anything to your body. What it’s doing is it’s artificially stimulating the sympathetic nervous system. So you’re electronically elevated, simply subtle, suddenly elevated sympathetic state. And, of course, that spikes cortisol and cortisol creates eventually inflammation if you don’t dissipate it, and that creates irritability, which creates pain, which creates all these things, and then you get into this vicious cycle, and so on. But anyhow, the most surprising thing that we learned, or what I did, first of all, I’ll go back to that original story that when I did that, I could tell I knew I was grounded. But the most surprising thing is the next morning I woke up and that meter was laying beside my side. And normally for me to go to sleep, I had to take Advil or something. And I went to sleep without the Advil and I didn’t think too much about that, but I felt good in the morning and I slept. And I did that for a couple more days and the same similar thing. And then a couple of days later, I grounded a couple of friends that I had there that I had met. Told them, you guys have to try this. There’s not a lot to do in Sedona. So anyhow, I tried it or we grounded them out. And sure enough, one of them said, yeah, you bet this thing helps you sleep. The other guy, he said, do you think it has anything to do with arthritis? He says because my arthritis is way down. And I said, I don’t know. I think it’s just sleep. But I didn’t know anything about arthritis or those kind of things. And so then all of a sudden, I recognize that all my pain started to dissipate. And then I went on a journey trying to figure out, you know, the early internet back then, you had AOL and you had not very much, you had Nexus Lexus, where you data retrieval, but there wasn’t much on the internet. So it was really hard to find anything.

Darin: So this is like in the ’90s.

Clint: Yeah, this is ’98, ’99, that era. So I ended up going down to University of Arizona, Tucson, and met with a couple people there and found out a little bit, but the only thing that anybody can come up with is when you operate the surgery. I mean, you have to ground the patient to prevent static and all those kind of things.

Darin: Oh, really? So they were doing that in hospitals?

Clint: But they didn’t know, I mean, they didn’t think of a biological effect, they were just thinking of preventing static electricity and extraneous electrical charges that could cause or simulate a cardio event. So anyhow, that’s all I learned at that time. But I kept playing with it and then one day I realized that there’s something really here because my health is coming back, my energy is coming back. And my friends said, wow, this is real, this is significant. And so to me, I had the greatest day in my life and the worst day of my life all on the same day because in the morning I said, wow, I figured out something, I’ve learned something and nobody else knows about because no matter who I talked to, nobody knew anything. The problem was, nobody knew about it. So you got to talk to every person individually, and try to educate them. So that was a real challenge. So anyhow, finally, I got tired of them. I just said, I’m going to go out to UCLA. And I said, they’ve got to understand what this is, and try to find out why nobody is aware of it, nobody’s using it. And the only reason I knew anything about grounding was because of my background. So if you go to talk to anybody else in the world about grounding, they say what are you talking about? But anyhow, when I went out there, it was fun. They kind of laughed me off campus, they said, do you expect us to put a stick in the ground or a stake in the ground and tie a wire around somebody’s toe and that’s going to make them sleep better? And I said, you better believe it. And they said, no, get out of here, your nuts go away. But anyhow, I did get a couple of students from meeting those people who were doing dissertations or whatever, and they kind of taught me how to do a study. So I went up to Ventura and got 60 subjects, long story all by itself, and I divided them into two groups, like they told me how to nurse, they did all the interaction. I went out and grounded half of them with placebo, half of them are grounded and all we did is put a 12 inch by 24 inch pad underneath their sheet and told them to sleep on it. And the thing that came back is everybody slept better. They had more energy. They had a lot less pain. But they had all kinds of, like some of the ladies talked about, they didn’t have the PMS cramps. A couple of them said it improved their TMJ. But there’s a whole host of– all these studies and everything I’m talking about are available on the earthinginstitute.net. So we looked at that study and said, okay, now we have enough evidence that we can go get a real study done because people in UCLA, they wanted more  evidence, they wanted more information, so they could make sense of it because they didn’t understand electrical. I didn’t understand biology at that time. Now, I think I do well, but anyhow, so after that study, actually even got it published with my first study and I wasn’t even a doctor. That was pretty cool. So anyhow, then they said, okay, we need to do another study. And so then we started to get ready for the cortisol. But I have to tell this one story to go on about electric fields because I know a lot of people are afraid of electric fields and all of these things, but they don’t know what to do about them because they’re invisible. And most people don’t want to give up their electrical environments. But anyhow, one day when we were doing that study, we had two people. One of them was like an 80-year-old woman who had terrible arthritis in both of her wrists and the other was an 80-year-old gentleman who had just had heart surgery, looked like he had been run over by a truck. I didn’t think he was going throughout the study. But anyhow, so I went to the gentlemen first in a young adobe house. I went in, measured his electric fields in the bedroom, and he didn’t have any electric fields because it was a thick adobe house and there was more electrical outlets on the side where his bed was, brick floor, and his metal framing on his bed was touching the brick floor. So technically the frame was grounded. And so anyhow, and he was a live patient, live subject and I said, man, this is terrible because we’re not going to get any results out here because we’re not using any electric fields. So then that afternoon, I went over to the lady’s and grounded her, and she had the highest amount of electric field I’d ever measured on a person. She had a heating pad on her bed, and she had lamps and all kinds of electrical stuff and on metal lamp and everything next to her bed. And then other kind of medical appliances stuff. And so anyhow, we went to grounded her and she was like 20 volts of environmental electrical charge on the body.

