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Clint Ober and Lewis Howes:
Lewis: So what is grounding?
Clint: grounding is an electrical term and the earth has a negative charge. Everything connected to the earth –trees, animals, plants, everything that lives on the earth has a negative surface charge. When you stand barefoot on the earth, your body is conductive and it’s electrical first and chemical second. Everything in your body is electrical—your brain, muscles, cells, everything that takes place in your body is electrons moving around. When you ground on the earth your body is negative.
Lewis: when your feet are barefoot on the ground, your body is negative.
Clint; yes your body equalizes with the earth.
Lewis: when you are not on the ground then what happens?
Clint: then you start depleting your free electrons. When you are standing barefoot on the earth, you are one and the same electrically with the earth. You are grounded.
Lewis: you are a negative.
Clint: you are earth potential. I asked myself I wonder if there is consequence to humans no longer being naturally grounded. That’s not a question many would ask unless they had installed or been involved with installing millions of ground rods. In the cable industry any time you run a cable into the house you have to drive rod, cut the cable and put in a ground block so if there is lightening, static or anything on the cable lines or an electrical event then it goes to ground whether it goes into the house, or goes to the tv. That can create a fire in the home.
Clint: it’s all about fire, so inflammation in ‘fire.’ I didn’t know that just lifting my arm up will create static electricity if I am not grounded. We are in different environments where we are not grounded.
I found in the bedroom there were really high voltages on my body charges. If you have a foam bed, there is static electricity from the foam. If there is any polyester in the blankets or coverings there is static electricity.
My mind focused so I went to the hardware store and bought 3 inch wide metal duct tape like you would wrap around furnaces. I laid it across the bed, connected a wire to it, threw it out the window and connected it to a ground rod. I did the same thing with the meter. I knew when I laid on it I would be grounded and I could confirm that with the meter.
The first night that I did that, I woke up the next morning and the meter was by my side. I was 54 and I was a cowboy. I had every kind of ache and pain you could think of. I skied for over 30 years and played tennis. I have done everything that you can imagine that you can injure yourself with. I had a lot of pain in my body.
For me to go to sleep I had to take advil or something. That night I just feel asleep. I woke up startled in the morning. I had not taken advil because I was messing with the meter and just fell asleep. I didn’t really understand because I had fallen asleep without the advil. I did that for several nights. So I had a couple of older acquaintances who didn’t sleep well and they tried what I was doing.
A couple of days later one of the guys came over and asked if this could help his arthritis in hands because they were better. Then I realized my pain level was down.
Back then all I had was AOL or Nexus Lexus for data retrieval. There was no information out there on grounding affecting the body except when you have open heart surgery, they have to prevent static electricity from creating a cardio event. It was unknown.
Telephone, cable and power you have to ground everything to maintain electrical stability and to prevent charge or to prevent fire. I didn’t know where to go as I had no background in biology. I had a significant background in electrical.
I went out to UCLA and I ended up connecting with the Sleep Lab. I told them what I was doing and they said you mean to tell us if you put a nail in the ground, tie a wire around it and then around someone’s toe on the other end they are going to sleep better? I said yes. They told me I was crazy. We joke around a little bit, but they knew nothing about electrical. According to them the body is not electrical and they do not know the cause of pain.
Go to medical libraries and look up the cause of pain, the cause of lupus, the cause of MS, and all say ‘cause unknown.’ They treat the symptoms and they do not know the cause. Or if they do know it wasn’t in the literature 20 years ago.
A couple of the students were intrigued and I got a couple of them to design a study since everyone said I had to have more proof. I went to Ventura, Calif and they helped me write the study. We got 60 subjects and I had to design a mechanism to ground people for a number of days. Half of the subjects would be grounded and half would not, so it was a blind study.
We had to get 60 people and that was the hard part. I was getting a haircut one day and heard two ladies talking about not sleeping well because of pain. That is who I needed. So I went to the woman who owned the salon and told her I was doing a study on pain and sleep and needed people to be in the study. She started gathering up subjects and then I went to a few of the other hair salons. We ended up with 60 subjects who were not related and not known to each other. Over a month 30 of them were grounded and 30 were not grounded.
They were not told if they were grounded or not. We wanted to see if there was an effect with pain and sleep. We did the study and we had significant results. It was an anecdotal study and it was enough information to create interest. What happened everyone felt better and had less pain. The ladies with PMS issues had less PMS issues when they were grounded.
TMJ started disappearing for people who had it. There was a host of different issues. This was only in the grounded group. This published study is at https://earthinginstitute.net .
So there were significant results and the 80% of the people had improvements. The placebo group had from 10 to 20% improvement. I didn’t know anything about studies so I learned everything along the way.