Darin: So 20 volts of electrical pollution was hitting her every day.

Clint: Yeah, all day and all night long it’s on. And her arthritis was so bad that she’s in total pain and heat, you could feel the heat. So anyhow, in order to ground her, her son was there, and he helped me get her grounded and everything. So I made up the bed and so I had to test the product. So I grounded the bed pad, grounded the meter, and then I would test her body voltage, that’s how I know what the body voltage, then whatever touched the pad, and then I would re-measure the body voltage. She didn’t know what I was doing. And it didn’t matter. So anyhow, I had to put a patch on one of her hands so I could do that. And then a patch on the other hand for the meter. And about five minutes, when we’re just talking to her son, she raised her hand, she says this one is working, or this one’s not working, this one’s working. And I didn’t quite understand what she meant. Then I realized that the grounded patch, she said was working and the patch on the meter wasn’t working.

Darin: It was working on her arthritis on the one hand that was grounded taking her pain away.

Clint: Yes, so I took the patch off at one hand and put it on the other hand with the meter and took the meter off. And she said now it’s working. And I said that was how I first learned how fast grounding reduced pain. And so anyhow, then when they got the study, when the nurses went out and got the paperwork and brought the study papers back, and the papers were all laying out there one day. So here are these two people on that day. They both had severe health issues, too many to name. But anyhow, one of them had 20 volts of environmental electric field in their bedroom. The other one had just a very small amount of grounding measurable like 20 millivolts. But they both had the same results. And I said there’s something totally wrong here. My pad was working. I didn’t measure it right, something is really wrong here. So I went back, check the pad. Sure enough, it’s working just fine and everything was just right. And that night, I went home and I said, you know, there’s something amiss here, I’m doing something wrong, I’m missing something. And then I started doing more tests and then I realized that it was the electrical potential of the earth or grounding the person to the earth that was reducing the inflammation. What we now call inflammation back then, the word inflammation, but was it reducing the pain? And then everybody’s skin color came up, their vitality came up and all of these things. So then I went home, and I said, so these electric fields, we’re blaming them for all these problems because we can measure them but in reality, when I do the experiments, they don’t really matter if you’re grounded. If you’re not grounded, those electric fields are really taxing your nervous system. But if you’re grounded, there’s no effect but it’s the electronics coming up that wire into the body that’s going into the body and reducing the oxidative stress.