We thought that it was the electrical fields and the static electricity that was causing the problems. In the study we learned otherwise. I went to see a man who had heart surgery who was elderly. I went into his bedroom and it was in an adobe home with a brick floor with one lamp in the room. The bed had a metal frame on the brick floor so there was no EMF and no static electricity to speak of.
That afternoon I went to the home of an 80 year old woman with arthritis in both hands and could not hold the meter so I could test her. I was talking with her son. I had put a patch on each hand and connected one to ground and one to the meter so I could make sure she was grounded when she was on the pad. Suddenly she said it wasn’t working on one hand but it was on the other
I didn’t know what she was talking about and I realized she was feeling something with the arthritis with the patch with the grounding cord. I swapped the cord from the meter to the grounding cord and then it was working on both hands. This was within 5 minutes. The hot burning arthritic pain was going down.
On the way home I stopped at the medical supply house and bought some electrode patches and gave them to people with arthritis and bursitis and asked them to try it. Over the next 2 or 3 days they all called and I heard the words, ‘magic pain patch.’ It just made pain disappear in minutes.
The bottom line was that when the study was done there were the same results. One had no static electricity and no EMFs and the other woman had horrific EMF and horrific static because of all the stuff she had around her bed. They both had the same result so I thought there was something ‘amiss.’
I did a lot of testing and then I realized it was just being connected to the earth. It was being grounded to the earth and not environmental factors. What happens when you are grounded to the earth? You have earth potential and you equalize with the earth. And the reason we ground everything to the earth is to prevent fire or an electrical event. 14.34 min.
At that time the word inflammation was not in the English language. This was back in 2000 and there were no papers on inflammation. Inflame means ‘on fire.’ Back then it was just ‘pain.’
So everyone’s pain came down and then I didn’t know what to do from there. I met a newly retired anesthesiologist in San Diego and he said he was interested in what I was doing and ‘didn’t think there was anything to it, but he would like to test it even though he thought I was wrong.’
So we put together 10 or 12 subjects and measured cortisol in saliva every 4 hours for 24 hours so we could have a profile. We did this on each subject and grounded them. We did this for a month with a 12 x 24 inch ground mat that we used for directing static electricity on electronics. So we have pre-grounding and post-grounding cortisol profiles.
The cortisol in the before tests were like spaghetti and not co-ordinated. Most of these people didn’t know each other. When we did the profile at the end, the cortisol was high at night and low in the morning. Afterwards it went into a synchronized secretion profile. It was lowest at midnight and at 4AM it would skyrocket until about 6AM and that is what gives you the energy to get out of bed. Throughout the day it would drift back down to zero.
The younger women had high cortisol profiles because of stress and the older women with chronic fatigue and other issues from exhausted adrenals had very low cortisol. Afterwards everyone’s cortisol went into a nice synchronized band and everyone slept better, had less pain and they had more energy. So, you cannot have charge in a grounded object.
Lewis: what does the science say about walking barefoot and healing the body and reducing chronic inflammation? 17.58
Clint: with the nice synchronized band of cortisol people have less pain and more energy. So you cannot have ‘charge’ in a grounded object.
Lewis: what about walking barefoot for healing the body and reducing chronic inflammation according to science?
Clint: we learned along the way that if you ground someone with arthritis buy putting an electrode patch and a coil cord connected to a ground, the pain goes away in 5 to 10 minutes. Nobody will believe this until they experience and then they want to know why no one told them about this.
In 1960 we were either barefoot or we wore leather-soled shoes. Leather soled shoes hold moisture, they hold perspiration and body salts, so they are conductive. Going barefoot was common. I was born in 1944 I was from rural Montana and we wore leather shoes to work and to church.
But generally when you got out of school for the summer you ‘lost’ the shoes. Barefoot was common. If it was raining you carried your shoes so they didn’t get wet and ruined. You wore shoes ‘on purpose.’ Back then you weren’t allowed to wear shoes in the house.
Plastics were invented in the 1960s. The first thing we did was put them on the soles of shoes and create those ugly green, yellow, orange or red shag carpets. Everyone carpeted their homes and started wearing rubber soled shoes. They were great because now everyone could afford shoes and you didn’t have to worry about water. They were inexpensive. People could afford carpeting now; before it was wool carpeting over wooden floors.
We started to lose our ground in 1960. Television came and we started spending more time indoors and less time outdoors. When we did go outdoors we had shoes on. Over the next 60 years 95% of all shoes sold are plastic-soled, synthetic material shoes. Everyone lives on the computer, TV and no one goes outdoors anymore.