Darin: So for years, maybe most of my life, people have been asking me, “What kind of foods do you eat? What kind of exercises do you do? What kind of water should I drink?” All of these things and so much more we put into a 21-day program so that can take you through a theme every day of knowledge, action, and then eating these delicious meals, working out, getting support, anchoring in these new habits so you can do what? So that you can kick ass. So you have the energy, the vitality to live the kind of life that you really want. That’s what it’s all about. So all in this app, we have grocery lists, we have education about real hydration and what greater oxygenation and the balance of alkalinization. All of these things we are diving into as you’re heading down this hero’s journey of implementation into a new life to give you the kind of life that you actually want. So join my Tribe. All you have to do is go 121tribe.com. Sign up, and you get three free days. Join me on this hero’s journey. Join the Tribe.

Darin: When we’re talking about earthing or grounding, we think it’s doing something from– It’s like I’m thinking of it like taking something out of the body. But what you’re saying is the Earth’s natural energy electrical system is traveling up the grounded cord, or if you’re on the earth, it’s traveling up your body barefooted, etc. and is actually giving your body electrons to help balance it from the electrical pollution of the man-made stuff that it’s being stressed with. Is that correct?

Clint: Yes. When you put two bare feet on the earth, then your body is going to absorb enough electrons from the earth until you equalize, you are at the same electrical potential as the earth, meaning you have the same amount of free electrons in your body as the earth does first pro rata. The key to that which blew my mind back at the time and nobody would listen to me and I didn’t know what I was talking about half of the time, but I said, if what we’re doing here is true, then you can’t have this pain and this oxidation in a grounded body. And then you look at the animal world, all the animals who live in the wild. They don’t have cardiovascular disease, arthritis, they don’t have any of these modern health disorders. The animal on the other hand, who live indoors with their owners, 50% died from cancer, which is an inflammation. So I had this cowboy logic going for me. So we went on, kept doing studies. And the first thing we did was what everybody wanted to know was why does the grounding make pain go away? So what’s the mechanism of action here? Nobody knew, and I had not a clue except that heat in arthritis is a fire. And I know fire is what we’re trying to throw in with grounding in the communications world. We want everything to stay electrically stable and cool. If there’s any resistance, you’re going to have smoke and fire, or you’re going to blow a chip or you’re going to blow something. So we kept doing studies, and the second study we did was on cortisol. We would measure cortisol every 4 hours for 24 hours, and then put it on a profile. Then we grounded him for a month to 6 weeks, and went back and did the same thing again. And what we saw was at 4 AM in the morning, the people who were grounded, their cortisol was skyrocketing straight up, all of them equally. And at 6am, it reached a peak, then it would come down, drift down on a 24-hour cycle. And he was the lowest at midnight. And then that’s how we learned that if you’re not sleeping at night, there’s only one reason you can’t sleep at night, that’s because your cortisol is elevated. Otherwise, sleep is autonomic, it’s going to happen. But if there’s a bear in the woods or there’s stress or whenever, cortisol is elevated, you’re not going to sleep, you’re going to worry, keep one eye open. And we did the cortisol study and we got really, really great results. For the first time, we could say that, yes, grounding affects the autonomic nervous system, and it affects cortisol, the 24 hour circadian secretion or cortisol secretion profile. And that was a big discovery. And so you know, what can you say, is take your shoes off, stand on the earth, you’re gonna feel better. But everybody wanted to go on but still it did not give us a mechanism of action. We could see another result but we didn’t know how. So one day, I met a doctor, Stephen Sinatra, who was a cardiologist from back east. He was attending a conference in San Diego. And so I went over to him with the doc who helped a cortisol study. And he looked at what we were doing. I grounded him, playing with him a little bit. He says, Clint, he said, if you’re affecting pain, you need to be studying inflammation. But nobody knew what inflammation was back. This was 2002 or 2001. There was nothing in the literature. The word meant that somebody sprained an ankle and it would swell up and it would get red and hot. And he said, no, that’s not the inflammation I’m talking about. He said, I’m talking about–

Darin: The chronic cellular inflammation on a molecular level proliferating throughout the body. Yeah, that’s different than just a swollen ankle.