If you want to go outdoors and get grounded, where would you go unless you have a home with a yard and that is more rare these days. Parks are for pets. So we lost our negative charge over the last 60 years.
I didn’t have a clue of any of this and now this is my story for the last 20 years. We have produced 25 to 30 peer reviewed published studies on this subject and they are all at https://theearthinginstitute.net and we have produced a couple of videos, and movies.
The Earthing Movie is on youtube and other locations. We have a book we have not fully marketed but we have sold over a million copies and it’s published in over 20 languages: Earthing, The Most Important Health Discovery Ever. We say that because what is in it free and it’s important.
We didn’t know until after writing the book, we found information from Europe and over the last 100 years ago. I was at a convention in San Diego and Dr. Stephen Sinatra, a cardiologist from back East, came out and was at the convention. The doctor who did the first study with me said we needed to visit with Dr. Sinatra because he was a cardiologist and the ‘heart is electrical and he will understand what we are talking about.’
We schedule time with him and he said if this is affecting pain, you need to be studying inflammation because pain is about inflammation and that word is not in the literature. It was to researchers, but not generally. Inflammation to me was like twisting an ankle playing tennis and having it swell up. He said he was talking about chronic, lowgrade inflammation.
I took it from there and started doing more research and came across how the immune system works. The white blood cells, nutrifils and microphages, when there is a pathogen, injury or a damaged or wornout cell that needs to be replaced, the immune system sends the nutrifil that encapsulates the pathogen or the damaged cells and releases reactive oxygen species.
As soon as I heard the word reactive then for some reason it meant to me it was electrical. Reactive means that it is electrically charged and it has a strong enough charge that it can pull an electron away from a pathogen and kill it.
That was the first clue. I couldn’t get help from doctors and no one understood this because it was too bizarre. As time went on we did the next study. But on the way I figured that when you ground yourself to the earth it is like a garden hose with water.
When you have the ground wire, the electrons are coming up the wire by force because everything will equalize with the earth. If you have a ground pad that you are lying on it is grounded. When you lay on it you are grounded. It’s the same if we put a patch on your hand and you are grounded.
It’s like cutting a hole there and pouring water, but it’s electrons pouring into the body. The body equalizes and as soon as it becomes negative it immediately stops the inflammation. The pain stops. When the pain stops you know the inflammation stops.
In the early days the only people I could get for subjects were the rheumatologists and it was women with lupus, MS or fibromyalgia. They cannot help these people so they gave them to me to start grounding. As time went on a woman came in one day and had to hold her hand next to her chest because of the pain.
She was totally stressed. She wanted to be in the study and couldn’t because she had to go to the bathroom every 20 minutes. Because she had come I said I would ground her for awhile. I put her in the chair and put patches on her arms. She was moving around, but she was interested. Her coloring started to pink up, her demeanor calmed down.
She kept talking and all of a sudden after 40 minutes I asked her if she needed to go to the restroom and she said she was doing okay. An hour later the loss of control of the arm stopped. She took the patch off, went to the restroom before she left. She came out of the bathroom almost in tears and said, “look at me, I’m like my old self.” Her pain was down and her demeanor changed. Most of all she still had the damage done to the arm.
As time went on I could tell a woman after she had been grounded for 5 to 10 minutes, I could honestly say, you no longer have MS. What you have is damage from MS. How you will recover is unknown to me, but there is recovery. The body is a self-healing mechanism. When you put the fire out and stop the inflammation, it can heal.
You cannot have MS when you are grounded because the body is flooded with free electrons. When the nutrifils are in there taking care of the damaged cells where the myelin sheath would cause the problem, then that stops. The electrons reduce the remaining reactive oxygen species. It stops it dead.
This sounds bizarre. That is how confident I became. I know that lupus, MS, arthritis, bursitis, any kind of flaring disease, –if the term has …itis…it is inflammation.
Lewis: so it puts out the fire and you might have the remnants of the challenge you are faced with if you have had it for years. So it may take time to heal arms and hands that have been cramping and ‘curling’ for years.
Clint: you are not going to have the hot, burning pain. There could still be ‘leave me alone’ healing pain.
Lewis: how easy is it to ground yourself and how long does the grounding last?
Clint: it is cumulative. If I ground someone for 30 to 40 minutes they will have their blood viscosity normalize. As soon as you ground a person the blood before grounding is sticking and sticky. That is why so many people are on blood thinners. So as soon as you ground the red blood cells have a surface charge so they equalize with the earth. Now they have a negative charge.
The more negative the red blood cells are, the more they repel each other like negative magnets. Now the blood is thin and not sticky and the cells can get in and out of the capillaries, reduce the inflammation and return the body to normal. Thirty minutes will get you on the way. It will reduce enough inflammation to let you know there is something going on.
Lewis: so it lasts a half a day, or a day?
Clint: it depends; I have grounded people who had chronic arthritic knee inflammation. I grounded them for 30 minutes, they got up and the pain went away forever. I have people with MS and they have a challenge ahead.
Lewis: what are the benefits of walking on dirt, laying on the grass, or putting your hands on the ground. Are there different benefits?
Clint: animals that live in the wild are grounded 24/7. They don’t have cardiovascular disease, MS, lupus, arthritis, and cancer rarely exists in nature. The only animals that die from cancer in nature do so because we have contaminated or destroyed their environment.
Lewis: so cats and dogs die because they are in the house.
Clint: all the animals who live indoors with their owners manifest similar health disorders as their owners from diabetes to you name it. Diabetes is an inflammation related disorder. 50% of indoor domestic animals die from cancer just like their owners. So it’s environment and it’s about being connected to the earth 24/7 and then you can’t have those disorders.
In nature your feet are the most conductive. We know this by measuring the palms of your hands and the bottoms of your feet—those are your ‘ground paws.’ We have used our hands forever to touch living green plants, trees, and so we were naturally grounded. These are the most conductive areas of the body.
Your body is always going to have autoimmune response, the immune cascade. You are going to have oxidative radicals in your body to reduce pathogens and damaged cells. The oxidative burst is what causes inflammation. Inflammation doesn’t exist in nature. You need to get grounded until the pain goes away. You don’t have to go to a lab—when the pain stops you know the inflammation stopped.
You cannot have pain without inflammation, but if you have pain you have inflammation.
Lewis: so it might take an hour being on the ground. Is touching grass or plants better than touching dirt or sand?
Clint: I try to tell people it doesn’t matter because you are not grounding an electrical system. You are grounding a human body. And earth has a universal ground.
Lewis: what about the sand or the ocean?
Clint: if you take sand, an inch of it, it’s damp. It’s great if you are in wet sand or in the ocean and you will be well grounded. You are going to be grounded in palm springs if you are sitting under a palm tree because there is moisture in all sand—it holds moisture. It is rock and you have the nighttime condensation, so there is moisture everywhere.
It’s going to be better if you have a grass yard—and I tell everybody—but if I can convince you to put your bare feet and your hands on the earth, that’s great. If you can’t do that, take a chair outside, take your shoes off and put your feet on the earth and just sit there. Your respiration is going to calm down, your oxygen saturation is going to rise, your color comes up because your blood viscosity normalizes.
Your pain will diminish and when that happens you are reducing inflammation in your body, or you are only left with the healing pain but the burning, oxidative pain will go away.
Lewis: what are we missing out on by wearing shoes all the time and not being connected?
Clint: whenever you are grounded you cannot have inflammation. When you are not grounded you start losing your redox potential and you’re bleeding off your free electrons just by breathing oxygen, eating food or all the environmental stressors. Eventually you become short of electrons and you become gaunt or grey and your energy drops, and you are fatigued.
If this goes on too long and you don’t recover, you go to bed with this damage and in the morning you get up and you are stiff and you don’t have energy. You have to have coffee to ‘wake up.’
Lewis: does grounding support extending your life span?
Clint: we did a rat study in Canada in Alberta. We took 60 breeder rats. They have their litters and then they are euthanized afterwards. So what I wanted to do was to let these rats live out their lives and monitor them. 30 were in grounded cages and 30 were not in grounded cages.
At the end, the ungrounded rats had lots of alopecia—hair loss. That’s the ungrounded rats. These were ‘middle age female rats’ in rat time. As they got older they developed lots of alopecia and a lot of biomarkers that are indicative of metabolic syndrome. This is all these inflammation related disorders.
But the number one thing—the difference in age was very little. All the rats in the study ate the same thing everyday and had the same amount of water. They had healthy food and healthy conditions so there weren’t the normal environmental stressors.
The rats that were grounded were 14 to 20% less weight than the ungrounded rats. This was healthier weight. Being grounded you are less likely to have metabolic syndrome health disorders and this is inflammation. Alopecia is inflammation. That study is available at the Earthing Institute. Quality of life was better for the grounded rats and they were not obese.
People can live to be 80 or 90 years old, but they will be in pain. The average age (of longevity) for a man is 75 and I am 78.
Lewis: but you want to live healthy.
Clint: I can get up out of my chair with ease; I can move, I can dance for 3 hours if I want to. I can walk 5 miles, and prefer to walk barefoot and that is not easily done, so I wear grounded shoes. I can’t walk 5 miles in a regular shoe like everyone else. I lose my energy after a mile and a half.
Lewis: so you wear the grounded sandals and keep your energy throughout the day?