Clint: So I went to work after he left, doing everything I could. Then one day, I was reading up on the immune system and how the immune system produces reactive oxygen species and especially neutrophils. And as soon as I heard the word reactive, then I knew that, wow, that’s electrical. It’s missing an electron. It’s electrically charged, positively charged, and it’s looking for an electron, and it’s going to go steal it and start a fire. That’s how a log burns. And so I understood that, until then we started looking and doing a few more experiments, getting the same results. So Stephen called me one day, he says, bring your stuff and come back here, I’m going to get you the other group of [00:41:49] and see if we can figure out what’s going on. So anyhow, the first thing we did is we drew blood for every person. There’s like 12 different [00:42:01] drew blood from every one of them and looked at it under a microscope and you could see that most people, they’re blood were sticky. Almost everybody was except for myself and nobody was grounded, not even Stephen at the time. Anyhow, then we grounded them all for 30 to 40 minutes. And then as an end result, everybody’s blood spread out.

Darin: So you did a live blood microscopy and you looked at a live blood analysis and you saw the coupling effect when someone wasn’t grounded and that’s very hard for cellular respiration, hard to detox, etc. And then when you grounded it, they opened up and there was space again, and there were more free flowing.

Clint: Right. And so we did like 12 people that day. And then we could also tell by the color of the skin. Everybody’s faces would get rosy and pink and their demeanor would change. Then at that time, we said we saw that and now we wanted real hard evidence that that was what was really happening, what was that, what caused that? Red blood cells, all cells have molecular surface charge and that’s how they repell each other and I saw the blood skips on through the veins and everything. And when that electrical potential becomes reduced, then the blood cells would stick together and share an electron. It’s kind of like electroplating chrome on a bumper, positive charge from a negative charge and put them together and they stick. And so that’s kind of what’s going on here. So anyhow, then we grounded everybody and we had this great results, and then so we thought about it for a couple of three weeks and said, okay, we need to find out how much electrical change is occuring on these red blood cells. So then we designed another study where we could take a gold wire and put on a voltage on it, then we put blood on a plate and then you turn the battery. And then the speed at which the blood cells were traveling away from that wire would give you an idea of the amount of charge. You had a constant charge on the wire so it would tell you what the constant or what their charge was on the blood cells. Everybody’s voltage was a little bit different on these people who were on the study. And then we grounded them and then you’re going to increase the blood viscosity by a factor of 2.7 which is huge. So what we did is we significantly– the bottom line is when we ground the body, red blood cells equalize with the earth itself. They have the same electrical potential as the earth itself. Now, because they’re more negative, so now the blood cells like little negative magnets, when you put them together they push each other apart. So now the red blood cells push each other apart and normalizes the blood viscosity, so now the blood can get in and out of the capillaries, you have no [00:45:12] formation, no sticky blood. Your blood circulates, all the blood in your body circulates once a minute, and it’s really moving. So we ground them for like I think 30 minutes or an hour, something like that, and it actually happens faster than that. But anyhow, the main thing that happened is so now we found our mechanism of action by increasing the negative surface charge of blood, it can get in and out of the capillaries, oxygenated tissue, clean up the debris, and do what it’s supposed to do. And so you put shoes on, then that charge begins to deplete.

Darin: Let’s say I go run outside and without shoes on and I come back and I’m at my computer, I’m on my next Zoom call. How long do you think that it takes to lose that charge?

Clint: Well, what we found over the years in our studies, we can ground people for 30 minutes and it will last for 30 minutes afterwards, some people maybe an hour depending on how much issues they had. But people who ground every night, they seem to build like a capacitor. They build and hold charge. But really what’s happening here is the more you can reduce, you know, oxygenated tissue, prevent inflammation and so on. But once inflammation starts off, then your body, your immune system has to go clean up the debris and all the problems so it can’t do what it’s normally supposed to do. So by repairing and getting grounded often and frequently and repairing that as much as you can, then the immune system doesn’t have to spend so much time fighting inflammation, do what it’s supposed to do in the body.