Clint: I walk between 2000 and 10000 steps depending on what is going on—barefoot or in grounded shoes.
Lewis: are there grounded tennis shoes?
Clint: the only thing we have is the grounded foot cloth.
Lewis: why do the sandals work?
Clint: there is a piece of carbon that comes along the top, through the shoe and along the bottom. When the shoe touches the earth, it is conductive and your foot touches the carbon so it’s like standing on the earth. You don’t have to worry about stickers, glass, etc. Ladies will go barefoot.
Lewis: when I walk on grass with my shoes off I always feel more energized and connected.
Clint: when your body is grounded, your body is full of free electrons and full of this earth energy. Now you cannot have inflammation and your metabolism is ‘cooking along.’ If you are not grounded then you are bleeding off these free electrons and getting fatigued and you’re body can’t function.
As soon as you ground yourself you have a greater range of motion. You have more energy and your oxygen saturation increases. Our bodies evolved to be grounded. We are always connected and whatever period of time, we are grounded. When you are grounded you don’t have inflammation.
If there had been inflammation along the way, we wouldn’t be here as a species because we wouldn’t have all these pharmaceuticals to keep people alive.
Lewis: so we had other types of pain, but we didn’t have the inflammation.
Clint: pain was hunger and injury. In 1960 90% of general medical practice was for infectious disease, acute injury and child birth.
Lewis: so there was no MS, arthritis, when you were growing up?
Clint: maybe one in 10,000. But now it’s like autism. Autism is an inflammation related health disorder—oxidation of the brain stem. Diabetes started to increase in the 50s? It’s exacerbated by sugar and foods today, but what caused the problem was inflammation. There are studies on the Earthing Institute that explain all these. Diabetes is an inflammation health disorder. If you are grounded the sugar is not going to be quite as bad, but you’ll put weight on.
Sugar is not good for you because it’s not a natural thing in the type of sugars we eat. Processed foods are not natural. So those are going to challenge and stress our bodies and create inflammation. But if you are grounded you can reduce the inflammation to get you through this. If you are not grounded it will be exacerbated.
Lewis: how does grounding support weight loss or increase metabolism; does grounding help the gut microbiome?
Clint: if you have inflammation in your body, your immune system is using all its resources to fight the inflammation that it is feeding. So it’s a vicious loop because the immune system doesn’t know that one day we would put shoes on. Or that we would be disconnected from the earth.
Lewis: what is the difference from barefoot indoors versus barefoot outdoors?
Clint: barefoot indoors you will have less static electricity and things like that but you are not grounded.
Lewis: is there a way to have a grounding tool that you plug into your outlets that make you feel like you are grounded?
Clint: yes. Over the years as we did the studies, in order to them we had to create ground points. They are anything from an electro-patch—an EKG patch. You put one of those on the body and you connect it to a ground. That grounds the body and the electrons can get through the skin.
Lewis: we have the grounding pad that we got from you. I put my feet barefoot on that. Is that the same thing as being on the earth?
Clint: yes. What we did in order to do our research and ground our subjects, we would use 12 x 24 inch conductive fabric or rubber like you would use in the electronics industry. It was connected to ground. When you were on it you were grounded.
In many cases we put these in the home so that people had them for 30 days. At the end of the studies a lot of people had great benefit and wanted to keep them or wanted one for their mom or whomever. As time went on when we had scraps left we finally asked what was the best thing to give people. We knew that people would not comply.
It’s really hard to get compliance in studies. So people may not even finish a round of script if it is not part of their daily routine. So we needed to give them something they could sleep on, put on their bed one time and ground it and there was no effect on their routine. They go to bed as they normally do and there is no work.
Lewis: we put this on our bed last week and it’s like passing out right away.
Clint: so we developed. They were accidental products. Remember I was the first guy to put data over a satellite from a personal computer. I was retired, so this is really interesting. There became a huge demand; we did not advertise. This was all word of mouth with relatives. Anyone who got grounded wanted one for their mom and so on.
We kept improving and we have carbon mats you can sleep on directly or put a sheet over them. We have the little mats to put under your computer on your desk and have under your hands while you are working. You can put it on the floor and put your feet on them. The patches are for acute situations.
It’s really simple and we have a pillow cover that you can put your pillow in. It’s grounded and you put your pillow case over it. A lot of people love that product. It’s something again that you don’t have to do anything once you set it up.
Lewis: what is a daily habit, a routine for people to think about with grounding? What if they have 20 minutes a day.
Clint: I tell a story that helps answer that. When I was young, I was babysitting cows. You look at them to see if they are healthy and happy. If you see one that looks different from the herd, acting strange, bawling, looking glassy eyed, you take them out of the herd and put them in a pen. Then you have to go ride the pasture to make sure the water is okay, there are no noxious weeds coming up, the grass is okay. Normally there is something wrong so you move the herd to a different section of pasture and fence off the other area.
Clint: so I have this prevention background and I always ask what caused this? What is the root cause? Not, do I need this pill or that pill. I was raised that way.
Clint: some years you would have an infestation of jackrabbits. Or you would be driving down the road and it would look like there is a lake out there (and there’s not that much water in Montana). It was the light reflecting off the jackrabbits’ eyes. That is how many there were. During the day it was fun to watch them; there would be a coyote sneaking up on them. Once the rabbit was aware of it, it could spring 10 feet up in the air. The rabbit zig zags over the pasture and generally the coyote would run out of energy and lay there panting. The jack rabbit would run just a little bit further. Conservation of energy is everything in nature.
The rabbit goes a little farther and if you are close enough you can see the rabbit quivering. Then all of a sudden there will be a visceral shake. Then the rabbit goes back to eating as though nothing ever happened. Then the coyote wanders off. Now I know that the rabbit was grounding out the cortisol. The shaking was the inflammation created from the cortisol from the chase by the coyote. The rabbit was burning adrenalin and creating inflammation in the body.
So you ground out the inflammation. The grounding reduces the excess radicals that will otherwise oxidize and create inflammation. I tell this story because most women today over 30 have some kind of inflammation disorder. They are healthy but they are doing everything. They exercise too much and that creates inflammation.
I learned this from the MS ladies and I always asked what happened in their lives prior to MS developing. In the beginning they can’t tell you. Then they may say I lost my house in 2008 and I lost my job. Then they went into a chronic elevated fight or flight state and a body flooded with cortisol. Then they couldn’t get out of it and that created pain. The pain created more cortisol and then they ended up with lupus, MS or whatever.
The reason I tell this story, 99% of who I work with are women. Guys are not going to buy earthing products. They are: I’ll do it myself; this can’t be true. Or whatever. Women are different and they know intuitively they are connected to the earth.
A woman gets up in the morning and has slept on a foam bed with normal covers that create static electricity. She gets up and is stressed, fatigued. She has to get the kids off to school and if she has a mate she’s feeding her mate off. 80% of all women over the age of 30 sleep alone because of inflammation, heath issues, anger, all the things that go with not being well.
They do all these things that are rushed. Then they have to take care of themselves and then get dressed, drive to work never having grounded. Then she gets to work and has to put up with the boss, the clients, whatever stresses are there. It’s traffic coming and going and when she gets home she’s ready for a drink. Then the stress of all that is still in the body when she goes to bed.
I call this cortisol ‘coyote juice.’ Everything in her life is a coyote—the kids in the morning are the coyote, the husband, the boss, the traffic and the coyote causes the rabbit to trigger fight or flight. Cortisol is secreted in to the system. It’s chronic all day long and you have these spikes of cortisol that builds up in your body You end up with a lot of anxiety, irritability, and sometimes pain or depression. It’s relentless.
When you get home at night you are full of coyote juice—cortisol. I don’t care if you don’t do anything else, go outdoors with a chair when you get home, put your feet on the earth, and sit there for 30 minutes and drain all that inflammation. You can think of it going out of your body into the earth—that’s fine. It’s the earth coming up and releasing electrons. It doesn’t matter how you think of it.
You need to drain this and reduce the inflammation in your body. Then you can enjoy the kids, go to bed and wake up in the morning and feel better. If you wake up with aches and pains and you don’t feel good you need to consider sleeping on a grounding pad. In nature you would always have been grounded. So start there. If you can’t do anything else, this routine is free and it will change your life, I guarantee it.
Lewis: what is your routine on a daily basis? Are you barefoot a lot, are you using the sandals, are you using the mats?
Clint: I have been grounded for most of 20 years or longer. I have done studies for 23 years. I started out with the grounding pads I was using on the subjects. I have lots of pain and I kept the pain down. I grew up on a ranch. I skied. I had more injuries. I remember one day when I was around 53 or 54 I looked up at the sky and said God, why did you make my body with so much pain in it? I was in chronic pain just from all the injuries and whatever. I realize it was me that caused it.
I sleep on a grounding bed cover and I have a grounded pillow cover with a pillowcase over it. I have a mat under my computer and a bigger ground mat under my chair and desk and I am barefoot all the time. I am generally barefoot when I go out of doors and I have a house that has nice Saltillo tile floors so they are grounded. I am grounded most of the time.