Darin: Yeah, so there are two things. So what you brought up which is great, so on the one hand, it happens very fast. You were looking at literally live blood cells changing almost instantaneously. So it’s not rocket science that we are of the earth, we have lived on the earth, we have slept on the earth, but on our modern-day fatal convenience, we lifted ourselves off of the earth, we put ourselves in comfortable beds, and we took ourselves off of this incredible magnetic field of the earth that makes sense. It’s important for us to be connected in our own pursuit of our own health.

Clint: It’s fundamental. Grounding is electrical stability. When you have inflammation in your body, your energies are off. When you’re grounded to the earth, like the animals, you have to look at the animals in the wild and look at the health of the animals in the wild and you can see it. I mean, it’s just crystal clear versus the animals who live indoors with their owners. But anyhow, there are two things that are missing. One is grounding and the other is sunlight. People don’t get enough sunlight. Sunlight is live energy. I mean, it’s coming from the sun, protons and electrons. It’s alive. I mean, it’s energy. And then live food. Eating food is as close to being alive as possible. Dead don’t eat food. 

Darin: Exactly, that’s electrical too. I mean, it’s live, it’s electrical, it’s hydrative, it’s reparative, it’s all of that.

Clint: Spring water. I think really we need to look at nature and who we are, and that’s who we are, and that’s where we came from, and when we disconnect, we are like astronauts in free space, we lose our dance.

Darin: And by the way, for everyone listening, like as I’m sitting here, I am on one of the earthing mats as we speak. So I am grounded even in my thing and that’s a beautiful thing that you have done. You’ve created these products that people can bring because you know, not a lot of people can be on a Zoom call sitting on the ground and earth themselves, but now you’ve made that accessible and very easy. Plug that in, make sure your house is grounded and plug that in to the outlet and because everything is grounded, you can see with the little devices, I love the fact that you sent the devices to show people of putting in the plug, you can see that it’s actually grounded. And then when you plug in this grounding rod and then my mat that I just put my feet on or put it in my bed, it grounds me and you’ve made that accessible, it’s cheap, it’s easy, and your bringing earth medicine back to people. So I am stoked for what you’ve done and stoked for you tenacity of staying with this.

Clint: I have a little story that I tell a lot especially to women because in doing my research, getting subjects was one of the hardest things we could do and to get people that were healthy that didn’t have health issues, but we ended up getting ladies with MS and lupus, and diseases like that. And one day, I was asking a woman with MS, I said, what happened? How did you get MS? She was like 35 years old, and I said it’s not an inherited thing, is it? And she says, no. She said, I don’t know, it just happened about 3 or 4 years ago and it’s just getting worse and worse and now I’m in trouble or whatever. And so her rheumatologist sent me over to get her grounded to see if that would help her. But anyhow, a couple of minutes after that, I asked her questions, she said, you know, I never thought about it. She says, but that’s the year we lost our house, my husband left, and I lost my job, and just everything went to hell. And she said I just got into stress and whatever. And so then what I realized was I started asking people all the time what caused before you got cancer, what happened in your life? Before you got lupus, what happened in your life? And every single time, there’s a huge story of loss, stress, and internalizing stress. And I tried to tell a story to help them, when I was young, we have huge amounts of rabbits, rabbit infestation, whatever you want to call it, these big jack rabbits. And then you would have a lot of coyotes that year because they lived on the jack rabbits and you had good grass so it’s kind of a cycle thing. But anyhow, the rabbits, they all sit there and they’re eating grass, that’s all they do all day long. And then all of a sudden, a coyote is sneaking up on them and the ears go up like that and then as the coyote starts to lunge, then they spring. They can just spring high. And then they started zigzagging back and forth across the pasteur keeping one eye on the coyote. And eventually, almost every time, the coyote runs out of energy first and he just drops to the ground. The rabbit would run just a little bit further but he can still see him. And then he’s sitting in there shaking, you can kind of see. I mean, he’s just had his life threatened. [00:53:05] visceral response, they shake. And all of a sudden, he goes back to eating grass like nothing ever happened. And then after doing all this work and everything, I finally put this behind that basically, your cortisol spikes, the fight or flight spikes, cortisol becomes elevated, say it’s the rabbits life, but afterwards, he’s got the ground habit that affects the cortisol because there is a lot of inflammation being created in his body during the chase and so on. So what I try to do metaphorically for people is that it’s like women. They get up in the morning, they’ve got the kids going off to school, they’ve got the husband taken care of, they got food, they got all these things, challenges, and then oftentimes, they go to work. And then they have to put up with the traffic and everything else. So I think all these things are coyotes, you know, the phone rings, that’s a coyote. Kids scream, that’s a coyote. Everything’s coyote. So all day long, you’re fighting the coyotes. And at night when you get home, you know, dinner time, this and all the stress, it’s just coyotes all day long. I said, what you have to do at night, no matter what, if you can’t afford to be grounded or anything like that then you have to go outdoors for 15 to 20 minutes and dissipate all of that charge in your body, the stress, like the rabbits do. Otherwise, you’re going to go to bed with that cortisol running and the slightly elevated sympathetic nerves, anxiety, irritability, and there’s eventually more pain and that keeps the cycle going and then eventually it’s depression, and then eventually your immune system can’t keep up with it.