When I go outdoors in summer there are certain areas you can go barefoot, but generally I wear the grounded flip flops. I don’t like to walk as much as I used to because of the seasons. There are certain seasons that I love to walk and you can walk forever. You have the wind and heat… I am grounded 90% of the time. I don’t have any pain and no inflammatory pain.
Lewis: what is your diet like?
Clint: in the morning when I get up, I generally will have 2 to 3 eggs, an avocado, some keto toast. Some mornings I have the keto type bread with nut butter such as walnut or almond butter and some organic jam. I do try to cut out the excess bread carbs. I don’t divert from that much.
I usually have soup at lunch and I’ll eat soup before I eat anything. At dinner I will have fish, vegetables, maybe 4 oz. of meat. I don’t eat a lot of meat because my body doesn’t crave it. I loved bananas a bit on the green side. I like blueberries and I snack on frozen blueberries or raspberries. But I still like sweet treats. Keep the cookies out of the house or they’ll be gone in half an hour.
Lewis: I grew up right before video games came. They started to come when I was 5 to 10 but I was still going outside. I got into sports at an early age…soccer, basketball, football at the gym, or being in the back yard and playing and climbing trees. That doesn’t happen with kids now; they grow up with their ipads and their iphones or tv. There are multiple screens in front of their faces, inside and ‘protected.’ They have soft things around them, carpeting and not going outside as much. What is your advice to parents raising kids for the future about the importance of grounding and being outside? What are the bad things that will happen if they don’t do those things.
Clint: we already know that 40% of the kids have some level of diabetes. They have chronic allergies, and those are inflammation and health disorders. They are full of anxiety, ADD, ADHD and I used to call that chemistry-it-is. I don’t do that any more so I don’t get in trouble with the…….
But, think of it this way. Health is your most natural state and you can see that with the animals in nature. If you don’t have health then something is interfering with your immune system’s ability to maintain and restore health. If a child has health issues of any kind, it’s generally because of the immune system. The only way you can maintain and keep them healthy is to get them grounded some portion of time. Sleeping grounded is easy. Put it under the sheet and they don’t even know.
When kids are over 7 and into video games you are not going to change that. It is not possible. So we have ground mats and a lot of the gamers use them. you have to use artificial grounding. Electrical is conductive.
Lewis: is it better to be outdoors in the grass or have a grounding mat? It’s better to be outdoors on the earth breathing fresh air with sunshine coming down. The other problems are fresh air and the indoor pollutants. And we have the loss of sun with the roofs over our heads. We are short of vitamin D and our health is compromised. Grounding is not the cureall but its loss of sun, fresh air and grounding are the causealls.
Something in the environment is challenging your immune system. If you are indoor and the air you are breathing is challenging, your immune system has to deal with everything you breathe. If you don’t get enough sun and vitamin D that is going to affect everything in your body. You need oxygen. It’s not one thing—we stepped out of nature and we need to put our toes back in nature.
I try to work with the young moms. They are the ones taking care of these children. But the moms themselves are in trouble. We try to ground them first and then she can ground her mom so she can be freed up a little. She can get her own life back so she can take care of her family and so on.
You have to find ways to entertain these children. We used to love to go play in the creek, build caves, and the last thing we wanted to do was go in the house until tv came along.
Lewis: I remember my mom had to call me in at night. We wanted to be out playing.
Clint: we used to sleep in the barn. I don’t have the answers. If you can’t do it any other way. If we ground a child in the house, the animals are going to gravitate towards it. The children will start using it. Children know when they are grounded or not and they miss it when they don’t have it. They feel better when they are grounded.
I tell the moms that what feeds a lot of the cortisol into the body is mental. A lot is environmental, but there is a lot that is mental—psychological –and that causes the fight or flight to trigger. That is what is causing the cortisol.
You can take a child, adult, someone who is angry, take their shoes off and put them outdoors for 30 minutes. The anger goes away and the demeanor changes. They are different. The pain comes down, the circulation comes up. The demeanor shifts, there is a smile. It’s hard to experience all these things in the home if you are not in nature. It is getting rid of inflammation in the body and then the immune system can go back and the body is restored. You have more oxygen and more energy.
Lewis: what about growing up with a lot of native Americans …what were the greatest lessons that they taught you? I feel that community has not been as repected in recent years. Are you still in contact with them?
Clint: I’m 78 and most of the ones I grew up with are gone. I think the younger Native Americans have a sense of this and are trying to pull it back. The thing I learned about being with these Native Americans is they are not like us. Back then they didn’t understand ownership—how can you own a tree? How can you own the land? It belongs to everyone. You had the tribes were on the government created reservations. But they would go down low in the winter and move to summer pasture in the summer.