Darin: And that’s the instinct of the animals. And there’s a great book called Waking the Tiger, and they talked about the neurological need for all animals, especially prey animals to dissipate that electrical charge, that cortisol, all of that stuff. And it’s exactly what you’re saying as us. And we think we just need to take all of this stuff on all the time, but we don’t take that time and kind of letting the earth help us out, sit down on it, be on it, and then meditate and let yourself have that time, and it’s so important. So it’s a great easy thing for anyone to do but we just have to actually do it.

Clint: A lot of people said, at home, you got all– the original certain grounding is about your children. You wouldn’t want to ground them so you can get them back to normal, calm them back and get them back to normal. So anybody who’s having a bad day, you’re full of stress, you’re full of anger, whatever, all you have to do is go outdoors, put your feet on the earth for 15 minutes. You can’t be unhappy and can’t be angry when you’re standing grip around the earth, especially if there’s sunshine on your head. It just dissipates it away.

Darin: Amen to that, man. Absolutely. Dude, it’s so good. I love this conversation so much and I can’t wait for people to hear it. Where can people find you and where can people get a hold of some of these amazing grounding mats?

Clint: Earthing.com has a family of mats that are relatively inexpensive, very effective. There’s 26 peer-reviewed published studies on grounding and the effects of it. You could buy them all at the earthinginstitute.net. I highly recommend if possible to watch the earthing movie. It’s on YouTube. It’s commercial free. And it’s very authentic and very beneficial to see those people, but that’s basically it. The earthing.com has this, you know, these are products that are all developed by byproducts from doing our studies and everything. And the main thing is what can we do to ground people during sleep was our main objective or sitting at the desk or at work or wherever, just to get the stress out of your body. You have to reconnect with the earth. The earth has resonating energies also. You have to connect to those. Better connection, better reception, and then it manages your cortisol secretion and other hormones, your sleep stages, all these things. This is all nature. This is all natural. We just lost our connection with the earth.

Darin: Hundred percent. Well, we don’t have to anymore and if we just take time everyday and also you made it so simple for us to do that with your technology and it’s super easy for people to implement. So hey man, thank you for all of your renegade work when you’re kind of by yourself for so long and now, I’m grateful that more and more people are learning about what you’re doing. Thanks, brother. Appreciate it.

Darin: That was a fantastic episode. What was the one thing that you got out of today’s conversation? If today’s episode struck a chord with you, and you want to dive a little deeper on a variety of topics, check out my live deep dives on darinolien.com/deepdive. More episodes are available on darinolien.com as well. Keep diving my friends, keep diving.

Darin: This episode is produced by my team at Must Amplify, an audio marketing company that specializes in giving a voice to a brand and making sure the right people hear it. If you would like or are thinking about doing a podcast or even would like a strategy session to add your voice to your brand in a powerful way, go to www.mustamplify.com/darin. That’s www.mustamplify.com/darin.