Clint: I grew up in Montana and the Pryors (mountains) would be the summer camp. They lived more in tune with nature. Most people wouldn’t know Earl Biss was a Native American from Hardin, Montana, Crow Agency. I bought a lot of his paintings and I kept a lot of his. He did one especially for me that was in the Bitterroot near Missoula, Montana. There are 2 little riders on horses and then all this scenery. The idea behind it was the horses and the humans were just a piece of all of it. They weren’t prominent. The concept is that they see themselves as being part of everything. A blade of grass is your cousin. You don’t kill anything or destroy anything. Anything you take, you honor it. It’s a peaceful way of life; they aren’t angry and they take care of each other.
I can’t imagine not having the essence of what I learned from them in my being because it makes me like a boyscout half the time. They care for their environment and don’t waste life and take what they don’t need. They don’t go sport hunting. It’s a way of life that is earthy and makes you feel good inside.
Lewis: I ask everyone this question at the end of our interview. It’s called the 3 truths. So I’d like you to imagine that you continue to live as long as you want to live and you continue to accomplish and fulfill what you want to in your life. But at some point it’s your last day on earth. That last day you have to take everything you created with you—anything that you have ever shared. It has to go somewhere, with you or somewhere else and we don’t have access to that information any more. You get to leave behind 3 things or 3 lessons and that you can share and this is what you will be remembered by. What are the 3 truths that you would leave behind?
Clint: number one is family. You have your own personal family, your community and your bigger community out there that is not taken care of the way we would a family. I think we …are all the same, we are all one. I think it’s important that we need to take care of each other rather than beliefs such as politics. It’s innate. Truth is in the heart. There is something there, but it’s about family and taking care of each other.
But money is evil. If your life is about money, you do not have a life. Money is a by-product. You don’t need to worry about money—you need to provide benefit and things that help people and improve their lives. But if you go to work just for money that is evil because you don’t have a conscience and you lose yourself. You are out there working, taking care of your family and all the things you do in life, and you forget about yourself. Most people do; I did.
I almost lost it and that scared me more than anything else. It’s important to learn rather than at 60, 70 or 80, but to go back and find yourself. Take care of yourself. Take care of that little boy and be grateful. It’s hard to understand life and it’s a challenge to figure it out.
It takes years because it’s about learning what not to do and it’s about getting rid of all those bricks of beliefs that you are encased in. In doing all this it is so you can see and some people call it ‘finding God,’ finding whatever. One day you will find it—it’s there. When you experience that sometimes you won’t ever be able to explain it. It helps you to know that you are a piece of this. You are not suffering from it. It’s about being happy with yourself and putting yourself first and taking care of your health.
Lewis: that’s beautiful, Clint. I want to acknowledge you for the incredible transformation you had in your life and the journey you had. I think it’s amazing that you grew up on the land and essentially went into the ‘make money business mode’ in the cable, electrical side of things. You lost your health and came back full circle and you used the different skills you developed over time to now help heal and find solutions and get back to what we are supposed to be doing as human beings—being in nature. I acknowledge the journey you have been on and to educate, to teach with these products to really heal. It’s an amazing journey and I am glad that you are an example at 78 without the inflammation and pain and you’re flexible and thriving and being the example by living this way. How can we support you and where can people go for products?
Clint: www.theearthinginstitute.net is where we parked all the studies, links to the movie and book. The Earthing book is on Amazon and free when people buy any products. Theearthinginstitute is a good resource. There are 20 years of research there and untold amounts of time and money were invested in that. There’s no advertising and it’s not political.
www.Earthing.com is where the products from $29 to $199 plus for grounding yourself and your family. I remember in the early days I was talking to California Health Services. They said ‘we understand what you are doing but before you go out and tell people, they need a no-cost solution and they need a low-cost solution. The no-cost is simple. Go outside. If you have chronic things then you need the low cost tools. They are just extension cords to the earth and the products themselves don’t do anything except conduct earth energy to your audience.
The Earthing movie is on youtube and there are other videos. There is a short version of the Earthing movie went viral with over 60 million people.
Lewis: what is your definition of greatness?
Clint: I think greatness is a personal thing and it’s not that something thinks I’m great. It’s to touch people’s lives in ways that helped or made them better. I remember doing a little project that probably touched every home in America. It saved money and industries. More importantly I had a vision that I could see the future 20 years ahead and I could pull together data, put it on a satellite, feed it to a computer, and all that filtered into the internet and so on. The internet couldn’t be here if we had not built cable the way we did. I was a piece in a part of this thing called life and it’s all connected and it’s all one thing. I was a piece and part of it and I think I did good. I think greatness is being grateful that I was part of it and able to contribute. Greatness is being able to go on your way out with a smile on your face.
